I liked what I saw from the first handful of articles, so I’ve added that site to my feed reader. It’s good to see you back again! I hope you’re doing better.
That’s really kind of you! Don’t expect to be inundated, it’ll be a weekly thing for whoever is in the fediverse scene, loves gaming, tech and so on, and wishes to contribute articles. I think it’s fun, so I’m glad you gave it a nod of approval!
I don’t even. Every individual part of RDR2 is pretty good. It looks good, sounds good, the writing really deserves recognition for managing to keep a 100 hour plot interesting and at no point was it ever clear to me why this needed to be an interactive medium because the gameplay and all the other bits don’t really interface. Inside missions you can’t leave the very narrow developer intended path at all, your choices boil down to “what gun do I shoot this guy with”. Outside of missions you’re free to do “whatever” except whatever is also just mostly shooting guys or animals - none of which you have to do or affect anything.
The exploration is and stumbling upon odd sidequests initially is like the only part where it makes sense to be a game, because you couldn’t recreate that in another medium and some even ask of you, the player, to use your noggin to solve shit. All the rest of it though, you could basically get the same experience by watching The Sopranos and after every episode you finish a level of Quake.
Which on it’s own would be fine, a piece of art can just be a good time for a (long) while and that’s good but RDR2 ranks among there as the most expensive videogame, especially if you exclude obvious scams like Star Citizen and live service games like WoW that have just been getting content forever and everybody involved in the production was reportedly forced into insane crunch times to make the horse balls react to temperature. And for what?
its a fine cowboy simulator. i’m fine with story-focused games. played kentucky route zero recently and it has literally NO gameplay at all, still a worthwhile game. i think that’s what it boils down to, if you think of games as art meant to evoke atmospheric and emotional experiences.
about crunching in the videogame industry, yeah. we should probably be undertaking such huge projects in an open-source collaborative kind of way but i don’t think society is ready for that just yet.
Certain parts of the game haven’t aged well, but there’s no denying that Vaas was a wonderfully done villain. He’s a great test case for the “a good villain can’t be absent and mysterious” argument. Most of the memorable villains in gaming have been nearly omnipresent; Vaas, GladOS, Andrew Ryan, Handsome Jack, etc…
All of them are good villains because they are consistently present. They have enough screen time to actually develop into full fledged characters. They’re not just some dark and mysterious overlord, patiently waiting in the bottom of a dungeon for you to come fight them. They’re persistently in your face, interacting with you. Even if they’re not actively hindering your progress, the fact that they have a continued presence means their eventual downfall is that much more satisfying.
I mean, if that’s all you want in a villain, I guess, yeah - Vaas was constantly pestering the player. His dialogue and mannerisms were just awful though. Philosophy 101 freshman tweets level awful. I feel like putting him on the same level as GLaDOS should be criminal.
Hell, if philosophy is the driving factor for a good villain, then GladOS wouldn’t even be on your list. A villain doesn’t need to be morally grey to be a good villain. Plenty of good villains are evil just for the sake of being evil. Even GladOS would fall into that box.
The point was simply that players need an end goal to keep them focused, and having a consistently present villain acts as a moving end goal. The player is driven to chase that goal until the conclusion, because the villain is always just out of reach. If you see a goal waiting on the horizon, the march there feels like a slog. But if the goal is consistently at your fingertips as you chase it, you’ll chase it all the way to the horizon without even realizing.
Hell, if philosophy is the driving factor for a good villain
…I didn’t say it was? That’s just Vaas’ whole schtick - poorly understood philosophical quips that everyone eats up for some reason. Again, if all you need is a bad guy constantly needling you, then I suppose I see why you like Vaas. I just don’t think that’s enough to make him “museum worthy”.
If we wanna get into what I think makes a top tier video game villain, I’d say the critical characteristics would be menace, intelligence, and capability. In short, they need to be an obvious threat that know what they’re doing and are a challenge to best, both mentally and physically. To be honest, I can’t think of all that many villains in video games that I would consider that good. GLaDOS fits for sure. I think the Kingslayer in The Witcher 2 is also quite good. Fumbled ending aside, Mass Effect had a good run of baddies as well - Saren, The Illusive Man/The Collectors, The Reapers. There might be more, but that’s all I can think of atm.
