I used to print armored core walkthroughs and take them to my room. I think that’s why my parents let me have a computer in my room. So I could use a floppy to bring them over without printing
I remember the game grumps did a walkthrough of some sonic game and they were going through some guys 10+ year walkthrough that was really well done. It was hilarious some of the comments the walkthrough person wrote.
Perhaps it’s because I grew up with adventure puzzle games and point’n’click games, but GameFAQs was always the nuclear option for me.
I much preferred the Universal Hint System - an approach more suited to nudging you towards figuring out the answer for yourself.
There’s no denying that it was (and is) a fantastic resource though. Hell, I’ve even written a guide myself. One of the last bastions of the 90s and 2000s WWW experience.
I remember finding online guides for the first time back in the days of dial up. It was incredible. So many games I had places where I was stuck and you just accepted that you have to figure it out or you just don’t continue the game.
I absolutely love the no-nonsense approach of gamefaqs (and the likes). <3
if I’m stuck in a game (usually some 90’s point&click adventure), more often than not I just want an easily ctrl+f searchable walkthrough, and does the site ever provide.
I remember how useful the FFX-2 guide was. We didn’t have a computer at home when I was a kid, but I was able to head to the town library and print off the neat formatted text only guide.
I think I first played this in like 2005 or something. I was underage and didn’t have banking credentials yet, so I bought the licence by mailing a letter full of coins to the author. Back then a lifetime licence was a few dozen euros, but I bought the major version licence for like 15€. That version received updates for a couple of years, from what I remember. I never bought the lifetime licence, but re-bought a major version licence twice and then bought the game again when it launched on Steam. In the end buying the lifetime licence would’ve been cheaper, heh, but I don’t mind supporting the developers.
I still keep coming back to it every few years. There are other games in the same genre or very adjacent to it that are better as games – Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is the first to come to mind – but there are some things about URW that no other game really does, notably the whole realistic iron age survival thing (it’s a different genre altogether with less nuanced survival gameplay, but another iron age favourite of mine is Vintage Story, which is basically a Minecraft mod spun off into its own game).
The animal AI in particular is really good. The way you hunt in this game is a pretty good representation of cursorial hunting, which is basically just running after the animals until they tire – something humans are good at thanks to bipedalism. You only rarely manage to take down larger animal like elks (moose in American; the game calls them by their European name) in one strike, which means that you have to wound them and then jog after them until they collapse from exhaustion and blood loss. Or you can dig trap pits in chokepoints and corral them into them, another real hunting strategy used in iron age Finland. The tracking in the game is also very involved. You do it by following tracks displayed on the ground rather than a compass arrow, and you often have to track animals for very long distances and they will try to lose you by moving erratically.
Damn, now I kind of want to go back and play the game again.
Up until the big UI/UX update a few years back, the vast majority of people had never heard about Dwarf Fortress outside of the sickos and the people who remember when LPs were forum/blog posts.
Unreal World has been in that same category where the people who play it love it and the rest vaguely recall their favorite youtubers maybe trying it out once.
I have never played Dwarf Fortress but I thought it had name recognition, I guess the average COD, Fortnite type player might not have heard of some niche game like that
…God I miss forum-based let’s plays. I was never a SA member (Something Awful, not Sturmabteilung, though there’s probably some degree of overlap there), but I did browse the lparchive website once upon a time. Some folks put so much effort into their presentation, I want sure where the game ended and the LP narrative began.
There was one in particular that was an LP of the Blade Runner adventure game. That’s a game I had watched my dad play on our family Compaq back in the day, so I thought I knew what I was getting into, but the combination of the game having secret narrative branches (that change based on a random seed when you start a new game, I think) and the posts being written in a first person, hard-boiled noir style, made me think that we had played different games.
I vaguly remember playing some version (I think a demo) of this in the 90’s. Crazy to see it’s still going. It’s on Steam. I should probably check it out again sometime.
Where the Trump-as-Master Chief post is merely cringeworthy, the Homeland Security message is flat-out dangerous. Comparing immigrants in the US to a parasitic alien life form that infects and annihilates advanced societies is not deeply offensive, it’s also rooted in the worst of human history: As seen in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch of the Holocaust and “cockroaches” in Rwanda, to name a couple recent examples, dehumanizing the “other” so you can more easily inflict cruelty, injustice, and horrors upon them is hardly a new technique, and the US government’s messaging was not subtle.
You might think that using imagery from one of its best known videogames in a call to “destroy” immigrants would prompt Microsoft to action, or at least to express some small modicum of disapproval. For now, at least, you would be wrong: Rather like Nintendo, which eagerly picks copyright fights it knows it can win but kept its mouth tightly zipped when Homeland Security used Pokémon to promote violent immigration raids, a representative told PC Gamer that “Microsoft does not have anything to share on this matter.”
Unexpectedly good political commentary from checks notes PC Gamer
In Contact Harvest, Truth learns of a new species that has been discovered, and apparently the old Forerunner scanners say the humans have a lot of holy Forerunner artifacts that are indicated by this symbol:
Truth goes to talk to the old Forerunner AI kept prisoner in the basement and says “You guys didn’t provide a legend with your scanners, what’s this thing?”
