I apparently love downvotes but here goes: All the Borderlands games (annoying childish cell-shaded skinner-box) and everything Gearbox is and has ever created it utter shit. The CEO is a garbage person, and thier dealings with Epic is Capitalist-Oink-Piggy shite! "“FUCK YOU 2K & GEARBOX, AND FUCK YOU BORDERLANDS!”
Got to argue, I’m a 39 year old gamer, started with PCs back in 90s.
The games are casual fun, they work great as co-op shooters. Story is what it is, but the games themselves are lighthearted and just pure entertaining fun.
The first felt really fresh at the time. FPS was dominated by various milsim shooters and Halo, and the irreverence and clever cell shading style worked well.
Two dialed things up in scope and scale and added some nice environmental variety.
But the rest? The presequel? The 3rd? I just couldn’t. It was more of the same, tired, repetitive, the jokes started really scraping the bottom of the barrel. I had fun early on, but I’m out.
I liked 1 and 2. Got bored for the prequel and 3 early on.
Tiny Tinas I did play and really enjoyed that game. It felt like a reasonable advancement over BL 1 and 2. It felt like they stagnated for a bit and raised the bar slightly with Tinas.
I really wanted an MMO style Borderlands with 4, and I wouldn’t value 4 any higher than Tinas launch price. But I am interested in what the game has to offer.
If you liked only the first two, def give Tina’s a try, if it has a good sale.
I loved the gameplay of pre sequel. But the writing for that was constantly throwing me for a loop on how any of it was greenlit. I didn’t mind the writing in 1 and 2, I got a few chuckles out of that. Pre sequel just made me groan, moan and yawn.
Yes, but it should still be illegal for a company to do this. Don’t let them blame the users for accepting this bullshit. As Louis Rossmann would say, they have the mentality of a rapist.
The problem is the just astoundingly terrible writing, immensely insufferable characters, and astonishingly brain dead gameplay.
Why have weapon balance ortactically interesting scenarios or any real sense of progression in gameplay when we can just procedurally generate guns and do everything we can to make everything into roughly the same level of bullet sponge with auto levelling?
They are the lowest common denominator of co-op shooter games, made for people who enjoy bombastic sensory overload and near zero prefrontal cortex brain activity while gaming.
Occult Crime Police is a fantastic free offering for those looking for a bit more Ace Attorney. It mostly follows the gameplay of Ace Attorney games, in which you investigate murder scenes involving strange, paranormal phenomena, and then discover contradictions in people’s witness accounts to uncover the culprit. It’s a bit easy, but maintains some great humor and charming animation production value.
Continuing this in the same thread as it’s a bit topical:
Are you a fan of Love Live! School Idol? Me neither! I basically knew nothing about it at all. Regardless, Gyakuten Live is an incredibly detailed cutesy Ace Attorney style game, in which the characters of the show gather for “school trials”. Though you may need to put up with a cutesier all-girl cast, and the stakes are much lighter and involve things like stolen possessions rather than murder, the mysteries end up having a surprising number of twists and even some heartfelt motives at the end. Features a fully custom soundtrack and LOTS of custom artwork, matched with some traditionally silly Ace Attorney humor.
So far, THREE cases are available, and each features a different prosecutor. The game’s page lists plans to continue up to 6 episodes.
In ItchIO’s standard, the game is “name your own price” - so you can choose to download it for free. It’s unlikely to come to Steam since it technically infringes on an anime/manga without permission.
One more coming if my AA recommendations are well received.
Adding one more to the Ace Attorney spinoff block:
Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane is a well-written fan spinoff of the AA formula, taking place in a fantasy universe where magic is real, but mostly the domain of the nobility. Trials are a form of theatre, where the nobility knows how to tip the scale, but your mentor knows how to tip them back.
It introduces some very enjoyable mechanics, in which knowledge of each spell’s effects and conditions constitutes its own evidence. Tyrion bears his own magical ability that lets him view the thoughts of witnesses. He is also accompanied by the defendant of his first case, a mercenary-mage named Celeste, who gets a lot of investigation banter with Tyrion, much like Maya and Phoenix.
Five cases in all, and none of them are shortened crapshoot cases, nor is there a downer ending; all the major threads conclude with satisfying endings, and the developer hopes to make a sequel from the world they’ve built.
