Oh my god we need John Brown simulator. Old western setting, open world, muskets, horses and hand-drawn maps, tracking down slavers and stalking them across the prairie and conducting raids on their properties.
I think the last two games I bought at some high premium launch price were GTAV and Cyberpunk 2077.
That second one still stings. I played it longer than I should’ve probably because of the price, and I’ve not bothered with the DLC, even though people said it fixed the game. The price just left a bad taste in my mouth.
I’ve sunk probably a thousand hours into Slay the Spire, have beaten Hades, and just finished Cult of the Lamb. Looking for something else to scratch that itch- preferably on switch. Any suggestions?...
Beware though, it’s quite different to other roguelites in that the world it creates is suprisingly expansive. You can get lost in it, mentally. There are quests that can take you dozens of hours to complete, all on the same run, and even if you become so absurdly overpowered that nothing can threaten you directly, till you can fly inside the sun, you can still get turned into a sheep and die in a single hit.
Also the wand-building is complex, it’s like a programming language. People have built wands that can teleport you to parallel worlds, and the developers did not intend for that to be possible. And in a way I’ve never seen magic be done before, you can screw up and kill yourself with your wands, just like a discworld wizard. It’s so easy to do, it’s a rite of passage for any new player.
Some people don’t like spoilers on this game so here you go, but honestly getting just a little spoiled made me get properly into it to understand what the hell people were talking about.
Tap for spoilerI was maybe 8 or 9 hours into reaching the hardest boss in the game, up to NG+24 or so, just a couple of hours away from my destination. I was teleporting, had hundreds of thousands of hit points, had immunity to every kind of damage, could tear through the terrain like it wasn’t there, had weapons that would evaporate any enemy in the blink of an eye even as they became exponentially more powerful with each NG+ level, and I was being careful. I had even pacified the world so nobody would attack. Then some asshole dropped in from off-screen with a wand of transmogrification, got hit by the chainsaw on my tele wand and retaliated while something exploded nearby throwing fire over us, and I, now a sheep, flopped around impotently for a few seconds on fire then just fucking died.
I… stopped playing after that one, I’ll be honest. But I will return.
And rather than simply being repetitive, the way the world loops creates an ennui that’s kind of haunting to me. The whole game is littered with versions of people trying to achieve immortality, and if you manage to reach a point where you actually can’t die, you feel like you’ve soft-locked yourself, because dying is how you get to the end-screen. You can just end the run from the menu, but it feels fake somehow.
10/10 would try to kill god and confront my mortality again.
I mean, I don’t know how much they anticipated. There are a lot of projectile path modifications that are clearly meant for tinkering, but the idea that they knew their players would do this is hard to tease out. It’s a simulation game built very much on “Things are what they are,” and they know this has deep implications.
Like when I was turned into a sheep, I wasn’t “noita (sheep)”, I was just “sheep”. The noita I had been playing as was effectively stored in a state of nonexistence until the transmogrification wore off, then the sheep was replaced with the noita. So transforming yourself - or simply causing yourself to temporarily cease to exist - can be a way to eliminate side effects of certain things.
If there is one thing that it might be worth spoiling yourself on, if you’re struggling to finish a run, is in the next spoiler.
Tap for spoilerLearn to escape the Holy Mountain without collapsing it. Being able to return to edit wands, go back up in the world, and access health is a game-changer. Finishing the game without that trick is something I don’t think I’ve ever done. All the big lore stuff is discovered after finishing your first run anyway as far as I can tell.
Other than that, I would look up how to design good wands. This can be a good thing to learn by doing for a while, but there are deep interactions that you could soend a thousand runs not learning. I think the shared science is a big part of what makes this game great.
I said Noita is my favourite roguelite, but actually Heat Signature is probably tied with it. It has a completely different philosophy of soft failure.
If your character dies in space, they’re dead, but they can also be captured, then another character can rescue them. And if a mission is going sideways, you can huck a wrench through a window and fling yourself into space, as long as you’re confident you can pick yourself up with your space pod before you pass out.
It’s very fast-paced with quick runs. Each character that comes along has different traits, and you can have 4 different people on the go at once. Each character has their individual quest - which can be rescuing another character - and when that’s done you can retire them or keep them going.
It’s very open to how you want to play.
