Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary - Puyo Puyo is the greatest competitive puzzle game ever made, and 20th is a massive package of incredible extras to go with it. I made a video just showing off how many cool things are in this game, and got so carried away that it ended up being an hour long. To this day, I continue to have a chip on my shoulder about how everything else Sega has done since doesn't come anywhere close to this game, and so the west has never gotten to see the best of what the series has to offer.
Skullgirls - Best damn fighting game of all time. Fast, explosive, with tons of options for flexible teambuilding. It wears its old-school influences on its sleeve, in an era where too many modern fighting games feel watered down. At the same time though, Skullgirls was also so far ahead of its time for having functional online, a training mode more robust than any other game at the time, and tons of excellent QoL features.
Slay the Spire - Spire has ruined all other roguelikes for me. What I love about Spire is that it does not let you get away with just looking for one powerful synergy that will carry you, many enemies are designed to hard counter one-trick decks. You're forced to adapt and actively consider what threats are coming up and what you need to deal with those threats, recognizing the difference between the cards you want and the cards you truly need.
At first I was going to disagree and say “hey at least they are still looking up information, unlike most people” but then I did a 540° on that idea when I realized that I myself was a great example of how the OP is right.
I have been building things in my back yard like crazy this summer. I am currently working on a purpose-built little lego/craft tray for my wife to use in the house. I have gotten to plan out every detail in my head and sketching on paper, including convenient geometry knowledge like multiplying by the square root of 2 to find lengths for 45° supports or the good old 3-4-5 triangle for getting a right angle in a pinch. I have been able to discuss the table’s use with my wife to figure out the perfect features. It will be a little wooden table that’s ~2’/60cm wide like a TV tray but it will be held up by cantilever legs that are long enough and tall enough to hover the table over her lap with the footrest up. And it will have other features like little segmented bins for pieces/parts, and an instruction holder.
It’s a great activity for numerous reasons. It gets me outside, it gets me physical, it gets me interacting with my wife and excited to give her the finished product, it gives me opportunities to practice new skills/tools, and it engages the senses as well as the mind while I spend hours in a calm almost meditative state and not seeing anything that’s happening on my phone (though it will read texts to me through my earbuds).
It’s a pretty funny look. I’m wearing a big round brimmed sun/fishing hat that looks almost like Gandalf’s but without the pointy top. From the outside the sound of the scene is 95% the sound of falling water and birds chirping, interrupted by the 5% of the time spent actively cutting or planing some wood. But if my earbuds are in my ears, they are blasting my playlist of various high-tempo Thrash and Industrial Metal songs! (at 45-50% volume. I’m responsible here, lol)
So if I take all that and compare it to some schmuck who pulls up ChatGPT and types something like “design me a sturdy two foot wide table, create a list of the pieces I need and the cuts to make them, and generate detailed assembly instructions with pictures.” Yeah you might still get a functional table but your life has missed out on the vast majority of the potential benefit of the activity!
This is the way I started looking at these tasks once I really internalized the whole “life is about the journey, not the destination” thing.
busy weekend for us but there’s no way I don’t finish it tomorrow. (right?)
The stuff I’m making right now is all just pine, with flat surfaces and 90 degree corners like you might get from ikea. But with visible wood grain and built so that you can dance on it or use it to hold the biggest aquarium you can find.
I grew up when solutions either were not available or cost money to get either by subscribing to a magazine, buying a magazine, or calling a 1800 hotline which cost ludicrous amounts of money for the time.
When gamefaqs and the like became popular it was great to get the answer instead of giving up. I couldn’t imagine growing up always having the answer handed to you though.
I had a a guidebook for Desperados. I ended up using the “hide around corner, shoot, and then blast everyone coming around the corner”-tactic instead of the guidebook 80% of the time.
desperados and commandos were both just that kind of game. i revisited desperados recently and the amount of mileage you can get out of “lie down in tall grass, quicksave, stand up, shoot, lie down” is frankly ridiculous.
