I remember seeing these ads as an impressionable young gamer and getting the idea that Playstations had games that were scary and weird, and Nintendo games and handhelds were for boys. Generally the ads told me “this is not for you”. Because I only ever saw ads for specific PC games and never for PCs themselves, (they were aimed at adults, not in the kind of magazines and comics young me was perusing) even though I was still not the target market it clicked more with me. I think that might be a part of why I’ve only ever really gotten into PC games over the years. I knew there were games I’d like and games I wouldn’t, and never got the same platform level messaging.
I remember seeing an ad for Thief and thought it looked cool, and I remember being super grossed out by that Quake 3 ad, but I never felt unwelcome or out of place playing PC games. In contrast, the focus on marketing to young males is really obvious in those console ads.
Examples of some PC game ads I remember working for me and led to me getting them:
Kolanaki linked it above. It’s a disgusting crusty gamer den implying the game is so addictive you’ll live in filth. I remember that image being on the first couple of pages of a PC Gamer issue from the late 90s or early 00’s.
You put your finger on it. Most of the ads say, “this is not for you,” to a young girl.
Old ads for cars, alcohol, cigarettes etc. were like that as well. They’re aimed at the hotshot guy who has a chick he’s treating poorly, or more accurately, the guy who wants to have chicks throwing themselves at him. They have nothing to offer a woman or girl, because why would she want to be ignored arm candy?
I guess the one with the woman holding a controller in the bathtub may be an exception.
I’m sure a lot of boys and men were weirded out by these ads too.
Oh this was nothing. My ‘news’ posts take me some time, and effort, which is why they’re kinda on pause right now (the 17th is when I see my specialist, get blood results, see what is next etc), so for now it’s this kinda thing - smaller!
Best I found was a Discord server called “dads gaming”. Rather than whiny youngsters, you get middle aged med who have little time for gaming, so they play casually and are happy to play with others who are also mediocre. I haven’t used this for ages though.
Day 360 of sticking with anything is impressive. Thanks for sticking with this and posting content for us to consume. I appreciate it and hope you have something special planned for your anniversary.
I can barely play online games against anyone without getting wiped in 0.0001 nanoseconds if it’s a PVP game. Never had skills, so I’ll never be in denial about losing what I never had.
I’ve been trying to not use Steam on linux for a while now unless necessary (I have too many games there). GoG + Heroic keeps me pretty sane. Otherwise it’s Lutris for starting them (which I’ll agree is VERY clunky but you can get things done). I think we’re actually getting over the hill of “Linux gaming means Steam” that we’ve been on since the SteamDeck launched.
While it’s working fine for now, what do I do if I’m offline and Steam decides this is one of those days offline mode doesn’t work? What if I get banned from Steam?
This is a pretty valid-ish concern I would say. It’s one of the reasons I’m using GoG mainly now (which yes, still buying licences so similar concerns just maybe not as great or maybe I’m kidding myself)
GOG is legit though. You can archive those offline installers and they’ll work forever (barring future OS incompatibilities etc). For the titles that support it I use the Linux installers otherwise I just run Galaxy through Steam for the time being since it reduces the amount of wineprefixes I have to configure with Steam.
Strong disagree. If anything, it was the opposite.
The Steam Controller was AMAZING for playing games that did not have gamepad support. And I still think it is the best way to play Stardew Valley. But it also came out at a time when PC ports to console were more or less expected and even RTSes had gamepad support out of the box.
At which point you have a controller that only makes sense for a very limited subset of games.
That said, a Steam Controller 2 that is basically the deck minus the display would be amazing.
Okay, but I didn’t want to buy a new console. Instead, I wanted to use my PC as a console replacement.
But also, there’s a surprising amount of games that never got a console release. For example, Blood and Septerra Core—never arrived on any console. I own those games, and the Steam controller let me play them on my TV very easily.
“ahead of its time” to let people play a game from 1999 is kind of my point.
The Steam Controller was very much designed with 90s/VERY early 00s gaming in mind where you might have a closet full of controllers for every game you like. A wheel for racing, a HOTAS for flight sims, a different HOTAS for mech sims, a gamepad, a guitar controller, a spinning knob, etc.
But it came out at almost the exact same time that the entire industry standardized on xinput with different face button labels. AND when xinput was making it trivial to just use that xbox controller on your PC.
And yet, when I look at my library, only half of new games released within the past five years support X-input. They are still exclusively keyboard-and-mouse.
Granted, that’s way more than what was available 10 years ago, but it’s still a problem.