Sid Meiers Alpha Centuri, it’s the best 4x game of its era and is a perfect example of how well games from the 90s can play, in many ways it feels like a modern game made with severe technical limitations. Today the graphics are outright bad (they weren’t exactly jaw dropping at the time either), and the UI lacks a couple of modern sensibilities and QOL features but everything else is top notch.
Can people please stop using the genocide poem to talk about businesses indpendently choosing to moderate porn games on their platforms? The first time that poem was used, over six million people died. Whereas you just can’t goon on itch anymore.
I get why people are unhappy, but no one will die from this. There is no government mandate. This is tone-deaf and offensive for anyone who has or is currently experiencing genocide. People in my country are being rounded up and disappeared. This is in no way comparable and that poem should not be invoked.
Finally someone mentions it. It’s just straight up gross to compare. But I will say people getting this mad isn’t as absurd when you have the backstory.
In the context of US; Gay, lesbian, or trans characters existing is enough to label a media under “porn” and states like Florida regularly ban lgbtq+ books using this loophole.
So a lot of people instinctively go on defensive when anyone bans porn.
Also full story wasn’t the business independently chosing to moderate. Another company told them to and game company had to comply.
People are mad an unrelated company out there is trying to regulate what you can’t buy with your money. It just feels weird.
That’s irrelevant in this case, since the outcry came from payment processing companies and a sex-negative feminist interest group from Australia (not America), with some ties to TERF organizations. Yes, not great. Special-interest groups from other countries should not be able to have this much influence just because they tattled to a payment processing company. But just to be clear: This Australian radfem group is also not affiliated with the people in power in fascist governments, and the poem should not have been used. Yet people are acting like the federal government has struck down itch.io itself, and saying that this is an example of the mounting Halocaust. Fascism is rising in the U.S., but due to other, much more alarming factors and not this one.
I will be much more concerned when elected Republicans start going after a designated porn site, like Pornhub or something, to scrub out the queer content or to shutter it altogether. itch.io was never a designated pornography site to begin with and elected Republicans never set their sights on it.
So when you invoke the genocide poem, you really need to be asking, “Who is the they in this situation?” If it’s not a fascist government, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t apply and it’s offensive to the POCs, disabled, and trans people facing real problems in the U.S. right now.
Censorship is always the first step. Genocide is the last step. People getting mad when the first step toward fascism is crossed is a very good thing to fight fascism and try to prevent a future genocide. This is exactly what the poem is about : react on the first step, because it will be too late when the genocide starts.
In our administration, censorship wasn’t the first step though. I’m not sure why you think this set of events is the first step. The Trump Administration dismantled the Constitution and Administrative State earlier than this, and ICE disappearing people and Trump making anti-trans EOs predates this as well.
And it really seems like people on the internet care way more about the censorship than the much worse things happening right now.
Also, there are other places to find porn, so is censorship really happening in this case? You could sooner point to Paramount, 60 Minutes, NPR and The Late Show as examples of censorship, which also came after more extreme regime actions.
What a great game! Such a unique and engaging way to do questing in video games. Finishing the quests without a guide is such an incredibly rewarding experience! Some are pretty hard to figure out, but it’s soooooo good.
How do you feel about Skyrim? I kinda want to recommend Morrowind via OpenMW, which should run fine on the Deck, but I guess both games would feel too much like DnD for you.
Undertale, if you haven’t played, might be fun.
You can also check out Trials of Mana, which is a remake of the SNES game and, unlike the remake of Secret of Mana, doesn’t seem to have any unpatched game breaking bugs. Other JRPGs that might be work checking out are the “Ys” and “Legend of Heroes” series, both should have plenty of games that play fine on the deck.
Lastly, Rune Factory, which is fantasy harvest moon (the farming sim that started it all, so to speak) with some light dungeon delving and leveling up.
As an alternative to Skyrim, try Enderal. A free total conversion of Skyrim (you need Skyrim obviously). It's a complete new game with new mechanics, story, skills, etc. It's fully voiced and waaaay better than Skyrim IMHO.
