I’d take GTA 4 or 5 over San Andreas, easily. And at this point, a large part of the appeal is GTA Online for a ton of folks; not me, but a ton of folks.
Long story short, I was trying to make some pork buns and it ended with the tip of my thumb being sliced off, after hospital visit and six stitches and back. But I’m kind of bored out of my mind. Can’t do the steam deck. Can’t do really anything with a controller. I have a large library of games, most of which I haven’t...
Which thumb? If your left thumb is still functional, when I had a hand injury in middle school, I got to be really good at Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2. If your dominant/mouse hand is still functional, anything mouse-driven ought to do, and that covers a wide range of genres from CRPGs to adventure games to 4X games and more.
It also only works as long as the AI can actually competently do the QA work. This is what an AI thinks a video game is. To do QA, it will have to know that something is wrong, flag it, and be able to tell when it’s fixed. The most likely situation I can foresee is that it creates even more work for the remaining humans to do when they’re already operating at a deficit.
I don’t know what they were testing, but if your output is text, it will be a lot easier for the AI to know it’s correct than any of the plethora of ways that video games can go subtly wrong, and that’s where my lack of faith comes from. Even scraping text from the internet, my experience is more often that AI is confident in its wrong answer than it is helpful.
If you’ve never had a gaming computer before and you’re on a budget, look up how to set up Heroic Games Launcher and make accounts with Epic and GOG. They give away free games all the time, and almost all of them will work on Steam Deck.
I’m thinking 2015 - Witcher 3, Undertale, and Kerbal Space Program are all classics. Fallout 4, Arkham Knight, and Cities Skylines were all excellent too, though fallout 4 and Arkham knight aren’t necessarily the best games in their respective series.
1998 comes up a lot in response to this question, for good reason. Pokemon Red/Blue, Baldur’s Gate, Metal Gear Solid, Thief, Half-Life, Fallout 2, StarCraft, and on and on. Games were made much more quickly back then, and the technological advancements allowed for a lot of these games to do new things that no one had done before, that were quite predictably going to be well-received.
If I’m putting together a pantheon of great years in gaming, it looks like 1998, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2023. If I’ve got to pick one, it might be 2004. Half-Life 2, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (an odd choice for many, but it’s maybe my favorite in the series), Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes, Halo 2, Burnout 3: Takedown, Star Wars: Battlefront, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Unreal Tournament 2004, The Sims 2, Doom 3, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Viewtiful Joe 2, Ninja Gaiden, Counter-Strike: Source, etc., etc. This was a magical time in online multiplayer, where it was pretty new for most, and you could do things like proximity chat in a shooter and expect people to actually use it for the video game at hand instead of spewing slurs into the mic. Local multiplayer was abundant. Obtuse game design made to sell strategy guides was just about obsolete, and DLC had yet to be invented (outside of beefier expansions). Midnight launches were exciting, and I have fond memories of, for reasons I can’t explain, playing Halo 2 on launch day in a 12-player LAN using bean bags, projectors, and 3 Xboxes set up in a local college’s racket ball court.
Pillars 2’s turn based mode was such a great addition that it propelled me through the game a second time after I’d already finished it in RtwP. Pillars 1 didn’t have that option when I played it, but from Pillars 2, I’m quite certain it will be the better way to play the game from now on.
It’s a good game, but at least in RtwP, it could be a real endurance test. Most of my combats that went wrong did so because I had decision fatigue from having to march through so many enemy mobs.
Free Windows 10 support ended for most people this past month, and the trend line of Linux usage has been quite clear leading up to this, as people prepared for the inevitable. An increase in Linux usage is also correlated to a drop in Chinese players, which did happen this month a little bit, but Linux usage is also trending up...
Who else has an incentive to do so other than Valve? Even when you buy a pre-built with Windows today, those things are subsidized by bloatware that’s already installed on the machine.
You’re on Lemmy, a site people use when they don’t like reddit. You don’t see any reason why there might also be a ton of people here who use Linux, an operating system you use when you don’t like Windows?
THPS offline mode is the same version as elsewhere, but it magically allows itself to operate offline when it thinks it’s running on a Steam Deck, which you can do with a launch parameter. Baldur’s Gate 3 actually has a native Linux version that is only officially supported for Steam Deck, and that might be closer to what you’re referring to.
It’s possible, but it’s also possible that they already had that offline segregation built into the code to support the Switch version, and that it was trivial to enable.
