I’ve got a small backlog of games on my laptop (running Arch Linux with KDE) through Lutris. I usually play with a keyboard and a mouse, but since I sit pretty close to my screen (ik bad habit), it starts getting uncomfortable after a while. So I’ve been thinking about picking up a gamepad for some more relaxed, couch style...
Yeah, Xbox controllers are pretty much standard. Comfortable, not overpriced, great compatibility with everything, no fuss. Newer ones, from the past several years now, will have Nintendo-style d pads, now that the patent has expired, and connect via bluetooth for wireless play or with a USB C cable to save on batteries. Speaking of batteries, it uses AAs, which means that you can actually swap them when they get low, as opposed to PlayStation controllers where batteries don’t last long and they aren’t really exposed for you to access them. I’m not going to tell you Xbox controllers are the be-all, end-all, but there’s a high chance it’s all you need.
EDIT: Even though I use Xbox controllers all the time, I forgot that the newest Xbox pads actually have d pads that are even better than Nintendo’s design. They look funky, but for my money, it’s the best d pad out there.
Not me, sorry. On desktop Linux, I’m always wired, and the bluetooth always just worked when I needed it on Bazzite or Steam Deck, connecting via the controller setup in the Steam menu, but maybe someone else here will know.
This Tuesday, we’re bringing you a special episode of State of Play running for more than 40 minutes, focusing on games created in Japan and across Asia, alongside a few other exciting updates.
There is, because we expect more fidelity now than we did in 2011, and Skyrim was built on some existing bones. When you’re trying to make a game like that in Unreal that you haven’t done in that engine before, it’s going to be smaller (if you’re smart). Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t get to be that big without building on Original Sin 2, and the same can be said for Elden Ring; perhaps without a pandemic in the middle, those games might have even been made in more reasonable time frames than 5 or 6 years.
Right, there is little difference between them because they had the prior game in the series to build off of, but don’t just gloss over “and graphics”. The fidelity that we expect today is why you can’t just make the next Morrowind with 50 people, because people expect it to be better than Morrowind now that we’re 20 years removed from it. A smaller team than that made Dread Delusion; a larger one made Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. From those, if they’re fortunate enough to have financial success, they can build on it just like Bethesda built on Morrowind’s bones. What Obsidian made with a similar team was The Outer Worlds, which kept the fidelity up but the scope small, and I think it was the right decision, because otherwise, you end up taking 7 years per game like Kingdom Come. Those are great games, but it took 15 years to get two of them, and the first one was rough.
I’m sure there were other sources before it ended up on GameFAQs, but it was a one-stop shop for all the stuff you would have found in magazines and strategy guides, and it was free. And that was the difference. The one kid on the playground who knew about GameFAQs would share, and internet adoption only went up over time. GameFAQs is almost solely responsible for strategy guides and hint hotlines becoming obsolete.
I’m not convinced the market for strategy guides was “booming” by the time we got to 360, even if some existed. That was the same time manuals started to disappear, and it was even the generation before that that the obtuse moon logic of older games was discarded, I’d wager due to GameFAQs.
I’d imagine the reason we went back around to gaming outlets handling guides again is that there’s still a desire for text-based guides, but video guides have a monetary compensation to them that text-based guides on GameFAQs don’t when they’re crowdsourced. I sure miss being able to go to GameFAQs whenever I need to look up anything for a game in the past ~7 years or so.
Alright, sure, a pivot to the collector’s market makes sense, but it makes sense in the same way that GameStop pivoted to Funko Pops, you know? Neither GameStop nor Funko is bankrupt yet, but it’s pretty clear what caused their decline.
FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn’t as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think.
Emphasis mine, that’s exactly my point. Video is crowdsourced and leads to revenue, while GameFAQs crowdsourced guides don’t. When I look up a YouTube answer to a question about the game I’m playing, and they have 4 minutes of preamble describing the problem before they show me the solution so that advertisers like their video better, it sure seems to explain the A->B. Speaking for myself, embedding images in guides never made them that much more useful to me, and the era we’re in now where the likes of IGN are taking over text based guides just leads to far more of them being incomplete and never finished.
