I got suckered into playing 800+ hours of GTA Online and paying thousands of SEK for shark cards over a year or two before I realized what a terrible game it is.
I was addicted to it, and paid money every month to buy shark cards.
When my work situation improved however, I took a few steps back and realized that I had wasted a lot of money on it and that I was only chasing the dragon that was just out of reach, kept away from me by carefully crafted mental mechanics of the game.
I was disgusted and refused to participate further.
I uninstalled it right away and have never looked back.
I never spent a dime on it, but I did play for over 3000 hours before rock star blocked linux. I enjoyed the grind rather than the reward, so it sort of became my little safe-space game when I was really stresses out. could always just go hang out with my buds for a few hours and grind out a million bucks. I’m still kinda torn up about the anticheat situation tbh, I would gladly play alone if there were any way to play the same game. but story mode just doesnt compare for me, completly different game :(
Yup. I’ve been boycotting Nintendo and EA for the past twenty years. EA due to the destruction of countless talented studios (Origin, Bullfrog, Westwood, Pandemic) and Nintendo when they were caught by the EU doing anti-competitive price fixing (which they still seem to be doing today).
I have missed out on nothing. A game is just a game; a piece of multimedia content to entertain. There are countless astonishing games out there; missing out on a few doesn’t harm you.
People really need to learn to vote with their wallets. And no, I don’t think sailing the high seas and yarharhar legal questionability is acceptable. You don’t need to play the game. There is nothing that important you’re missing out on for the “cultural zeitgeist”.
Piracy still increases the fandom and increases sales (contrary to what IP owners will tell you). So piracy is still supporting these organisations and feeding into their success.
Vote with your wallets. Don’t support business practices and businesses you don’t believe in. Give your time and money to those that deserve it.
Obviously this is a problem for radio astronomers. I keep hoping we’ll build the proposed Lunar Crater Telescope so we can have a truly silent view of the universe.
For multi-mode (full duplex) you would still need a power amp repeater every 500 meters, which requires a lot of power and create noise. You can’t be quiet with noise.
Yes, because there’s no way to transmit power or data anywhere without being loud af in any signal spectrum. It’s physically impossible.
Even with fiber, you need a laser to beam the signal, and a powerful amp on the moon to recieve the signal and boost it with fuck ton of high power repeaters to the other side of the moon which is also loud af
Be that as it may, it’d be minimal compared to the interference that terrestrial radio observatories have to deal with.
I guess I’m just saying that I don’t understand why you’re being so negative about the concept when it’s clearly going to be orders of magnitude better than existing antennae.
I’ve been boycotting Ubisoft for years, haven’t missed a damn thing.
Yeah, there are so many great games by non-shitty developers. Skipping Ubisoft, EA, and Activision entirely is not only possible but there are more great games left than one can play anyway.
Yeah, I think it was in Assassin’s Creed 2. At the time, people were unable to play the single player game they bought at launch because Ubisoft shitty authentication service couldn’t handle the load.
It’s amazing just how much better games have been from indie devs and smaller publishers. I don’t see a single game from EA, Ubisoft, or Activision on there.
Cost cutting and designing for the lowest common denominator. Suits are afraid to take risks, because they want to sell to the widest possible audience. So they end up playing it safe and making bland milquetoast games that all feel exactly the same.
In fairness even if a big studio released a great game, enough people would either try it and not like it, or just give a bad review because it’s EA, that it wouldn’t make this list.
And by OFF, we mean actually off. The last thing I want is the game to push out a minor update 5 years after its last update, and all of the mods I have are now broken.
Yeah, you should be able to pick a specific version number for single player games. I’m fine with it defaulting to “latest”, but at least give me the option to stick to a specific version.
Also, fuck the “Would you like to share all data with the publisher, or only limited data” bullshit. It’s a single player game with no multiplayer whatsoever. I shouldn’t need to share any data with the publisher. If I see this shit, the game immediately gets blacklisted in my firewall.
That is a reason why offline installers are so important. At the very least we should be able to disable auto updates and still launch the (outdated) game.
Reminds me of one of my biggest pet peeves - a bunch of games will pop up a warning “Oh no, you’re not on the Internet! Some stuff won’t work!” on start up, always. Hate it, unless I’m trying to connect to a multiplayer mode of some sort.
