Yup. Steam is my go-to because of easy game steaming, steam deck integration, etc. But I know what I’m sacrificing for that convenience. Luckily Valve is an incredibly customer focused company and I have a huge amount of (well deserved IMO) faith in. GOG however is definitely still the best way to own your games.
A lot of things can cause “the mind to wander” and, frankly, I’m not a health professional but as a person who sometimes has trouble focusing I somewhat sympathize. There are times when I simply can’t sit down and enjoy myself, and there’s nothing that can be done about that. Usually times of high stress and anxiety.
But outside of those extreme cases, there’s generally a few things here and there that can help alleviate. The first, and maybe almost stupidly obvious one, is to do some of those tasks beforehand. I don’t have to stress about doing the dishes or paying the bills or returning a call if I just do it beforehand. Logging into the bank app is just 5 minutes, why worry about it otherwise.
Another is to get comfortable and shut yourself off. Leave your phone in a place you can’t reach from wherever you’re gaming (or watching a movie, or reading or studying. Your phone should actually be in a different room every time you don’t immediately need it) as well as any other electronic devices. Close the windows and doors, turn off your PC. Make it a bother to stop enjoying yourself.
Take a bathroom break (or if its in the evening, a shower+grooming) and maybe have a snack or a full meal. Have a bottle of water nearby. That crosses out basic biologic annoyances (until you need a pee break but that’s at least a healthy obstacle).
Exercise a bit. Sounds out there, but exhausting yourself physically isn’t only healthy, it also takes your mind off a lot of things. Since that’s a relatively boring activity that can also have your mind wander, have some podcasts handy, but something light and preferably with 2+ hosts so you can have several voices in your head that aren’t yours but also don’t need to follow a story or anything heavy. Going on a walk while listening to a 1 hour episode should be good enough (and something we all should do regardless of attention issues)
On the subject of podcasts, I’ve found that some games aren’t gripping enough to draw my attention or are repetitive enough that I don’t need to dedicate all of my attention to them, so I’ve dubbed them Podcast Games and do both at the same time. Roguelikes do very well in this regard, as well as management games, or anything that isn’t story heavy (or if the story blows) and where the sound isn’t exactly necessary.
And sometimes, ultimately, maybe you just aren’t really in the mood for a game. There are hobbies of mine that I enjoy, but don’t do much because I’m not “in the zone” as often, like reading or watching a TV series. So if gaming is like that for you, swap around and enjoy yourself, time spent doing something you like isn’t time wasted.
Optional: I’ve found that I’m much better at sitting down and watching a movie or a show when I have someone alongside me to chat up. Maybe having someone along to play/watch together, or simply streaming through Discord for a friend might be a solution. You’d be surprised at how many other people are also bored and would accept an invite to watch you play while chatting about their day.
It’s a line from the movie “The Exorcist”. Coincidentally just watched Ricky Gervais’ new standup special that just came out in which he riffs on this exact line.
I adore Nethack; there is so much to discover! Although, most of it is stuff that kills you. My first ascension was with the very reliable human Valkyrie.
Yeah it’s ridiculously deep. Like I said, I played it for 30 years and I still learn new stuff all the time when I read the wiki or watch videos, like “damn! Had no clue, that is pretty smart, what a bizarre mechanism but it’s perfectly logical when you think about it” hahaha!
Hahaha! First run ever that I got a wand of wishing and genuinely have nothing more I need, so I wished for a blessed figurine of an Archon and applied it, and he spawned with Demonbane and just mows down monsters like it’s nobody’s business. :)
Oh wow, you are going to spend a lot of time on the https://nethackwiki.com, there’s also a tutorial on YouTube that goes into the basics. First tip is: dying is fun! Just experiment a lot in the beginning. Start out with a dwarven valkyrie, that’s the easiest class/race to play.
In the beginning you’re just going to learn the controls and get used to visually id monsters and items. I don’t know which version you play, I can recommend one with a visual GUI, I’m an ASCII purist myself, but the interface for vanilla Nethack is just brutal. There are variants like Fiqhack and Dynahack that come with a bunch of QoL improvements like separate windows for message history, inventory, stats et c.
It takes a very long time to learn and master (as evidenced by my 30 year journey), but there is just something to it, it is so well thought out and it has been continuously tweaked over almost 40 years, and sees plenty of people still playing it.
There’s a nethack subreddit that I would recommend checking out when you have questions!
I stopped looking into much new stuff beyond word of mouth, last I played was Neither, I think, and it was very disappointing that that didn’t go anywhere. neat that you can still run a server, though
Yeah like… A lot of people out there like Taylor Swift, Imagine Dragons, a lot of bands/music artists that are kinda generic, and also a bunch of TV shows and games that CAN be considered “generic”… like, sometimes you just want bread and butter, you know?
