Sterile_Technique

Sterile_Technique, wczoraj (edited godzinę temu)

The Witcher 3 - Wild Hunt $39.99 $3.99 (90% off)

If you’ve somehow managed to avoid Witcher until now, it’s a dark medieval fantasy, 3rd person, open world RPG based on Norse Slavic mythology. Lots of political intrigue, choices that actually impact outcomes in game. Fantastic voice acting, story, soundtrack, and combat/gameplay mechanics. This is one of the best games on the market - if you don’t already have it, now’s the time! There are also two DLCs that are each the size and scope of an entire standalone game - don’t miss those!

Also available DRM free on GOG for the same price.

(shoutout to @Klystron for GOG intel)

Sterile_Technique, wczoraj

Grounded $39.99 $19.99 (50% off)

This is basically “Honey I Shrunk The Kids” as a survival builder. Set in the 80s, you and up to three others are teens that miniaturized by… well you gotta figure out the how and why, and how to return to normal size by navigating the back yard of a scientist with some knowledge on the tech. TBH, I didn’t really expect much from this game, but found myself having a ridiculous amount of fun with it. It is REALLY well made - the attention to detail is insane, from the yard design to build pieces. I wish I had this game when I was a kid, but still enjoyed the hell out of it in my 30s.

Sterile_Technique, wczoraj

Satisfactory $29.99 $14.99 (50% off)

Sci-fi, you’re dropped down to a lush alien planet to do what humans do best: strip all of its natural resources! Combat is limited, but boils down to fighting off wild animals - the main gist of the game is building and optimizing things like miners/conveyor belts/smeltors/assemblers/etc to automate the pillaging of the environment with increasing efficiency… which admittedly sounds more like work than play, but this title caught me a bit off guard with how fun and - true to its name - satisfying it is play.

Sterile_Technique, wczoraj

Subnautica $29.99 $9.89 (67% off)

Sci-fi survival builder: you’re on a massive spacecraft that ends up crash landing on an ocean planet; your goal is to figure out wtf happened and find a way off the planet. This game is 80% feel-good tropical diving simulator; and 20% thalasaphobic deepsea horror. This has become one of my go-to “idk what to play” games that I keep returning to for a nice digital tropical vacation… with a dash of fleeing in terror from, uh… spoilers. No really though, if you don’t already know this game’s story, DO NOT start looking up videos and posts etc about it - just buy it and dive in.

Sterile_Technique, wczoraj

Valheim $19.99 $9.99 (50% off)

You’re a viking that died and you find yourself in a purgatory called “Valheim” to prove you’re worthy of Valhalla. Another survival builder - with a somehow charming combination of really bad graphics paired with really good lighting. The combat is kinda clunky, but the other elements of this game make up for it. Well worth $10!! Don’t forget to turn your music on before summoning a boss.

Sterile_Technique, wczoraj

Orcs Must Die! $9.99 $2.99 (70% off)

Hybrid tower defense and 3rd person shooter/slasher. This game is… fucking stupid! Like by design - your character is a moron, and says some of the dumbest shit you’ll hear come out of a protagonist’s mouth. So with this game, you get a high dose of face-palmy humor paired with orc arms/heads/bones/etc flying across your screen after they get blended up by all your traps. Gameplay is surprisingly solid; you’ll get some time to think and plan where to place traps and obstacles; then you’ll get hit with a wave of orcs and other fantasy critters and try to manually pick off any that make it through the traps. There are a couple more games in this series - imo #1 is the best, but if you like this one, keep the others on your radar too.

Sterile_Technique, wczoraj

Once you get a hold on dodging/parrying/etc, you’ll feel like a damn ninja, especially on harder difficulties; but leading up to that, yeah combat is… OK. Also don’t miss out of experimenting with different builds - one of my favorites optimized using bombs, which later into it makes you a walking B-52 - fun build if you enjoy clearing trash via a wave of pure chaos, then mopping up the stronger guys by way of the sword.

And yeah, the whole package is what counts here: Witcher 3 is a fantastic all around game. It isn’t without it’s imperfections, but they are barely noticeable amidst the tsunami of ridiculously high quality you’ll be hit with from all the other features.

Sterile_Technique, wczoraj

Witcher 2’s controls are a bit janky, but it’s a solid game in and of itself for the story alone; if you can stomach some pretty bad mechanics to enjoy an otherwise decent product, I’d say start at #2.

