chameleon

chameleon, 12 days ago

Can't wait for a new generation to rediscover the exciting fun of having to survive Kil'Jaeden's balls and whatever that darkness phase is even supposed to be, despite the boss technically hitting 1 HP in 5 seconds.

chameleon, 1 month ago

Steam changed it so that popularity metrics are mostly ignored during the first couple days of Next Fest. This started with the October 2024 run, and it's a big part of why you no longer have the good demos popping up quickly at the start. To my knowledge, they never published details on it, but there was a short blurb in the developer Q&A. Things should get better starting sometime tomorrow (tends to be day 3 or day 4).

The idea is that it gives games that don't have pre-existing marketing a way better chance of success, instead of the really massive snowball effect that used to exist where devs lost out for the entire thing if they weren't popular within the first couple of hours, but it has made it a hell of a job to look for new games.

chameleon, 1 month ago

The PS2 Ace Combat games (4/5/Zero) are still best-in-genre as far as I'm concerned, and have held up exceedingly well in general. Aerial dogfighting with good controls, good mission design and interesting story.

Sky Odyssey is a more "relaxed" little flight game that I also like, still got game-like controls but no combat, just missions where you fly through hard situations.

chameleon, 2 months ago

I've also been playing this, even though it's well out of what I normally play. I'd describe it as being closer to an ARPG than a MOBA, and for both better and for worse, it feels like a roguelike version of mid-seasonal gameplay in ARPGs. Couple of buttons on relatively short cooldowns backed up by buildcrafting meant to make those buttons utterly broken with lots of good opportunities available. There's okay variance between runs. Buildcrafting is super flexible in general, you can move all of your ability upgrades around to other abilities at any time with no cost, you can even give almost everything to friends in co-op.

Not all is good. The game was review-bombed at launch due to the metaprogression and cooldown changes from the demo, and honestly, that was probably correct. The balancing work and the per-character XP requirements ruined some of the fun that the demo had. The worst was hotfixed within a day, even adding a compensation system for demo players, and progress is like 3X faster now, but it still feels like it's too slow and not fluid enough. I sorta settled on having a "main" in a genre that's more fun if you swap between characters to keep things fresh. The devs will probably find a solution sooner than later.

There's some other problems like the performance absolutely tanking in lategame regardless of what you're playing on (my trusty RX 580 performs about as well as my friend's RTX 4080, and that's a pretty universal complaint), there's some multiplayer bugs like a boss attack that only the host can survive, some questionable balancing here and there, one of the 8 characters feels unfinished (Shell), but overall it's been pretty good, fills a pretty unique role and the problems don't really detract from what I'm getting out of it.

chameleon, 2 months ago

Even with the current thumbs up/down people get it wrong. Give it a thumbs up but write a scathing review.

I've done that and it's a result of not having more options than good/bad. Always the same cause: I really wanted to write a 3* review for a game that has a lot to praise but its core is fundamentally flawed, but Steam doesn't let me give a 3*, so I try to correct for the review score bracket I think the game should be in.

chameleon, 2 months ago

For the benefit of people that can't watch this horrible video:

This is really about them being able to change the already extremely vague terms of service and you having no recourse other than voiding your purchase if you don't like it. There is some focus on a gun thing early on, but it's just an example where they flip-flopped multiple times over the years based on vague wording in the ToS that was changed after the fact. Commercial modded server owners were the main ones that had to make changes because of that rule, often taking guns away from players that had them, but it's generally enforced very inconsistently.

But the main thing they're focusing on in the lawsuit is the mass deletion of legitimately bought Minecraft copies when they stopped Mojang account migration in 2023 (everyone that didn't migrate then no longer owns Minecraft according to Microsoft; no refunds). That, too, was effectively a one-sided ToS change. And to make matters worse, the old ToS had an explicit clause that you could keep playing the game in singleplayer even without agreeing to any new ToS.

This lawsuit is being done in Sweden. I don't know if this kind of ToS/contract validity has actually been tested there before.

