Personally I’m excited to see what the mod landscape is going to look like in a year. As with most Bethesda games, I couldn’t care much less about the game itself outside of that key feature.
I think I got it on my third attempt. Though I haven’t actually finished it yet! Only 2/3 in and then something shiny distracted me - I’ll pick it up again soon. People described it as a soulslike, so after Elden Ring clicked for me I decided I would try the funny bug game again. Glad I did!
Having all pins present, I wouldn’t be surprised if the drive still gets detected while bending a SATA cable back juuuuuust right so its connector makes contact with the pins.
I’ve used computers for years like that, also these card edge connectors are pretty standard and can be easily replaced by anyone who can do basic soldering.
Seconded. If OP lives anywhere near a city, there’s probably an electronics repair shop within reach that would solder on a new connector for less than the cost of a new SSD.
Dude, I remember people going OFF on Returnal not offering any saves and people having to keep their consoles in rest mode for days at an end because they wouldn’t want their runs to end. I kept arguing with people on rexxit that any respectable rogue-lite/-like has a save function - STS, Hades, Dead Cells - yet they still kept arguing that implenting saves would “ruin the vision of the game” and “make it too easy”.
Guess what Housemarque did: they added a save on exit option. You can now suspend your run and finish it whenever. Not having to potentially brick your console just because you can’t save mid-game sure is a boon lol. The game sure got a lot easier with this implemented. /s
STS does allow you to cheese the game with its save system, which is why most roguelikes also delete the save file after they load it, only saving the game when you need to put a bookmark in it to come back later.
It certainly helped me during my first Slay the Spire runs, when I’d often mess up the order of the cards (the most common being applying vulnerable AFTER doing all of my attacks).
It's a problem when cheating changes people's opinions on how fun the game is. If the game forces you to use a certain mechanic that you otherwise would have ignored, that often gives you a better appreciation for the game. In the case of a roguelike, if you can cheese the save system, you're no longer required to actually get good at the game systems and can instead keep reloading until the memorize the solution, which is the entire problem the genre is out to solve.
I mean, if you're knowingly turning on cheat codes in a game, you know you're deviating from the intended experience, but if you're doing something the software lets you do, that's something the designer is trying to tune to steer you toward having a better time. Often times you can take a dominant strategy and think less of the game for it being too easy or one-note, which can and does happen when you can exploit a save system like this. I got through the first Witcher game mostly by save scumming, and I didn't think particularly highly of it, but the sequels did a much better job of introducing me to the potions, oils, and monster hunting mechanics that would have made the game easier and more solvable without save scumming. Had I known for the first game what I knew of the sequels, I might have enjoyed the game more, but that first game especially didn't force me into learning those systems.
You’re viewing games as perfect and the designers’ vision as always correct. That’s not always true. Take XCom 2. Many people may tell you that ironman mode (prevents save scumming) is the only real way to play but the game is buggy as hell. Not only do things not always work right sometimes the game just crashes. A buddy of mine has lost multiple save files because of it. The game doesn’t force you to use ironman mode so it’s not a counterargument to what you’re saying but it is illustrative of the point I’m making about games not being perfect.
Also, why do you view save scumming as the dominant strategy? In reality, many difficult and unforgiving games all but force players to use specific strategies to win. Everything you’re saying about gamers avoiding fun choices for optimum ones is not unique to save scumming. Many games already force players to do this and things like save scumming can actually allow players to try different builds that are less optimal.
It’s like someone saying the only true way to enjoy a book is by physically reading a physical copy and that audiobooks are more optimal and therefore less fun. No. Different people just want different things.
Many of the B side challenges in Celeste I played with the 90% speed accessibility option. Trying for 30 minutes to try and get a single damn strawberry was just too much for me. I still had a blast playing it.
I'm neither assuming that a game is perfect or that the designer's vision is always correct, but the designer is intending for you to experience a game a certain way, and it's often most fun that way. If certain strategies are dominant such that they invalidate large portions of the game that are there, it usually results in that game being boring. Your mileage may vary, of course, but that's how these things tend to go. The Witcher is a much more interesting game for me when you utilize potions, oils, and monster manuals, and I found the combat to be quite boring when I didn't know how to interact with those systems and instead just reloaded saves for better dice rolls. By forcing you to play a certain way, like by omitting certain save systems, they're making sure you play the way they intended, and if the game is as good as they hoped to have made it, it will result in the most people having the best time.