Well, I’d argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn’t have purchased GameFAQs.
I’ve heard lots about acquisitions of games media as they’ve nearly all gone independent lately, especially Giant Bomb, who was part of this family. CNET certainly believed it could make them money, but hardly any of this stuff made anyone any money as they changed hands multiple times. At the very least, it could benefit from economies of scale around securing ads in one deal and displaying them in multiple places, but advertisers paid out less for traditional ads on static web pages at the same time that video ad spending was increasing.
But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn’t fit the timeline at all. It’s off by 5-10 years, at least.
In a lot of cases, the people who enjoyed it will have already said what they wanted to say about it, and then the detractors can just yell out the loudest. There’s a perception that BioShock Infinite was only praised because of release hype, and a lot of people look back at it unkindly for one reason or another, but I’ve seen a number of people experience it for the first time in just the past couple of years, unaware of any reputation it might have, and they loved it like we all did at launch.
You know, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I’d say Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is worth playing for a lot of reasons, but I think it’s got huge fundamental issues in both its combat and narrative design; it’s still on the short list for most outlets’ game of the year awards this year. Hades just got a sequel, and I didn’t even care for the first one. For many people, those two games are just about the only roguelikes or -lites they’ve ever played, but I don’t think they’re even good ones of those; the level generation is so limited that you’ll have seen all their permutations quite quickly, and the bonuses from boons just about all feel superfluous and interchangeable. Hollow Knight holds this legendary status among metroidvanias, and Silksong followed suit. I thought Hollow Knight was just fine, but I was surprised to find that this was the game with that sort of following. When facing the possibility of playing Silksong this year or about 5 other video games that came out this year, I don’t think Silksong is making the cut.
But your mileage will absolutely vary. These games have hype for a reason: a lot of people love them. You might, too.
I haven’t played any 3.5e proper, but I understand Pillars of Eternity 1 is largely based on it, and I’ve played a handful of the 2e games. I dig a lot of the changes in 5e. I wouldn’t say the power is so flat that the differentiation only comes down to role play; I’d say a lot of it comes from the apples and oranges comparisons between classes, like things beyond to-hit roles. Your fighter has no AoE attacks like the wizard has but has Second Wind and Action Surge, for instance. The advantage to flattening the differences a bit more is that your character’s role is less preordained (“you are playing class X, so you must be responsible for Y”) and that you are less hamstrung by the absence of one particular role, which scales better to small parties.
Souls games didn’t make sense to me until I saw Giant Bomb play through Demon’s Souls. Mechanics that I didn’t know were there were explained in plain English, and then I could better understand where I went wrong when I died.
I had a great time with that game with the difficulty turned up a few notches. It really makes you use the tools in your tool belt, plan ahead for weaknesses, and lay traps. Without that stuff, I likely would have found it to be a generic open world, too. The story will always be ridiculous, but even taking itself seriously, there’s a payoff toward the end of the game where taking itself so seriously is still satisfying and makes sense, even with a world filled with absurd robot dinosaurs.
I’d take GTA 4 or 5 over San Andreas, easily. And at this point, a large part of the appeal is GTA Online for a ton of folks; not me, but a ton of folks.
Long story short, I was trying to make some pork buns and it ended with the tip of my thumb being sliced off, after hospital visit and six stitches and back. But I’m kind of bored out of my mind. Can’t do the steam deck. Can’t do really anything with a controller. I have a large library of games, most of which I haven’t...
Which thumb? If your left thumb is still functional, when I had a hand injury in middle school, I got to be really good at Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2. If your dominant/mouse hand is still functional, anything mouse-driven ought to do, and that covers a wide range of genres from CRPGs to adventure games to 4X games and more.
It also only works as long as the AI can actually competently do the QA work. This is what an AI thinks a video game is. To do QA, it will have to know that something is wrong, flag it, and be able to tell when it’s fixed. The most likely situation I can foresee is that it creates even more work for the remaining humans to do when they’re already operating at a deficit.