I have never tried Skyrim because it appears to be a first person game and first person games tend to give me serious motion sickness. I’m physically unable to play them.
Undertale
Played it, it’s great.
Ys
I tried the Lacrimosa of Dana but never got to complete. Don’t know why, I have this recollection that it’s actually a good game? Maybe I should revisit that!
Skyrim certainly plays better in first person, but you can change the camera to be 3rd person, slightly behind your character. The default kinda sucks and you’d be better off trying one of the camera mods. You’d also need a few mods to get a better experience overall, like SkyUI for better menus, and Unofficial Patch to fix fuckloads of bugs Bethesda never bothered to fix in 14 years
ah, Runescape. The version I played aaaages ago is apparently now called “Classic”. The only thing I (barely) remember from those times are my massive piles of Kebab -items in my inventory, they were dirt cheap as healing items, but they did have a chance of dealing damage when eaten, instead of healing. :D
I decided to give Vintage Story a try. I was not prepared for what I was about to experience. I can already say it's not for everyone. It's like if you took Minecraft survival mode and then turned it into an actual survival mode. One of the first things everyone makes in Minecraft is a pickaxe. It took me about 2 hours to get the first pickaxe and then another 10 hours (though I did a lot of other things before upgrading my pick) to get the next tier of pickaxe. I probably would've gotten it quicker if I had only focused on that but I had a lot of other survival needs that had to deal with. But to go over what you need to make your first copper pickaxe.
Obviously you need copper. Copper bits can spawn above ground (and a small hint that everyone mentions. If there's copper on the ground there's a small vein of copper right below it in the first layer of sedimentary rock). When you've collected enough copper you need to smelt it and cast it. To smelt copper you can't use wood, you need to use charcoal. How do you get charcoal? You make a charcoal pit and burn wood into charcoal. You need an large amount of wood. How do you get wood? You make an axe. How do you make an axe? You flintknap an axe head and combine it with a stick. Now we can smelt copper but how do we cast it? For that you need to create a pickaxe mold. To create a pickaxe mold you mold clay and then fire it in a pit kiln. A pit kiln is pretty much a hole in the ground that you fill with the clay mold, dry grass, sticks and wood and then let it burn for a whole in game day. When you have a mold you put molten copper into the mold. But you can't just take molten copper and stick it into the mold. You need a crucible to hold the liquid copper and tongs to hold the hot crucible. A crucible is made the same way a mold, you form it from clay and the fire it for a day. Tongs are probably the easiest part of the part of the process as you need just sticks and rope (which you make from cattails). If this feels like it takes forever it's because it does. This is why it's not for everyone but my god did this push the right buttons because unlocking the pickaxe felt like a real milestone.
And in case anyone cares what I did for the next 10 hours, I harvested probably about 1000 tule plants to make a thatch roof. I started a farm and collected different kind of seeds (because you need to rotate crop to keep the soil healthy). I made a cellar because your food will spoil within days if you don't stick them in the cellar. I collected enough copper to make a copper anvil so I could make more advance copper tools. I prospected the land to find tin and lead veins so I could make other metals than copper. I foolishly believed making leather might be easy so I hunted some animals until I looked up leatherworking and then gave up because I hadn't found limestone (or it's equivalent) to start the tanning process. Instead I started to make compost from the leather which I will later use as a fertilizer. Oh and I made a fruitpress to make juice from all the berries I've found.
It's a real survival experience and I'm definitely enjoying the complexity of it all. There's an in-game survival guide that is pretty informative so I don't need to go online to understand how something works. The game also has a very customizable gaming experience. You can very much tailor your experience to be a bit less survival or significantly more survival. You can also modify the worldgen to fit your needs which is something that got removed from Minecraft. There's also a really good modding support. So far I've added the Carry On mod that lets me move chests and barrels around because when I expanded my base (to have more space for my stuff) moving my stuff around was a pretty annoying experience. I also have my eye on some other mods but those require starting a new playthrough and I want to get a bit better grasp of some of the mechanics before pulling the trigger on a new playthrough.
TL:DR I absolutely recommend Vintage Story to anyone willing to put in the effort it demands. You will be rewarded for that effort.
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