blindsight

blindsight, wczoraj

Right, but Steam still let’s people who own delisted games download and play them forever. (Well, assuming they’re not live service games with no servers, but that’s not a Valve problem.)

blindsight, 2 dni temu (edited 2 dni temu)

I have a slightly different perspective as someone just starting Rise as my first ever experience with this series.

Holy shit, the tutorials are terrible. Massive info dump walls of text explaining too many systems at once, cryptic warning messages to confirm you want to dismiss the tutorials are extra confusing… And despite the massive info dumping, they don’t even tell you everything you need to know to complete the tutorial missions as you complete them. When you go to trap your first monster, there’s no tooltip to teach you how to use items in the “how to trap” explanation or NPC dialogue. I needed to google it.

And no ability to pause in a singleplayer game? I googled some explanation about pause being on one of the menus, but I couldn’t find it. Thankfully, suspending the game on a Steam Deck pauses it, so it’s playable.

Also, why was I given massively OP equipment and piles of loot just for logging in? The entire early game is now so easy that it’s not fun. I’m only 3 tutorials + 1 “real” mission into the game, so I’m going to try starting over without the EZ-mode loot and give it a second chance, but so far, I’m not impressed.

If I’d bought this through Steam, I’d have refunded it already before the 2-hour playtime window closed.

TL;DR: Terrible new-player onboarding has me questioning if I should push through.

blindsight, 3 dni temu

Grow: Song of the Evertree has lots of crafting materials, but no money. I haven’t played it much, but it mostly seems to be about gathering daily to grow the Evertree, then using the resources to expand the town.

blindsight, 19 dni temu

I haven’t been following PoE2 very closely, but I hope it plays well on Steam Deck. If it plays well, then I’m going to play the hell out of this…

blindsight, miesiąc temu

I just looked it up and I already own it from the Itch.io Bundle for Ukraine. I should play it sometime! Also on sale on GOG rn at a historical low price DRM-free.

blindsight, miesiąc temu

I think that’s fine, tbh. Not as many customers will pay $80+ for a subscription. Then companies that sell games with more ethical business models will be more competitive, too.

blindsight, miesiąc temu

It seems like the Archive.org .zip dump’s “size” is just 12580366816. I assume that’s bytes, which is only 12½ GB. That seems way too small to include all the romhacks, doesn’t it? I thought a lot created assets and HD textures and such. But that also seems like way too much to just be website data, and most hacks are tiny files.

Does anyone know what’s in that data dump? I’m tempted to download everything, even though I’d only ever use a miniscule percentage of it.

blindsight, miesiąc temu

I had completely forgotten about the quest mode and tetronimo ball mode.

I’ve long-ago lost (or sold, maybe?) all my original DS stuff, but it’s nice how cheap and easy it is to buy a used DSi/DS Lite and then get a flash cart or soft mod. I should pull it out and play it again. Highly recommended as a console; the DS has lots of timeless games.

blindsight, 2 miesiące temu

I played Superhot first on the Deck. Since time only moves (much) when you’re moving, you have lots of time to practice aiming and getting used to track pads/stick + gyro controls. It requires precise aiming, and there are occasional times where speed helps, so it was a good “training” game for me.

It’s still not as natural as KB+mouse, but I’ve been enjoying Ziggurat 2 a lot (on normal difficulty). I won’t push into hard modes, like I would on PC, but it’s working well for me.

blindsight, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

I already knew the broad strokes of most of what I’ve watched so far (about halfway), but it’s very entertaining. I’m watching at 2× speed, fwiw (which is typical for me).

