Calcium Contract is a boomer shooter with a pretty unique rewind feature. Humorous with old school feels, but for a modern time. It’s a one man project.
Gridworld - a simulation game made up of a grid, as the name suggests. You can control the size of the grid, and what spawns in it. The core of the game are these tiny creatures that each take up 1 square. They have varying nodes on them that represent traits and abilities. Under the hood the game says these have to be “wired” correctly by the neural network to make a creature act right. So basically you let this thing run for hours and eventually get little square creatures that eat plants and maybe each other to live.
There may be more people watching Deadlock than there are watching and playing Concord today based on available data and reasonable extrapolation. Valve continues to market in a unique way that works.
Concord is dead on arrival. Kind of a shame, the game looked a bit interesting but being $40 and having very generic art this was bound to happen. Deadlock is in a whole other league.
It’s basically impossible to increase the price tag on a game like that, and if you go free, the design pivots to a lot of abusive monetization systems. People run into that at the 10th hour of any free game.
It might be failing for a lot of reasons - I don’t think that one is necessarily their mistake though.
Honestly, paying for a (primarily) multiplayer game isn’t a problem for me. I actually might prefer it when you look at Overwatch vs Overwatch 2. But I wasn’t about to sign up for a playstation account to play my Steam game.
I think that’s what makes it such a good point of comparison though. It’s titled differently and we were promised it would be different, but all that really happened was they changed their monetization tactics. And maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I remember liking Overwatch when it came out, but now I have almost zero interest in playing Overwatch 2, even though I’ve gone back to it a few times just to give it a try.
Yep. Gog is probably where we should all be getting our games tbf. Being mad that a game is available on one drm store instead of another drm store is kind of silly. In either case we’re only buying the license and not actually owning anything.
You can download an stl for the battery cover. I modified it to allow the backpack controller to attach to/detach from the main controller. The original is in a box somewhere safe and well.
It’s an extra 12 button Bluetooth controller using an esp32 dev board. So your games need to allow you to use multiple controllers. You could also program it to send keyboard keys but I haven’t tried it.
I actually made it because I got banned because I couldn’t use my lights in euro truck simulator 2 multiplayer mod. I’m not sure I’d want to use it in any competitive games as it’d likely break off if I got mad.
I think it was only like 24 hours. It’s all automated though. So you get a thirty second countdown mashing buttons to try and work out how to get your headlights on if you spawn at night.
I think they were worried about their branding being associated with violence. In the 90s, there was a ton of anti-video game propaganda branding it as violent garbage that was corrupting our children.
Ironically, video games are very good at conditioning human responses to iconography. So despite the Red Cross’ hostility, video games still succeeded in conditioning a lot of people to instantly associate plus signs (any color) with health.
The red cross, red crescent and red crystal emblems provide protection for military medical services and relief workers in armed conflicts.
Under no circumstance is it acceptable to create a situation where something could be mistakenly identified as being associated with the Red Cross. If it appears in the game it might appear on a publicly visible computer screen, poster, TV, etc and thats not acceptable.
It is, genuinely, in the Geneva Conventions that nobody should use the red cross except for to designate medical staff and establishments that are protected under the conventions. The idea is to make sure that there is absolutely never any doubt that that symbol means anything else in order to minimise the risk to those people
Yeah they have a legitimate case for defending the use of the symbol so aggressively and the best way to avoid is to use the green and white variant that is used on pretty much every first-aid kit sold.
My biggest gripe with this is games that present a historical setting, such as World War 2 games. The Red Cross was all over the place during WW2. Saying game developers cannot ever use it under any context means that a game that wants to present historical accuracy would not be able to.
The way it could work is that they could just put a message before starting the game that the red cross is only there to present a historical setting, but otherwise is a symbol of Red Cross movement. And there could be a setting to switch to green crosses, if you want to stream, etc.
To add, the first time I heard about it was through the video game stuff. So if anything, I think we should view them going after game devs as a form of spreading awareness. When it hits headlines it makes it clear just how important it is to not use it in other contexts.
i look at this and nod. then i look at sponsored fortnite skins with the red cross and realize they dont give a fuck about that actually, theyre just greedy.
I haven't played Fortnite so I might be missing something, but glancing at screenshots and promotional stuff it looks like they're consistently using white on red instead of red on white
Not sure about everyone else but to me using an insanely popular game to fund global non-profit organisation is kinda a good way to raise money. It’s really a weird hill to die on.
The red cross sign has a very specific meaning and protection under international law. They don't want the symbol to be used outside of the agreed uses because they don't want that meaning, and consequently the protection it affords, to get muddled.
They also don't like when a red cross is used on a random first aid kit in the real world.
Everyone is betting Tonga will not get itself into a war.
But if it hypothetically happened, I assume they would be pressured to use an alternative war flag by the international community.
On a more serious note, applying international laws against sovereign states is always more complicated than to enforce them against individuals and organizations operating inside of signatory states.
BG3 is great and all but there are other games with at least equal voice acting quality. For all its qualities I never felt like “wow, I’ve never seen voice acting like this in a game!” when I played BG3. It’s really good and really consistent but nothing earth shattering.
