Monopolies aren’t defined by the availability of alternatives. It’s based on the market share captured by a single entity. We’d need to see statistics to determine if it’s a total monopoly, but I’m not aware of many other hosting platforms for game wikis. Maybe fextralife?
Yeah I think hosting is the thing that they’ve captured, far more than the notion of a domain-specific wiki. Of course, there’s nothing stopping an aspiring wiki admin from hosting on a platform that isn’t targeted at game wikis.
Fextralife is utter shit. Always giving you the most unrelated information in the longest amount of time all while being forced to watch a stream you don’t care about.
GameCube games MSRP was 49.99. Adjusted for inflation it is $79.30. The reason things feel so expensive is because you get half cooked broken DLC ridden games as the norm and a large portion of income goes toward housing, transportation (cars specifically), food and education.
Mhmm. Everyone is shitting on Nintendo, but the reality is their games are literally keeping up with inflation. The problem is that our wages haven’t kept up with inflation, and the cost of living has, at least, kept up. In some cases (rent), it’s grown faster than the inflation of everything else.
Don’t get me wrong, Nintendo is tone deaf for making this decision now, and I suspect they’d still make billions with a $15 price increase rather than a $30 one. I’m not defending them. But the picture is a lot larger than them.
If Nintendo always made games that didn’t need dlc or got free updates, didn’t require Nintendo online for full functionality, or had to pay a 30% platform fee, it would make much more sense for this price. I don’t believe for a second they won’t make a profit at $60 for their mainline games.
You’re also forgetting maybe the biggest factor: library selection. We used to have a lot of choices, but not literal thousands of choices across all our platforms. If we only had our choice of a few hundred games, $80 might sound more reasonable.
theres also the chance that at least for TTYD, that was a players choice version of the game, which retailed for 20$ new. since its 2006, on the wake of the Wii
I have ~10k hours in counterstrike across multi game versions and accounts. I noticed a similar thing over my years. The players doing well in a match were often neutral towards gamer girls, but the guy having a shit match would be the fastest sack of shit every time. Especially if one of the top fraggers pointed out they were being beaten by a girl.
Obviously there are always exceptions to any rules but in my anecdotal experience the guys who were confident in their abilities didn’t care about women but losers would attack them just for speaking.
Counter Strike was way better when this was the vibe. I am so tired of competitive this and gun case that. I’ve never been interested in 5v5 scrimming in any serious way, but that’s all CS2 wants me to do.
I want gun game, I want wc3, I want ZM. I want quirky custom maps (glass!) and quake sounds and !bet ct all. I want to fuck around with new friends on a server for an evening, not to sweat my balls off throwing practiced smokes on dust2.
Same thing kinda happened to TF2. I mean, Competitive is dead but the server browser and community servers are not what they used to be. I miss when it was front and center. Today most people just play casual on Valve servers.
After a quick search it seems like the CS2 in-game server browser has gone to complete shit. I hope Valve fixes it. It’s part of the Source Legacy.
If it makes you feel any better those hours were spread out over the last 10 years or longer. I can’t even remember when I started. Just one of those ol’ reliable games for me.
And the worst part of it is that probably half of those hours happened within a few years in the middle there. I played like 6 hours a night every night with my friends. Good times but yeah…
My heavy CS days were early in csgo days. Back when the skin gambling scene and the pro scene were popping early on. My buddies and I would watch the pro games and then get all hyped to improve and we would jump into ranked only to get fucking pub stomped. Good times. Eventually we did start getting good. I only ever got to whatever rank was below global and only two of my buddies ever got to global.
However my top fps bragging moment was actually in valorant when it was a closed beta still I absolutely shat all over pro csgo player at the time named JDM in a lobby. Top fragged and completely dominated him the entire match.
That was when I peaked in my fps gaming lol. It’s all been downhill since. I’m still better than most people at fps games in general, but I am not as sharp and snappy as I was when I was a younger man with way more free time to practice and improve every night.
