All I hope for is that the Controller fits well in my long thin hands - like the fat Steam Controller does.
With the right joystick in place, it’s certainly a product I may buy. The Steam Controller trackpad was not a sufficient alternative for joystick input when most games designed input with the right joystick in mind. Aiming and camera control with a variable and non-tactile deadzone and input default of trackpad camera controls has always been annoying to me.
Well the joy-cons kinda do that but if you wanted something that’s actually adult sized you’d have to check 3rd party options and there’s probably no guarantee that it will work on anything other than the Switch.
Yeah. Your main combat level is on the player/companion, so it’s much easier to change up your team and try out different beasts. Individual beasts do have levels, but that’s more about when you can ‘remaster’ (i.e. evolve) them and to unlock moves (which you can swap out at will). Also, elemental type effects are so much more interesting than just a flat damage bonus, and the music is really good. So in summary, yes, I would highly recommend.
I recommend it, but in response to the first part of your comment, I guess it depends on what parts of Pokémon you dislike.
Mechanically, I see the combat as more matured and nuanced. Battles are almost always 2v2. It uses a board game-inspired system where you pay action points to use a move; you gain 2 each turn, plus a bonus one when you hit with type advantage. The type system has interesting interactions: advantaged moves apply status effects, which give you setups for comboing moves together, instead of nuking opponents with double damage. For example, lightning ⇒ earth turns the target into glass, then metal ⇒ glass spreads damaging shards onto the battlefield. The game cuts down the grinding as well, with your character gaining levels instead of your monster tapes, so you can get to using a new tape with no catch-up grind at all. Stickers are a powerful evolution of the move system. You can freely move stickers around and they can appear with rare mods, ARPG-style, that customize how the sticker works. As an equivalent of Pokémon abilities are passive stickers, which trigger with certain conditions, which let you “program” a tape. There’s also an impressively robust fusion system that comes with an interesting strategic tradeoff: you get bigger stats in a fusion with your partner but lose action economy.
The game’s plot is a fresh one that breaks the standard formula of creature collectors. There’s a side quest that makes a nod to the usual “gym leader series”, but the plot is focused on discovering the mysteries of the island you’re stuck on and finding a way home. There’s a memorable and surprising cast of characters and a clear anti-capitalist message (you fight vampire landlords). I like the worldbuilding, too. It avoids the usual uncomfortable questions surrounding creature collectors, like notably the whole capturing and fighting part — you record images of monsters to tape and transform into them instead.
I find the monster designs imaginative and distinct. The roster is must less focused on elemental animals and more on folklore and cryptids, which ties into the overall plot of the game. The boss designs are also really cool, but that’s a spoiler.
Also, there are mods.
There might be reasons you still won’t like Cassette Beasts. The combat is still turn-based. The post-game is pretty thin, though I suppose this update is expanding that. You have to collect crafting materials to trade with NPCs for stuff, but only a few materials are scarce enough to care about. The game is pretty easy on the default difficulty, but there are settings to make it harder.
I’d add to the cons that some of the teammates are inconsistent gameplay wise. Some gets fusion very early, other pretty late (Eugene if I recall it well). Their story are similarly inconsistent, with some quite well done, and others very bare.
Season 3 was pretty bad, everyone was so shiny! 4 is good so far. Art style is back and improved + the gameplay is way better (combat!)
I think they somehow added part of the style to the previous games too, if you wanted to replay them anyway 👀
And you’re right about Wolf, if it were a tv show I’d never hit skip on the intro. Hopefully season 2 is still happening?
Edit: on the art -
“Graphic Black” art style brings Season 4’s enhanced visual style to all previous seasons. Also includes full dynamic lighting to episodes that previously did not receive this upgrade.
Walking Dead season 3 was weird because Clementine went from being a sweet and timid kid to being a shoot first ask question later, fuck everybody kind of person. She’s very hostile to the player character in 3. You don’t see any transformation as to why her personality changed so much. I kind of get it, she’s growing up into a teenager in a post apocalyptic zombie infested world. But then you start the 4th game and she’s much closer to who she was in the first 2 games. It’s hard to imagine anything she did in the 3rd game as being canon
The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series
There’s a lot of hours here, it has the 4 Seasons, 400 Days (a dlc), and The Walking Dead: Michonne. Seasons 1, 2, and 4 are great, give this a shot if you haven’t yet! I’m replaying it and it still stands up.
