Glide

Glide, 7 dni temu

Bugsnax. Substantially better game than I anticipated.

Glide, 7 dni temu

Adding to this one. Incredible game.

Glide, 11 dni temu

God, Mouthwashing was a masterpiece.

I also really, really enjoyed Arctic Eggs, but it’s so absurd that I can barely recommend it to people.

I appreciate Critical Reflex in ways I hadn’t quite put together until reading this article.

Glide, 14 dni temu

Compared to World and Rise? It’s just not very good. It’s by far the fewest hours I’ve put into a Monster Hunter game since… Well, literally ever.

Glide, 13 dni temu

I’m famously a World hater, so yes, absolutely. Until Icebourne released, I was extremely disappointed with World, even for a pre-G Rank release.

Though, all of the titles since Generations have had the problem of being released with a portion of the planned content missing. I was more forgiving of it before, though I am having a hard time pinpointing why.

Glide, 22 dni temu

I still have the CD in a box somewhere. It was loaned to me by a friend and I never gave it back. Hilariously, I still see that friend, so that might make for a fun conversation.

Glide, 25 dni temu

Friends and I downloaded it, prompted by this post. There’s a little bit of awkwardness and animation jank, but man, does the game get the core concept right.

Space is not flat, the ship feels like a near arcane contraption, rail guns should feel like they’ll punch a hole in a small planet, and grappling hooks always feel good. These guys know what I’m looking for. The only thing I could genuinely ask for is a more true to physics flight model, but ultimately, I’ll be too busy taking down fighters using a rocket launcher while gravity-booted to the nose of my ship to care too much.

Glide, 25 dni temu

I do want to state that the flight model has NOTHING on Elite. But otherwise, it is in a lot of ways a game which I wish Elite was a lot closer to.

Glide, miesiąc temu (edited miesiąc temu)

I hate that you get downvoted for pointing out the reality of the situation.

Relative to the price of everything else, $80 for a AAA videogame is actually reasonable. The problem is that rent has gone up drastically, food has gone up drastically, and our wages have stagnated. Getting pissed off at Gearbox for charging $80 for Borderlands 4, and then paying $15 for a burger and fries without an equal reaction just doesn’t seem sensible to me.

Everything is awful, and videogame devs aren’t the ones stealing all our buying power.

Glide, miesiąc temu

What in the late-stage capitalist brainrot.

It’s “simple economics” to attack people trying to make art and entertainment for having the gall to ever consider increasing their prices, knowing full well that the cost of living has increased drastically? You’re going with “that’s just the market telling them they’re charging too much” while ignoring the reality that rent has doubled - and in some cases tripled - food costs have gone up 50%, and wages have barely improved? It’s the fault of video game developers that you have relatively less money and cannot afford to purchase their product around the other products you need or are expected to purchase?

If your wage increased with the cost of living, you would not see this price as “too high.” But because some price increases are on necessary purchases, we attack the unnessecary ones, like good little capitalists. Adam Smith would be proud.

Glide, 2 miesiące temu

I’d hardly call $50 games “budget titles.” Is paying $30 for a meal at a steakhouse a budget meal just because that high-class $50 a plate reservation-only place exists?

I agree that price doesn’t equal quality, but I don’t feel so good about trying to normalize AAA $50 games as “budget titles.” And the link to the article is broken, so I am not sure what the greater context and points of the article are.

Glide, 2 miesiące temu

My partner and I make a point to occasionally play through a couch co-op game as well. Here are some of the things we enjoyed.

Phogs - Currently playing this. It’s a cute, dog-themed puzzle game thing, where you play as two heads of a single long dog-thing. We’re enjoying it, but we’re not particularly deep in, and I do wonder if it’ll get Ibb and Obb samey, but it’s worth checking out imo.