You’re absolutely correct, I had a similar experience
I played CS for roughly the same amount of time; my clan ranges from DMG to Global, but we had a rule that if you were in the clan, we’d 5-man with you regardless of your rank, so if you were Silver, you’d have a chance to rub elbows and learn strategies from the higher skilled players.
Then we got a Global, a girl named Moon.
Holy hell, it’s like people’s brains did a 180°, they were incredibly mean to her, for no reason, and eventually it came out that she was trans, and they bullied her even worse, out of the server.
I kicked everyone who bullied/demonized Moon for being trans; because at the end of the day, it was about being a honest human being, and not just a CS player/gamer.
Especially if one of the top fraggers pointed out they were being beaten by a girl.
Not really a gold star by the top player’s name for this, either. The comment alone leaves plenty of room to be interpreted as “girls should be easy to beat/poor gamers because they’re girls.”
They wouldn’t say “you’re getting beaten by a girl” as much as they would respond to the guys losing their minds who happened to be below them on the scoreboard by saying things like “Why are you yelling at her she’s playing better than you are shut up”. Kinda way.
I’m not a misogynist but anybody who consistently scores top on a public server pretty much is a pubstomper asshole by definition. And I have certainly been that. You don’t do it for the challenge, or you’d be doing league and more competitive modes.
Intellectual property is a resource. Corporations are in the business of hoarding resources to extort ration at a price. Microsoft doesn’t care about the studios. They care about owning ip.
The Outer Worlds is pretty much what Starfield could and should have been and was made by Obsidian, the developers behind a ton of other great games such as (in chronological order, with the best of all games ever bolded)
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2
Neverwinter Nights 2
Fallout New Vegas
Pillars of Eternity
Tyranny
Pillars of Eternity 2
There’s even a sequel to it coming out some time this year so you don’t run as much of a risk of running out of game any time soon!
Hard disagree. They’re both equally boring as shit, but Starfield at least had decent ship flying/building mechanics. What did outer worlds have? Nothing.
It did? Outer Worlds was just an over-exaggerated parody of capitalism, Starfield at least had some somewhat-believable world building in terms of how the tech progressed, how/why did humans start to live among the stars, conflict between different religions or factions, the xenomorph threat...
Like I'm not saying any of these were done well, but it did have decent worldbuilding and some neat ideas, it was just the execution that sucked. OW might have some better parts than SF, like companion writing (although it was pretty cliched and cheesy there too) so I'm really surprised you use world building as your example lol
im just salty about starfields world building shouldve chosen different example
OWs world building was fine. nothing special, just fine. there were stupid things but they were either a joke or there to back up a point (“we moved this dangerous animal to this planet to make a deodorant and now its killing us” 👈 this shit is supposed to be funny and anti corporation. does it work? dunno, its stupid, might be funny to someone, its fine, little cringe )
starfields world building just grinds my gears. when there are stupid things, they are there because someone at bethesda thinks its coool as heck or didnt think it through. fucking space cowbois. fucking colony war. why add mechs into your world and ban them? why artificially limit the number of star systems the nations can control?
Totally agree the dlc really made it one if those “it gets good after x hours” sorta things; All different vibes for the dlcs too. The raider one was lonely but it felt like it was supposed to be.
Thank you! Felt like I was I playing a different game than everyone else.
Everyone mocked Starfield’s Neon for being Discount Cyberpunk. But at least they played it as straight as they could. Like, I could believe people live there and had a life.
It felt like Outer Worlds kept trying to make jokes about how cruel capitalism is versus tell a real story. Like, “Oh boy time to go increase shareholder value!” Or “I love Space nuts. I have to say that or I die.” Like wtf, where’s the subtlety?
It’s not Borderlands 3 bad, no where near it. But it’s pretty bad.
In this genre of “big space games”, The Outer Worlds stands near to Mass effect, because it follows “the Bioware formula” pretty closely: The player and a group of followers visit several semi-open worlds, where they look for a MacGuffin related to the main story while solving local problems. (I’ll write a short essay about the Bioware formula someday…)
The Outer Worlds was a good game (not great) and I look forward to the sequel. I’ve played most Obsidian games and I wish they wrote more sci-fi.