Mendicant Bias the Forerunner AI explains, “Oh, that’s the symbol for Reclaimer. Reclaimers are the people my old bosses chose to inherit our empire after they all kicked the bucket.”
Truth says “Wait, you’re saying this is a planet full of demigods?”
Mendicant Bias is like “Yeah, haha, I guess if you insist on worshipping my creators as gods, then you’d better start worshipping these people instead from now on. They’re supposed to be your new bosses.”
Truth says “No, absolutely not. I worked much too hard to become a space pope and I’m not letting the second coming of Jesus get in the way of my plans. I’m going to declare a space jihad against these new aliens so nobody finds out they’re demigods.”
Anyway, the new species were humans and the Covenant declared a holy war and nearly wiped humanity out. Truth also ordered a genocide of the Sangheili after the Sangheili generals started asking a few too many tricky questions like “why are we having a space jihad against the humans they seem nice”
Good to know! I’ve just been having regular encounters with high quality content from there, rather than being a regular reader, so I haven’t had any awareness of anything in the background. In a world full of “gaming journalists have no place in an era of AI” this is really heartening to hear
Pokemon Red got me through a year of boring ass 9th grade early morning study hall on my Gameboy Pocket.
With that being said, it’s hilarious to me that someone else took the “pocket monster” formula and built it into something bigger and better than Game Freak or Nintendo could ever develop.
Nintendo is clearly upset about Palworld, but fuck 'em. They had over two and a half decades to improve the formula and now the best thing they can do is half-assed, low effort cash grabs; Gameplay with the depth of a teaspoon and the visuals of a smeared turd.
i wonder tho, why are they going after palworld specifically? cause palworld is faaaar from being the first pokemon-inspired game, and id argue it’s not even the best one
and it can’t just be the plagiarized design allegations (which, tbf, some pals are really on the limit, not that it’s a bad thing), because if it was they’d just use their existing copyright instead of filing tons of new patents
Pokemon is the biggest media franchise on planet earth. To call that dumbass palworld AI SLOP “bigger and better than GF or Nintendo could ever develop” is MAGA-level batshit insane. Nintendo is ROLLING in money rn, they don’t need to try harder for shit. They’re doing phenomenally.
The bitching about Nintendo is wild, like yalls don’t quit. Give eternal passes to Sony and Microsoft, but the pikachu/Mario guys are the villains…??? Give me a fucking break.
More profitable is not the same thing as better. For example, Marvel movies are pretty shit, but they make a ton of money. Palworld is better than Pokémon, for many reasons. One major one is that it actually tried to innovate on something. That’s more than Game Freak has done in decades despite having an infinite money glitch.
The fact that there are still hardcore pokemon fans out there who buy every one of their games like it’s a masterpiece is crazy. They aren’t even just bad, you have to put effort into making them look that shit, and the gameplay is basically still the same as i played on the original Gameboy when i was 12
I haven’t played them in ages, but from what I’ve seen of them they’re worse than we had back then. At least they tried to present some challenge. I think that’s mostly gone now, like it is for most mainstream gaming.
I’ll be the first to say I don’t like Linux gaming’s dependence on valve. I wish steam wasn’t the best experience, and I applaud all the effort that the FOSS community puts in to keep them honest.
But for the “gambling” monetization in particular, this is really a “don’t hate the player, hate the game” situation. It’s on people/govts to regulate this. If Valve said tomorrow, “you’re right, we’re not going to monetize gambling anymore because we think it is unethical”, they would just lose to a competitor who is less ethical.
It’s the same as saying, “if you’re rich and are pro higher taxes, why don’t you just choose to pay more? Nothing is stopping you.” Because that’s not going to fix anything, it’s just a losing strategy. What you need is a system where everyone is required by law to behave in a way that benefits the society.
To that end, Valve’s most ethical move would be to lobby the govt to ban unethical monetization. I know they’re making bank, but whether they’re making enough to out-lobby all the others who are also doing this, I don’t know…also we all know the US is not exactly positioned for effective FTC policies right now…
What you need is a system where everyone is required by law to behave in a way that benefits the society.
That’s not feasible, but it’s probably feasible to require everyone to act in a way that doesn’t hurt society, and make restitution when they do hurt society.
For example, I’m okay with gambling in games being legal, but there needs to be rules:
no kids
pay into a fund to help those with addiction
odds of winning are clearly posted in a way that’s accessible and understandable, and the odds are verified independently
there should be a way to buy something instead of gambling for it
must have a way to set spending limits to protect drunk gamblers
Valve could literally ban gambling on all Steam games if they wanted to. stop playing devil’s advocate for billionaires, Gaben has enough yachts already
You can install Proton by other means. It doesn’t have to be through Steam. And by now, since Valve made so much of the groundwork already, the development of Proton can be done by the community, like so many other FOSS projects.
And you can build your own PC and peripherals, yet every aspect of the gaming industry is funded and driven by corporations. Always has been, and Linux gaming is no exception.
I specifically acknowledged the FOSS efforts to eliminate depenence on valve, I think it’s great, but even Bazzite uses the SteamDeck UI. Do you know if there’s a FOSS deck UI replacement that unifies all storefronts/repos, and works as smoothly? I want that to exist.
Steam is just objectively the smoothest linux gaming experience for the largest number of people right now. It’d be awesome if that wasn’t the case, but for now it is.
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Aktywne