Speaker on ceiling: Anyone detected using an emulator will hear from our legal department for stealing the product we have but refuse to make available for sale.
Absolutely yes. It’s timelessly good. I played a bunch of the post-SotN Castlevanias on GBA and such and even with the more advanced systems and everything, none of them hit the same. It’s insane how well they nailed it on their first go.
There really isn’t a remaster, just ports. There’s very little to improve.
I think there may have been some voice re-recordings here or there, but otherwise most versions are pretty much the same. I think the Xbox 360 Live Arcade version is missing some unimportant FMVs and some other minor details, but it’s still completely decent.
It was a secret unlockable in the PSP game Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles with an added character and other stuff, but then you have to deal with the PSP emulation or whatever.
I’d suggest either emulating the original or getting it as a PSOne Classic on PlayStation Store unless some other route is more convenient.
I played it for the 1st time, no nostalgia googles and I didn’t really enjoy the back tracking that much (even using the quick travel spots), the way to get the powers (you kinda need to remember where the monsters are) and discovering the secret rooms felt like a chore to me.
The only Castlevania games that I have played to completion have been Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin of ruin for DS, and regarding the genre, additionally to that, it would be Metroid Zero Mission, Guacamelee! And I think those are the ones I can remember… And I didn’t feel that way with them.
I did enjoy the OST and the graphics a lot though.
I’ll admit that 100%ing (or rather “100%”ing it - iykyk) it can get pretty tiresome, but I actually found that the backtracking wasn’t too bad because the castle map was so good. For some reason I was able to remember a lot of routes in it, but I couldn’t find my way through the later games for the life of me without checking the map screen every five seconds.
As someone who played later entries first and then went back to SotN, IMO it's a bit rough around the edges in comparison. Still a fantastic game, but I think later games managed to improve on it.
You don’t have to have nostalgia for the game to appreciate how wonderfully crafted and expansive it is. It has one of the best soundtracks of any game, period, and its art is highly detailed and numerous. It has a ton of secrets (including one MAJOR secret) and a couple of extra game modes that enhance the replayability.
I would say the game seems to get better every time I play it. Is that nostalgia or something else? There are a lot of games I played before I had ever seen SOTN, yet I don’t feel the same desire to keep replaying them. I think it’s like a piece of classical music or a great movie. The more you replay it, the more details you come to appreciate. The original Deus Ex is like that for me as well.
It’s an fantastic game, as other have already told you. But I’d like to add that there’s a randomizer for it and this basically adds almost infinite replay value (at least for me!)
As long as it’s communicated amongst the participants. Yes! If anyone could just pause it because they wanna go see a movie now or make a baby? NO!
Solution: everyone in a sessions needs to enable this. So a friends-group can actually take a break for a tinkle. Or that everyone has to enter the menu or such and then the game pauses.
I’m hooked on Nightreign right now. It would be pretty nice if there was a special pause ping you could do that paused the game if the other two players agreed with reply pings.
Pausing in StarCraft allowed any player to pause, and any player to unpause. Additionally, each player could only pause a finite number of times (like 5 per game). I think this could work in nightreign.
The hard part is that there’s no chat in nightreign, so someone will pause and you have no idea if it’s legit or they’re just griefing.
I mean, I’ll give them some money to activate developer mode so I can install emulators on my Xbox. I don’t need emulators on my Xbox but it’s gonna sit there doing nothing otherwise because I’m not paying for Gamepass
I’m in full agreement there, but at least it’s a small one-off payment to just use it the way I want to rather than playing cat-and-mouse with hacks and software updates
I already own an Xbox, there’s no earthly way that buying an old anything would be cheaper than paying the small developer mode activation charge for the console I already have (bought second hand a few years ago from a friend who had used it 3 times)
It is one of the most addictive games I’ve played, and yet, I have learned more from it than almost any other.
Programming has been a core part of my career for about 20 years, and I can’t think of any other time I’ve had such leaps forward as I did in the first few months playing factory.
It really is a great visual representation of large scale systems management.
KSP really is top tier Edutainment. I finally understood, why we don’t shoot all garbage into the sun 😅. Turns out, rocket science really is some rocket science
KSP definitely. I was literally doing astrophysics at uni when I started playing. It got me a much better sense for orbital mechanics and trajectories than any class ever did.
Yeah, there is a huge gap between being forced to do what you need to do because the whole thing is on rails and not being given even a hint of what to do. So many games can’t find a spot in between the two extremes.
Not being able to find things isn’t finding my own way, it is just frustrating because I probably walked right past it and didn’t happen to look at it the right way to get the interact option. I need strong hints or even the choice to be told where to go or I get frustrated and quit games.
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