Edit: Just finished it. Wow. I had no idea there was still new ground to cover in NES Tetris. Really cool ending with explaining the next Grail in NES Tetris.

blindsight, 4 miesiące temu

To add to this:

Ain’t no way a brand new game studio is getting a loan at 6%. If they can even get a business loan at all (good luck!), it would be at a much higher interest rate due to the risk, and/or require assets to be held in collateral (only an option if you’re already wealthy to begin with…)

blindsight, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Earthbound and Super Mario RPG are the two best entry points to SNES-era JRPGs. I haven’t played many JRPGs since the OG PlayStation generation, though, so I’m out of the loop on newer games. But they’re both better entry points than any of the PS1 JRPGs that I know of/played.

I’m more partial to Super Mario RPG, personally. Timing attacks in battle made the grind more engaging, and the Mario world is well known by pretty much any gamer already, too.

blindsight, 4 miesiące temu

There’s a double XP romhack.

“Skip the grind” romhacks are the only way I play a lot of JRPGs. I don’t want to mindlessly battle to advance in the game. I have better things to do with my time, like playing a wider selection of games. I don’t need games’ length padded!

Not sure if it’s needed for Earthbound, but I’d probably just use it anyway. Most games set up a good leveling curve, so double XP shouldn’t break the game even if it’s unnecessary.

blindsight, 4 miesiące temu

I was curious, so I looked it up: Earthbound has a fairly gentle XP curve. Double XP takes you from level 33 to 40, assuming you play the same.

I haven’t played Earthbound enough to remember if there’s grinding, so idk if it’s necessary. In general, I tend to find the existence of double XP romhacks is usually enough to indicate that I’d rather use them, based on my playstyle preferences. Someone thought it was beneficial enough to put hours of work into!

blindsight, 4 miesiące temu

Same for me. Lots of consoles have lots of great games, and I really like the idea of the PS2 library’s depth and quality. I bought a 1TB MicroSD card for my Steam Deck OLED and loaded it with a 1TB image of curated roms from a private tracker thinking I’d play a lot of the ones I missed…

…But the only non-Steam game I’ve played is FF5 for the SNES. I’ve wanted to play it since I found out Final Fantasy “III” was a lie. The Steam Deck is the ultimate SNES RPG machine.

That and my SD2SNES in my childhood SNES gets a lot of play time with my 6 y.o. son. He’s almost able to beat world 1 of SMW solo, but he prefers Kirby Super Star, where he can beat world 1 and most of world 2.

blindsight, 4 miesiące temu

I’m feeling the same way about Minion Masters. I just play it on my Steam Deck, but it got an Android release recently. They gave away a few of their “DLC” packs (which is how I found it about it), so maybe my experience is a bit atypical, but I’ve just been playing for a week or so and I already have more than half the available cards and enough currency that I can craft any cards I really want to finish a deck.

I haven’t paid a cent. It’s so generous with its freemium model that I’m probably going to buy an in-game currency pack if I’m still playing once my Google Rewards wallet ticks high enough to buy one.

blindsight, 4 miesiące temu

I’m privvy to some of the details from this on the EA side of things, and everything in this video is accurate, from what I know.

It was quite a bit of work for EA to strip FIFA out of everything, though. All the UX elements, of course, but they also wanted to be sure to strip FIFA from database names and entries, servers, and a whole host of other places. EA wanted to be 100% confident that there was no mention of FIFA anywhere, just to be completely in the clear from any trademark disputes.

Hearing my connection in EA talk about it reminded me of Y2K patching, lol. Going through the codebase and databases meticulously to check and double check everything.

blindsight, 4 miesiące temu

Cool, that’s great, but that’s also kinda the point.

Live service games suck because you can’t depend on being able to play them. This is trying to fix that. So you (or anyone else) can play these games offline—eventually. Once they shut down the servers, customers should still be able to access their purchases. This campaign is trying to force companies to design around releasing a patch to strip out the online portion/online DRM or face significant financial consequences.

blindsight, 4 miesiące temu

Or a patch to strip out the online portion. If developers know they’ll need to create that patch eventually, then they can design the game around it. Offline/LAN play/local servers were the norm until ubiquitous high-speed internet.

