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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.