Oh, and as is common for AA games, take a listen to “Eye of Horus”, the game’s equivalent of the “Objection!” theme when Tyrion nails a contradiction. The game’s soundtrack as a whole has some real bangers, for both the high points and the emotional pulls.
I recently bought stardew valley and its fun but the farming grind feels kinda forced, no? I feel like I need to pay attention to not loose myself in the game which defeats the purpose.
I can imagine it gets better but the grind is kind of not for me. The mining and farming grind in minecraft I understand and the grind in factorio as well. Maybe its heightened due to the saving cycle that seems to want you to keep going.
I used to find it kinda stressful until i realised there was no time limit to the game like the usual harvest moons so once I realised that, I never find myself rushing around or overextending my ability to farm to grind more and just focused on what I was enjoying in the game which was a bit of everything.
There is sort of a time limit though, you get your “review” at the end of the second year (at which point no new events happen). Also getting things planted in time for when the seasons change etc is kind of time-limiting.
But that’s all detail, it’s great that people can enjoy it without time pressures!
I only really played early on, not dabbled with it properly in years but I do remember things happening. It’s not like I could only get things to happen in the first two years in game
There are ways to play (besides mods) where you barely have to grow crops. Unless you’re trying for all the achievements there’s not really a wrong way or a time limit to play.
No bro, Xbox isn’t evil anymore. Phil Spencer is a good guy and Gamepass is the “best deal in gaming”./s
On serious note there is some legit reason to do something like this. Things like the Cronos Max or Rapid fire controllers are a legit problem in multiplayer games because they are hardware cheats essentially.
But they could have created an API that allows games to check if a unoffical device is detected if that is the reason.
The problem seems to revolve around brands that haven’t acquired this licensing
It seems to just be rent seeking? Since it’s retroactive there probably isn’t a security change and malicious hardware can spoof being licensed, though this is unclear. So it probably only hurts legitimate small brands.
absolutely, hence why I put forward the idea of an API that would allow games to stop people from joining multiplayer matches or flag their highscores if sketchy hardware is involved! For Single Player games, who cares!
But deep down we all know that this first and formost is a money grabbing scheme from micro$oft
fun fact, whenever a game has crossplay - and has a big enough player base that i can do this, i will turn it off 100% of the time purely because I have experienced sooo many cheaters from the pc side of the crossplay.
a very common complaint about crossplay over on the consoles side of thing is “let us do just-console crossplay”
it is what it is, but it’s also funny to see someone say what you said there. One of the great things about pc gaming is the freedom you have to do what you want, which unfortunately makes it 1000000x easier to cheat.
I don’t think cross play for competitive is worthwhile because either PC players have an advantage in the form of mouse aim, or console players have a wagon-dick-sized advantage in the form of aim assist. Competitive cross play only makes sense if you have input based match making.
What’s frustrating for me is when the PC side cripples mixed-input entirely even though I just want mouse-look, gyro aim, and analog movement from my controller without any aim assist. (Looking at you, Destiny 2 and Halo.)
As an avid modder I can tell you that’ll make it harder but not impossible, I was halfway to hotwiring an xbox controller so I could run my xbox over parsec
I can already hear my business administration professor scream that everyone in the free market tries to screw each other from that statement lol. Why yes of course, money. Planned obsolescence is the only logical choice, people! I bet nobody will source old, but durable products and repair them instead, no no. That’ll never happen!
Game Pass is the same scam as Netflix was back then, and I’m not falling for it twice.
Netflix used to be too good yo be true as well. 10€ a month for literally everything ! Now they don’t even make blu-rays anymore and you spend more time looking up which service has the thing you want to watch than watching it, so people are pirating again.
I’ll stick to physical games and GOG as much as possible.
That may be true, but that wasn’t the point he tried to make. The problem is that netflix used to have everything at a good monthly price and once they dominated the market, enshittification and price hike started, plus all the other companies wanted in on the action, starting their own service.
Now MS is trying to do the same to the PC gaming market.
It’s also worth noting it came out in 2017. In the years leading up to that namely around 2014 everyone was questioning if Sony was going to have to declare bankruptcy. Throwing a large amount of money into a product that can draw users to your console/platforms for a cheap price that your main competitor couldn’t afford to do probably sounded like a good strategy at the time, knowing they could drive costs up if they got the user base built.
