Pxtl

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

There cannot and should not be balanced and open discussion on this issue. You cannot “polite” your way into finding a way to say that non-binary people are not legitimate.

This is paradox-of-tolerance stuff. Maintaining an inclusive community requires being intolerant of intolerance.

The existence of non-binary people does not hurt you.

Insisting on finding ways to deny that they exist hurts them.

So no, there will be no polite disagreement.

Fuck the chuds.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

See, so many of the things below I can think of about games I was addicted to but wasn’t really enjoying. Like, if I’m hearing the music while I fall asleep? That’s a sign I’ve been playing it a crap load, but I also can think of many games that sucked me in chasing carrots and kept me up until dawn… but the actual fun parts were fleeting.

Games I actually enjoy have me grinning like a maniac once I start getting into top-tier flow with the actions available, like threading needles in a racing game.

Relevant SMBC:

www.smbc-comics.com/comic/happy-2

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

No, we’re downvoting because of conspiracy theories about planned obsolescense.

Yes, it’s disappointing how hardware requirements climb for minimal appreciable improvement, but Hanlon’s Razor applies.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Remember when TV had commercials instead of video games?

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Does this mean we’ll finally get decent gyro support in PC gaming?

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I’m more talking about API level. There isn’t a proper standard operating-system-level interface in Windows for gyro, so 3rd party controllers don’t have it, so it’s not really a thing in Windows/Xbox-first games.

This will raise the floor so every gamepad will be expected to have gyro.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Cope.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Honestly even the idea of an emergency fund, I mean accounting dorks say things like “save six months salary in an accessible, liquid form”.

Does anybody really do that? I mean for a middle-class well-educated dual-income household that’s probably close to 100k, which we were all recently reminded the limit for bank account insurance.

If you own your home doesn’t it make more sense to have a secured line of credit set for emergencies and then ride as close to the wire as you feel comfortable?

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

Sorry, forgot this was an international community. $100k CAD. So $75k USD. We’ve the same 100k bank-insurance limit here, but its $100k CAD.

Either way, I know plenty of people who make near $200k of household income and are still fucked because they didn’t get into the housing market in time before the door slammed shut (average home in Greater Toronto is now well north of a $million, even with our stupid-expensive interest rates). Like, teachers and realtors make $90k CAD after a few years of experience these days, but that doesn’t accomplish much when rent keeps jumping and nobody can afford to buy. Basically the only reason everybody isn’t eating cat-food is they’re either in a pre-rent-deregulation unit or they bought before it all hit the fan.

Also, side-note: the traditional concept of “middle class” is not the modern expansive definition of “basically everybody who doesn’t own either a private jet or live in a cardboard box”. That is, somebody who pays rent and has a job that doesn’t require grad-school used to be considered “working class”. It’s just that for some dumb reason we all collectively decided that “working class” was something to be embarrassed about.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

“Good” is not the metric for preserving things. “Important” is. Marvel’s Avengers is important to preserve because this failure is a major historical milestone.

Like, imagine if somehow every copy of ET for the Atari 2600 vanished. Would anything fun be lost? Of course not. But would we lose some critical context in an important historical event? Yes. Very much so.

Fortunately, Atari games aren’t the kind of ephemeral media where we have to worry about that like cloud-service games or pre-code cellulite films.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Youtube lets creators monetize their content, wikis don’t. Everything is a hustle now.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

I’ve no interest in the Diablo series, but am I the only one who hates streaming as a measurement of success? It’s like the gaming media equivalent to when journalists report on Xitter hashtags… it’s just the easiest, dumbest metric available.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

I’m always flabbergasted that 100h of gameplay is considered a failure of a product.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Honestly, I’ve only ever spent over 100+ hours on a game I felt “meh” about once before that I can think of (it was Disgaea).

In any game with RPG elements like unlocks and numbers-going-up (and these days that’s all of them), it’s always worth asking yourself “am I really enjoying this, or am I just anticipating the next carrot it’s dangling in front of me”?