The most frustrating for me was Immortals: Fenix Rising on the Switch. I refused to create an Ubisoft account and actually had to put my system on airplane mode so it would stop trying to force one on me.
If there is something better than opensnitch for this on Linux someone tell me. It‘s so annoying to block applications from accessing the internet on it. I‘ve tried like 4 different methods.
I used to buy Steam games without a care in the world. Now to spend even 5 bucks I make myself go through a quality control checklist so vast it would impress a space shuttle commander. There's just been too many abandoned games, terrible sequels, fake reviews, unnecessary game launchers and disappointing Steam sales. That's not to say there isn't still an excellent bunch of games on there, but they're all hidden deep in the forest and I have to go sniff em out like a basset hound.
Well ok but I did say it was long. Tbh, my checklist is almost a minigame itself now 🤣
So once I've found a game that looks interesting, I do the following:
Google video search for the game's title and filter to past week, then month, then year and that shows me how many people are actually talking about this game right now and who's doing the talking.
I look at the Steam reviews and initially filter to only show negative ones. I find it's a lot easier to see if the game's been review bombed that way. Also, a lot of negative reviews complain about features I find positive so that's helpful too "This game was way too easy! I finished it in 30 hours and I still had all my hair at the end, harumph!". I also check phrases like "Abandoned by the devs" or "Yet another asset flip" or "Beware! The EULA is a privacy nightmare".
I then switch to positive reviews and read the short ones. The dissertations are just way too much detail at this stage (or any stage really for me).
At some point early on I check the Steam update history. If the last update was years ago I factor that in. I also try to keep on top of relevant news like that time the entire staff of Annapurna Interactive quit, making a sequel to Stray unlikely.
Also, if it hasn't had that many recent updates I'll join the Discord and see how active that is. That's usually so revealing. Often in a positive way like with the G-Rebels devs.
Then I go through my top YT game reviewers like Raptor, Scarlett Seeker, Splattercat Gaming, Orbital Potato and Nookrium and see if they've talked about the game.
I look for the title on Allkeyshop to see if there's a cheaper EU unlockable Steam game key available.
I check for trainers in case I need an escape hatch if it turns out to be too grindy or tedious but still worth playing.
If all the searches have been positive so far I'll wishlist it around this point. If there's a demo I'll play it. If it looks amazing from the start I'll install the demo after looking at a couple of gameplay videos.
I also have a 21:9 monitor so I hop into the Steam discussion group for the game and look for confirmation that it's compatible.
If it's too expensive I'll check SteamDB and look at it's price history. My personal limit is <7 bucks for an old game and <18 for a relatively new one (unless something exceptional suddenly appears like Eriksholm).
I'll check if there any Steam sales coming and if the theme is likely to match the game I'm looking at.
I really do actually do all this by the way. It's the only way I've been able to get more sensible about the games I buy.
Actually that’s not a bad list at all. But reading this I am asking myself: isn’t that more a list to detain YOURSELF from adding too much on your pile of shame :D
Oh yeah definitely :) Also I've noticed there's kind of a new feeling of satisfaction when a game does somehow make it through this assault course and I buy it finally. It feels like an achievement in itself.
I would throw in isthereanydeals and gg.deals into the mix. Those provide good historical tracking of multiple stores for games, so you can really be sure you are getting the historical low during a sale.
If I spend a fiver on a game and it entertains me for two nights I still consider that fine value to entertainment ratio. If I went out somewhere in real life with the boys I’d be spending a minimum of $50 and that’s for a single night out. So I buy a lot of indie games in the $5-10 range without much guilt over it. Weird single-dev projects with pixel art and a 5 year span in early access are my favorite kind of art.
Now if you’re asking me more than about $20 for your game then yeah the quality control checklist comes out. But my standards are much lower for the $10-tier and I’ve found some really good games in that tier. Not ones that I’m still playing, maybe, but ones that I had a good time with for a few days to a few weeks and that I remember fondly.
I’m more of the just stick to the indie goats type of guy, those which give you unlimited replay ability, but reading your comment made me fondly remember Yes your Grace!
A little game which i got through in two days and probably never touch again but absolutely loved. It made feel more like a King (of a really small realm) than a crusader kings or civilisation.