I don’t know what they were testing, but if your output is text, it will be a lot easier for the AI to know it’s correct than any of the plethora of ways that video games can go subtly wrong, and that’s where my lack of faith comes from. Even scraping text from the internet, my experience is more often that AI is confident in its wrong answer than it is helpful.
If you’ve never had a gaming computer before and you’re on a budget, look up how to set up Heroic Games Launcher and make accounts with Epic and GOG. They give away free games all the time, and almost all of them will work on Steam Deck.
I’m thinking 2015 - Witcher 3, Undertale, and Kerbal Space Program are all classics. Fallout 4, Arkham Knight, and Cities Skylines were all excellent too, though fallout 4 and Arkham knight aren’t necessarily the best games in their respective series.
1998 comes up a lot in response to this question, for good reason. Pokemon Red/Blue, Baldur’s Gate, Metal Gear Solid, Thief, Half-Life, Fallout 2, StarCraft, and on and on. Games were made much more quickly back then, and the technological advancements allowed for a lot of these games to do new things that no one had done before, that were quite predictably going to be well-received.
If I’m putting together a pantheon of great years in gaming, it looks like 1998, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2023. If I’ve got to pick one, it might be 2004. Half-Life 2, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (an odd choice for many, but it’s maybe my favorite in the series), Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes, Halo 2, Burnout 3: Takedown, Star Wars: Battlefront, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Unreal Tournament 2004, The Sims 2, Doom 3, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Viewtiful Joe 2, Ninja Gaiden, Counter-Strike: Source, etc., etc. This was a magical time in online multiplayer, where it was pretty new for most, and you could do things like proximity chat in a shooter and expect people to actually use it for the video game at hand instead of spewing slurs into the mic. Local multiplayer was abundant. Obtuse game design made to sell strategy guides was just about obsolete, and DLC had yet to be invented (outside of beefier expansions). Midnight launches were exciting, and I have fond memories of, for reasons I can’t explain, playing Halo 2 on launch day in a 12-player LAN using bean bags, projectors, and 3 Xboxes set up in a local college’s racket ball court.
Pillars 2’s turn based mode was such a great addition that it propelled me through the game a second time after I’d already finished it in RtwP. Pillars 1 didn’t have that option when I played it, but from Pillars 2, I’m quite certain it will be the better way to play the game from now on.
It’s a good game, but at least in RtwP, it could be a real endurance test. Most of my combats that went wrong did so because I had decision fatigue from having to march through so many enemy mobs.
Free Windows 10 support ended for most people this past month, and the trend line of Linux usage has been quite clear leading up to this, as people prepared for the inevitable. An increase in Linux usage is also correlated to a drop in Chinese players, which did happen this month a little bit, but Linux usage is also trending up...
Who else has an incentive to do so other than Valve? Even when you buy a pre-built with Windows today, those things are subsidized by bloatware that’s already installed on the machine.
You’re on Lemmy, a site people use when they don’t like reddit. You don’t see any reason why there might also be a ton of people here who use Linux, an operating system you use when you don’t like Windows?
THPS offline mode is the same version as elsewhere, but it magically allows itself to operate offline when it thinks it’s running on a Steam Deck, which you can do with a launch parameter. Baldur’s Gate 3 actually has a native Linux version that is only officially supported for Steam Deck, and that might be closer to what you’re referring to.
It’s possible, but it’s also possible that they already had that offline segregation built into the code to support the Switch version, and that it was trivial to enable.
It can be a slow transition, but I did the same. I had equal space for Windows and Linux in 2017, predating the Proton years. When I built a machine in 2021, I saw how much I was using each OS, and it ended up being 1.5TB Linux and 500GB Windows. Whenever I build my next PC, I’m quite confident I won’t have any reason to use Windows at all, seeing as I haven’t even booted that partition in about a year. If there is some odd use case, like a firmware update utility for a peripheral that requires Windows or something, I’ll just install Windows briefly on a cheap mini PC I’ve got and then set it back to Bazzite when I’m done.