Cassette Beasts - Couch co-op, Pokemon inspired, adventure RPG with great storytelling, fantastic music and a retro aesthetic. The world is very Zelda-like in exploration and puzzle solving, while combat is Pokemon double battles. Highly recommended, just be aware that one player gets to be the player-made protagonist, while the other is one of an interchangeable series of partner characters.

Sea of Stars - The co-op update did a lot of good for this game. A Chrono Trigger inspired, faux-SNES era, indie RPG. There’s a lot of unvoiced dialogue, which I could see as being a barrier to enjoyment as a multiplayer game, but the game is paced quite well, so I don’t think it’s a huge problem. Also, players do take turns inputting commands, but everyone is responsible for the timed hits/blocks, and you each control a character of equal agency in the overworld, so it avoids the largest co-op turn based RPG folly of having one player and one half-watching “follower.” There are a ton of accessibility options/features (difficulty is VERY malleable), and as an added bonus, there’s a free story DLC coming on the 20th.

Children of Morta - This is perhaps the most “hardcore” of my list, but the girlfriend, despite explicitly not enjoying “hard” games, really really enjoyed this one. An action-RPG with some very light roguelike elements, Children of Morta has you play as a family of hunter-gatherer-warrior types in a fantasy world, working together to stop a malevolent power from corrupting the physical world. Each family member has a different playstyle, their own skill tree, and a lot of personality. The game is very story driven, with a few moments being taken between each run for the fantastic narration to drip feed the narrative, slowly teaching you more about the world, the characters, and their family dynamic.

These are the ones that came to the top of my mind, either because they were particularly good or, in the case of Phogs, is ongoing. If I see anything else worth mentioning when I look at my Steam list next, I’ll add.

Glide, 2 miesiące temu

That’s an interesting take. I found them to be very different people. Two different flavours of cliche’d anime protagonist, sure, but very different people none the less.

Glide, 2 miesiące temu

God fucking dammit.

Glide, 2 miesiące temu

This thread is actually huge, so apologies if this has already been recommended, but take a look at Against the Storm. It’s an indie city-builder with a bit of a rogue-like spin. You can usually get it on fairly deep sales, and the rogue-like elements combined with some meta-progression gives it a real play length, even though a single city-building session is a ~45-60 minute experience.

Glide, 2 miesiące temu

Mhmm. Everyone is shitting on Nintendo, but the reality is their games are literally keeping up with inflation. The problem is that our wages haven’t kept up with inflation, and the cost of living has, at least, kept up. In some cases (rent), it’s grown faster than the inflation of everything else.

Don’t get me wrong, Nintendo is tone deaf for making this decision now, and I suspect they’d still make billions with a $15 price increase rather than a $30 one. I’m not defending them. But the picture is a lot larger than them.

Glide, 2 miesiące temu

There’s no “sanity” system in Look Outside. The closest thing is a hidden “stress” stat which, last I checked, is literally just combat problems when it gets low.

That said, Look Outside is a fantastic game, and the Dev is super down to earth and active with his players. Highly recommend.

Glide, 2 miesiące temu

It can be both.

Glide, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

Genuinely couldn’t stand how on-rails it is. Why advertise this wide open world and then constantly restrict and limit my options to interact with it?

There’s lots of positive things to say about it. The combat is, yes, perhaps more satisfying than ever. They really nailed the Monster/weapons/armor designs this time around. I feel like there’s value in gathering again, something that recent titles have lost.

But it’s all stained by the low-rank experience. Spending 10-12 hours behing hand-held through a series of walk and talks where I am constantly prompted to stare at the beautiful landscape piece, or the way small monsters interact, as though the game is afraid I’ll miss it if I am left to my own devices, was both boring and insulting. There was a lot of decisions made to put cinematography ahead of gameplay experience here, and these decisions have genuinely made Wilds my least favorite release Monster Hunter title to date.

Glide, 3 miesiące temu

Oh I don’t have any performance issues. My 3070ti has no issue holding 120 fps (with frame Gen on, mind you). Game plays perfectly.