Like, I used to play Civ games way too much, and now I don’t because I realized that the actual fun parts of the game were kind of fleeting and most of it was about The Next Thing.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

Yeah, I feel the same about the events. But there’s only 2 “pro” tracks (White Land and Port Town 2), and I think they’ve dropped the frequencies of the full Grand Prix now with the Miniprix (which also include White Land and Port Town 2 as their final race)… which means I still haven’t played on Silence (I tend to be a bit too aggressive and end up blowing up on the 3rd or 4th track on Grand Prix).

That’s still a total rotation of 6 tracks (I’m not counting Silence because it’s hard to get there), and most of the time you’re playing on only 2 of them.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

I mean even without inventing new F-Zero content, there are other Mode-7-style F-Zero games (that nobody played, but still they exist). It wouldn’t ruin my nostalgia to play tracks from BS F-Zero GP2 or the GBA F-Zero games. But yeah, you can’t tell me splatting some tiles down for new tracks would be that hard… I’m sure this is a game where you could even procedurally generate the tracks pretty well and eliminate the “memorization” aspect. I’d love that as an “event mode”.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Mario Kart 64 Balloon Battle 64

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Zero-K. It’s a competitive online RTS loosely based on the classic Total Annihilation (which led to Planetary Annihilation and Supreme Commander). Some of its features are a bit overcomplicated, but it does an amazing job innovating within the RTS genre.

It’s fast, aggressive, and fun. You spam units, claim territory (in the form of metal-extractors and energy-grid that upgrades their output, and building defenses to protect that) and raid and assault your opponents.

It abandons the hoary old concept of factions, instead giving you your choice of starting factories… and as the game progresses, you can expand into other factories to access the synergy of units. So you start a battle with a narrow slice of the unit-pie, but ultimately can access the whole inventory in a single match. There is no “teching” really, besides constructing resource-buildings, which keeps the focus on resources, construction, and combat.

It has a full single-player campaign that introduces the game’s complexity bit-by-bit… but the campaign does have some difficulty spikes, particularly since the units do get rebalanced once in a while and so an old mission will become suddenly easier or harder as the developers patch the game.

The game has a Lua-based GUI plug-in architecture if you like WoW-style UI mods as well.

zero-k.info

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

If we’re talking stuff on F-Droid, the big one there for me is UnCiv. It’s an excellent fully-free reimplementation of Civ V… with all the nightmarish one-more-turn-oh-God-is-it-dawn addictive problems that implies. Only real flaw is that by adapting Civ V, it also adapts Civ V’s big flaw: traffic jams. Unciv units neither stack nor combine so waging war in an obstacle-rich landscape is hellishly tedious. Also the higher difficulties feel just abusively random and unfair because the hard-level AIs get free resources, but that’s normal for a Civ game.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

I miss the early AC games where skating cost energy so mechs’ walking speeds actually mattered. Then you had a much deeper and more profound difference between a huge tanky mech compared to a fast sprinter. The motion models between quads, tanks, and bipeds were deeper too.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Imho apple has it right for high-end vr: no wires because wearable computer.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

I mean a wireless wearable computer would have network lag but the important lag – between the rendering GPU and the screen – would be nil.

I mean streaming the video data to the headset Miracast-style would be dumb, I agree, but afaik all the rendering hardware in the new Apple headset is inside the headset.

The new Steam Deck and its copycats have proven that a compact gaming-grade PC is doable. If not fully contained in the headset, then make a little fannypack with a cable up to vr headset, but you can walk around untethered otherwise.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

Tomb Raider 2013 is an excellent M-rated take on Uncharted that happens to star Lara Croft. While the actual “tomb raiding” is present, the tombs are physics puzzles that are side-quests and are distinct from the core plot, which is mostly combat and the occasional puzzles and exploration.