It can be a slow transition, but I did the same. I had equal space for Windows and Linux in 2017, predating the Proton years. When I built a machine in 2021, I saw how much I was using each OS, and it ended up being 1.5TB Linux and 500GB Windows. Whenever I build my next PC, I’m quite confident I won’t have any reason to use Windows at all, seeing as I haven’t even booted that partition in about a year. If there is some odd use case, like a firmware update utility for a peripheral that requires Windows or something, I’ll just install Windows briefly on a cheap mini PC I’ve got and then set it back to Bazzite when I’m done.
They kept the original title from the video, which is typically ediquette. The long and short of it is: from the perspective of someone who wants access to all of these games on modern platforms in an official capacity, especially for online play, it’s not a good package. There’s a lot of input delay, and the online experience is missing a lot of crucial features, not to mention some audio issues as a result of the emulation methods.
At the very least, this is the case on PlayStation. This same company put out the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary collection, and it had a lot of the same problems on consoles. The input lag in particular was less of a problem on PC. To my eyes/ears/hands, the input lag isn’t a problem in SF 30th on PC, but I haven’t measured it scientifically, nor am I so familiar with those old games that I’d notice something is off; on PC though, it passes the sniff test. It’s possible the same is the case for this collection on PC, which would still suck for console players, but it would at least mean that one of these versions is still good. Also, in the years after SF 30th, Digital Eclipse has focused on the documentary aspect of their work, and Max Dood doesn’t really mention this or care much about it at all, but it is a major factor in the appeal of DE’s collections.
I certainly thought I wanted to play Enter the Matrix but as Neo, but I felt Path of Neo jumped the shark with things like MC Escher, fire ants, and giant Smith.
Heroic has gone pretty well for me. I’ve found a few exceptions that are solved by the same trick though. If you’re running a game like The Thaumaturge, and it doesn’t boot on the GOG version, take a look at SteamDB. SteamDB’s entry for the game has a “depot” for VC 2019, VC 2022, and DirectX 2010. If you run winetricks on The Thaumaturge via Heroic and install those three dependencies, it works.
Mostly they bought or founded studios that didn’t produce a product. They bought the Killer Instinct devs, Double Helix, who mostly have now left and formed Quarter Up Games, working on the new Invincible Vs game. They put out a hero shooter called Crucible that launched and was quickly shut down. Their biggest success has been New World, which is a moderately successful MMO. They also forked CryEngine into Lumberyard, which found some favor in the market. Other than that, they’ve got some co-publishing deals, including for an upcoming Tomb Raider game, which may now be in jeopardy.
As it relates to gaming, no. This is a large company who thought they could muscle their way into a very competitive market and then found that they very much could not.
As one Reddit commenter put it: “I thought Capcom organised this circuit as a marketing tool for the game. Makes no sense to charge viewers to watch it. And esports is, unfortunately, still way too niche for that to be profitable.”
It’s shooting themselves in the foot, not their audience. Their audience has plenty of Street Fighter tournaments to watch.
They’re charging for it because the Japanese audience will pay for it, and I guess they don’t want to handle it differently abroad. Fighting games, at least up to this point, have been sustainable in a way that the rest of e-sports have not. The rest of e-sports was predicated on future growth, and fighting games have only grown as fast as the money coming in, in general. (2XKO is putting out $50k in pot bonuses for a game that doesn’t look to be earning that much, and the Saudis now own SNK and treat Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting like they’re Call of Duty.)
He’s right. It’s despicable. Trading card games, too. The thing with Valve is that, outside of this monetization of online games, they’ve unquestionably had an enormous positive impact on all sorts of things in this medium just by way of sheer market forces. They’ve done a lot of great open source work, and they’ve helped create a viable exit ramp from Windows. Despite claims of monopoly on PC, they’ve created more market competition than we could have ever hoped to see otherwise. A lot of what they do is informed by what they would want to pay for if they were the customers. That stuff can be true, and at the same time, they have directed their online games in a data-driven way toward whatever creates the best results, and that result is legalized (mostly, for now) gambling for children and other addiction-driven spending behavior via battle passes. The worst part is that if they ever arrived here by accident, they’re not remorseful enough to stop, since it makes so much money.
Rejecting monetization strategies that look, function, and feel a lot like gambling doesn’t mean players will always appreciate their alternatives, however. Hall said that even he is frustrated by the “Paradox model” of paid expansion and DLC packs his studio RocketWerkz chose for its survival game Icarus after moving away from a free-to-play scheme.