Starfield was much better than Outer Worlds IMO. I enjoyed my time with Starfield, it’s not perfect of course. I’ve tried to get through Outer Worlds three times but it’s just not fun, I also strongly dislike New Vegas. Just ok writing doesn’t make up for shitty gameplay.
The core of the problem is that there’s absolutely nothing effectively preventing companies from abusing IP claims to harass whoever they want.
At least you’d expect claims to be automatically dropped when coming from an assumptive/disingenuous party. Something like “you issued 100 wrong claims so we won’t listen to your 101st one, sod off”. But nah.
As such, “your violating muh inrelactual properry, remove you’re conrent now!!!” has zero cost, and a thousand benefits. Of course they’d abuse it.
The role of AI in this situation is simply to provide those companies a tool to issue more and faster claims, at the expense of an already low accuracy.
IP and copyright laws have been the bane of the internet. Not only stifling fair use but it has become nothing but weaponised for corporate warfare. the DMCA isn’t fit for purpose.
An individual would risk corporate lawyers lobbing suits at them they don’t have nearly enough resources to fight. In that way, it’s much like other forms of activism: individual actions are easily singled out and retaliated against.
If a ton of people were to do so, however, they might have an impact. Either the registrar would have to take steps to limit who can submit them, which might conflict with some laws, or they’d invest a great deal of resources trying to sort out the legit ones. Trying to single out people for retaliation is hard when there’s enough of them. In this way, too, it is like other forms of activism:
There is strength in numbers. There is power in unity.
If, hypothetically, someone were to coordinate such actions in the style of a crowdsources DDoS, and they could get enough participants, they might get away with it.
Sounds like a job for a group similar to Anonymous, just less focused on actual illegal activities and instead just playing out the legal methods of fighting against corporations.
[Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, nor from any country following Saxon tribal law like USA. Take what I say with a grain of salt.]
As far as I know, in theory the victim of the bogus DMCA could sue the copyright troll for damages, including attorney fees and all that stuff. In practice, it would be the same as nothing, megacorp who hired the copyright troll would make sure that the victim knows its place.
I mean, there is. DMCA essentially protects content hosts from copyright claims. When they get a DMCA notice, they remove the material and inform the user whose material is removed. If they want to contest it, they can submit a counter notice denying the claim and basically saying “take me to court then”, with their contact info so a suit can be filed. At this point, if nothing is filed in a two week period, the host is free to consider the initial takedown notice void.
Sending a takedown notice under DMCA that’s knowingly false is perjury, which would presumably come up at the court hearing.
The problem is that defending against a copyright troll in the court is an expensive headache, and the copyright troll has a whole army of lawyers to prove for sure that the Moon is made of green cheese. As such, even if the target knows that it’s a bogus claim, they still comply with the troll to avoid the court.
Sending a takedown notice under DMCA that’s knowingly false is perjury, which would presumably come up at the court hearing.
In theory, yes. In practice, good luck proving that the copyright troll knew it and acted maliciously.
you don’t get entire functional UI elements accurately populated with appropriate data out of a “bug”. at best its a feature that was being tested internally and never would have made it past that, at worst its something that went live early.
Oh whoops I accidentally built an entire ad portal and placed it onto the main page and oh no I accidentally passed it through multiple levels of code review QA and approval, then crap I deployed it to the test environment then prod
Yeah it is possible he’s accurately, but misleadingly, calling it a bug because it was not meant to be deployed to production (yet). I do not think that’s how he wants or expects people to take it when he calls it a “bug”, though.
First thing that came in to my mind was Gears of War with its specific third person view and hiding behind covers. I don’t think it was the first game with that mechanic but the most influential one
I think you need to be more specific than just “third person”. Third person view was in Pong, Pac-Man, Asteroids, Centipede, etc. It’s the default for most games.
First person was probably introduced with Battle Zone.
Which, I don’t mean to sound pedantic, I just literally don’t really know what you mean here.
Then you will need to extend that to the OP of this comment chain as they didn’t specify either what Gears of War is. I am going to edit my comment to clarify but I do feel you are too pendantic for asking this.