Witcher 1 is… so bad it’s kinda comical. I’d just pull up a story summary of Witcher 1 on youtube and call it a day. If you’re a masochist, go ahead and give the actual game a whirl; but I’d recommend modding the snot out of it to at least make your character OP as fuck, allowing you to mostly skip the god-awful combat. But even then, the only selling point is the story, which again you can just pull up on YouTube.

That said, you can dive into 3 with zero knowledge of the previous two and be just fine. There are things that will go over your head, but nothing significant.

Sterile_Technique, 14 godzin temu

Abiotic Factor

Hadn’t heard of that one… it’s like a survival builder set in Half Life 1 lol. Wishlisted!

Sterile_Technique, godzinę temu

Oh, good catch. Fixed.

Sterile_Technique, 2 dni temu (edited 2 dni temu)

Initial scroll through looks pretty meh. There a list of good’ns going yet?

Edit-

From another thread, looks like Witcher 3 is 90% off. If you haven’t played it yet, now’s the time!

Sterile_Technique, 2 dni temu

One of the best games on the market. Worth every cent and then some, even at full price.

Sterile_Technique, miesiąc temu

Getting abusive parent vibes from the language of Sony’s post.

Sterile_Technique, miesiąc temu

Naw it’s more like “we did something we knew would make you incredibly uncomfortable; but now that you’re screaming we’re worried about the neighbors hearing it and we don’t want the cops called on us, so we’ll back off until a more opportune time.”

Sterile_Technique, 3 miesiące temu

Addictive and entertaining are synonyms now?

Sterile_Technique, 3 miesiące temu

Xcom 2 has been on my list for years… hit 97% in this sale, figured it’s finally time.

Sterile_Technique, 3 miesiące temu

That’s the one!

$3.88, only about $0.50 more than just the standalone game. If the reviews are any indication, this is a damn steal!

Sterile_Technique, 5 miesięcy temu

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/29fdbd44-a827-4337-9059-9096b9530f01.png

Sterile_Technique, 6 miesięcy temu

Grounded is the game I wish I had when I was 10. Basically “Honey I shrunk the kids” as a multiplayer survival-builder.

Sterile_Technique, 7 miesięcy temu

We’ve been hooking kids on gambling since (at least) baseball cards, which -surprise!- were heavily lobbied to convince law makers to let it fly.

Consumers were doomed the instant we failed to torch and pitchfork that shit.

Sterile_Technique, 7 miesięcy temu

One that never really took off for the N64 almost surely because the controls were so fucked - Jetforce Gemini.

Those who took the time to tolerate and master the janky controls were rewarded with a shooter that was otherwise second to none. AND YES THAT INCLUDES 007!

Hearing the music cranks the nostalgia up to 10 immediately.

Sterile_Technique, 7 miesięcy temu

N64 and earlier consoles emulate really well on smartphones. In terms of storage, those games are tiny, so you could probably fit Nintendo’s entire library from the first Gameboy through the N64 on your phone if you wanted to.

Way higher quality than pretty much every mobile game, free, no micro transactions, no ads (assuming your emulator isn’t shit).

If you want to game on your phone, this is the way.

Sterile_Technique, 7 miesięcy temu

They absolutely play better with a controller, but you’d be surprised how not-terrible the touch screen interface is after just a bit of getting used to it.

I break out Mario 64 or the two Zelda 64’s occasionally and outside of just a few wonky parts (aiming the bow… ugh…) the play quality is alright on touch screen alone (+ binding one of the volume keys to Z).

Sterile_Technique, 7 miesięcy temu

Was really looking forward to this one.

Sterile_Technique, 7 miesięcy temu

You’ve got The Secret World on there already, but worth mentioning they did a remake: Secret World Legends. Whole ton of QoL changes, combat was revamped, but otherwise the same game.

Suuuuuper niche game, but if it happens to be your niche it’ll become one of your all time favorites.

Sterile_Technique, 7 miesięcy temu

Skyrim-like

Enderal.

Official page here: sureai.net/games/enderal/

Original Skyrim version: …steampowered.com/…/Enderal_Forgotten_Stories/

2016 Skyrim re-release “special edition” version: …steampowered.com/…/Enderal_Forgotten_Stories_Spe…

You’ll need whichever version corresponds with the version of skyrim you own. If you own both, I’d recommend choosing the version of enderal that goes with the version of skyrim that you play the least - because it uses skyrim’s assets, switching back and forth has been known to corrupt saves, so back up any skyrim saves you care about.