I think this is the first time I ever watched a video at 0.5 speed. "this was done due to retention purposes for the video to maximize spread potential". Yeeeaaaah. No. Checked reddit, it's downvoted to the negatives over form. Checked a different place that would be all over this, entire topic is discussing the form and there's not one mention of what it's about because nobody got that far. The exact kind of person that might take time out of their day to join a class action is not going to watch this garbage. I think it's good to have this tested, but I straight up don't trust this guy. Supposedly maximizing views while getting zero information through to anyone is not going to help the cause.

chameleon, 2 months ago

They already implement instant bank payments in a lot of countries where there's a reasonable consumer-to-business solution for it. I know at least Sofort/iDEAL/Bancontact are supported just fine in their respective countries.

chameleon, 3 months ago

You can, but most everything that would let you run your own boot-time code is supposed to end up in the TPM event log, which the TPM is happy to attest to with its unique/uniquely bannable attestation key. Not too difficult to set it up so that no attestation = no access.

This type of attestation is far from perfect for a lot of different reasons, and it would be really impractical to automate bans with it, but I guess it's a tool they see value in.

chameleon, 3 months ago

Yep. It would be incredibly bad if they did automatic bans for any key they don't recognize, but it's technically possible.

Edit: from what I'm reading it apparently just refuses to let you in with unrecognized/non-MS keys. Yeah that makes a lot more sense.

chameleon, 3 months ago

Another World/Out of This World. Short game, but also a 1991 game made by one dev and one composer in two years, and artistically it still holds up fairly well even today.

chameleon, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

The new owners are so trustworthy that they weren't even transparent about who they are. In the comments of the original announcement they defend that with:

This post wasn’t about Chosen — it was about Robin and the legacy he built over 24 years. We’re the new owners and ultimate decision-makers at Nexus Mods. We’ll share more about ourselves when we’ve earned that right. For now, we’re focused on listening, learning, and making modding even easier, and yes, you’ll see us around in the community being active.

I can't say I find that statement to be particularly trustworthy given it's coming from an NFT bro.

chameleon, 4 months ago

Dual nominations for Paper Mario: Sticker Star & Paper Mario: Color Splash. The only thing I really remember about them is that I played them and they left me without any feelings about them whatsoever.

chameleon, 5 months ago

The store page is kinda confusing. I don't think the line "Join forces with other players to take on the creeping night and the dangers within featuring 3-player co-op." along with both singleplayer and co-op listed as valid playing styles is something most reasonable people would interpret the way that it really is: be exactly 3 players with external voice chat available because all other ways of playing the game will suck hard.

They've been sorta honest about that in interviews and such but those don't have the same reach as their huge marketing campaign.

chameleon, 7 months ago

Started Blue Prince, but to be honest I haven't gotten past the initial "RNG wall" and I'm sorta over it. I'm 5 hours in and continue to get the same rooms I've documented in detail in my notes with little new to show for it, and while I have some leads and puzzle pieces, nothing fits. Not particularly excited about a lot of the small repeat puzzles anymore either. I get the impression that I just need one or two pieces of knowledge that the game is refusing to provide to me. Kinda hoping that the good old trick of complaining on the internet will make things work out.

chameleon, 7 months ago

That's what I've been trying, yesterday ended up being a little more fruitful (internet complaining trick worked!) and luckily gave me more interesting rooms, though I'm not convinced it was any action on my part that did it.

chameleon, 7 months ago

It was just a two question + your name form: type-in your #1 pick but also why. Full-on first past the post, single vote only, no option to name other games. Pretty flawed methodology overall.

That said, I will admit that I did put in Shenmue and while I didn't expect it to get #1, I hoped it'd be top 3 at the very least. I really do trace more or less every successful strongly story based open world game of the 2000s back to a combination of Shenmue and Half-Life. Shenmue's story didn't have a super wide appeal and would be completely uninteresting to most teenagers at the time (which was still the main gaming audience), but the method of storytelling is top-notch, and its open world just felt far more genuine than anything predating it. Meanwhile, Half-Life did an excellent job at telling a story that looks boring but is actually very interesting, and did so in an engaging, if not particularly open world way.

chameleon, 8 months ago

For what it's worth, this game was formerly "Monolith". Fantastic twinstick bullet hell shmup roguelite. Difficulty is somewhat on the hard side but it's learnable.

chameleon, 11 months ago

Powered through Beastieball over the past week, a creature collector/"sports" game from the devs of Chicory and Wandersong. I had fairly high expectations because I enjoyed the devs previous work, but it turned out even better than expected. Lots of cool creature designs, music is Lena Raine's usual standout stuff, story kept my attention.