Oh! Also, if you’re trying to do your character’s big final mission and it goes wrong, usually you can bail and try again. I lost quite a few characters before I realised that.
You know why villagers cause so much lag if there’s too many and they’re allowed to roam free? Well, rather than optimise their pathfinding logic they just… recalculate their paths every goddamn frame. They also take shortcuts in calculating their paths to reduce this overhead, so their movement is derpy and frequently kills them.
You could make the path then record all the blocks they will interact with, and only recalculate if one of those blocks changes. Boom, millions of operations eliminated, and you’ve got some spare time to make sure the paths will actually work. You could also stagger pathfinding so if a bunch of villagers need a path all at once - like you just blocked a path to where they were all going - you could spread out that load, and prevent lag spikes.
But they don’t do that, so people end up sticking them in tiny boxes on top of carpets so they stop trying to pathfind. Just absurd stuff.
Any of you feel like we’ve become so fixated on graphics and perfomance to the point where the actual game part of a video game is often overlooked, or at least underemphasized? I don’t know about the rest of you, but all I come across on social media regarding gaming is about resolution, ray tracing, DLSS/FSR, frame rates,...
It’s by the same guy that made The Stanley Parable, but it’s more serious.
It’s the same themes from Stanley Parable except made into an actual story instead of one long recurring joke.
I’m not saying the long recurring joke is bad - someone will probably hate that I said that - but they’re just two different things that both do their different things very well. The Stanley Parable explicitly never builds to any kind of conclusion.
I’ll be straight with you - I never played Ricochet. I was just doing the joke from that one guy who asked Gabe about it that one time. But the fact you ported it to the Source engine is honestly really cool.
The combat may not have been the most interesting versus basic grunts, but it never got stale. I’ve never played another game where the core gameplay changed so much so frequently.
Physics interactions -> Basic FPS -> Fan Boat -> Mounted Gun -> Gravity Gun -> Zombies & Traps -> Car -> THE CRANE FIGHT -> Rockets & Gunships -> Ant Lions -> Ant Lion Minions -> Turrets -> Resistance Squads -> Striders -> Super Gravity Gun
Honestly the HL1 combat may have been somewhat more challengjng, but it was a grind. Fights were often just frustrating. I’ve abandonded playthroughs because I didn’t feel like spending another 10 hours beating my head against the endless amounts of enemies just to get to the end of… whatever I was doing I forgot.
HL1’s big innovation was never removing control from the player just to tell the story. Beyond that they also had some interesting AI behaviour and weapons. It was a game with old-school length and old-school difficulty.
HL2’s big innovation was the physics engine, and they played with it in so many ways, while polishing every other aspect of the design. They kept the gameplay tight and did something just long enough to explore it and then they moved on. They never forced you to hang out just repeating the same loop over and over to pad the length.
Had to downvote, but the game is great. I play it with my kids and it is reliably hilarious. There are so many interactions that something surprising happens with amazing regularity.
I think it might be more subtle than that, unions exist so that when negotiations happen they can fuck back, but we know Microsoft can strategise longer term than that. They pioneered “embrace, extend, extinguish”. Embracing a union then trying to infiltrate and turn it into a corporatised union is another version of that exact same play.
I suspect subcontracting is how they get around the lasseiz-faire nature of employment there. There’s a famously open policy where nobody tells anyone what to do.
But I imagine that policy can’t extend to subcontractors. There it’s “here’s money, make the servers happen”.
Are there any good casual/low-stress mobile games that aren’t filled with microtransactions? For example: easy puzzle games, match-3 games, low-difficulty adventure games, or clicker-style games....
A Dance of Fire and Ice is an incredible rhythm game that you buy once and that’s it. I think there’s an expansion pack but it’s a single purchase. Whether that’s your idea of “casual” really depends on what you like. You can always play chill low difficulty levels when you need to zone out, and high difficulty levels when you want a challenge. It can get stupidly hard.
You can try a demo online at that link. It told me webgl wasn’t supported on mobile, but it worked pretty well for me just now on firefox, even if it was a bit laggy. It should work fine on PC.
I pirated it on PC after my kids told me about it and ended up buying it three times on Steam and twice on mobile. It’s just that good. I’ve built a custom digital drum to play it and I’m now making a custom MIDI controller, so we’ll see if that does better when connected to the game.