I know I bring up Disco Elysium a lot, but that is one game where I got repeatedly shocked at the quality and diversity of the voice acting. With the exception of one single character I think it’s acted to absolute perfection.
I also didn’t really feel the same about Alan Wake 2 like, at all. I thought it had superb acting (both voice and full video segments) and probably hold the quality of its acting above BG3 personally. Alan Wake 1 less so.
mass effect and the first few dragon age games had great acting, Kingdom come has great acting, most of the Sony exclusives have great acting, it’s out there. It’s just rare.
I second Disco Elysium’s voice acting and also all of Supergiant Games catalogue, especially Bastion, Transistor, and Hades. Portal 2 is the most hilarious video game of all time, and a major part of that is its voice acting.
The Stanley Parable, Borderlands 1/2, Prey, System Shock 1/2, the Bioshock series, SOMA, the new Doom games, Path of Exile, all elevated by their voice acting.
right up until redacted and suddenly it’s reeeaaaal difficult to find a way to end the game, because dying isn’t an option if you didn’t prepare for it XD
I found one of those genies that multiply in someone’s multiplayer room.
I farmed the Valkyrie for wishes until I was broken, but I still could not reliably cast my own wish spell. Turns out, it gets harder to cast the more you level it up. You would need some ridicilous stuff to counter that.
Rimworld, way too much Rimworld. A big part of it is that I’ll often have it one a second computer during the workday just on pause to pop in during downtime but I guess that still counts as playtime just being loaded.
For me a lot of it is in trying to maximize efficiencies. Setting up task duties and resources where you have plenty enough but not overloading your storage. Defensive position designs to counter any possible situation. Layouts to the base to allow free movement.
Lot of others try for specific artistic ideas or scenario goals, but I’m something of engineer minded player.
It is a dedicated and organized team of modders that has output a stunning amount of content, all of it cohesive, and what many would consider required “base game” content.
They have literally put out dozens of mods that could be standalone DLC, all for free.
I will. Going to start playing again today. Trying to pull away from Hollow Knight which I committed to finally trying this holiday. That’s a fantastic game.
I’ve found that as I got older, my taste in games has narrowed significantly. I used to be able to play pretty much anything, or especially any popular or critically acclaimed games. But these days I just don’t give a shit about most of what’s out there. I do have certain genres and developers that interest me though, so I know there are occasionally going to be some new games that I really like. And every now and then I might get surprised by something too.
I suspect this is a natural result of having much more limited time as we become adults. I used to love all kinds of games too, but today if I feel like a game doesn’t respect my time it gets thrown right onto the “no thanks” pile.
It’s limited time, but also the selection these last few years has felt very uninspired. Everything is extremely derivative and been done to death.
There was a mass consolidation of developers/publishers recently, on top of further extended development cycles that has really limited any kind of variety we might have seen.
You can only play reskins of essentially the same game for so long. Not to mention recycling gameplay loops microtransaction hell toxic multiplayer experience (cheating griefing), makes for a minefield of unplesant game experiences. Sticking to what you like and know is how you get enjoyment out of playing.
Does it not feel weird sometimes to be disconnected from the gaming zeitgeist? Like, we can obviously still follow news and whatnot, but I'm particularly talking about having no significant emotional investment in contemporary releases—in other words: being disconnected from the hype of announcements and release cycles.
I know people consider this a blessing in this age of hyper-consumerism, but there's a communal aspect to it that I like, and it often feels odd to not be part of it.
Not weird for me. I don’t play anymore at all. Don’t even have a system to do so. But, I watch YouTube videos about games and game facts or speed running every night before bed. I know more about games now than when I actually played them. I just don’t have time for them anymore but that doesn’t mean they don’t interest me. I lost my passion for playing games years ago but not the idea of it. I don’t know or care about the hype but I just find it terribly interesting via others hype or interest in these games. If that makes sense.
Like, we can obviously still follow news and whatnot
I stopped following the news first, then largely lost interest in new games after that. After TotalBiscuit passed I haven’t seen a single thing about video game news or reviews. If there’s something I’m interested in I might skim through a review, but that’s the most I do.
If you’re not sure what StopKillingGames is about, the creator of the campaign, Ross Scott (of Freeman’s Mind fame) made this short video to give the rundown.
If you liked the puzzle design of The Witness, you’ll enjoy Taiji as more of that but with scenic pixel art.
Instead of a linear sequence of tutorials and puzzles, Taiji is open-ended. You can wander wherever you want, solve the puzzles you stumble upon, and ultimately discover this place’s secrets. Sometimes you find a puzzle that you don’t understand, so you’ll just have to leave it for later, when you’ve learned more puzzle mechanics. It’s like a metroidvania but gated by knowledge instead of abilities.
All the puzzles are built on grids of tiles that you can turn on or off. There are no tutorials; you have to figure out the puzzle mechanics on your own, hinted by environmental details.
definitely scratches the same itch more than games like the talos principle. there’s like one group it completely fails to properly tutorialize imo, and one that kind of falls short (although having played the witness will make your assumptions more accurate i think). other than that it’s a brilliant game.
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