Also, Lara using a shotgun and assault-rifle seems wrong.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Ah. I never got far enough in the classic games to see those weapons. It’s just the new games had a serious tonal problem with “this is serious movie game and killing has real gravity now massacre 30 guys with an AR”. It just feels like it would have managed to capture the grounded tone it was going for better if it’d stuck to the pistols and bow.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Not only can UE do the exact same thing, but Epic doesn’t need small indies as much since they have a more diverse clientbase of heavy-hitters. Epic is much more able to absorb the damage if they make a pricing change that loses them the indie market.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

Authentication servers do not run themselves, they need babysitting and patching and upgrading because this is users’ passwords and secrets. Microsoft obviously does not want to keep managing this old login system because it’s miserable unrewarding janitorial work for a sysadmin or a developer.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

The players still have their stuff and their user ID, just under a new login process. They’ve been pestering users to make this migration for years and years.

Edit: also, this is Java edition, meaning the worlds they built are just Minecraft save files that a new user could access. The cloud-based one was Bedrock Edition, that’s the one where you’d have cloud-based worlds that you could lose if you lost your account.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Yes it was so much better when it was owned by a Qanon-brain-addled bigot.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Yes, but in this case? The users are being migrated to a new authentication account and have been notified for many years that they needed to move over - it’s been like 5 years, right? The servers are staying up. And if you’ve got a Mojang account, any possibility of this still being under even the most generous warranty is long gone.

If you want to participate in a community where you control the software, you should be getting into open-source games. Minetest is great! It has a better modding system than Java edition! But ultimately, if you’re playing commercial games, you have to deal with a reality that the company owns it and there’s no guarantee what will happen to their servers after the warranty is expired.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Be gay, do crime.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

People switching to Unreal are like the ex-Twitter users who went to Tumblr and Threads.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Yeah, I’m loving AC6, but the design decisions that make the game so much better on the KB+M are actually kind of baffling from a console-first company like FROM. I played the hell out of the AC1 games back in the day and while that series’ aiming controls were a joke, the fact that you cycled through your ranged weapons instead of having all 3 accessible at the same time, combined with the fact that the game used only one button for “boost” which covered both jumping and dodging, meant the weapons and boosting actions fit nicely on the 4 face-buttons. Now, AC1’s weapons were very flawed in that there was often minimal reason to cycle through them - they didn’t generally have cooldowns or meters so putting a weapon away wasn’t super useful. Best strategy was a 1-weapon mech, generally. But still, the simpler controls were a lot more pleasant on a game controller.

And author is quite right about how rotation rate has grossly changed the game’s strategy and feel. For example, if somebody got behind you in old AC, the strategy was to get to cover while you ponderously rotate, or to burn energy like a fiend boosting backwards to get them into your cone of fire.

Not that I dislike AC6 - I love the game - but I hope this renewed interest in the AC series will lead us to a simplified spin-off or copycat 3rd-party game that properly fits onto the controller.

I just think there was some good gameplay lost.

But yeah, I’m playing it on KB+mouse, and I’m a PC gamer primarily.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Twitter has gotten enshittified. Reddit has gotten enshittified. Now Unity is getting enshittified.

It’s time to learn the lesson: don’t be a sharecropper on somebody else’s property.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

This kind of stuff was what turned me off the Armored Core “Spiritual Successor” game Daemon X Machina. So many fights involved scripted foes where it wasn’t obvious they were scripted as undefeatable until I’d burned out half my ammunition.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Well the Curtis rifle is hardly forgotten-about, it’s just that high ROF weapons that can charge are super tedious to wield in this dual-wielding meta.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Ugh. A part of me wants to give AMD a chance for my next upgrade and push back against Nvidia’s near-monopoly of GPUs but I really don’t want to deal with how everything kinda-sorta works on Radeons.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Oh of course. I don’t actually blame AMD for those kinds of bugs. But it’s the reality as a user, at least in my experience… but it’s been like stupid long time since I’ve used a machine with an AMD card.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

I mean who would ever suspect that the man who wrote and directed the Wing Commander movie could be incompetent?