The game works as well on mobile, if not better because the touchscreen is so responsive.
There is a “puzzle” in Riven that I got stuck on for hours, just searching the map looking for anything that I had left to do. I couldn’t find any more interactable things that hadn’t been done. Then I looked it up and found it was a door that you had to enter then turn around and close to find the hidden passageway behind it. There was no puzzling value to it being hidden like that, it was something you either simply found or didn’t. I put it down to old-style game design that hadn’t yet learned what not to do in a somewhat open world game.
Honestly this iteration could move the entrance like one metre to the left so it’s not hidden and it would be a better game for it.
The only similar experience I had with Myst was the rail maze. I didn’t notice the audio cue at all so I just mapped out the whole thing on paper by following the left hand wall. I say that because when I was done, I tried following the right hand wall out of curiosity and it was the shortest possible path. It was like a cruel joke on people who say that you can find your way through a maze by following the left hand wall, just because the “left” wall was the way people phrased that concept.
I finished the whole series and it was better designed later on. None of the other games had such notorious sticking points.
I have played through that and I don’t remember that part, did they make it easier to find or something? I’d be shocked if they left it the same, it really sucked.
Actually the 3d thing makes a lot of sense. I had a walk around the new Myst game recently and everything’s location was so much clearer when you weren’t navigating it through static screens.
Did you ever finish it? If not the conclusion of the game was pretty satisfying, and nothing is spoiled by being told about the door thing. It’s actually more memorable for me than the following ones, maybe because I spent so long wandering around in despair. I actually tried replaying it a little while ago but just bounced off the extremely clunky 90s design and the technical limitations. I think this remake will be a good chance to try again, and see the environments rendered nicely.
Yeah, 3 and 4 were where they hit on a really good balance between the pre-rendered graphics and a smooth experience with the skybox-style wraparound images. In V they went to full 3D rendering which was clunky because the computers of the time just weren’t up to it. I think now we’re finally seeing how good these games can look and work in 3D.
Yup, if you’ve played Obduction it’s like that. Full 3d environments made with modern rendering. I tried the latest Myst remake and this one feels like a modern game, although I imagine most of the early 90s design foibles are still there.
I haven’t played many of the other remakes of the original, there have probably been too many, but it’s nice to see the later games getting this treatment.
This is going to be important for maintaining the legacy of old video games.
Like, emulators are fine, but access to recompilation makes it much easier to keep things in a generally useful format.
Honestly one of the reasons I don’t play emulated games much is that the extra step of configuring and running the emulator is a hassle, and sometimes it straight up doesn’t work.
Edit: Anyone who thinks access to the source code is somehow worse than the original executable code, just ask yourself, what is the legacy of say, Doom, for which we have access to the source, versus literally any other closed source game of that era that requires DOSBox to be run? Doom is a meme that “runs on anything” and has a thriving modding community, and it’s hard to think of examples of DOSBox games because you never think about them. Source code is important.
Right, but it’s not just pushing a button to get the recompiled code, there’s still translation work to be done. Crucially, a framerate will need to be chosen, so you can just choose to base the framerate on the processing done.
Sure, the ROM is “original” but I’d argue that accessing the source code - or an analogue to it - is a more fundamental way of archiving the original, since without that source code we don’t have access to how it was originally made.
The point is not that it competes with ROMs or replaces them, but it adds to them and makes the archive that much more complete.
Also for games where emulation doesn’t work or isn’t practical, recompilation can allow us to maintain games that otherwise couldn’t be.
The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of cost-saving machinery, and often destroyed the machines in clandestine raids. They protested against manufacturers who used machines in “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to replace the skilled labour of workers and drive down wages by producing inferior goods.
You are conflating technology and its benefits with the owning class’s misuse of that technology. Capitalist apologists love to do this because otherwise the crimes of capitalism would have to stand on their own and there would be no defending them.
It’s exactly this conflation that lets people claim that the luddites were entirely anti-technology, but they weren’t. Again this is a lie that has been spread by capitalists to defend their own image.
The luddites were killed and suppressed by the military and the government made industrial sabotage a capital offense, and then slandered them. Maybe if they’d won we’d live in a world where reporters weren’t murdered over the Panama papers for instance.
