LoamImprovement

LoamImprovement, 16 dni temu

I actually really like the SNES game, it is objectively not great though. You can’t even save, so emulation is a must unless you can dedicate an 8-10 hour sitting to it.

Particularly that it switches between top-down outdoors and a pseudo-FPS indoors, and the claustrophobic interiors and darker music give it a lot of charm.

LoamImprovement, miesiąc temu

Fucking ghoulish.

LoamImprovement, miesiąc temu

It was slim, but I had hoped that we might get an Arx Fatalis 2 what with the Fatal Fortress easter egg. No more, I guess.

LoamImprovement, miesiąc temu

And they’re probably carving themselves a nice bonus out of the tax write-off for the studio closure.

LoamImprovement, miesiąc temu

I mean, let’s not forget that the early consoles had their own pitfalls, a period of gaming that spawned tropes like ‘Nintendo Hard’ and ‘Guide Dang It’ in order to, among other things, pad out the length of what we would consider an otherwise barebones game, and to sell time on their hints and tips hotline. I do feel like there was less bullshit in the past, but it definitely still existed.

LoamImprovement, miesiąc temu

I preferred the switch lite with a protective case that gave the grips a little more body, made it way more comfortable to hold. At least until I picked up a Steam Deck, which ended up being pretty much everything I wanted out of portable gaming, and waaaay easier to emulate on.

LoamImprovement, 2 miesiące temu

I wonder what happens when the last whale has been milked dry. With the number of shitty cash grab games out there with heinous monetization, surely the ecosystem reaches a tipping point where there literally just isn’t enough money to go around, both because the whales themselves run out and the remaining number gets spread too thin among too many Clash of Clans, FIFAs and Diablo Immortals. Do you think we’re going to start seeing real effort in those spaces to appeal to players again, or do they just implode because nobody wants to serve a declining market?

LoamImprovement, 2 miesiące temu

You’re only allowed to have fun if we can monetize it

LoamImprovement, 2 miesiące temu

Redfall also flopped last year

Feels like an understatement - this was the game that killed Arkane, because a majority of the team decided they’d rather fuck off than work on whale chasing live-service nonsense. And like, good on them, but it means no more Dishonored, no sequels to Prey, no chance of Arx Fatalis II, and it fucking sucks to see enshittification strangling good talent. I hope they’ll find success outside of MS’ looming shadow.

LoamImprovement, 3 miesiące temu

I don’t know if I could call it good, exactly, but one unique concept that I haven’t really seen captured anywhere else was the Dungeon Maker series on PSP, that allowed you to build dungeons that you would then explore/fight/loot, to give yourself funds to build out further/deeper, ad infinitum. It was clunky, controlled pretty stiffly and basic as ARPGs go, and after a certain point you kind of went on autopilot, but there’s a certain je ne sais quoi to it that I really quite enjoyed, especially if you planned out your builds. I think a similar title was released on the DS but it was turn-based and not particularly well-executed.

LoamImprovement, 3 miesiące temu

Seconding the Dark Clouds, god I wish that series had continued.

LoamImprovement, 3 miesiące temu

Volatile

Read: We don’t want to put the time and resources into making quality games when we can prey on whales in shitty Skinner box mobile apps.

LoamImprovement, 3 miesiące temu

I got a Serta Lautner executive chair as a gift, normally runs about $300 off sale. It has adjustable air-bladder lumbar support and is so soft I’ve taken naps in it.

I recently accidentally sheared a bolt holding one of the arms on because I failed to check it every 6 months, I called the support group and the lady on the other end was kind enough to waive the cost of the replacement kit and shipping. Cannot recommend enough.

LoamImprovement, 4 miesiące temu

Nothing of value was lost. Any content worth having couldn’t have existed without Kurvitz’ writing.

LoamImprovement, 4 miesiące temu

I don’t think they would want to deal with this shit again, and I wouldn’t blame them. I’m just going to be content with the fact we got one good game.

LoamImprovement, 4 miesiące temu

Crow Country looks and feels really good. It’s by the same folks that did a whole bunch of flash games back in the day, notably Detective Grimoire, which is getting iterations today.

LoamImprovement, 5 miesięcy temu

The Looker

🤔

LoamImprovement, 4 miesiące temu

Oh I know, I’ve played it, I like it, but I’m a chronic shitpost enjoyer. I suppose you can’t beat the price, but I think I’d hesitate to call it a puzzle game, exactly?

LoamImprovement, 5 miesięcy temu

Admittedly, I’m guilty of buying EA because there have been dry periods in the GameDev pipeline and I was desperate for something new, but I’m okay with it for smaller devs that don’t have the budget for the kind of QA that bigger devs do. That said, the fact that some of these games have been in EA for over a decade (putting aside whether or not they’re effectively a functional product at this point) is a pretty egregious abuse of the community goodwill, and bigger developers shouldn’t be using it at all because it’s encouraging the trend of pushing out buggy messes with 60GB day-1 patches that still don’t make a game playable.

