nekusoul

nekusoul, miesiąc temu

I’d have a bit more symphaty if they at least tried to do the bare minimum before choosing the nuclear option.

Most notably, the PVE queues in LoL were infested with bots for years and you could tell them apart from real players before they even made their first move. Often times you’d be the only human player. If stuff like that wasn’t caught, I have serious doubts about their previous efforts to catch “real” cheaters.

nekusoul, miesiąc temu

Yup. At the very least, they shouldn’t have made it a requirement for TFT. If it were possible to cheat there that’d be more of a game design problem anyway.

nekusoul, miesiąc temu

That’s true. Personally though, it not being optional for any amount of time just shows that there’s no good argument to have it be mandatory in the first place.

nekusoul, miesiąc temu

Yup. I’ve always loved having a handheld device as a companion to my PC. The first few months with the Switch were great, but as time went on I just wanted a better designed Switch that’s also just a PC, particularly after getting hardware-banned for trying to fix some of the issues myself with homebrew apps.

I never would’ve thought that we’d actually get to see a device that’s real so quickly (anyone remember the Smach Z?), is actually pretty good and how quickly it’s now becoming its own market segment.

nekusoul, 2 miesiące temu

They’ve basically perfected keeping the community mostly happy by toeing the line between putting out solid base games and putting out greedy DLC.

What we’re now seeing is what happens when you don’t immediately change course after you skimp on making a good base game.

nekusoul, 3 miesiące temu

I just got the (first) completionist achievement after 60 hours plus however many I spent on the demo. I might try a few of the challenges and try to win with the final stake at least once, but after that I think I’m done.

It’s an absolutely amazing game and has secured its place in my deck building hall of fame beside Slay the Spire and Wildfrost.

nekusoul, 3 miesiące temu

I’ve been really looking forward to this one since watching the first short clips. Also helps that Pseudoregalia really got me into the mood for some more Metroidvanias recently.

nekusoul, 3 miesiące temu

Most games are great because they provide something unique or are polished to perfection, so it’s wild that they’ve made something that manages to be both their first attempt. Really looking forward to whatever they decide to do next.

nekusoul, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Played it a bit so far and the controls are really unique. Definitely needs a lot of learning to get somewhat competent, but also very powerful when mastered. I’d be surprised if this isn’t going to become my favorite platformer of the year.

That said, the tutorial level (1-0) feels rushed. Very confusing pacing and camera transitions as well as bad audio mixing. Thankfully I haven’t seen any of those issues again in any of the proper stages.

nekusoul, 5 miesięcy temu

A bad voice probably also just feels much better and complete than having no voice at all. At least based on the observations I’ve made when adding sound effects to my games as a hobbyist. A silent game just feels bad.

nekusoul, 5 miesięcy temu

I’m currently playing one of the games in Last Call BBS: 20th Century Food Court.

For anyone familiar with the Zachtronics catalog of games it’s like someone bolted one of the programming games onto one of their factory games, but the programming part is done using cables. Unsurprisingly, programming with cables gets quite messy, so even after a short break I usually have to restart a puzzle because I don’t recognize what part was supposed to do what anymore.

So yeah, great game, would recommend.

nekusoul, 5 miesięcy temu

It’s a great game but that’s indeed one big issue of the game. Most of the game is pretty lenient when it comes to difficulty, but there are a few bosses that come with pretty enormous difficulty spikes. I’d recommend looking up how to power-level when you reach those sections.

nekusoul, 7 miesięcy temu

Seems like they won’t release it before it’s in a state where it’ll “just work” on about machine, which makes sense, since that’s the thing that helped the Steam Deck to success.

To that end it’ll probably be a while before they can get there, particularly for machines with NVIDIA GPUs, assuming stuff like multi-monitor VRR and bug-free Wayland support is on the list of requirements.

nekusoul, 7 miesięcy temu

Finished three games this weekend:

1. The Talos Principle. I’ve had this game for years, but always bounced off during the second world. Finally stuck with it in anticipation of the sequel. Overall, not as difficult as I imagined, but some puzzles are quite frustrating, either because the solution feels like a bug or because the setup is long and a mistake requires a full reset. Still very enjoyable even though I didn’t care much about the story.
2. FF7 Remake Intergrade. Not much to say about this one. Very solid DLC and just the right length. Next up: Continuing my playthrough of the original FF7 from where Remake ended.
3. Cocoon. Probably my favorite game of the year beside Hi-Fi Rush. Really cool main mechanic that’s explored at a very enjoyable pace. All puzzle elements are clearly telegraphed as well and unintentional red herrings get blocked off to avoid confusion. Didn’t really see this game get noticed though, which is a shame.

nekusoul, 7 miesięcy temu

Played through the first (quite short) chapter today and it’s really promising so far. Really fun combination of movement mechanics, particularly the rope usage, which is something I’ve never seen in any other game.