E: You can scroll down to the dividing line if you want to read the history and not my condescending screed about your ignorance. I suspect you won’t read much of this so I’m putting this note here at the top to let you know that if you don’t read the whole comment then you’ll probably sound like a fool in your reply. I mean that’s already true but like… even moreso. If you don’t like the way I’m talking to you, you can refer yourself to the way you just talked to me.
Okay, so I think you’ve fucked up here. I think that because you seem to think I’m asking you for a demonstration, ie, for sources. But if you actually read my comment carefully you would know that I asked you for a claim. This was me politely asking you to simply say what you mean instead of hiding behind insinuations and vague hand-waving.
And the reason this is a fuck-up is because anyone who actually knew how to understand and source literature on a topic like this would have immediately known the distinction between making a claim, and demonstrating a claim. I have made quite clear claims but not yet demonstrated them. You have not made a single claim that could even be demonstrated, you have just assumed that everybody already agrees with your version to the point that it does not even need to be stated.
I also know it’s a fuck-up because I have heard this fact as a rebuttal of a common misconception several times from a number of trustworthy sources, and before I repeated it I quickly checked to make sure I had it right, and it does appear to be the consensus of historians; I found no evidence of a credible debate on this; nobody is replying to some other side on this; it is uncontroversial.
I said the same thing four different ways there because you do seem to have some trouble following what is being said.
I am now going to go beyond what I originally asked you for and give you some real information, and then after that, if you still feel like it would be a good idea, you can reply. I suspect you won’t want to though, because if you had the information to hand you wouldn’t have protested so hard against me asking for even the most basic stating of your position. You also might have read something and learned that you were wrong, but let’s not expect the moon. I suspect you went so hard because you realised you had nothing and you hoped I would be cowed by your obvious confidence, but I wasn’t. I was in fact somewhat invigorated by it.
The label now has many meanings, but when the group protested 200 years ago, technology wasn’t really the enemy
The word “Luddite,” handed down from a British industrial protest that began 200 years ago this month, turns up in our daily language in ways that suggest we’re confused not just about technology, but also about who the original Luddites were and what being a modern one actually means.
Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them. In truth, the secret of their enduring reputation depends less on what they did than on the name under which they did it. You could say they were good at branding.
As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
Also because I can see your fingers racing to the keyboard about this: the first article on wikipedia is not the only thing I have read on this, I am simply using it because it is a good overview and starting point, and because it clearly shows just how easy it would have been for you to learn literally a single thing about this topic, but you chose virulent ignorance instead. I have in fact gone beyond wikipedia by giving you an actual source, and you aren’t even there yet. By failing to even state your position, you have refused to enter the arena of discussing facts.
Now, I did mention the Panama papers, and that was a nod to the way that the rich employ violence against their detractors, and perhaps that was a stretch, but I could make the argument to someone interested. I doubt you are.
The problems the Luddites were protesting are more closely related to the modern problem of Fast Fashion, in which vast quantities of extremely poor quality transient clothing is produced and destroyed every single year. It is an economic, ecological and social disaster that ironically employs many many people in the most brutal shop conditions. The “cheap” clothing you championed as the cause of the “flourishing” is exactly the problem that the Luddites feared, and it has not been good for the planet or for people. The horrendous work conditions of the industrial revolution also led to clothing factories where children were employed to crawl under operating machines and were frequently minced by them. This is the kind of barbaric treatment of human beings that the Luddites were against and that the ruling class had them killed to maintain. This sort of thing still happens today, but in far away countries with poor populations that you don’t see. Capitalism hasn’t resulted in plenty, it has resulted in abject poverty for the vast majority of the world’s population so that a small minority can live in luxurious comfort. I assume you don’t think that’s real capitalism or something, but you’d be wrong about that too.
The term Luddite did not come to have its modern meaning until the 1950’s, at which point anyone who had ever known a Luddite was long dead and they were not able to protest the slander, but popular perception is often given by the ruling class, so we get people like you who apparently go off the vibes of the word you’re familiar with and confuse that for actual knowledge.
We haven’t done nothing. There’s Rojava and the EZLN building whole competing systems. There’s loads of people doing mutual aid or building cooperative economic structures all over the world, and those movements are gaining a lot of traction as people are waking up to how shit things are.