LoamImprovement, 5 miesięcy temu

There’s also the AA scene to consider. Nacon did a fantastic job with the RoboCop game - it doesn’t break any new ground, but it’s a simple, solid game that captures the tone of the RoboCop franchise well.

LoamImprovement, 5 miesięcy temu

Doesn’t it literally use stolen pokemon assets?

LoamImprovement, 5 miesięcy temu

There are artists who disagree. They’re saying the proportions are identical to models used in Pokemon Violet/Scarlet.

videogameschronicle.com/…/palworld-pokemon-plagia…

LoamImprovement, 5 miesięcy temu

I mean, the problematic part here is that they take the model in the first place, or at least that all signs point to that being the case. Sure, you can coldsteel the hell out of an existing character, but if you’re using an asset you didn’t develop and didn’t license to make a product that you then sell for money, no matter how different the end result looks from the original, that is absolutely infringement. It’s infringement that might have gone unnoticed had the models been more sufficiently edited, but at the end of the day it’s the theft of someone else’s labor.

I don’t know if that’s what happened here, but when the industry professionals say it’s hard to get model proportions that close even moving the same asset into a different engine, and the whole roster is uncannily similar? If it looks like a duck…

LoamImprovement, 5 miesięcy temu

Imagine a company telling you that you should get used to not owning the things you buy when arguably the most popular game in their most popular franchise is about being a literal fucking pirate.

LoamImprovement, 5 miesięcy temu

The link’s broken for me but I assume it’s the RE8 Dimitrescu flyswatter thing?

LoamImprovement, 6 miesięcy temu

It’s true.

Source: I’m the uncle who works for him.

LoamImprovement, 6 miesięcy temu

I take my Deck with me when I travel. The case is a little on the larger side, but it fits in a backpack under a plane seat. I do tend to have the opposite problem with the switch though, my hands cramp up because the joycon grips are so small. Battery life is an issue though, I can get maybe 3 hours out of it if the plane doesn’t have an outlet.

It is a little hard to call the Deck a platform on its own because the library is all borrowed from an existing client and Valve doesn’t really make games anymore, but for people who have a PC library or are looking to start one and don’t necessarily have the money to throw at a whole gaming PC, the Deck is a solid choice for something portable-yet-powerful - it’s good enough to run Elden Ring pretty stable. It’s also really good for gen 6 and older emulation, both because the hardware is capable and because Valve doesn’t give a fuck what you do with it.

LoamImprovement, 6 miesięcy temu

Well I don’t know how to make a game, but I do know how to write interesting characters and stories, and Emil clearly doesn’t, so something something glass houses, Bethesda.

LoamImprovement, 6 miesięcy temu

Christ Almighty, they used to have to give the first hour of a completed game to us for free, now people are paying to betatest the most dogshit asset flips. How did we get here?

LoamImprovement, 6 miesięcy temu

Sponsored by Monster Energy and Ride with Norman Reedus?

LoamImprovement, 6 miesięcy temu

Of the OWSC-type games that I’ve played, the one I’ve enjoyed most is Raft, and even then I get burnt out on it pretty quickly. I think it’s because, at least until you get your raft surrounded with metal plated platforms, there’s a very direct relationship between the materials you pick up and the amount of ‘base’ you can build, and so you’re pretty constantly engaged with collecting, refining, and using most of your supplies in a very straightforward and immediately gratifying manner.

The thing in these games that burns me out is, it seems to be a neverending parade of collecting materials and recipes to get better materials and recipes, to the point that you’re thumbing through like eight different pages or tabs of schematics looking for what you need to make, then digging through some arcane storage system to get the shit you need to make the shit you need. After a certain point, it feels like having a second job.

LoamImprovement, 6 miesięcy temu

Maybe it’s just me getting older, but since Skyrim, Bethesda games have failed to capture that magic for me. They’ve been leaning on the creation engine for too long, to the point that so many of the features, not the least of which being the goddamn shouts, are all carbon copies of one another, the base building is literally just a fucking resource sink, the gunplay sucks and the enemies are all bullet sponges unless you dip into late game planets and filch a late game gun, the jobs are 90% basic bitch fetch quests, and the core gameplay loop of “go place --> grab shit --> sell shit” has not evolved since Morrowind.

I stop playing games when they start feeling like a second job, and for me that point in Starfield was about three hours in when I was trying to complete survey data for the homesteading program and I was wandering around this deserted planet, looking for samples of flora and fauna, and I scoot back from my desk as I realize, for 20 minutes, I have done absolutely nothing meaningful or engaging. The closest I’ve come is, I’ve pointed a scanner at a bunch of procedurally generated animals hoping they don’t land a hit on me because they’re too spongy for me to kill, so I can fill a meter, so that when I’m done filling meters I can go back to BDG and tell him this place is suitable for people to live. That’s not fun. It barely qualifies as gameplay, and it is an aggressive waste of time.