They kept the original title from the video, which is typically ediquette. The long and short of it is: from the perspective of someone who wants access to all of these games on modern platforms in an official capacity, especially for online play, it’s not a good package. There’s a lot of input delay, and the online experience is missing a lot of crucial features, not to mention some audio issues as a result of the emulation methods.
At the very least, this is the case on PlayStation. This same company put out the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary collection, and it had a lot of the same problems on consoles. The input lag in particular was less of a problem on PC. To my eyes/ears/hands, the input lag isn’t a problem in SF 30th on PC, but I haven’t measured it scientifically, nor am I so familiar with those old games that I’d notice something is off; on PC though, it passes the sniff test. It’s possible the same is the case for this collection on PC, which would still suck for console players, but it would at least mean that one of these versions is still good. Also, in the years after SF 30th, Digital Eclipse has focused on the documentary aspect of their work, and Max Dood doesn’t really mention this or care much about it at all, but it is a major factor in the appeal of DE’s collections.
I certainly thought I wanted to play Enter the Matrix but as Neo, but I felt Path of Neo jumped the shark with things like MC Escher, fire ants, and giant Smith.
Heroic has gone pretty well for me. I’ve found a few exceptions that are solved by the same trick though. If you’re running a game like The Thaumaturge, and it doesn’t boot on the GOG version, take a look at SteamDB. SteamDB’s entry for the game has a “depot” for VC 2019, VC 2022, and DirectX 2010. If you run winetricks on The Thaumaturge via Heroic and install those three dependencies, it works.
Mostly they bought or founded studios that didn’t produce a product. They bought the Killer Instinct devs, Double Helix, who mostly have now left and formed Quarter Up Games, working on the new Invincible Vs game. They put out a hero shooter called Crucible that launched and was quickly shut down. Their biggest success has been New World, which is a moderately successful MMO. They also forked CryEngine into Lumberyard, which found some favor in the market. Other than that, they’ve got some co-publishing deals, including for an upcoming Tomb Raider game, which may now be in jeopardy.
As it relates to gaming, no. This is a large company who thought they could muscle their way into a very competitive market and then found that they very much could not.
As one Reddit commenter put it: “I thought Capcom organised this circuit as a marketing tool for the game. Makes no sense to charge viewers to watch it. And esports is, unfortunately, still way too niche for that to be profitable.”
It’s shooting themselves in the foot, not their audience. Their audience has plenty of Street Fighter tournaments to watch.
They’re charging for it because the Japanese audience will pay for it, and I guess they don’t want to handle it differently abroad. Fighting games, at least up to this point, have been sustainable in a way that the rest of e-sports have not. The rest of e-sports was predicated on future growth, and fighting games have only grown as fast as the money coming in, in general. (2XKO is putting out $50k in pot bonuses for a game that doesn’t look to be earning that much, and the Saudis now own SNK and treat Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting like they’re Call of Duty.)
There was a ballot proposition in my state some years back to build a local casino. I’m not a gambler, but we all have our vices, and it’s possible it could stimulate the local economy, so I looked into it. Of the research I could find, the best-case scenario seemed to be that it maybe had no ill effects on the local populace. The worst case was that people susceptible to gambling addiction were now exposed to it when they otherwise wouldn’t have been, and that was devastating on those people’s lives. Not only is online gambling accessible to us anywhere, which is proving to be systemically problematic in things like sports betting apps now, Valve skirts current regulations to make it available to those under 21.