Anywho, Enderal is set in its own universe - it looks and kind of feels like skyrim because it’s built from the same blocks, but has nothing to do with the Elder Scrolls, or Tamriel, etc (barring a few easter eggs). New lore, new characters, new terrain, new music, new voice acting.

The company that made it is “SureAI” - indie dev crew that has nothing to do with AI. /shrug. It’s a predominately German studio, and while Enderal is available in English, iirc the English version is voice acted mostly by German native speakers who happen to know English as a second language. Reason for mentioning that is: be gentle in your judgement of the voice acting, lol. Along the main quest line, it’s pretty much all rock solid; some of the side quests and random NPCs… not so much. And the children NPC voice acting is fucking awful. The console command “TAI” (after targeting an entity) can be used to shut up an annoying NPC without breaking it - just TAI it again if you happen to need to interact with it for a quest or something later.

Speaking of the command console - don’t be afraid to use the command console!! Again, this game is built on Skyrim’s engine/assets, so it comes with all of skyrim’s problems - e.g., step on a basket full of cabbage; get launched into low orbit. Things like quest items falling through the floor n’ shit can happen, so you may need to use the console to force a quest to progress or some shit - also save frequently, same reason. And from a technical standpoint, some of the shit they do with Skyrim’s engine is mindblowing.

Not much of a sales pitch so far lol. The good stuff though: Enderal’s story is pretty wild. There isn’t really a traditional antagonist - instead it tackles concepts ranging from philosophical to religious to emotions / repressed emotions… this game WILL get under your skin, but in a really artistic kind of way. Very much a passion project by the devs.

Combat and skills are completely redone. It’s not like Skyrim where you can just shoot icicles up a mudcrab’s ass until your destruction level is 100. It plays kinda like an oldschool RPG where killing shit gives you overall-level xp, but raising skills requires skillbooks that you’ll need to find or buy. Also the things that were OP in skyrim are no longer so - try the sneaky archer build in Enderal and you’ll get your ass handed to you in pretty much every encounter. I recall having a lot of fun with the 2H sword path; and the magic ‘schools’ are mostly redone (like iirc there’s a school of ‘Entropy’ that an entire talent tree dedicated to dark lifesteal type spells, and stronger attacks that use HP instead of mana) so read through the options, cuz a lot of them will be totally new.

Even with all the combat tweaks though, it plays pretty familiar to Skyrim, just don’t lean too heavily into Skyrim’s tricks.

The story though, and the way they tell it… holy shit. If you’re a bookworm, you know when you finish the last page of a REALLY good book, and then get hit by that kind of empty feeling as it sinks in that the ride is over, and you want more but know there’s nothing left? I’ve played a fuckton of videogames, and only ONE has ever hit me with that at its conclusion: and yup, it’s Enderal.

It’s a slow start, and there’s some jankiness in general like the occasional shit voice acting and technical instability, but if you can look passed that shit (and I mean, keep in the back of your mind that it’s a FREE passion project from an indie dev crew with no real budget), then this game will go down as one of your all time favorites.

Sterile_Technique, 7 miesięcy temu

How was the book?

Sterile_Technique, 8 miesięcy temu

I’ve seen this pop up a few times, but there are a couple big issues that pop up right out the gate.

Space is constantly expanding with no center. If we’re in a back hole, we and everything else in here are cruising toward the singularity. And if we’re in a black hole, we’re already passed the event horizon, the point at which gravity is so strong that even light can’t escape; and as we progress toward the singularity, that force becomes exponentially stronger… so light from one point inside the black hole would have very limited potential to cross paths with another point… so how is it light from stars is actually making it to us / for the few stars we’re actually in the line of fire for it’s light - if that’s even possible inside the event horizon - shouldn’t the night sky only have a narrow region of visible stars; and shouldn’t they appear distorted as s all hell?

Sterile_Technique, 8 miesięcy temu

We’d be somewhere between the event horizon and the singularity - once we’ve made it to the singularity we’d just be crushed into it to join the infinitely dense speck of matter.

Between the event horizon and singularity we can still exist as a unique object/entity, we just can’t move any matter/energy from the inside out.

But once we reach the singularity, we just become more mass in the singularity. No more me, or you, or Earth, etc: just singularity.