Here's another example. Batman: Arkham combat is an amazing replication of what Batman is in video game form. It's one man taking on dozens of others, usually more lethally armed than he is, with some athleticism and a bunch of gadgets. You're incentivized via the scoring/XP system to never button mash, use every move in your arsenal at least once, never get hit, and to take out every enemy in the room in a single flowing combo. However, it didn't steer most players into playing that way very effectively (at least on normal difficulty), and many leave the combat system disappointed that they can beat it just by attacking with X and countering with Y.
As a !pokemon fan I didn’t buy for these reasons but that doesn’t stop hordes of parents or certain fans from buying anyways. If they’re happy, I guess… meanwhile I’ll be fine as long as they don’t go after ROM hacks.
From what I’ve heard a lot of the same og programmers and animators from the game boy days are still in charge of making the games and they don’t want a large team. They also don’t want to have to work really hard or learn new skills, so basically all the work falls to inexperienced people being led by people with incredibly dated skills. Nintendo still rakes in tons of money so they don’t see the need to interject.
It’s too bad steam doesn’t have a “mixed” review option.
Like Fallout4. It’s terrible. Bad story. bad gameplay. Buggy. But I still sometimes mod it the fuck up and play anyway, because I want a kind of stupid stealth shooter or to stomp around in power armor. So I don’t really recommend it, but you could do worse.
IMO this is a good thing. With a “mixed” option, it’s hard to know where the borders are for each person. Say you rate a game on a scale of 0-100 - is “mixed” 30-70, or 25-75, or 20-80, or anything else?
AFAIK with surveys etc. there’s also a bias towards the “middle” option. By not giving one, you force people to think harder about their opinion, which in turn makes the rating more useful.
I wish it used a 5 star system instead of binary yes/no. I don’t like that “yeah, it’s a decent game” and “holy shit this game will change how you see games going forward” get weighed the same. A game that everyone kinda likes will have a similar rating to a game everyone loves.
Would also be nice if they had a “shows promise but it isn’t quite there yet”. Or a way of using ratings to encourage devs to address issues, and maybe a mechanism where certain issues can be tied to a review and then the dev can mark the issue as “addressed” to make those reviews expire with a notice to the user that the game might be much better for them now. It sucks to see a game with a bunch of negative reviews addressing an issue that was since fixed.
Hey, just wanted to say I appreciate your posts. They give me the vibes of cracking open an old EGM. It’s nice to have a nice curated newsletter that doesn’t read like the SEO garbage that’s all over the web.
Exactly what I am going for, since I wasn’t alive for the old blogs and newsletters and old gaming sites. I’m tired of sites begging for Patreon members, and using ads, and its all such a drain.
Thanks for saying so, it makes me so happy seeing anyone read these damn things!
I read all of these too and I love them so much!!! I don’t have to close 2 separate video players playing ads, one taking up the top half of the screen and the other taking up almost the entire bottom left or right…which pop back up after like 2 minutes.
There’s also no agenda or weird outrage- just pure gaming news and neat little oddities that I enjoy reading about.
You should definitely look into starting a website as well as a career in journalism because you are amazing at creating this here little ‘zine and I’d love to see it flourish into a career if it’s something you enjoy doing :)
I would sub in like maybe Darkest Dungeon 2 over Frostpunk? Less well received but still better than any of the other three. Both were distinct changes of pace, darkest dungeon just sold its soul to the epic games store and lost the bond you formed with characters over a long campaign in exchange for the roguelite shorter runs.
I had a decent time with it and probably would’ve played a 2nd run had the game not failed me because every faction (including the rebelling one) was too happy to pass the final law or whatever. They probably fixed that by now, but it was pretty souring.
It is such a beautiful game. One of my top gaming experiences.
The environments, the pacing, the story telling, the interactivity - just excellent.
If you are interested in playing it and you don’t have a PC with a 1060 or better; or can’t afford PSVR2 or Quest 3s, then consider giving it a go at a VR game cafe.
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