There’s no technical reason why Diablo 4 needs to be online only. It was a design decision made for DRM and microtransactions. D2 still works great and has thousands of active players.

blindsight, 5 miesięcy temu

Watched the whole thing. I hope this gains traction!

Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about this yet; I’ll set a reminder to check in a month if the petition in my country is active.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to submit a complaint to the French consumer protection agency since I don’t own the game.

blindsight, 5 miesięcy temu

idk, I think there’s more to it than that.

This is another layer of “horse armor MTX”, now with selling pay-to-win features in AAA single-player games. In this case, the first (early?) time it’s been done, it’s “mild”, but it’s a step in the wrong direction.

I don’t like “slippery slope” arguments, in general, but it doesn’t cost me anything to boycott this game for having P2W MTX in a full-priced single-player game. If enough people agree, that might send the message to the industry that nickel and diming their customers isn’t a good business model.

Edit: Also, not including the MTX in review copies is egregiously sleazy since they were hiding it. Customers couldn’t make an informed decision (and their review scores are inflated).

blindsight, 5 miesięcy temu

You’re the first person I’ve seen say Mario, which I find surprising.

For me, it’s Super Mario World, including romhacks. It’s platforming perfection. I particularly like the SMW Central level competition compilation romhacks since you can skip the levels you don’t enjoy.

Spyro is another one I come back to, especially now with the remastered version.

Diablo 2, with mods now, is another. “Stay awhile, and listen.” I sure will, old man.

For a long time, it was Counter Strike and Team Fortress, but I don’t really play FPS games any more so it’s been almost a decade for me at this point.

blindsight, 5 miesięcy temu

Simon Tatham’s Puzzles is a fantastic set of FOSS puzzle games. They look ugly, but they have easy intuitive controls with good instructions for many different puzzle games. (40, I guess?)

blindsight, 6 miesięcy temu

Nice. Wario Land for the Virtual Boy was a fantastic game. It’s a shame so few people have played it.

blindsight, 6 miesięcy temu

I think they also have potential for creating lots of variations in dialogue pre-run in a database, and manually checked by a writer for QC.

The problem with locally-run LLMs is that the good ones require massive amounts of video memory, so it’s just not feasible anytime soon. And the small ones are, well, crappy. And slow. And still huge (8GB+).

That of course means you can’t get truly dynamic branching dialogue, but it can enable things like getting thousands of NPC lines instead of “I took an arrow to the knee” from every guard in every city.

It can also be used to generate dialogue, too, so not just one-liners, but “real” NPC conversations (or rich branching dialogue options for players to select.)

I’m very skeptical that we’ll get “good” dynamic LLM content in games, running locally, this decade.

blindsight, 6 miesięcy temu

I think it’s slightly different for a few reasons:

1. It’s almost completely unregulated. Gatcha games, slot machines, loot boxes, and the like are all literal gambling, yet have mostly skirted gambling laws and other regulations.
2. The in-game UX is unregulated and is designed to encourage spending and obfuscate costs. Games themselves are designed around maximum addiction. Then they include time-limited items/deals to encourage FOMO. Hell, the only reason Diablo 4 is a live service game is so people who buy skins have a (forced) audience to show off to.
3. What happens on screens in virtual spaces may not be monitored by parents (or schools) at all, as closely, or as easily. Parents may not even know their child is buying in-game items and skins, or not understand how it’s different from buying games/DLC.
4. The ads themselves are also mostly unregulated. Children’s TV ads are tightly regulated in a lot of the world, but digital ads have carte blanche to advertise to children directly.
5. Social media acts as a magnifier, with high-status steamers and other content creators rocking high-priced skins acting as game-specific niche “celebrities”/influencers, and are also completely unregulated.

I worry for my kids that they will face a lot of pressures that just didn’t exist for me in the 80s and 90s.

blindsight, 6 miesięcy temu

As a newbie, I was rushing to figure out all the mechanics fast enough to unlock the greenhouse in year 1. It was a bit of a stressful optimization game trying to max out every single day.