The time it takes to move from event horizon to singularity would scale with the size of the black hole, so I guess if the singularity had enough mass to generate an event horizon the size of what we understand to be the universe, then yeah the trillions of years it would take for things like Earth to form, life to develop, etc could all happen as we move closer to the singularity, but we run into the snags like the ones I mentioned in my first post - the observable universe would all be on a crash course toward the same point, and not uniformly moving away from everything as space expands; and the further out we look into space, the more distorted it would become: distant galaxies wouldn’t appear as neat discs, but as stretched lines. We could even use that distortion to infer the approximate location of the singularity and gauge how much time is left before we’re smashed into it.

Sterile_Technique, 8 miesięcy temu

I mean, yes I’m assuming they follow the laws of physics. To my knowledge everything about them that we actually can observe does actually follow the laws of physics (including things like time dilation), and we can use what we do know to form a pretty solid hypothesis about what we don’t.

I mean, I could argue that they’re actually c’thulu eggs, and you can’t prove me wrong because we can’t look inside! …but there’s also no evidence to support that. Drawing conclusions about reality based on science fiction is silly. We ofc don’t know everything about the universe, but we should stick with what real evidence actually supports.

Sterile_Technique, 8 miesięcy temu

Yeah I agree that we shouldn’t try to contradict the evidence we have without a good hypothesis to back it up

That’s what I’m saying though - the hypothesis that we exist in a black hole does contradict the evidence currently available. Or at least I think it does - I opened the contractions initially as a question because this isn’t my area of expertise. I’ve had a few relevant classes, and have a casual interest in the topic, so I think I have a pretty solid foundation at least; but ultimately I’m just a medic, so I was kinda hoping someone with a more dedicated background would chime in.

There’s a LOT of BS surrounding the topic of black holes - and understandably so. They’re intriguing as hell, so it’s no wonder that they’re so often the object of artistic freedom. But all’s fine and well to proclaim that they’re some kind of portal, or mini universe, or cleverly disguised alien spacecraft, or even a sentient creature… in the context of science fiction. But to say any of those about black holes IRL should come with supporting evidence, especially if some aspect of the proposal clashes with our current interpretation of what we can either directly observe or indirectly postulate.

Sterile_Technique, 8 miesięcy temu

Elder millennial, here. One of the weird things about the 90s was cereal boxes marketed to little bastards like me at the time would often have some kind of toy included in it.

PC gaming was kind of in its infancy and growing rapidly in popularity, so eventually the inevitable happed: a cereal company promoted their cereal by shoving a fucking CD into it, that little bastards like me lost their shit over, installed, and played the snot out of.

Chex Quest.

It was literally just Doom, except reskinned so the demons were boogers, and everything else was a fucking Chex cereal advertisement.

AND IT WAS AMAZING! lol

Best box of cereal my parents ever bought. Not a bargain bin, but I feel like “in a box of cereal” fits the spirit of the question.

Sterile_Technique, 8 miesięcy temu

Here’s hoping the project isn’t scrapped, but I’m not convinced they’d scrub all mention of it over a music license.

Sterile_Technique, 9 miesięcy temu

Fuck, I was excited for this one.

Sterile_Technique, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

Reminds me of the disenchant comic:

Full

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/092ca0b7-69ec-43af-8638-2dbdfc59c363.png

Sterile_Technique, 10 miesięcy temu

Xfire had such a good system for overlay. and just so many good features. It was better 10 years ago than Discord is today.

Sterile_Technique, 10 miesięcy temu

It was very feature-rich. Literally everything discord offeres, but better implemented, and every feature was customizable - the in-game overlay being the one I remember most fondly. In addition to a VOIP indicator like discord has, it had a text-chat overlay too that my guild used a lot. We were spread out over multiple games, but we all had one unified in-game guild chat thanks to Xfire. You could resize and reposition everything in the overlay, and could set a keybind to toggle whether your mouse and such could interact with the chat windows or just click through it to interact with the game. It was clean as fuck.

VOIP quality was outstanding. UI in general was customizable and also clean as fuck.

It had a built in screen recorder.

Everything was intuitive to use and easy to use.

It was just really, REALLY high quality all around.

Hope it makes a comeback.

Sterile_Technique, 10 miesięcy temu

It did a really good job of putting the stuff you actually want on screen, while staying the hell out of the game’s way!