The sportsball system is surprisingly complex, if a little hard to learn. I went through multiple types of team setup and felt like a lot of different setups were viable in the end. Every match is a 2v2, every offensive turn is 3 actions worth, and you get a defensive turn too. You really have to build a team with good synergy between them and be smart about swapping in and out.

Only real downside is it's still early access and a decent chunk of creatures have placeholder art or don't have the full set of animation frames yet. Most are reasonably finished but there's a couple that are a little jarring.

chameleon, 1 year ago

It technically still exists in the game properties -> installed files tab, but it doesn't really work. The backup files you get require you to be online to meaningfully restore and will trigger a patch to the latest game version.

Practically speaking it's better to just make a copy of the game install directory manually, gives you a better chance of things working (even though most games require some kind of external tooling for that).

chameleon, 1 year ago

For current exports, it's some custom .csm/.csd file combo. Not sure if there's any tools for working with it, seems like it'd be more annoying than just using a normal archive format either way.

chameleon, 1 year ago

I don't know if the Atari Lynx counts as non-major. Anything from Atari should probably count as major, the thing supposedly sold 2 million units, but I can't remember the last time I've seen anyone mention it and that's still less than 2% of the Game Boy's 110m+.

I got the original model as a hand-me-down towards the end of the 90s and I wasn't super fond of it. The thing looks and feels like a brick and ate batteries for breakfast, the internet says 5 hour battery life but I remember getting like 2. The "left-hand mode" is a cool concept but putting two pairs of A/B buttons on the device feels like something they could've done better. It had color, a couple of arcade ports were really great games and there was Chip's Challenge, but younger me got exhausted just using the damn thing.

chameleon, 1 year ago

Crimzon Clover, any version's good but World EXplosion is the most recent. It's a fairly difficult and chaotic bullet hell, but the novice mode should be reasonably approachable as long as you're willing to learn, and the design is superb.

Similarly, the whole CAVE backlog. Not all of them have novice modes or the like, and there's quite a few games not really available outside of MAME. The original DoDonPachi is/was considered the best starter bullet hell for a long, long time and still holds up pretty well, but is more difficult than a lot of modern games on their respective novice modes.

On the indie side of things: Star of Providence (formerly Monolith) is an indie roguelite bullet hell twin-stick-ish shmup with a pretty good amount of depth. ZeroRanger is a much more story-based game that I really enjoyed.

chameleon, 1 year ago

NieR Automata, for basically the same reasons. Hard mode is filled with instakills everywhere and is really just a damage multiplier, so you have to be the right kind of person for that. If you're not, Normal is probably already fairly easy because of all the auto-heals, but the pacing can be a bit slow for something where most enemies aren't dangerous. Might as well play Easy and play for the story.

chameleon, 1 year ago

Or 800€...

This whole thing is shaping up to be the PS3's "five hundred and ninety nine us dollars" version 2.

chameleon, 1 year ago

Aside from all of the problems with the game itself, I think they must've had one of the most unfortunate launch moments. Hero shooters had been pretty much on the downturn and then just before they launched, Deadlock went public and suckered quite a lot of the hero shooter audience into playing a full-on MOBA/FPS hybrid. And Deadlock is very quietly breaking all kinds of silly records for what's technically an invite-only alpha (currently #8 on Steam's most played with 137k concurrent players).

chameleon, 1 year ago

Eh, no. "I'm going to make things annoying for you until you give up" is literally something already happening, Titanfall and the like suffered from it hugely. "I'm going to steal your stuff and sell it" is a tale old as time, warez CDs used to be commonplace; it's generally avoided by giving people a way to buy your thing and giving people that bought the thing a way to access it. The situation where a third party profits off your game is more likely to happen if you don't release server binaries! For example, the WoW private/emulator server scene had a huge problem with people hoarding scripts, backend systems and bugfixes, which is one of the reasons hosted servers could get away with fairly extreme P2W.

And he seems to completely misunderstand what happens to IP when a studio shuts down. Whether it's bankruptcy or a planned closure, it will get sold off just like a laptop owned by the company would and the new owner of the rights can enforce on it if they think it's useful. Orphan works/"abandonware" can happen, just like they can to non-GaaS games and movies, but that's a horrible failing on part of the company.