I pretty much only buy games that are either very well-known to be good (famous on the level of Skyrim, Stardew Valley, etc.), or that I saw a “let’s play” of.
I’ve started just waiting a bit. If a game is actually good, waiting a few months won’t really matter. If the game is dead by then, it was never worth the money in the first place.
Same. I’ve got a huge library of rpg games I can play, don’t really play games that I need to have day 1, I just watch a few hours of someone play it and I’m good.
No man’s sky did make a full 180 recovery though, I bought it after the fix for me, my kid and some friends so we could play together.
That’s my experience with 99% of old school point and click games. At some point in every one it devolved into me running in circles and trying every item on every object.
When I played Day of the Tentacle I got stuck. Eventually I caved in and ordered the official hint book. Mind you, back then this entailed mailing a physical letter and the money somewhere. I guess my parents helped with that. And then you had to wait for your order to arrive. And the post was a lot slower than today.
I waited weeks for the book to arrive. And then, the day before it came, I finished the game. Use physics book with horse was the last puzzle I needed.
But the money wasn’t wasted entirely. The game’s story was written down from the pov of one of the characters. Pretty funny.
Hint books were an experience back then. I remember the hint book for myst had this whole narrative about some other person who got trapped in the book, which was supposed to be like the player. It was this whole story of how they solved all the various puzzles. I remember it being quite long but I was also like 9 so maybe it was just like 10 pages
Yeah, basically every game that runs on scummvm is a good candidate here: leisure suit Larry, kings quest, police quest, the dig, sam and max, Indiana jones and the fate of Atlantis, all the sierra and lucasarts ones
Myst series is another good one. Journeyman project trilogy. These all ruled when I was like 12 years old
I miss when games were confusing and aimless by default. I know there are still games like this but I feel like the default now is a game that’s like “oh hey, go down this hallway full of locked doors! Except one door is unlocked, that’s a secret area, good for you! But otherwise go down the hallway to the next hallway!”
Also the end of the hallway is glowing, and there’s a pulsating dot on your minimap. And if you take 5 seconds longer than needed, your character says to himself: “maybe I should go to the end of this hallway”.
Oh man, king’s quest. Those games were literally impossible without a guide and you needed to go to areas in very specific steps to not softlock the game.
You’d play leisure suit Larry or whatever and get 3/4 of the way through and get stuck. Then you’d check a walkthrough and realize you didn’t check the trash can on the first screen of the game for a key item and now you’re fucked and literally have to start over from the beginning
Or you’d get to a death condition and get a screen that just mocks you: remember to save early and save often!
I gave up on point and click games when the solution to a problem in Monkey Island 2 was to put a fucking dog in your pocket. Even the look Guybrush gives when he stuffs the dog in is like "bet you didn’t think to do that initially huh…?’
The funny thing is that LucasArts games were done as the “antithesis” to Sierra games, as the latter were chock full of cheap deaths and “Did you remember to do some little side thing 2 hours ago? No? Progress locked, fuck you” situations
Kinda. The website was inactive for a few years there, and only recently started updating again. The author was focusing on Patreon, which was reportedly porn of the VGCats characters.
I don’t understand. You have two friends, each with a good arm, that’s two good arms. Tape your friends together and have them coordinate and BAM: two-handed gaming.
sadly they live 80km apart from each other, and both are right handed, so they couldn’t face each other while playing. We’d need a pretty weird dual-monitor setup if we’d tape them together.
Maybe its the 'tism but I never gave a shit about most microtransactiony things unless they have a “pay-to-win” element. That’s why I gave up on GTA online.
But if its just like “exclusive skins”, I could give a shit. My default skinned character can still win against a guy in a bear-suit with a golden AK and that’s really all I need. I have no particular FOMO of not winning the fashion part of the game.
I do wish games I could turn off their constant begging for my money though.
My default skinned character can still win against a guy in a bear-suit with a golden AK and that’s really all I need. I have no particular FOMO of not winning the fashion part of the game.