The bits I used gamefaqs guides for (btw I love they are still there ^_^) are rarely fun anyway. Mostly, it’s achievement grinding or 100%ing. If the game itself needs a guide to navigate it, I usually just drop it. If it fails at informing me about it’s mechanics that much it’s not for me.
I’ve fallen into this exact trap when I played the HD remaster of Suikoden 1&2 a few months ago. The games still hold up pretty well but are a bit too dated to my taste to have more than a single playthrough, so I followed guides to get the perfect ending, which involves recruiting all 108 characters into your army.
At first I was just looking at a very light guide that told me which characters were missable and approximately when to get them. Then I got impatient and looked up their location and recruitment conditions. And then I ended up following a complete walkthrough step by step to make sure I wasn’t making any mistake.
That completely took the fun out of the games and I burnt out halfway through the second one.
Running Steam games on Mint, I don’t think I’ve ever run into a game that flat-out didn’t run. Usually they work out of the box. The most I’ve ever had to do was select “Force the use of a specific compatibility tool” and try out a different version of Proton from the dropdown list.
So far, everything mostly works. Occasionally I have to tinker with some environment variables to get some games working, but so far everything I have tried has been playable.
I have ryzen 5800x3d, 32 GB ram, rtx3090, 1440p 120hz gsync screen, nvme + bunch of other drives. Running Arch (wayland, kde plasma), games installed from steam/gog + few standalones from regular installers. Mostly I use proton-ge, but some games run fine with just wine. ntsync + wayland enabled.
some games (eg. PEAK) have MASSIVE flicker unless I explicitly disable wayland support for them (PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=0), and then it’s fine.
Only thing really lacking is performance, eg. Cyberpunk 2077 with RT is slower than on Win10. It still does about 60 fps, but the dips below are way more harsh. AFAIK this is a thing accross the board with DX12 games with current nvidia driver, supposedly there’s a fix cooking, but we’ll see.
I don’t play competetive pvp games at all, so I can’t speak for those. But so far friends only co-op & single player games have worked just fine.
are you using the env variable to enable it for the game? AFAIK it’s not enabled by default, and It dawned on me that I have it enabled on /usr/share/steam/compatibilitytools.d/proton-ge-custom/user_settings.py (the config file for proton-ge). But it could still be nvidia issue, wouldn’t surprise me
Ah the bug muck. I once made it to the Greek area before moving on to seiken densetsu 3 which I also did not finish because I went back and played through chrono trigger again even though I’ve finished it like 5 times on multiple platforms. Why some games never get finished is a mystery. It’s not a bad game for square usa’s first game.
It’s more interesting than the magic sistem in secret of mana, and maybe more balanced. Secret of mana is the closest game to this one in terms of mechanic, but there’s a certain tiger boss that is required to unlock the magic system and it’s something else entirely.
I don’t feel like the story telling was as good in Evermore. Secret of Mana grabbed me a lot more with it’s characters and it’s difficulty, and I always loved the plot despite some pretty obvious flaws. The music is still one of the best ever soundtracks too.
I think Evermore also got completely overshadowed by Chrono Trigger being released just 2 months before in the US.
It was a very basic story with a self-insert character, probably intended for a younger audience. That worked very well for me at the time. I think it was my first RPG so I really enjoyed getting lost in those environments.
Evermore also had a lot of bugs. I remember getting softlocked so many times in the game. SoM had a few bugs too, but I didn’t recall being softlocked as often.
I love the visuals… I wish there were way more games out there looking like that, but at best it‘s (great) cell-shaded characters/monsters in a clay/plastic-looking world nowadays.
I think we’re definitely over due for the “Pixel Art” Indie game era to be over and instead move onto to trying to mimic things like this. Not that I have anything against the Pixel Artwork for games nor am I trying to make it “1 versus the other”, but it’s been going on too long and I feel like it’s starting to stagnate and make it harder to find stand out games
I think it‘s so dominant cause it‘s cheap and easy to make, and it runs on anything. I don‘t see it go anywhere anytime soon. But I hope some AA studios will try their hands on this style.
Definitely the reason. I suppose the runs on anything point I can appreciate considering my very first “gaming” device was hardly anything suitable for gaming
bin.pol.social
Ważne