Perfect, thanks so much! I kind of thought this but wanted to make sure. I’m not super familiar with them but have always been curious. Maybe somebody has ported it to Android
Maybe its the 'tism but I never gave a shit about most microtransactiony things unless they have a “pay-to-win” element. That’s why I gave up on GTA online.
But if its just like “exclusive skins”, I could give a shit. My default skinned character can still win against a guy in a bear-suit with a golden AK and that’s really all I need. I have no particular FOMO of not winning the fashion part of the game.
I do wish games I could turn off their constant begging for my money though.
My default skinned character can still win against a guy in a bear-suit with a golden AK and that’s really all I need. I have no particular FOMO of not winning the fashion part of the game.
Twitter user strahfe recently shared a patent by Activision that suggests buying cosmetic items could increase your chances of being placed in games against less-experienced players. The patent reads: “The microtransaction engine may match a more expert/marquee player with a junior player to encourage the junior player to make game-related purchases of items possessed/used by the marquee player”
I’m not heavy into conspiracies, but I’m suspicious enough to not give Activision the benefit of the doubt and bet that they’ve done this in secret if they have a patent for it. But really… if we’re even thinking about these kinds of things, the game is a lost cause.
An argument I heard, and adopted is that it’s never “just” cosmetic. Your enjoyment of the game is impacted by how you perceive your avatar. This is why fortnite skins sell so well to new players. It’s not just cosmetic to drop $20 on Cuddle Team Leader. It makes a user feel silly and increases enjoyment running around as an obvious pink mascot costume. It prolongs how long you play both by increased enjoyment, and sunk cost fallacy. In any game with cosmetics, purchases drive playtime.
Used to play games and I was so focused on gameplay, I always thought “why even have a lot of art in there”. But then you realize if the art sucks, you wouldn’t even be giving it a chance.
And this extends to skins and stuff. If it’s “just cosmetics”, that still means there is some art that is now hidden unless you throw money at your screen. And depending on how much it is, the game might be way too boring without it. So you’re still buying bits of a game after the fact. And voila, we’re back to the reasons why DLCs suck.
A good chunk of the 3DS library. So many titles I haven’t gotten around to yet.
I need to eventually finish monster hunter iceborne and then play Rise! I have a feeling I’ll probably end up just jumping to wilds though. It’ll probably be hard to go back to older titles when that game releases.
The Yakuza series! I have only finished zero, 1 & 2. They release them faster than I’m getting to them lol.
I really want to tell you to give rise a try because the sunbreak expansion is absolute peak monster hunter, but I agree that february 28th release date is creeping up way too fast…
I want to try it so badly! I loved that they leaned into the Japanese themes and imagery, too. I think I’ll definitely have to make some time to play it.
I want to also play persona 3 for the first time, but it’s like 100 hours or so, and I look at that number and think, “That’ll take me 6 months to finish.” Haha maybe I’ll hermit myself inside the house this winter and smash it out in half that time
I knew a guy who got real into it and started an “Accidental Cannibal Cult”. It was fun to listen to, if nothing else - I don’t get into those games much. Kinda like hearing EVE Online or Dwarf Fortress stories.
Rimworld is a great Colony Sim if you love the idea of Dwarf Fortress but want a gameplay experience that’s much more accessible with a much softer learning curve.
It plays into the chaotic post apocalyptic Mad Max style hellscape fantasy really well, and does not attempt to police your morality. You can love and care for your colonists, meeting their needs and growing to know them as individual people with their own unique stories, or you can play as efficiently or sadistically as you like, throwing ethics out the window and following the Geneva Suggestions wherever you deem prudent.
The base game is good for hundreds of hours of play, and expansions bump that up to thousands of hours of fun, but it also has a very healthy modding community if that’s still not enough.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Colony Sim genre, the basic idea is that you start with a set of semi-randomized colonists on a randomized map and need to build up a functioning Colony to survive. You the player take the role of a manager or overlord and set tasks for your colonists to complete, which they then take time to carry out while you watch and plan the next set of tasks. You need to gather materials, build shelter, grow or hunt food, defend yourself from wildlife and raiders, and recruit new colonists.