Twitter user strahfe recently shared a patent by Activision that suggests buying cosmetic items could increase your chances of being placed in games against less-experienced players. The patent reads: “The microtransaction engine may match a more expert/marquee player with a junior player to encourage the junior player to make game-related purchases of items possessed/used by the marquee player”
I’m not heavy into conspiracies, but I’m suspicious enough to not give Activision the benefit of the doubt and bet that they’ve done this in secret if they have a patent for it. But really… if we’re even thinking about these kinds of things, the game is a lost cause.
An argument I heard, and adopted is that it’s never “just” cosmetic. Your enjoyment of the game is impacted by how you perceive your avatar. This is why fortnite skins sell so well to new players. It’s not just cosmetic to drop $20 on Cuddle Team Leader. It makes a user feel silly and increases enjoyment running around as an obvious pink mascot costume. It prolongs how long you play both by increased enjoyment, and sunk cost fallacy. In any game with cosmetics, purchases drive playtime.
Used to play games and I was so focused on gameplay, I always thought “why even have a lot of art in there”. But then you realize if the art sucks, you wouldn’t even be giving it a chance.
And this extends to skins and stuff. If it’s “just cosmetics”, that still means there is some art that is now hidden unless you throw money at your screen. And depending on how much it is, the game might be way too boring without it. So you’re still buying bits of a game after the fact. And voila, we’re back to the reasons why DLCs suck.
Cyberpunk winning best ongoing game is such a joke. Yes, I enjoyed the DLC but if any game with DLC and updates can be part of that category then that category has no meaning at all.
Friends Per Second podcast had an interesting discussion around it. The term Indie isn’t well defined. Maybe never was. Most people probably see DtD as indie even though it had a publisher. A new category could be “independent” which actually has games that were published independently.
It has nothing to do with DLC. I think it deserved the award. Instead of just letting the game die that it shouldn’t have released in the first place. They fixed it.
I think we might have different expectations here. I think if a company sells a broken game, they should fix it without praise. The consumers paid for it. Specially should they not get an award for that. There should be a category for “most stable release” instead.
Yeah, what actually happened here is they put out a broken, unfinished game 3 years ago, have spent the last 3 years on damage control and fixing it (which means it never changed overall price on the store like a 3 year old game should) and now they want you to buy an Xpac and the ultimate edition so they can sell it again, still for full price. It’s not worth an award, it’s scummy.
I think the reason it gets praised is because it’s very rare that poor games get as much time and investment into fixing in this day and age. Most companies will just move on to the next game or even use AI to write their apology letters and then abandon the game entirely.
Awarded to a game for outstanding development of ongoing content that evolves the player experience over time.
Its best ongoing game, not best live service game. I think things like Stardew Valley or No Man’s Sky fit into this just like Cyberpunk did because devs should be praised for when they go above and beyond. I’d argue CDPR owed that to their fans but still, they mostly pulled it off.
Yes, Cyberpunk, sorry I didn’t clarify. And I agree with the 2024 take too.
As someone who is industry adjacent and has worked with people who work on games that are actively updated and improved for years…idk the Cyberpunk win doesn’t sit right with me. I have all the sympathy for the devs at CDPR and what they went through during the initial launch of the game, but this win just shows upper management at dev companies that they can get rewarded for releasing unfinished projects and finishing them later.
It’s also funny that they won against FFXIV, an actual good example of a game that was nuked to the ground and rebuilt with continuous support because of it’s initial failure.
There’s a huge indie scene with loads of ongoing games that would be far more deserving of the award than Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk literally stopped major developments with 2.0, the rest you’re going to get are easy to include content and QoL. Compare that to Dwarf Fortress that has 20+ years of development and is only 50% done with the final vision. You could probably also stick Terraria there because despite the devs saying multiple times that they’re done they’re still updating the game. I’m sure there’s more but those two were just at the top of my head.
The only merit CP77 has to be on that list is fixing a broken game. Do you think CP77 would’ve won the award if it had release in the 2.0 state and gotten 3 years of additional development? Would it even make it into the nominees list? I don’t think so.
I’m convinced they had Cyberpunk win it because they don’t have a “Best DLC/Expansion” category (yet) and felt like Cyberpunk deserved to win something for the way 2.0 and Phantom Liberty revitalised it.
Also, fixing your fucked it game isn’t ongoing either. CP2077 in this category is a disgrace. They shipped a buggy game, released DLC and actually finished the game and then won an award for it. Bullshit.
bin.pol.social
Ważne