Alan Wake and some other Remedy games are on the Steam Autumn sale for cheap if anyone is interested. And good stuff Atticus, I really enjoyed my playthrough. I think they did a great job with it. I appreciate the added depth to Cloud over the original.
Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou and Planescape Torment. I think both helped me think about death and reincarnation - what would it even mean to have a “soul”? Would it mean some sort of unbroken consciousness, or are we bits and pieces of different segmented ideas and thoughts loosely connected together?
The answer is you’re a meat robot! We’re all just chemical gradients that learned to think.
A lot of people find this really existentially problematic but I think it’s fascinating. It’s even more fascinating that the meat doesn’t like thinking about it’s meathood, and developed bits of brain meat specifically to think about souls & gods instead of reality.
Tong Nou offers some interesting explorations of the idea of dharma, which I don’t think it got in the same way before playing it. Even if we are ultimately electricity flowing through meat, we all end up with an idea of “purpose”? And the ultimate despair re: materialist atheism is that the answer to “why do some people just suffer and suffer and suffer?” is that things just suck.
In Tong Nou, there is a dharma or purpose underlying each life. There are some lives you instantly die when selecting, or whose purpose is to die. There’s one where you sacrifice yourself and become a sacred torch. Suffering given meaning.
Planescape has an afterlife, and your character is going to hell at the end of it. Forever. All of your actions only lead you closer and closer to maybe a moral redemption? But what’s really the point there? You’re going to suffer endlessly after all of this anyway.
There’s also a really good series of Oblivion mods - Ruined Tails Tale, and The Tears of the Fiend - that have captured this in a personally inspiring way too. You find out that you are a demon who stole the soul of the body you inhabit, that you cursed them to an eternal afterlife of wandering and suffering. Your attempts to fix everything make things worse. But what do you from there? Try to live a life which makes up for it?
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice stayed with me for quite a while. It’s a walking simulator with some mild puzzles and fun combat, but the real experience is something I’ve never seen before. They really made the best of the medium to tell their story. Also there is a short documentary you should watch after finishing the game.
Apple is trying to get games running on macOS, most obviously with the Game Porting Toolkit to make it easier for developers to release Mac versions, but they still face an uphill climb mostly because of the reputation that Macs can’t run games. Of course, Apple would also prefer that these games be sold on the App Store instead of Steam or the Epic Games Store, and I think a lot of developers aren’t too interested in that.
It would be funny if gaming on Linux ends up getting more traction than macOS because of Valve’s efforts with Proton despite the much larger macOS market share.
It would be funny if gaming on Linux ends up getting more traction than macOS because of Valve’s efforts with Proton despite the much larger macOS market share.
Enderal and its not even close. It shows a world that is in a deep decline and an apocalypse that is all but inevitable but manages to still feel hopeful in a way. Throughout the game there is this theme of how even if everything might fade at some point your interpersonal actions are still meaningful. The Rhalata sidequest alone easily outmatches most games that where published by “real” game studios and the main story just seals the deal.
I was thinking about the ending for days. I wish someone else could experience it for the first time so I can finally talk about it with someone. This game is so good, audio, graphics and story wise, it’s a shame it’s not widely known.
What’s your setup for playing retro titles? Do you own the original hardware or are you more of an emulation guy?
Mario Kart 64 is so comfy. Making me want to play it
Was also wondering what made you choose to do these posts on Lemmy rather than something like reddit? You’d get a lot more engagement there. Not that I’m complaining about you making Lemmy a lot more interesting 😅 just curious!
I do actually own original hardware, it’s a bit of a headache to setup though so I really only use it for situations where I feel like its controls are really needed or just special occasions. So usually I emulate.
I chose Lemmy because I liked how small the community was if that makes any sense? Like, I won’t complain if it gets bigger, but there’s something nice about refreshing the page a few hours later and instead of getting an onslaught of new posts to consume, it’s just a few new posts stacked on top of the old ones from before.
I guess if I had to summarize it, Lemmy feels a lot less like it’s trying to shove content down my throat which I appreciate. It makes interactions a bit rarer for me, but also makes them feel a bit more authentic
Yeah I’m more of an emulation guy too. I like upscaling and some of the QOL improvements that come with some ROM hacks.
Well put. Although I do use reddit it is information overload. Here it does feel slower paced and easier to digest 😅 feels more like old school forums in that sense
The QOL are definitely what makes it worth it. The only console I prefer OG hardware is probably the Wii and N64, and only because there’s not really a uniform way to capture the controls. Even then, there’s adapters for both controllers (I just don’t have any) and for N64 most games you can work around the controls in some capacity with only a little jank
Yeah it’s a similar story with DS/3DS emulation. You can work with it but games feel better on original hardware. I think there are some dual screen emulation handhelds coming out now though
Ooh, yeah, now that you mention it those are two other consoles i try to avoid emulating. I have a 3DS i still use regularly, but man, it does suck that there’s no comfortable way to play the DS/3DS games emulated on a PC
My PC isn’t anything special. I was cheap about the case (if i had my way though i wanted to put it in a old Beige PC case). Specwise it’s a Ryzen 7 3700x, 32 GB of DDR4 RAM, and a Radeon RX 7600 XT. It’s enough to run most modern games on Medium without breaking the bank.
I think in total it cost me around 900$? I remember i got the CPU really cheap (one of the pins were bent and i had to straighten it out) and the GPU i got a good deal on too.
Nice, there’s something so appealing about older cases. I wonder how difficult it’d be to fit modern hardware in one though. I want to build myself a decent budget PC one day, currently I’ve got an i7 4790k and gtx 980ti so very old! I don’t do much modern gaming though so im not in need of an urgent upgrade. I’ve also got a small form factor pc in my living room for emulation. It’s got a ryzen 5 pro 2400ge in it and I’m surprised how much it can actually run. Managed to get some switch games running on it🫨
My guess is the issue with the older case would be more so thermals. With the size of modern GPUs I wouldn’t be surprised if I ran into some issues though.
SFF computers are crazy. I had a HP Compaq for my first “gaming PC” (4 GB of RAM and a 32 bit CPU in 2016). As expected it struggled to run most things. Still, for its age and tiny ass size it did really well with things I wouldn’t expect it too
Yeah good point, would be pretty cramped in there. Saying that, sffs have basically no ventilation and they seem to manage 😅 if I had the money I would be attempting so many PC builds just for the fun of it.
Same. I always get fun ideas for builds but then look at PC part prices and go “no way I can afford that” and the idea just sits there lol.
I once saw a PC at my local Career Center in the Computer Engineer class that was filled with Mineral Oil irc (because it’s non conductive). That idea stuck with me because it was a very “why the fuck would you do that?” unhinged idea. They also had one with a screen slapped into the side.
Crazy I’d be interested to know why they did that 👀. I try to stick to second hand parts to keep the costs down but my only option is eBay really as there don’t seem to be many places that sell used PC parts round here
That’s where I got all my used parts too. I don’t have as many issues with eBay as I do with other online marketplaces luckily (and as far as I know they haven’t done anything scummy which is a plus), but something about it just rubs me the wrong way. Idk what it is
Gacha genre, it feels like. Addicting, but ultimately terrible for your health, though maybe a bit inverted, fast food affecting the body and as a consequence the mind, and gachas first the mind and as consequence the body.
Did you know YouTube has games now? They load near instantly, easily accessible on mobile or desktop, and they’re p much all shit. Most of them are basically generic asset flips or imitations of popular mobile games. I really can’t think of anything closer to cheap fast food.
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