It’s confirmed: the next xbox will be a Windows PC box. It sounds very interesting that this will also be backwards compatible with Xbox games, including 360/One/Series games. I wonder if it’s just emulation, and how well that will work
It wasn’t always worth it back then, hence why it was supported with ads or a subscription. Did you ever patch your game back then? Even that was subsidized by ads; the devs didn’t host the patch files themselves in most cases. Live services, which are unfortunately all too often synonymous with online games, host their own servers, and you’re paying for them with microtransactions. If a game uses the platform’s matchmaking for peer to peer multiplayer, which was just about all of them on Xbox Live in its early days, then you’re using the servers your subscription was paying for. Even today, many still use these features. But you’re correct that the ones not using these features are still locked behind that subscription on consoles unless they’re free to play.
Gamepad for Linux Gaming? angielski
I’ve got a small backlog of games on my laptop (running Arch Linux with KDE) through Lutris. I usually play with a keyboard and a mouse, but since I sit pretty close to my screen (ik bad habit), it starts getting uncomfortable after a while. So I’ve been thinking about picking up a gamepad for some more relaxed, couch style...
PlayStation State of Play Japan airs this Tuesday, November 11 (blog.playstation.com) angielski
This Tuesday, we’re bringing you a special episode of State of Play running for more than 40 minutes, focusing on games created in Japan and across Asia, alongside a few other exciting updates.
To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
What's a recent game you've tried playing that isn't worth the hype? angielski
‘Grand Theft Auto VI’ Is Postponed Again — to November 2026 (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
At this rate, the PS6 will be out by the time this game is ready.
Sliced off the tip of my thumb, what are some good one handed games? angielski
Long story short, I was trying to make some pork buns and it ended with the tip of my thumb being sliced off, after hospital visit and six stitches and back. But I’m kind of bored out of my mind. Can’t do the steam deck. Can’t do really anything with a controller. I have a large library of games, most of which I haven’t...
Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Rise of the Tomb Raider (SteamDeck) (imgur.com) angielski
I love the Steamdeck. I’ve never had a gaming computer & I love this so much. Best $140 I’ve spent on gaming.
Which year was the most stacked for game releases? angielski
I’m thinking 2015 - Witcher 3, Undertale, and Kerbal Space Program are all classics. Fallout 4, Arkham Knight, and Cities Skylines were all excellent too, though fallout 4 and Arkham knight aren’t necessarily the best games in their respective series.
Assassin's Creed is a "forever brand" because Ubisoft supported huge risks with it, ex director says: "Whereas, say, EA, you get these awful execs and they never made games and they came from toothpaste companies" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Pillars of Eternity – Turn-Based Mode Beta Announcement Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Pillars 2’s turn based mode was such a great addition that it propelled me through the game a second time after I’d already finished it in RtwP. Pillars 1 didn’t have that option when I played it, but from Pillars 2, I’m quite certain it will be the better way to play the game from now on.
Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Free Windows 10 support ended for most people this past month, and the trend line of Linux usage has been quite clear leading up to this, as people prepared for the inevitable. An increase in Linux usage is also correlated to a drop in Chinese players, which did happen this month a little bit, but Linux usage is also trending up...
This is not it my dude... (m.youtube.com) angielski
We could have lived in a world where Hideo Kojima made a Matrix game, if only someone had told him he was offered to make one (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Nearly 90% of Windows Games now run on Linux, latest data shows — as Windows 10 dies, gaming on Linux is more viable than ever (www.tomshardware.com) angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.nz/post/29912814
Amazon cutting thousands of corporate roles [including video games] (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Oh, and turns out New World, Amazon’s one reasonably-sized success in gaming, is shutting down in 2026, and development is ending imminently.
Capcom doubles down on its decision to go pay-per-view during the Street Fighter League despite the fact that nobody really likes it (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
'Valve does not get anywhere near enough criticism': DayZ creator Dean Hall says the 'gambling mechanics' of Valve's monetization strategy 'have absolutely no place' in videogames (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Microsoft's ambitious new Xbox: Your entire Xbox console library, the full power of Windows PC gaming, and no multiplayer paywall (www.windowscentral.com) angielski
It’s confirmed: the next xbox will be a Windows PC box. It sounds very interesting that this will also be backwards compatible with Xbox games, including 360/One/Series games. I wonder if it’s just emulation, and how well that will work