Rimworld in particular has fun building mechanics with an emphasis on building power grids and heat management (air conditioning and heating to keep your colonists comfy and keep food from spoiling). It’s a lot like a top-down Oxygen Not Included, but with simpler mechanics and more focus on its (procedurally generated) story.
Neat! Thank you for taking the time to make such a comprehensive review. Sounds like it’s up my alley! I enjoyed Frostpunk and the Tropico series (as well as Banished although I thought it was sort of boring after a while).
The colonists you are given all have character traits and there is a social aspect of the game. Colonists can start relationships, start families, break up, start social fights and end up in infirmarry… Sometimes, family members of your colonists come to your colony as raiders. All these stories forming during gameplay is the real strength of the game for me.
For example, there was this one colonist woman in one of my playthroughs. She was the tough, soldier type. She started one or two relationships in the colony but ended them. Then she tried to go back to them. It started creating some complicated feelings among the colony so I sent her to scavenge a nearby abandoned base.
Before she can leave, a band of raiders popped in. One of the raiders was her teenage son! So I start getting so invested in saving the son and bringing him back to the colony. I’m not that skilled in combat or tactics so I save the game multiple times until a trap injures the boy so his mom can snatch him without fighting. She takes him into one of the intact rooms in the ruin and patches up his wound, shares her food. (She takes him prisoner and you can keep talking to prisoners and convert them into your colonists. )
Here is a scene where raiders running around outside, raiding. And a mother and son, hunkered down in a room, trying to reconnect.
While the boy is recovering in the impromptu prison room, she gets out and shoots the raiders one by one. Rest of the raiders leave the map after losing enough members.
Mother and son talk about family, son talks about some childhood memories. Eventually, he is no longer a prisoner but a newly recruited member of the colony. Woman comes back with her son. Son turns out to be a psychopath but that’s ok. At the Rim, we love psychopaths, they do gruesome task of disposing raider corpses, for example, without getting emotional strain.
Mother stopped creating drama in the colony after son joined.
…
If you read people’s stories in the steam comments (there are a lot of war crime simulator stories, too, be warned) you may get why it’s so addictive.
Bulletstorm. It’s not about survival as much as killing enemies as creatively as possible. And the writing is brilliant in its stupidity. One of my favourite games of all times.
Even though they’re not traditional shooters, the Ratchet and Clank games are really fun. There’s a pretty big genre difference in the games in the franchise, with generally the earlier games being more platform-ey, especially 1 & 2. A lot of the humor from the original trilogy still holds up today.
There’s definitely some “unfun” parts in the games (giant mech fight from rac2 and the hacker from rac3 come to mind) but overall cozy imo. Some of the most unique and fun guns in any game.
If you’re looking for strictly more shooter, check out Ratchet Deadlocked. There’s barely any platforming and no mini games that I can remember, it’s pretty much all shooting. NG+ makes it super cozy. It’s really nice to play emulated.
The souls games, and Bloodborne in particular, can be hard and frustrating.
But with the right mindset everyone can beat them.
You don’t need perfect reflexes, you don’t need to learn super complex combos.
You do need to realize that (at least in the beginning) you are not super strong compared to the enemies you encounter.
If you start the game for the first time and run into a big group of enemies, you WILL die.
Then you learn to not do that and try to aggro one enemy at a time.
This goes for many more situations.
At first you won’t know how to approach some of them and you will die. And sometimes you will die twice and lose your hard earned resources.
This can be frustrating. And sometimes the camera was a bit buggy or your dodge didn’t work the way you thought it would.
But most of the time you could have done something different to avoid death.
And FromSoftware is quite good in giving hints what that is.
If you die in similar situations, there is usually a way to approach them differently.
That also goes for bosses.
And then there is the big open secret, you can simply level a bit more than absolutely necessarily to make souls games significantly easier.
If you only need to hit the boss 20 times instead of 30 and you survive his 3 hit combo and can heal back up instead of dropping dead after 2 hits it becomes way more manageable.