It’s been years, and I still scoff at the criticism. The Paradox model is to ask a price for a good that they produced. If you don’t feel it’s worth it, you don’t buy it. They don’t obfuscate the details of what’s in the expansion; they don’t make things available for a limited time only; they ask what they feel is a fair price for a product. It’s the only method of monetizing a video game that doesn’t feel scummy to me. If Hall doesn’t like monetizing Icarus that way, he needs to scope his projects down so they can put a bow on the last one and move on to the next one more quickly.
There was a ballot proposition in my state some years back to build a local casino. I’m not a gambler, but we all have our vices, and it’s possible it could stimulate the local economy, so I looked into it. Of the research I could find, the best-case scenario seemed to be that it maybe had no ill effects on the local populace. The worst case was that people susceptible to gambling addiction were now exposed to it when they otherwise wouldn’t have been, and that was devastating on those people’s lives. Not only is online gambling accessible to us anywhere, which is proving to be systemically problematic in things like sports betting apps now, Valve skirts current regulations to make it available to those under 21.
It’s confirmed: the next xbox will be a Windows PC box. It sounds very interesting that this will also be backwards compatible with Xbox games, including 360/One/Series games. I wonder if it’s just emulation, and how well that will work
Indeed, the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, with its Xbox Full Screen Experience, is essentially what the next Xbox will look like. It’s not dissimilar to the SteamOS interface and Big Picture Mode, which allows you to exit out into full Linux at will.
A big difference here, and something that it sounds like the FSE did not nail, is that SteamOS doesn’t just boot into Big Picture Mode; it intercepts how popups and game windows are drawn to the screen so that you never lose focus of the game window. It doesn’t force you to get out a keyboard or use the touch screen to enter a login password or PIN. It’s got those important considerations for the ways a game machine differs from any other personal computer. Microsoft, with all its wealth and the code base of Windows in its control, can make those same changes, but maybe they didn’t plan for it in their code base that now surely goes back almost 30 years at this point. Best of luck to those engineers.
New technology Microsoft is developing, alongside the “fixed” nature of the hardware, should eliminate a lot of the inconveniences that sometimes come with PC gaming. Things like compiling shaders, etc, shouldn’t be an issue on the new Xbox, for example.
I don’t know if it’s actually new technology, but what Valve does for the Steam Deck is to either handle this server side or to have people with a Steam Deck essentially upload their completed shaders back to the server to be distributed to everyone else’s Steam Deck, sort of like BitTorrent. This is what I expect Microsoft will do.
Right now, I’m told the current plan is for the next Xbox specifically to have no paywall for multiplayer.
It’s insane that they’ve kept that paywall for so long when it would be the easiest way to make their console more enticing than PlayStation, before they did this pivot of theirs. If the goal was Game Pass anyway, make online free and make that library on Game Pass attractive. The reason online is free on PC is because your store purchases are supporting the infrastructure that someone like Valve provides, and we crossed the threshold on consoles where digital purchases are the majority some time ago.
Where the Xbox Ally is disadvantaged, at least for Xbox console users, is the lack of the Xbox console library. There are more Xbox Play Anywhere (dual-license PC and console Xbox games) than ever, but most AAA publishers aren’t on board with this ecosystem just yet. Increasingly, though, it’ll become the default ecosystem for publishers, particularly if they want to support a PC gaming universe where they get 88% of the revenue rather than 70%.
This is a delusional paragraph in the wake of the Epic Games Store.
As far as I know, this same advantage isn’t granted to anything other than Steam Deck. On desktop, you often have a Vulkan shader step before the game boots that I rarely see on Deck. I could be wrong though.
Background processes can spawn pop-ups, update reminders, notifications, etc. If you listen to Dan and Bakalar’s chat on the Bombcast, even with Bakalar on the proper FSE like he’s supposed to be, you’ll hear examples of the controller inputs just not working the way they’re supposed to, often because something else spawned on top of it. You can hear the same in this GameSpot review of the Xbox Ally X from Tamoor Hussain. And I can tell you from experience, this happens on desktop Linux distros on handhelds as well.
If you’re fine with just Big Picture Mode rather than what SteamOS or Bazzite are doing at a lower level, more power to you, but for a lot of us, it makes a huge difference in the experience, and it sounds like Microsoft’s FSE hasn’t gotten all the way there yet.
When Microsoft can’t do it on their FSE, it certainly feels special. But no, it’s a bit more than deciding to close something or not. Do you have a Steam Deck or a machine running Bazzite? In gaming mode, check out a game that has one of those stupid pre-launch launchers on it, like most of 2K’s games, and note how it handles that differently from a desktop OS.