Thank you. Sorry. Never played that game and didn’t know that was specific to FPS. I know some arcade shooter games had that mechanic, but not in the context of free-roaming FPS. I think you’re right about Tomb Raider.
If you are attempting to ask which game popularized 3d, third person shooters, then yes, the original Tomb Raider is probably the most early, widely popular game that popularized this.
The term I refer to is “hiding behind cover” singular - so when I hear “hiding behind covers” I think of the COG seeing locusts, getting scared, and wrapping themselves up in blankets. Lol
To be fair when it came out seven years ago it really shook up the portable gaming scene. Every portable console coming out since is an iteration on that design. The joycons can go to hell though. And those weird ass online plans.
I really liked the original 2DS personally. The announcement left everyone incredulous as the device sounded and looked like a dumb downgrade. I mean, it was hard to tell if it was joke or not. In the end though it’s light, cheap, tough and surprisingly comfortable.
Hey, is it too late to buy a couple of n3dsxl in 2024? Is it unusable now as all online services are shut down? Can you still find game cartridges to buy?
I just want something simple to play co-op game with the wife and kids on camping trip or on-the-go sometimes. Last month I dug out my old DSLite from the attic and it’s still boot. My candy-crush-4-life wife love the Mario kart and couldn’t stop playing LOL. But we can’t justify to buy 2-4 Switch.
Because fuck Nintendo and their predatory anti consumer business model.
I think that calling BOtW similar to other full-scale console games of 2017 like Sniper Elite 4, Middle Earth: Shadow of War, Nier Automata, Prey, Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, RE7, or AssCreed Origins, is a biiiiiiig stretch.
It was a huge jump for Nintendo (it was basically putting GameCube-level games on a handheld), but it was still far behind other consoles. Witcher 3 (2015) even eventually released on the Switch in 2019, and it was massively graphically gimped compared to ahemreal consoles.
I didn’t say it’s not good, I said it’s not equivalent to console releases of that year. Graphics isn’t everything, and I still enjoy playing Pax Imperia and Nox, but that doesn’t change that it was a handheld game, not a console game. Pokemon Red/Blue were also some of the best selling games the year they released, but that doesn’t make the Gameboy equivalent as a console to PSX or N64 either.
BotW was originally developed for the WiiU, which it also released on. It is not a “handheld game”, and tbh I’d take it’s gameplay loop over Nier Automata or Shadow of War any day of the week.
The Switch design is an evolution of the Wii U controller, which itself was evolved from the the lower screen design of the DS, which itself was modelled on the old Vertical Multi Screen Game and Watches from the 1980s.
Have a look through all of Nintendo’s consoles and you’ll see the lines of inspiration drawn from generation to generation.
That and it’s a tire-screeching exit from the abusive road we thought gaming was going down. Microtransactions, lootboxes etc. Baldur’s Gate 3 is refreshing from that perspective and, like me, I think many are amazed that it’s actually working.
I see nothing revolutionary about a game not having things like microtransactions and loot boxes. Those are mostly restricted to multiplayer games, and the industry never stopped making good single-player games without that bullshit.
Only played the first one which was pretty good. It’s super big on character customization as it has a million race/class combinations. A bit more extreme than the rest
This is a very smart and thoughtful perspective. One should consider their time and money as valuable, and not put it in games they disagree with. Do you have any good alternatives to recommend for the most popular Valve FPSs?
You might not like my answer, but I haven’t really played new FPS games in years, because basically none of them are doing what I want. I’m well served in basically every other genre right now, but these things are cyclical. We’re just getting through the era of indie FPS games inspired by Doom/Quake and other more maze-like shooters, and we may soon be entering the era where FPS games are inspired by my favorites. My multiplayer these days is usually fighting games, and the only ones that will give you trouble on Linux are Dragon Ball FighterZ and the upcoming 2XKO, both due to anti cheat.