LoamImprovement, 7 miesięcy temu

"The game’s actually really good! Trust me guys!"

• Average everyday game player Hodd Toward

LoamImprovement, 7 miesięcy temu

I really want to see more games like Might & Magic 6-8 or Wizardry 8, in that vein of open world dungeon crawler, but not locked to a grid like M&M 1-5 or Dungeon Master 1&2 (although I do like those games, they’re more well represented in the contemporary space with titles like M&M 10 or Legend of Grimrock.

LoamImprovement, 7 miesięcy temu

Eh, not very well - there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that these games capture, revolving around skill allocation and character development that Skyrim doesn’t have. It’s exciting to become a water master in MM6 because it means being able to teleport freely between towns, or expert level spirit being able to bless the whole party at once.

LoamImprovement, 7 miesięcy temu

Bloodstained is a top contender, I can’t say I first discovered it on the Deck, but it just feels right on a handheld, in a way that it didn’t with controller on desktop, and the Switch just isn’t good enough to run it at a passable framerate.

LoamImprovement, 7 miesięcy temu

I can’t imagine what gives you that idea about the Steam Deck. I’ve had mine for a year and it’s a great little device.

LoamImprovement, 7 miesięcy temu

Lol whoops, did not see the OP next to your name. My bad.

LoamImprovement, 7 miesięcy temu

Steamdeck 2 Episode 2

LoamImprovement, 7 miesięcy temu

I’m going to make a recommendation for pretty much all the metroidvanias, the deck was practically built for them. The Castlevania Advance collection has three great old games, including Aria of Sorrow, which was the progenitor of Bloodstained (which might honestly have a little too much going on - if you feel like you’d enjoy a simplified version of that, Aria is your game.)

But also do remember to pick up Hollow Knight. And Blasphemous. And if you’re emulating, Metroid fusion, Zero Mission, Metroid prime even, if you feel like frigging around with the GC emus.

Also, Soulslike games play particularly well on deck. I can get a pretty stable 30 out of Elden Ring, I’m sure the older titles work pretty well too.

LoamImprovement, 7 miesięcy temu

If you’ve kept it in decent shape, the old model would make a great Christmas gift for somebody special?

LoamImprovement, 8 miesięcy temu

It can’t really be surprising from the series that tends to go above and beyond in their diversions. I can’t think of a Yakuza/Judgement that didn’t have half a dozen other Sega games, shogi, mahjong, cho-han, blackjack, hanafuda, collectible card games, cabaret club management, and slot car racing, to name a few, each with their own powerups and rewards.

LoamImprovement, 8 miesięcy temu

I mean, it’s bad, but it’s not nearly the worst of the firearms industry’s sins. Look up the Bushmaster ‘Man Card’ ads - Really outlines how the confluence of toxic masculinity and gun culture is a key factor in the prevalence of school shootings in the states.

LoamImprovement, 8 miesięcy temu

Yeah, pretty much. But of course, they deny culpability because “It’s not like we pulled the trigger” or some other limp-wrist bullshit excuse.

If gun lobbyists hadn’t pushed for a ban on the CDC studying gun violence under the pretense that the data would be construed as advocating for gun control, maybe some of those kids at Uvalde, or Sandy Hook, or any of the other hundreds if not thousands of school shootings over the last 20+ years might still be alive today.

LoamImprovement, 8 miesięcy temu

First/Third person shooters and tabletop-esque games, keyboard and mouse. Pretty much everything else, gamepad.

LoamImprovement, 8 miesięcy temu

I think it’s a fair criticism, not necessarily one I agree with, but the quantity of content available for the asking price certainly isn’t proportional to the base game, although it is quality content, bugs notwithstanding. I think maybe the only game that would come close to it on those terms would be Fallout: New Vegas.

I would hazard a guess that a large part of the pricetag probably isn’t just for the DLC though - It’s been three years since release and ostensibly the CP2077 dev team has been hard at work fixing the colossal fuckup the game was on launch day, and then some. There’s a lot of work that’s been put in to the systems overhaul in order to make the base game more functional and enjoyable, and I believe a lot closer to the original vision the team had before the marketing and hype (and death threats) nudged them to push out a rushed product, and all that’s getting packed in as a free update for a game that was probably underpriced at the typical $60 anchor point on release in 2020.

LoamImprovement, 8 miesięcy temu

I’m talking more about the dialogue between V and other characters where they just adamantly refuse to begin sentences with the words I/me/my/etc. It begins to wear after a while.

LoamImprovement, 8 miesięcy temu

I mean, it really doesn’t have anything to do with V’s gender, it’s literally just that they start every sentence like, for example, “…Thought” or “…Look like” instead of “I thought” or “You look like,” even when the VO is enunciating in a way that sounds much more emphatic than the dropped pronouns would imply? It makes the dialogue feel kind of disjointed at times.

Granted, I’m using the female V voice, I have no idea if the male VO runs into the same problems, but I imagine they’re reading off of the same script, so it seems likely.