You don’t usually hear about all these projects, in the same way you may not notice termites hollowing out a structure until it’s far too late to save it.
I have an urge to buy some of them on steam before they get delisted but don’t want to give any money to wb in the process. The way that apparently devs could just leave or sell/give away the game on other platforms made me think maybe wb doesn’t get a cut of every sale. Does anyone know that for certain?
If their priority is to make a nintendo emulator, they have to think about keeping their lines of communication secure against corporate legal threats, because those lines of communication are basically what software development is.
A bunch of beta QOL improvements are finally on the main branch.
late game spoilersThe last time I played I died trying to get to 64 orb Kolmi. I was at NG+24 or so and some asshole did an RKO from outta nowhere with a circle of transmutation. I had all the more love stacks, but I had a chainsaw on my teleporter wand for rapid fire, and this bastard dropped down from off screen and into the chainsaw, then retaliated against their own stupidity by turning me into a sheep, where I danced about for several agonising seconds on fire before I finally bought it. That was over a year ago. I have since decided that on long runs I need something other than chainsaw to make a rapid fire tele wand.
It’s taken me a while to want to play again, and I really wanted to wait for these improvements before I did.
Edit: I have been trying to make these spoiler tags work and it ain’t happening, folks.
Anyone else suddenly itching to blast Nazis in Wolfenstein for no reason at all?
Something about those awkward hand gestures really gets me going.
GTA VI Might Inspire Other AAA Developers to Price Their Games at $100 (80.lv)
Any Roguelike/Roguelite suggestions?
I’ve sunk probably a thousand hours into Slay the Spire, have beaten Hades, and just finished Cult of the Lamb. Looking for something else to scratch that itch- preferably on switch. Any suggestions?...
What's the greatest joy you have gotten from a video game?
Notch says he will work on a spiritual successor to Minecraft (x.com)
Valve is fixin' to start some arguments over the holidays because 'All adult members in a Steam Family' can see your Steam Replay page (www.pcgamer.com)
What happened to gaming?
Any of you feel like we’ve become so fixated on graphics and perfomance to the point where the actual game part of a video game is often overlooked, or at least underemphasized? I don’t know about the rest of you, but all I come across on social media regarding gaming is about resolution, ray tracing, DLSS/FSR, frame rates,...
What are your favorite "gotta go in blind" games?
Which games blow your mind, but only if you know nothing about them in advance?...
Half-Life 2 peaks at 52,000 concurrent players, 20 years after its release (steamdb.info)
λ ☣ ☢️ (λ)²
'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers' (www.pcgamer.com)
Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary by Valve
Recommendation engine: Downvote any game you've heard of before
This might be a slightly unusual attempt at a prompt, but might draw some appealing unusual options....
Shadows of Doubt, the procgen private-eye immersive sim, is leaving early access next month (www.pcgamer.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/18591054
Bethesda Game Studios developers form 'wall to wall' union that includes artists, designers, and programmers (www.pcgamer.com)
Steam Is Run By Fewer Than 80 Staff, Lawsuit Docs Reveal (insider-gaming.com)
Are there any good casual/low-stress mobile games that aren't filled with microtransactions?
Are there any good casual/low-stress mobile games that aren’t filled with microtransactions? For example: easy puzzle games, match-3 games, low-difficulty adventure games, or clicker-style games....
Riven | Official Launch Trailer | Available June 25th (www.youtube.com)
Trackmania 20th Anniversary: Desert Update Trailer (www.youtube.com)
How to port any N64 game to the PC in record time (arstechnica.com)
Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves' (www.pcgamer.com)
"PSN isn't supported in my country. What do I do?" Arrowhead CEO: "I don't know" (lemmy.world)
Does wb get any money from sales of adult swim published games on steam?
I have an urge to buy some of them on steam before they get delisted but don’t want to give any money to wb in the process. The way that apparently devs could just leave or sell/give away the game on other platforms made me think maybe wb doesn’t get a cut of every sale. Does anyone know that for certain?
Discord Shuts Down Servers for Switch Emulators Suyu & Sudachi; Disables Lead Developers Account As Well (www.theverge.com)
Discord👏Is👏Not👏A👏Replacement👏For👏 Websites
Noita - Noita Epilogue 2 Update (store.steampowered.com)