The Wolf Among Us
urban fantasy, nice and grim
The Expanse: A Telltale Series
Tales of Monkey Island: Complete Season
Batman - The Telltale Series
Batman: The Enemy Within - The Telltale Series
Didn’t play the bottom 4, so not sure on the quality. Tales From the Borderlands is currently free with prime, too! Worth a playthrough
I’ve played Tales of Monkey Island. If you’ve played Telltale’s version of Sam and Max, it’s pretty much the same kind of take. Probably suffers quite a bit from the episodic format, and puzzles are a bit straightforward compared to classic monkey island games. Fans of the series mostly consider it a huge letdown.
Can’t say anything about the more serious parts of the Telltale catalogue, I’ve never played those, but for having played this, the 3 Sam & Max seasons and Back to the Future, there was certainly a Telltale formula that started annoying me after a while. They went less and less subtle about crafting their dialogues so they all lead to the same answer, they clearly wrote their stories with an objective to reuse character models and assets, and they still used that in-house engine that looked and controlled terribly, barely improved through the years.
Their story based games feel higher budget, the controls start out serviceable but get better.
I think Wolf is the best controlling of the games I’ve played, but I might change my mind after Season 4. S4 is definitely the best looking so far
Thanks for the info! Monkey Island might be fun for a rainy day, never played the originals
You should definitely check out the original Monkey Island games when you have a chance! 1 and 2 got well done remasters, and 3 onward don’t really need any remastering.
Oh it was initially classed as insanely intrusive malware when kernel level AC was introduced about a decade ago, by anyone with a modicum of actual technical knowledge about computers.
Unfortunately, a whole lot of corpo shills ran propaganda explaining how actually its fine, don’t worry, its actually the best way to stop cheaters!
Then the vast, vast majority of idiot gamers believed that, or threw their hands up and went oh well its the new norm, trying to fight it is futile and actually if you are against this that means you are some kind of paranoid privacy freak who hates other people having fun.
EAC installation process includes “registration” of a game, and the uninstall process “unregisters” the game. If all games using EAC are uninstalled, EAC itself also should be uninstalled.
any software intentionally designed to cause disruption to a computer, server, client, or computer network, leak private information, gain unauthorized access to information or systems, deprive access to information, or which unknowingly interferes with the user’s computer security and privacy
It does not do any of these things. Like any software, it may have vulnerabilities, and being a kernel module it can be high risk. But that’s no different from any kernel module, like your graphics driver.
It’s a much higher risk than average because games are often abandoned within one year of release and still run as long as 10-15 years later and connects to the internet and other randos on the internet. See the Call of Duty games that allow you to take over the computer of anyone who connects to your online match. It greatly degrades the security of its users.
Technically lots of things people call “malware” don’t actually do any of those things. For instance they may hijack your default search engine, pop up ads, or otherwise monetize your computer at your expense. The category that was invented by ass coverers is “possibly unwanted program” but outside of those who worry about being sued by scumbags people colloquially refer to both what you call malware AND PUPs as "malware the root of which is “bad” after all. Language being descriptive not prescriptive I think this broader definition of malware is fine.
It unknowingly interferes with my security or privacy, 100%. It has root access. What’s it doing in there? Nowadays you’re naive to think it’s just to prevent game cheating. I guarantee they’re collecting all kinds of information.
Do you remember when Sony released cds that when inserted into Windows computer auto ran an installer that installed a rootkit that made it impossible for Windows to see any processes or files that started with a certain sequence of characters instantly turning any malware that named its files or processes similarly powerful rootkit. Oh and it installed a cd driver that made it impossible to copy their music.
Suggested removal was a full reinstall of windows.
I kind of assumed it would be packaged with each game, a waste of space (but how big could it be?) but leaving a game with anti cheat a global dependency seems like a bad idea.
inspired by the epic cliffhanger from Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Project Borealis represents a fan-made effort to realize a cohesive story conclusion to the episodic series.
I wonder if this takes Half-Life: Alyx into account?
So you bring an external mouse with your steamdeck? If that works for ya, more power to you.
Sometimes I need to pop quickly into the desktop so for my use case, bringing an external mouse would definitely inconvenience me. That’s when the trackpads come in handy.
gamingonlinux.com
Aktywne