Or it would be if the Steam Deck didn’t make it trivially easy to adapt keyboard-and-mouse controls to a controller. Which happened because of the innovation first introduced with the Steam Controller.
It’s now at the point where keyboard-and-mouse is optional—just a preference if you want to use it.
I mean… if you look at what I bought in the past five years you would think everyone was obsessed with spreadsheets and 100 hour CRPGs. That doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of games are made with cross platform in mind and many historically “M+KB only” games have excellent gamepad support. Sometimes, annoyingly, only in the console build but…
Yes. I do think Steam Input is awesome (even if it was basically just a cleaner interface to xpadder/joy2key). That isn’t the Steam Controller. The Steam Controller is what Valve was using to promote The Steam Machines which was their failed attempt at a console.
Again, just to make this clear: I am not saying the Steam Controller was bad. I am not saying Valve is bad. I AM saying it was not “forward thinking” and was very much rooted in a PC gaming era that was ending as orders were being shipped out.
When things aren’t balanced. It either tells me the devs do not play their game or they have a dominant strategy and don’t bother playing anything else.
I’ve heard stories from professionals and you would be surprised how many devs don’t actually play the game they are developing.
In almost every game the gameplay tips and tutorials they give you are not only suboptimal but often outright counterproductive. This is especially bad in multiplayer games.
It was really nice in Doom Eternal, where they added quick swapping to the tips.
Pc version of open world exploration game without quicksave key. There’s a lot of wrong with Grounded, but man i feels like Obsidian really losing touch with PC game with this one.
Conversely, Grounded has the best inventory management system of any survival game ever.
To the point that I have a hard time playing others now because they all feel tedious in comparison. It’s hard to imagine someone playing Grounded and then building a survival game that didn’t use hot deposit.
That’s true, a key for depositing item and also control whether the chest is affected or not is really handy for inventory management. Which really bother me that they don’t have quicksave, graphic setting customisation, turning off the character chatter, among other thing.
meanwhile i wish there was a slider that made the characters MORE chatty, the dynamic interactions are really charming to me! but i also specifically love how cliché they’re written, so can see how it’s not for everybody haha
JUST for hot deposit, yeh. the rest of the inventory/hotbar management always makes me wish i was playing something else.
the hotbar not being inventory space is fine, but tools disappearing because they’re in your hand is absurd. they really just added a “looking for the tv remote that i’m already holding” mechanic. the pinning system with filters is handy for food, but feels clunky outside that one usecase.
like they went with a realistic “the forest” style building system, and then the inventory management is the most videogamey shit in the world.
also the scroll wheel swapping hotbars by default is straight up whacky, i’ve heard the whole thing makes more sense on controller lmao
the pinning system with filters is handy for food, but feels clunky outside that one usecase.
The pinning system is an improvement over not having a pinning system that should exist in every game. Food, water, ranged weapons, explosives, healing items, shields, even melee weapons, it makes sense for all of them given that all of them can break.
Oooh, grounded felt like they didn’t play test for solo players. The end game suddenly got very grindy, and I decided not to finish because of it. Loved the game otherwise. I’m hoping they will try to balance it more for the second game
Stardew is always a good one and uses very little battery. Noita and Streets of Rogue have been fun too, and are also easy on the battery (pixel art roguelites).
I love the Deus Ex series and Human Revolution is worth checking out; even if you haven’t played the prior ones. It’s been a while since I played through it but I remember being drawn to the story and liked the stealth aspects.
The new System Shock remake is also great and is decent on my Steam Deck battery.
The funniest thing is that I can guarantee that whatever numbers Deathloop did they would have been much worse without Gamepass. Great game, but not the kind of game that can have mass appeal.
Arkane sucks now because MSFT forced them to make the kind of game they did not have experience in making.
It’s like hiring a plumber to fix your electrical problems, hiring a car mechanic to diagnose your skin condition.
This is the whole thing of large publishers buying out successful dev teams, then mismanaging the fuck out of them, then destroying them, by firing 1/4 of the staff, throwing another 1/4 all around their various other studios, then hiring a bunch of contractors for the remaining dev team to babysit / onboard for 6 months before they know how to do anything useful…
…all for a game that’s either a castrated, mutated version of what the studio is known for, of course with latest trending corpo buzzwords a ‘core features’, or is just something wildly different from the studio’s previous work.
This happens with extreme regularity in the history of the video game industry.
Almost like being rich is more likely to indicate someone is a pompous buffoon that takes credit for other people’s successes and blames other people for their own failures, than it is to indicate they are some kind of Ayn Rand style entrepreneurial ubermensch, mr ‘gonzo- rand 19’.
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