This is not necessary, people beat those games with base level running around naked with giant clubs, but not in their first run.
Use items, upgrade your weapon, level up your character, and the game will not be so grim.
But be prepared to not be able to rush through all the content without being challenged or using your brain.
Oh and if you choose to play Bloodborne (my first souls like and still one of my favorite games of all times) just enjoy yourself.
Every weapon is 100% viable.
For the first run the Saw Cleaver (R1-L1-L1) and the Axe (long R2 in two-handed mode) are slightly easier than the pimp cane, but again, every weapon is viable.
Just have fun with it, the games are classics for a reason.
In the sense of “do they require lightning fast reflexes or mastering a deep combat system”, no not at all. They mostly require paying attention and learning.
I don’t mind learning. I suppose it’s sort of like solving a puzzle. I’m used to horror games with puzzles so I’m used to thinking things through in games.
This isn’t to say it’s not a game that won’t challenge reflexes if you let it. I think it’s fair to say better reflexes in a souls like can serve to make a boss easier as you play more on the edge. Of course this takes having your game knowledge and pattern recognition on point.
If I may, I’d recommend starting with the Demon’s Souls remake if you’re interested. Bloodborne was the first Souls game I ever played, and it was quite punishing. I got quite far and greatly enjoyed parts of it, but it was my experience that it was extraordinarily challenging for a newcomer. Among all the Souls and Soulslike games, BloodBorne is intended to be played aggressively, which is not a good starting point in my opinion.
It was actually Returnal that taught me how to approach challenging games, i.e., almost like a puzzle game in how you try new things to break through impasses. That being said, I also found the Demon’s Souls remake to be a much more forgiving entry point, especially if you play as a magic caster. MP is limited so you still need to engage in melee, but magic is a powerful tool to play things safe if you play smartly.
It’s also just a fantastic game with great level design. I actually kind of like the segmented levels with a central hub.
I have a copy of Demon’s Souls remake as luck would have it. I have not played it yet but now I’m tempted. I wouldn’t mind playing that first actually. It looks really fun.
I loved it. I’ve since also played 100+ hours of Elden Ring and some other challenge-heavy games like Hollow Knight - I’ve thought about going back to Bloodborne with some experience under my belt because it really is a great game. But for me it feels like a lot to start over (and as much as I hate to be an fps snob, they never released a next-gen update and playing a game like this in 30 fps is a turn-off).
I think most Atari 2600 games fell into this trap, not just because they tended to have some of the most awesome covers and lacking tech, but some were just awful ports or phoned in licensed games.
I don’t have many specifically coming to mind, but the Raiders of the Lost Ark game had a really cool cover (still does, but also used to), but the game was an impenetrable mess, both visually and from a game play standpoint. It was quite complex though, so maybe there was something interesting beneath the depths that kid me could never figure out.
Generally, you want backups in three places, at least one off site for anything you deem important, so now’s a good time to start. SSD’s should travel fine as long as you take the right precautions regarding physical and static damage. Steam will handle most cloud saves, as will some other third party launchers. If you’re coming to the UK, I recommend Scan as a retailer.
For clarity, the recommendation is specifically 3 copies of your data, not 3 backups.
3-2-1 backup; 3 copies of the data, 2 types of storage devices, 1 off-site storage location.
So in a typical homelab case you would have your primary hot data, the actual device being used to create and manage that data, your desktop. You’d regularly backup that data into warm storage such as a NAS with redundancy (raid Z1, Z2, etc). Followed by regular but slower intervals of backups to a remote location, such as a duplicate NAS with a secure tunnel or even an external drive(s) sitting at a friend or family member’s house, bank vault, wherever. That would be considered cold storage (and should be automated as such if it’s constantly powered).
My own addition to this is that at least one of the hot / warm devices should be on battery backup in case of power events. I’ll always advocate that to be the primary machine but in homelab the server would be more important and the NAS would be part of that stack.
Cloud is not considered a backup unless the data owner is also the storage owner, for general reliability reasons related to control over the system and storage. Cloud is, however, a reasonable temporary storage for moves and transfers.
bin.pol.social
Gorące