Not to defend Netflix, but it did seem to me like the degradation and price hikes were a result of the other companies cutting in. I have no particular love for Netflix, but I didn’t perceive it to be like that until after external threat. Maybe I’m wrong.
Justwatch reliably tells me “this isn’t available for streaming in your region”. Sonarr tells me it’s an AMZN Webrip and I can Just Watch™
Edit: But like, no shade on Justwatch, it works as intended. It’s the streaming services who get worldwide licensing rights and then don’t bother targeting my little region.
Sadly justwatch doesn’t work for me. It gives the choice between a part of the country that doesn’t offer services where I live, or another country - which doesn’t offer services where I live.
So was Moviepass, but while they were operating it was a great deal for the consumer. I wasn’t going to sit that out just because I could see that they were gonna run out of money eventually.
The proper consumer response to these types of models (get them hooked with a great value proposition and then try to squeeze them once they’re in) is just to leave when things get bad. Subscribing to Netflix in 2013 doesn’t mean that I had to keep subscribing through 2023. I could get the benefit of a 2014 subscription and reevaluate each year whether it was worth continuing.
I worked at BlockBuster back when Netflix came out. It was legit a great contender, and an awesome service. BB had their own mail service, but it was just seen as a copycat. Also the franchise had a LOT of bad blood, and sometimes rightfully so. Depended on local management how much leeway you could have. The most lax stores that were lenient did the best.
The reason it worked was because physical media is protected by the first sale doctrine. So if you could buy a disc, it could be under one roof as rentable inventory.
Streaming and licenses is what fragmented everything and greed gave the appropriate incentive.
It also somewhat killed direct competition. When everything was physical on a shelf in front of you, all for the same price, you had direct comparison and competition. You could have any show or movie from any studio all side by side. That $2-5 could get you anything, across the board.
I saw this all coming from miles away. I don’t blame anyone, every step sounded like a great deal. I see a lot of the same things with Gamepass. It’s a great deal, and I don’t blame anyone for using it… But I don’t see it as being a long term net positive for the industry.
This also has big implications for consumer rights and society as a whole in other areas of digital technology and right to repair, it is a foot in the door to start actually holding manufacturers responsible for the full lifecycle of their products (digital and real) that requires them to actually relinquish their control when their product reaches end-of-commercial-life, instead of turning everything into digital garbage out of what basically amounts to apathy and compulsive rights hoarding.
Having the game streamed by all these huge channels before it’s even officially announced is kinda crazy. Everyone wants to play Valve’s “secret game” of course, so it’s free marketing. Pretty clever.
I got suckered into playing 800+ hours of GTA Online and paying thousands of SEK for shark cards over a year or two before I realized what a terrible game it is.
I was addicted to it, and paid money every month to buy shark cards.
When my work situation improved however, I took a few steps back and realized that I had wasted a lot of money on it and that I was only chasing the dragon that was just out of reach, kept away from me by carefully crafted mental mechanics of the game.
I was disgusted and refused to participate further.
I uninstalled it right away and have never looked back.
I never spent a dime on it, but I did play for over 3000 hours before rock star blocked linux. I enjoyed the grind rather than the reward, so it sort of became my little safe-space game when I was really stresses out. could always just go hang out with my buds for a few hours and grind out a million bucks. I’m still kinda torn up about the anticheat situation tbh, I would gladly play alone if there were any way to play the same game. but story mode just doesnt compare for me, completly different game :(
Yup. I’ve been boycotting Nintendo and EA for the past twenty years. EA due to the destruction of countless talented studios (Origin, Bullfrog, Westwood, Pandemic) and Nintendo when they were caught by the EU doing anti-competitive price fixing (which they still seem to be doing today).
I have missed out on nothing. A game is just a game; a piece of multimedia content to entertain. There are countless astonishing games out there; missing out on a few doesn’t harm you.
People really need to learn to vote with their wallets. And no, I don’t think sailing the high seas and yarharhar legal questionability is acceptable. You don’t need to play the game. There is nothing that important you’re missing out on for the “cultural zeitgeist”.
Piracy still increases the fandom and increases sales (contrary to what IP owners will tell you). So piracy is still supporting these organisations and feeding into their success.
Vote with your wallets. Don’t support business practices and businesses you don’t believe in. Give your time and money to those that deserve it.
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