Indeed, the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, with its Xbox Full Screen Experience, is essentially what the next Xbox will look like. It’s not dissimilar to the SteamOS interface and Big Picture Mode, which allows you to exit out into full Linux at will. Similarly, the Xbox Full Screen Experience will allow you to exit out to full Windows if you want to, and run competing stores like Steam, Epic Games Store, Microsoft’s own Battle.net, the Riot Client, and indeed anything else you want. Indeed, you could run Adobe CC or Microsoft Office on the next Xbox, if you so choose.
I’ll grant you that there’s room to interpret this paragraph another way, but it certainly reads to me as though this is it. It can get improvements between now and then for sure, but I think it’s out.
Hosting servers isn’t free. Someone, somewhere, is paying for it. It’s easy to forget that that someone used to be advertisers via GameSpy for so many games. Now, on PC, you’re paying for it via digital purchases on the same store that hosts the servers.
It wasn’t always worth it back then, hence why it was supported with ads or a subscription. Did you ever patch your game back then? Even that was subsidized by ads; the devs didn’t host the patch files themselves in most cases. Live services, which are unfortunately all too often synonymous with online games, host their own servers, and you’re paying for them with microtransactions. If a game uses the platform’s matchmaking for peer to peer multiplayer, which was just about all of them on Xbox Live in its early days, then you’re using the servers your subscription was paying for. Even today, many still use these features. But you’re correct that the ones not using these features are still locked behind that subscription on consoles unless they’re free to play.
There were actually good, written gags in that game, too. Plus the general “Indy found himself in a place where needed to improvise and punch some Nazis” sort of gameplay that the game did so well. I can’t even recall a single bug from my playthrough.
In Borderlands 4, there’s a side quest to cure someone of being a psycho. You need to get a handful of macguffins and plug them into this elaborate machine. There’s a lot of whirring and build-up, and then the machine essentially zaps the psycho and makes him explode. “He’s cured!” It got me, lol.
I was a big fan of Uncharted 2 and 3, but Uncharted 4 stopped giving me control of the action and started making it barely interactive or just a cut-scene, and I found The Great Circle to be an excellent counter to that, personally. Even if you saw a T-pose, it doesn’t seem right to call it a typical Bethesda thing. There’s a big difference between Bethesda, the developer of Elder Scrolls, and Machine Games, the developer of Wolfenstein and Indiana Jones; they don’t even use the same engine between them.
Your source is from a game from two years ago when it was new; not only does Proton get big updates all the time, but it’s far more mature in general now than it was two years ago. You lose access to Windows store, but Amazon, Epic, and GOG work through Heroic. Maybe EA and Ubisoft are a problem for some people, but those also might work through Lutris. I haven’t shopped with either in over a decade, so I’m not the best candidate to check.
New games pushing technology features will always lag slightly before they make it to Proton. It’s the nature of reverse engineering. On Kubuntu, on AMD, the only crashes I can name are for The Alters, which I knew from Proton DB ahead of time to expect some chop.
The gaming experience on Windows is to get interrupted by updates constantly, less gracefully handle sleep and resume, and sometimes lose control over the game window when popups come up such that you need to be rescued by a keyboard or the touch screen. Those aren’t just my experiences but also captured in the reviews for this very device. What you gain is compatibility with live service games with invasive anti-cheat and Game Pass. For some people that will be enough, but this isn’t even the first handheld gaming device to show a performance delta in Linux’s favor when tested. I don’t think many people are experiencing this stability problem you are, as it doesn’t reflect in many reviews, and a two year old forum post for a game running on technology that moves this fast doesn’t mean that it’s still happening.
I started a new run of Baldur’s Gate II to see if I can actually be good at it this time.
Of more recent releases, I’ve also been going through Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector and The Alters, both being very good resource management games in space.
It’s only the campaign, despite the fact that the competitive multiplayer was just as responsible for this game’s success back in the day. Split-screen is only supported on consoles and not on PC for some reason that I definitely cannot understand. And while it’s got online play, it surely won’t support LAN…in Halo…a game known for LAN parties.
“For quality games media, I continue to believe that the best form of stability is dedicated reader bases to remove reliance on funds, and a hybrid of direct reader funding and advertisements. If people want to keep reading quality content from full time professionals, they need to support it or lose it. That’s never been...
Its a non functioning product at launch, something that should be called out in a review.
It literally functions. I’ve played it at launch and will continue playing it. Watch Austin’s review on SkillUp, who had the benefit of releasing his review some time after launch but started during the embargo period, to see why a reviewer would not call it out.