Since I unlocked it, cash is rolling in so fast I don’t even know what to do with it anymore. I just hit Spring in t year 2 and it’s really chill, now. I’m thinking of selling most of my animals since It’s repetitive needing to pet them and make cheese/mayo every day. I might just cheat and get a couple auto-petters to make it even more relaxed…

blindsight, 6 miesięcy temu

$30 cosmetic microtransactions are reasonable in Path of Exile, imho. But it’s free-to-play, and most of their MTX are purely cosmetic.

To get the “full” experience, I suppose you’ll want to drop a retail-box-price on a supporter pack to get some stash tabs, but you can reasonably play the game to end game content (30+ hours of play time for the first time for a new player, I’d guess?) without spending a cent.

But MTX in a game that’s over $100CAD on release? ಠ_ಠ

blindsight, 6 miesięcy temu

I haven’t played much since before Ascendancy Classes were added to the game, so I’m well out of the loop (although I do keep up with some of the news), so maybe I’m still emotionally attached to the studio I started following in alpha.

That said, I don’t really have a problem with their business model. They need to get paid, and they don’t sell game-breaking MTX, beyond needing a map tab, a currency tab, and a premium quad tab. I don’t regret the money I spent on supporter packs; I got over a thousand hours out of the game.

blindsight, 7 miesięcy temu

I enjoyed it for quite a while. Last I played, the meta gets a bit stale at the higher ratings, but it’s a really great game up until diamond ranking, at least.

I’ll probably buy the full version when it releases.

blindsight, 7 miesięcy temu

I hadn’t heard of the game before, but this looks really cool. From what I’ve gathered over the last little bit watching videos:

It’s a turn-based tactical board/war/role-playing game based on “the best game Games Workshop ever made”. It’s set in a brutal post-apocalyptic fantasy world with permanent injuries and death, so there’s always tension that you could lose a unit permanently in any battle.

Negative reviews for the game are largely based on the randomness of the system; you need to carefully plan defensive strategies and use positioning effectively to mitigate the risk of bad rolls. You are expected to lose your team and restart. Often, when you first start. This isn’t so much a game to “beat”, as a virtual boardgame to play and see how far you can get.

It sounds like it’s a pretty complex system, too, where you need to carefully balance your team’s synergies and stat points to minimize risks. It sounds like there’s a very high skill ceiling to work towards.

This definitely isn’t a game for everyone, but I think it might be a lot of fun for me!

blindsight, 7 miesięcy temu

But you said yourself that you miss out on a lot of gaming sessions because you won’t buy EA games. If the game is fun, then who cares what it’s labeled? Presumably, your friends think the game is fun enough to play in its current state.

I don’t really understand the problem with “Early Access”; just make a decision based on whether the game is currently worth what they’re asking for it.

blindsight, 7 miesięcy temu

Steam is different, though; many games have no DRM and even more just have Steam’s DRM that’s already been cracked globally and is super quick to patch. They also maintain access to paid games even after they’re delisted.

AFAIK, the only problems with maintaining access to Stream games are software-as-a-service games when servers go down (MMOs and multiplayer servers, basically) and music with expired licenses (fuck the RIAA and copyright law for that one; not much Steam can do about that.) I have many delisted games in my library and I can download them any time I want.

Sure, Steam could go down, at some point. Maybe. But it’s not a big concern.

blindsight, 8 miesięcy temu

It’s a huge discoverability problem. Most people won’t use Netflix on their phone.

I guess you might find this if you have a tablet?

blindsight, 8 miesięcy temu

Shigeru Miyamoto is a legend. He comes off as very humble in this interview, too.