And I’d be more forgiving of the “15 hour long free game,” but it ate a part of the game I enjoy, made playing that part of the game with friends challenging to the point of feeling not worth it, and it’s required before I am allowed to enjoy the game I actually paid for. Those 15 hours - well, 12 for me - were more valuable to me than the price I paid for the game. 15 hours of work is well into the several hundreds of dollars space. But I already paid over $100 CAD once taxes were in. Why do I also have to give it my time?

Again, great game, but worst on-boot Monster Hunter to date. And that’s saying something, considering World doesn’t let you hold a weapon for the first hour.

Glide, 3 miesiące temu

I’m a teacher, and as soon as students figure out I play games, they inevitably ask me this question, but I largely think it’s an unfair question to ask someone who games as a genuine hobby rather than just a kill time.

I like to tell them that’s a really impossible question to answer and instead offer them my favorite franchise of games: Monster Hunter. I feel like I can more reliably say that I am a massive fan of the franchise, with it reliably being my favorite videogame franchise, without that seeming weirdly inaccurate considering the wide variety of genres and sub-genres that make up video game interests.

To say that Monster Hunter Rise is my favorite game would be a massive disservice to the captivating, genre-breaking storytelling power of Hades, my deeply rooted love of the flight mechanics in Elite Dangerous, my history as a brief world record holder for a Mario title, the thousands of hours of Team Fortress 2 I’ve shared with friends, or my experiences grinding World of Warcraft arenas to the top 0.5% of players. And I’ve somehow listed 5 formative titles from the top of my head without even representing my deep passion for rhythm games, with Hi-Fi Rush being a genuine contender for that “favorite game” slot that I am arguing doesn’t exist. So I don’t answer with any of these games, because not only would my answer be fundamentally untrue, but it’s not really the question my student means to ask, either. They want to know what I am into, and giving them a standout franchise that automatically gets my money when a title is released gives them a much better answer than any one title could ever do.

Glide, 3 miesiące temu

Based list. Outer Wilds in particular chef’s kiss.

Glide, 4 miesiące temu

If someone already owns Tunic and is considering this, I would say to just directly donate the money.

Or just like… Donate through the bundle and consider trying out some minor projects created by people who are trying to make something cool? Why turn down access to these games out of some form of perceived superiority? This notion that since you’ve never heard of these other titles they can’t possible offer anything of value to you is kind of a spit in the face of struggling artists of all types.

Glide, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

The experiences people are reporting with this game are so strange to me.

I loaded the game today during a 1hr break at work on my Legion Go. It took ~10 minutes to do the shader compilation, I opted to turn frame generation on, and the game defaulted the settings to high, which felt awful. After turning the settings to low, turning the upscaling quality from “Max Performance” to just “Performance,” adjusting the sharpness up from 0.5 to 0.6, and then disabling other features I don’t care about (cloud textures? I barely look up) or outright hate (why games continue to push aggressive motion blurring is beyond me - it looks horrible), I started playing.

I experienced a stutter whenever I step into a new space, or load a new cutscene, but it smoothed out in a fraction of a second. While the graphics don’t look the best, the game plays smooth. I did the opening sequence with no stutters, got to the not-tetsucabra fight, and maintained 45+ fps throughout the entire fight, with no stutters or issues. At points, the monster ran into a cave, which aided my hand-held PC and kept the game running at a smooth 60fps for those sections. This is directly in-line with my experiences running the benchmark on Legion Go, which averaged ~45 fps on nearly identical settings.

I haven’t yet run the benchmark or played the released game on my home PC, sporting a Ryzen 7 5800 and a 3070 ti, but the demo, which was less optimized and frame generation did not work during, played “fine.” I was unimpressed with the performance relative to the graphical fidelity in that play (though I am of the opinion that the more gritty, realistic aesthetic is ugly relative to the vibrant worlds of Generations, or Rise and unapologetically think they look better than even World).I can’t say I had problems or felt that performance or visual quality would impede my enjoyment of the game.