The Suicide Squad was a bad game, someone liking it does not justify a dishonest or lazy review
The quality of a game, and the evaluation of it in a review, is entirely subjective.
Neither of which are true is a bold statement that needs more then a “trust me” level of response.
Try looking right under the comment where someone who has been a paid reviewer called it out as nonsense. Or ask literally anyone in the industry. It’s come up on podcasts like Friends Per Second and Giant Bomb over the years enough times. If this was all a big marketing stunt where reviews were bought and paid for, someone would have blown the whistle by now.
You seem to be pushing the idea that its the audience is wrong and desperately assuming that people don’t like the media state due to an inability to reconcile their own preferences with the articles (wild and odd).
And yet you’re doing it right now. I can see why you would distrust a review if you don’t understand what a review is.
‘Grand Theft Auto VI’ Is Postponed Again — to November 2026 (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
At this rate, the PS6 will be out by the time this game is ready.
Sliced off the tip of my thumb, what are some good one handed games? angielski
Long story short, I was trying to make some pork buns and it ended with the tip of my thumb being sliced off, after hospital visit and six stitches and back. But I’m kind of bored out of my mind. Can’t do the steam deck. Can’t do really anything with a controller. I have a large library of games, most of which I haven’t...
Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Rise of the Tomb Raider (SteamDeck) (imgur.com) angielski
I love the Steamdeck. I’ve never had a gaming computer & I love this so much. Best $140 I’ve spent on gaming.
Which year was the most stacked for game releases? angielski
I’m thinking 2015 - Witcher 3, Undertale, and Kerbal Space Program are all classics. Fallout 4, Arkham Knight, and Cities Skylines were all excellent too, though fallout 4 and Arkham knight aren’t necessarily the best games in their respective series.
Assassin's Creed is a "forever brand" because Ubisoft supported huge risks with it, ex director says: "Whereas, say, EA, you get these awful execs and they never made games and they came from toothpaste companies" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Pillars of Eternity – Turn-Based Mode Beta Announcement Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Pillars 2’s turn based mode was such a great addition that it propelled me through the game a second time after I’d already finished it in RtwP. Pillars 1 didn’t have that option when I played it, but from Pillars 2, I’m quite certain it will be the better way to play the game from now on.
Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Free Windows 10 support ended for most people this past month, and the trend line of Linux usage has been quite clear leading up to this, as people prepared for the inevitable. An increase in Linux usage is also correlated to a drop in Chinese players, which did happen this month a little bit, but Linux usage is also trending up...
This is not it my dude... (m.youtube.com) angielski
We could have lived in a world where Hideo Kojima made a Matrix game, if only someone had told him he was offered to make one (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Nearly 90% of Windows Games now run on Linux, latest data shows — as Windows 10 dies, gaming on Linux is more viable than ever (www.tomshardware.com) angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.nz/post/29912814
Amazon cutting thousands of corporate roles [including video games] (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Oh, and turns out New World, Amazon’s one reasonably-sized success in gaming, is shutting down in 2026, and development is ending imminently.
Capcom doubles down on its decision to go pay-per-view during the Street Fighter League despite the fact that nobody really likes it (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
'Valve does not get anywhere near enough criticism': DayZ creator Dean Hall says the 'gambling mechanics' of Valve's monetization strategy 'have absolutely no place' in videogames (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Microsoft's ambitious new Xbox: Your entire Xbox console library, the full power of Windows PC gaming, and no multiplayer paywall (www.windowscentral.com) angielski
It’s confirmed: the next xbox will be a Windows PC box. It sounds very interesting that this will also be backwards compatible with Xbox games, including 360/One/Series games. I wonder if it’s just emulation, and how well that will work
When was the last time you actually laughed while playing a game? angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/37932218...
ROG Xbox Ally runs better on Linux than the Windows it ships with — new test shows up to 32% higher FPS (www.tomshardware.com) angielski
Ex-PlayStation boss says the games industry is "littered" with Fortnite clones and "people trying to do Overwatch with different skins," but keep dreaming if you're just trying to get "big sacks of money" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Rise of the Tomb Raider -SteamDeck angielski
What you guys playing this weekend?
Halo: Campaign Evolved | The Silent Cartographer Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
“For quality games media, I continue to believe that the best form of stability is dedicated reader bases to remove reliance on funds, and a hybrid of direct reader funding and advertisements. If people want to keep reading quality content from full time professionals, they need to support it or lose it. That’s never been...