Nintendo must be unique in their retention of talent long term; it was really cool reading the part of the article talking about the intergenerational teams, with original designers working alongside developers who played their games as children. Can you imagine going to work with those responsible for your childhood favourite games?

blindsight, 8 miesięcy temu

You can thank a combination of Hedonic Adaptation and the Paradox of Choice for that.

blindsight, 8 miesięcy temu

I initially thought you had terrible taste in music after listening to the first song… I had NewPipe set to 2.0× speed.

Whoops!

Thanks for the recs, OP and everyone else.

blindsight, 8 miesięcy temu

It’s nice to see people talking about it. I caught a streamer I follow playing it like a month ago and it looked like a lot of fun.

I don’t have enough time to game to justify buying it at its most recent sale price, but I have my eye on it for the first time it gets a deeper discount or gets bundled.

blindsight, 9 miesięcy temu

Thanks for posting. I just watched review videos for all 5, and they all seem skippable, with better options available in their genres, all with some klunky mechanic or grindy/repetitive gameplay loop that frustrates.

Looks like I’ll likely skip this month, depending what the remaining 3 games are.

blindsight, 9 miesięcy temu

This one is a bit out there, but I feel like Backpack Battles is a series of self-generated puzzles.

It’s an autobattler where you shop between each round to buy items and bags, and items affect other items in specific positions around them. So, you’re constantly trying to react to what the shop is offering you to build a combo (and get balanced defenses), then rearrange your bag to try to maximize your item synergies.

It’s completely free to play in early access until its full release in April. And the global leaderboards are very active. Good luck getting to Master Rank, let alone Grandmaster! (I’ve plateaued in Diamond… I need to work on my early game.)

blindsight, 9 miesięcy temu

You could also try Twitch. Most smaller streamers are open to answering viewers’ questions (and bigger ones probably would be, too, but they just can’t because of volume.)

blindsight, 9 miesięcy temu

Was anyone else floored that Half-Life came out 25 years ago? I mean, of course I can do the math, but it hit me hard how long ago that was.

I remember reading a preview article in PC Gamer about the revolutionary AI in the game, how enemies would follow you if they could hear you and set up ambushes.

Then the first time I played it, having the story told right in the game with characters doing actions that you can look around and see and interact with … It was clear to everyone at the time that this was the future of storytelling in first-person games.

I’m definitely going to need to try this on my Deck when it arrives and see if the gameplay holds up.

blindsight, 9 miesięcy temu

So glad I posted this, lol. I was still able to order an LE just now and was able to use the automated system to cancel my original order.

blindsight, 9 miesięcy temu

What is there to do in the end game? I’m at the point now where I can get 1000+ golden eggs and I don’t even know how much gold per run, if I want to, but the whole thing is just fairly easy and repetitive. No matter which character I get, I can use pretty much the same OP combo.

I guess I could just go back to making the game hard again by disabling eggs, the OP weapons, and other things, but then what’s the point since a lot of the fun is in unlocking things?

Or am I just “done” the game, now, and it’s time to move on to Soulstone Survivors or Brotato?

blindsight, 9 miesięcy temu

Rom hacks are so great, too. I always look for bug fix, QoL, and “skip the grind” mods (like 5× experience gain in JRPGs).

Some completely change the style of gameplay, too, like the Turbo mod for Secret of Mana.

blindsight, 9 miesięcy temu

I’ve heard D2R is really good on the Steam Deck, so I think I’ll start with that one. Or maybe PoE.

I’ve ordered an OLED Deck and I’m looking for games with fun gameplay loops that don’t take too much attention since I’ll most be playing while watching TV with my partner. ARPGs seem like a perfect match.

blindsight, 10 miesięcy temu

I’ll answer my question in the comments.

I think this business model is likely suitable only for a few types of games:

Games with a repetitive gameplay loop. Multiplayer or single player, but something where you want to start another run/match/game when you finish.

And sandbox games where there’s no limit to the gameplay.

But for games it’s suitable for, the free marketing you get from content creators is the best publicity you could hope for, and a great way to stand out in an increasingly overcrowded and competitive market.