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Hey Disney, you want to do a Big Stupid Live Action Remake movie? Stop fucking around with your beloved animated classics and do this fucking thing.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

It’s been 20 years they will obviously be changing the formula a bit.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Iir Nintendo has always said they never brought it back because they didn’t want it to be redundant with Mario Kart. I wonder what changed?

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I don’t mind the idea of an encumbrance system where it makes sense. Like, the idea of being able to carry whatever you want into combat feels obviously wrong to me, since you can just overwhelm any challenge with endless inventory - like you just grinded an endless supply of healing potions and smart-bombs. Encumbrance caused by your combat-relevant inventory creates the idea of a “build” of your character, it creates interesting decisions about which combat gear you’re going to keep available to roll with (or non-combat gear if your game’s core loop isn’t combat-driven).

Although I do see the argument that it shouldn’t be coupled to a weapon-durability system. I like weapon-durability as a way to make players fully explore all of the gear available instead of just getting “The Good One” and then never ever switching and making the optimal strategy super boring (yes, Steph Sterling, I’m That Guy) but it means working on the “build” of your character is constant fiddling and decision fatigue.

Either way, all that falls apart when it’s stuff you’re only carrying for saleable loot or for crafting materials. Unless you have an interesting and fun gameplay mechanic to provide supply-lines, that’s just adding tedium for the sake of realism. Yes, it’s not realistic that you can carry unlimited bricks, but taking that away doesn’t add anything interesting to the game, it just adds tedium.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Honestly, realism justifications for encumbrance outside of survival-type games where basic biological needs are the core gameplay loop have always been silly to me… but the latter one about wheels of cheese rings true.

To me the argument is “what does optimal play look like”? Without encumbrance, there’s no reason not to pick up every wheel of cheese, so optimal play is to pick up every wheel of cheese, which is tedious and dumb. But with encumbrance, every wheel of cheese becomes a tedious decision, and completionist-optimal play is to burn endless time ferrying stuff to the shops or storage or whatever. But as you said, making every wheel of cheese not something you can pick up breaks immersion.

So what’s the compromise that actually makes sense for the “wheel of cheese” problem? A realistic setting is cluttered with “slightly-useful” items. Don’t put so many “slightly-useful” items outside of settings with NPCs that will have realistic reactions to you stealing their stuff? But coding those realistic reactions (“uh, you’re The Savior, I guess you can steal all my food… a bit… okay that tears it call the guards!”) would be some more dev-work in these already-bloated projects.

But the problem still exists in hostile locales. A lived-in enemy camp is going to have store-rooms of “slightly useful” stuff. If the hero stops to raid the larder while massacring nameless Stormtroopers, is that a problem? I can see the immersion argument that “well, if you can, you probably should since you might need it and that breaks immersion” and therefore that justifies the encumbrance idea, but I also see Steph Sterling’s argument “this is just a game and I wanna!” And I have trouble defending realism in these games about butchering your way across the landscape without ever stopping to poop.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

If you’re trying to do it legally, you can easily to rip your own ps1 games with a drive bay. Haven’t tried it on PS2 or ps3 games. And ps1 emulation runs amazing on phones and raspberry pis.

So my ps1 emulation collection is pretty legit.

We shall not speak of the other consoles.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

I’m curious, can a standard Blu-ray drive on a PC rip PS3 games? Or do you need special hardware? I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to rip PS1 games.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Battlezone '98: One of the first notable RTS/FPS hybrids. You drive hovertanks and you build bases and you command other tanks. Set in a secret live war on the Moon, Mars, and Venus between the USSR and the USA during the cold war.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Buggywhip salesman demands accomodation from the horseless carriage industry.

Yes, I’m upset at the licenseification of the gaming industry as much as the next guy but that died long before physical media did. As long as a game can die without its first-party servers, games are leased and not owned.