As an aside, I’ll also say that where you put your time shouldn’t matter, if the product is free, for instance, but it does matter in online video games. Your presence in matchmaking is adding value for someone else who might spend money in the game, so you’d still be helping the causes of CS2 and TF2 just by playing on the official servers. For TF2, I think the code just went open source and there’s a revitalization project to bring it back to what it was like at launch? If so, that might be pre-loot-box, and playing that version of the game would help send the message you want to send. The same might apply to old versions of Counter-Strike.
I myself am against fomo. So we are sort of similar a little bit at least. We both dislike dark patterns.
I second that fighting games are mostly a mecca for us. I recommend Guilty Gear Strive, basically the only complaints people have about it nowadays is that it and it’s lobbies can load kind of slow, and some subjectively don’t like the gameplay, but that is up to you to decide (personally I love it’s gameplay). The new Virtua Fighter also looks incredible, maybe when it releases it will suit you well.
I also agree that tf2 classic looks great. It’s like the tf2 we grew to love but without the bullshit. When it releases on steam hopefully it gains traction.
Other games that are extremely pro consumer that I enjoy are Due Process and Straftat.
I haven’t been into FPS for several years, but if I was going to play anything current, I’d give The Forever Winter a look. It’s still being worked on, but the early access gameplay is really cool looking, and it’s bringing a lot of ideas to the table creatively.
I like a FPS but I have the most fun with the PVE sub genre of FPS. Left 4 Dead 2 and Deep Rock Galactic being my two favorites. Playing against other humans can be annoying if the skill balance isn’t right and if they’re cheating then it makes it no fun, imo.
Tes 3: Morrowind, every NPCs can be killed and of course if you kill some of them before they got usefull to progress the main quest you are locked.
At their death there is a notification message like “you fucked up, you can reload or continue to play in this world forever doomed”. BUT, in my first playthrough some broken mod I installed was hiding this message …
Also, in the same game you could lose quest item and be unable to finish the main quest. But that kind of require you to be stupid on purpose, because it’s obvious what item are important.
EDIT: found the in game message: " With this character’s death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
Hey man, Morrowind quests don’t hold your hand! It’s not like there’s a minimap and some big ass marker over his head saying “don’t kill and rob this half naked dude who looks like a skooma addict in his tiny studio apartment because he’s secretly the spy master for the main faction in the game”! I was young! I chose violence!
It was some small QoL changes in the UI and menus, recommended by my friend who recommended me the game. I don’t remember exactly the changes but there was nothing big added or changed in the gameplay
Good news. You can still beat the game if the “thread of prophecy is severed”, but it is fairly challenging and generally requires stumble-luck or at LEAST knowledge of how to normally beat the game. It helps to know the identity of another character you have to kill in cold blood to get “almost back on track”. And then the location that serves no real purpose except to get back on track from that situation.
Yes indeed, I know what you are talking about. But I would not really consider that the “normal” ending as described by OP. Even if the ending scene itself is exactly the same, it’s a very different path and clearly a much harder one.
OK hear me out: Minecraft in survival. For real. Nothing jump scares like a creeper going “psshht” in your back, telegraphing that you’re about to die in a destructive explosion. As you walk a narrow path over a chasm of lava in the Nether, the wail of the Ghast might make you fall out of sheer panic before it even shoots at you. The Warden is a special kind of scary too, as it’s nearly unkillable and will detect you by the noise you make. It sounds kind of silly but there’s plenty of players making the remark that Minecraft survival is basically horror.
And it’s all in a child friendly, non gory, voxel style.
Yeah that shit scared me when I played it at 40 years old. It kind of wears you down when you walk around in dark caves for hours on end.
Another alternative might be Subnautica. It has some jump scares but mostly it’s just the Deep Unknown that gives you chills. Few things in that game are actually dangerous.
Aw man, preparing for the nether and writing down my coordinates, terrified of ghasts and facing blazes for as long as I could stand it. I still prepare for any excursion from my base like a packrat.
While we’re at it with non-horror games: the level that introduced the flood in Halo CE really gave me a scare. I don’t know what it says about me, but I invited a friend over to play that level with me, lol. It’s a bit of a reach not being a horror game, but a great game with some tension here and there.
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