This article notes specific stuttering and runs the frame health tests to demonstrate it. I suspect they’re onto something that I am not experiencing for some reason or another. That said, I ultimately think the 4k, 144+ fps gamers running expensive GPUs are offended that they can’t play this one on the highest settings, and are review bombing the hell out of this title. I’m not sure what the deal with all the “ThAt’S nOt HoW fRaMe GeNeRaTiOn WoRkS!” screaming relevant to low end systems is about, as I am experiencing notable improvements through it.

I encourage people to test on their own hardware, rather than taking reviews at face value, as I’ve begun to believe that whatever issue is occurring is deeper than “Capcom didn’t optimize!” Use the benchmark, and take advantage of Steam’s refund policy.

Glide, 4 miesiące temu

Please reread. I had to make the game look mediocre (low, not lowest) to have an enjoyable experience on a $750 hand-held PC.

I was getting 60-80 fps on high settings in the beta on my 3070ti, when frame generation was broken. I have not tested on my home PC yet.

Glide, 4 miesiące temu

Hi-Rez is the king of creating a new game, pretending it’s their “big thing” and then enshittifying it while their good devs are moved to the next “big thing.” They are fad chasers who are constantly in a race to monetize a market and then move on.

I’m glad it caught up with them. Couldn’t have happened to a better company. Apologies to the earnest designers and programmers that got caught in the crossfire.

Glide, 4 miesiące temu

This is what a company looks like when it’s not funded by venture capitalists that insist the line always go up exponentially.

Good on Steam for taking the time an energy to create a feature that is strictly pro-consumer.

Glide, 5 miesięcy temu

Good. Now do the same to the major triple A studios attaching loot boxes to every sports game and battle royale. Why the fuck start with Mihoyo?

Glide, 5 miesięcy temu

Kinda hype. Had my eye on this one for a while. I’m a little cautious what “early access” means in this regard, though. I’ve had altogether too many rogue-likes release into early access without enough content to justify it.

Glide, 6 miesięcy temu

It’s been Jackbox every year for the past 8+ years. A side-effect of hosting the New Years Eve party for a bunch of gamers.

Glide, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

Problem is, I own most of the games on the Steam front page, so finding new and interesting games is getting difficult.

This. I feel totally underwhelmed by the sale this year because everything on the front page I already either own or have no interest in. I know the discovery queue exists, but it primarily tries to feed me the same jank I already know exists.

Glide, 6 miesięcy temu

While it would have been nice for OP to mention this, honestly dude, fuck off. People can decide for themselves if they want to install Epic for a free title without this kind of toxic, elitist discourse.

Glide, 6 miesięcy temu

Ah yes, an excellent rebuttal, more elitism.

Glide, 6 miesięcy temu

No. They’re whining about Witcher 4 using Ciri as a protagonist because they think she was made ugly.

Attractive women designed solely to be the object of male affection are allowed to be protagonists. When a woman stands on their own as a unique complex individual, they take issue.

Glide, 6 miesięcy temu

I think it has less to do with gender politics and more to do with delivery, though.

The writing was just better. They make Joel to be a complicated, sympathetic character, and create a situation in which, even as Joel/the player murders relative innocents, you know he is doing a bad thing from a complicated and genuine love. Then, they take that character and reduce all his love to “he did a bad” and shoot him, make you chase his killer for half a game, and try to make you sympathize with his killer after the fact? And it’s all tied together through this tired, “cycle of violence” trope that another major post-apolcolyptic zombie survival media has already bastardized and beaten to death.

The “fans” who defend Joel as the hero are insane, on that point I can’t agree more. But I think the dislike of Abby and the love of Joel is deeper than “guy good, girl bad.” I’ve seen far fewer complaints (though not zero complaints) about playing the notably more “woke” surrogate lesbian daughter than about playing as Abby.

As an aside, I’ve been thinking recently about how the game would feel if you spend the first half of the game as Abby, chasing her father’s killer, only to have the rug pull later that the killer is Joel. Then, you spend the second half playing as Ellie, dealing with the consequences, while the player is trying to reconcile what just happened. Though it prob would have been harder to sell a game that doesn’t open with Eillie and Joel.

Glide, 6 miesięcy temu

And originally created by a university design team with a female design lead, at that.

Even as Portal 2 adds male characters, one is greedy and responsible for all the conflict in the franchise, acting as something of a caricature for masculine stereotypes, and the other’s only defining trait is that he’s an easily corrupted idiot.

Portal is perhaps the best example of, and should be held up as the golden standard of, feminism in gaming.

Glide, 6 miesięcy temu

One winner and five nominee’s. Let’s not downplay being in the top 6 nominations for “best game of the year” as “losing.” It’s an incredible achievement no matter how you look at it.

Glide, 6 miesięcy temu

Man, calling this a snub is a misnomer to begin with.

Glide, 6 miesięcy temu

Why is it so hard just to say “this was not out intention, we recognize it was bad, and we are sorry.”

There’s a lot of words here for a non-apology.

Glide, 7 miesięcy temu

On the other hand… this feels like I would be calling it out as manipulative FOMO bullshit were it any other company.

While I hesitate to type this as it might be perceived as viewing a corporation as a friend, the intent matters, and GOG has a different history than the majority of FOMO abusing game companies. Did they identify that this is probably an opportunity to push some sales? Sure, probably. But I am chill permitting them that right when they’re visibly working to remove FOMO as a commercial strategy.

Glide, 7 miesięcy temu

Undertale is such a bolt of lightning. It both depends on its player having experience with traditional JRPG and having no fucking clue what it is. But when the conditions line up, as it did for many people at release, it was such a master fully crafted experience. But even the slightest amount of “it’s good because…” really siphons part of the experience away.

Glide, 7 miesięcy temu

The game can collect data, if that’s what they’re after.

My theory is that it’s all about advertising. It’s another point of contact with the consumer, and another opportunity to make sure every new release is presented to every potential buyer.

Glide, 7 miesięcy temu

We need a term for a Freudian slip caused by mobile autocorrect. Because “wallet garden” is extremely accurate, even if it’s not the intended word choice.

Glide, 7 miesięcy temu

I can’t help but read this headline as, “with climate change and the rise of fascism, the real world is ending, but how is this for a distraction: why can’t RPGs get the sense of urgency right?”

And like, this is genuinely an article and discussion I’m interested in, so this is not a criticism of anyone or anything other than the ambiguity of language.

Glide, 7 miesięcy temu

I think I disagree about the severity and urgency of some of the things you’re talking about, but I do agree with your sentiment. I restate: the only thing I am criticizing here is the ambiguity of language. It’s the “side quests” that give life flavour, and to give them up to deal with the “real problems” would be choosing to stop living because you’re too worried about surviving.

But still, strange headline choice.

Glide, 7 miesięcy temu

I don’t see how that statement refutes the problem being something to do with kernal level access. It’s entirely possible that the 24H2 update changed something that is playing poorly with the DRM in these titles.

Glide, 7 miesięcy temu

While I don’t approve of Epic’s stabs at exclusivity, Steam needs a competitor to keep it in check, and one that is making some efforts to support the preservation of art is a welcome choice.

Glide, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

My experience with GOG is that it is a fringe option, at least in the combined North American (USA+Canada) culture. Plus, the unfortunate reality is that in many cases GOG’s principles preclude it from being a genuine competitor to Steam. Insisting on being DRM free means half of released games never go to the platform, so it will always be the secondary “better if” option.

I worry about Steam’s functional monopoly on PC game access. It hasn’t been an issue so far, because it has remembered that it is, first and foremost, a service, providing consumer protection through a generous refund policy and supporting devs with easy access to simple matchmaking and anti-cheat systems. But without a healthy competitor, it would be easy for Steam to start milking it’s users and developers alike.