It’s also quite good looking since it’s one of the first UE5 titles and has some gorgeous lighting and high overall image quality as a result. No issues running the game on Linux either.

nekusoul, 7 miesięcy temu

To expand a bit on the user base issue: Even on Reddit with its giant user base a game needs to have a decently sized audience in order to sustain a healthy and active subreddit.

Now, hypothetically speaking, even if this place had a tenth of the user base, it would mean that a game would still need to be 10x bigger in comparison in order to maintain an active community.

For now, only a very, very small handful of games are above that threshold.

nekusoul, 8 miesięcy temu

Yup. Ideally there should always some kind of indicator, like a bar, that lets you easily see how many steps there are and which one is selected.

Also: If there are graphics presets available, if there’s one that’s called “highest” or “max” then that should actually crank everything to the highest possible setting.

nekusoul, 8 miesięcy temu

Like, there is an in-universe explanation for why you are solving puzzles.

That observation actually made me go through my library looking for more examples and, yeah, it’s surprisingly few. There’s ‘The Entropy Centre’, which also falls into the “You’re a test subject” category. Other than that there’s the Zachtronics games, where the reason for puzzle-solving is because it’s your work.

nekusoul, 8 miesięcy temu (edited 8 miesięcy temu)

Simply going one step down from buying every “halo” product would already do wonders for a significant price/performance increase.

That said, when building a new PC I usually start with the recommendations listed at Logical Increments, which has a neat table sorted by budget. Anything at or above the “Suberb” should give you what you want at 1440p.

I’d also very much recommend a high refresh rate monitor, preferably 1440p, which has either GSYNC or FreeSync with a good variable refresh rate range. It really helps with maintaining a smooth presentation as you aren’t forced to keep your game running at a fixed framerate anymore.

nekusoul, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

This is just a hunch, but could there be a loophole possible with those promotions where you get a discount, but only if you own another related game? Maybe devs can just add discount for owning a free game and fake a permanent discount that way?

But as OP already said, we’d need a dev who’s already published a game to confirm these kind of theories.

Edit: This comment is probably right and it’s just an automatically applied bundle discount, but there’s a bug in the Wishlist where it shows the combined price of the bundled games. If that’s the case then Valve should really fix this ASAP, since it probably falls under false advertising in some countries, even if it’s a bug.

nekusoul, 9 miesięcy temu

Something I completely missed, due to the insanity that is the runtime fee, is that they’re also getting rid of their Plus subscription.

While Plus never had a bunch of benefits, it was basically the edition for individuals and very small teams who just wanted to get rid of the splash screen. These users would have to use Pro now, which is 5x more expensive at 2040$/year/seat.

The roadmaps over last few years already showed that they don’t really care about indie devs anymore, but now it feels like they’ve become actively hostile.

nekusoul, 9 miesięcy temu

When it comes to “classic” comedy, then Hi-Fi Rush is one of the highlights in recent times. Not only are there a lot of jokes in the dialogue that landed for me, all the cutscenes are also loaded with perfectly timed visual gags. Lots of humour hidden in the environment as well.

Other than that, any “serious” game that has a wonky physics engine can accidentally be pretty funny on accident. Slinging around corpses in Dark Souls 1 for example.

nekusoul, 9 miesięcy temu

Runs great on my 5000 series AMD CPU and 3000 series Nvidia GPU

Just specifying the series doesn’t really say much. Based on that and the release year you could be running a 5600X and RTX3060 or you could be running a 5950X and RTX3090. There’s something like a ~2.5x performance gap between those.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu

I was initially also a bit surprised by the amount of it, but after thinking about it for a bit, Blizzard seems to have engineered the perfect conditions for this to happen:

1. Create a massively successful game for PC, which also creates a giant group of people who care about the game.
2. Make a bunch of bad decisions, which are particularly bad for the existing user base.
3. Only then release the game on Steam, meaning there are no positive reviews from the launch period and a bunch of disgruntled former players, all of which are allowed to review the game because the game has become F2P.

nekusoul, 11 miesięcy temu

There aren’t a lot of genuinely great mobile games, but Threes! is certainly one of them. What I like most about it is that it actually understands what it means to be a mobile game: Short rounds, no constant focus required and it can be put down at any time since continuing a round is pretty so easy as the complete state of the game is always visible to you.

And for everyone who likes Threes!, I’ll also recommend Twinfold. It’s a game clearly inspired by Threes but with some dungeon crawling and rogue-like elements added on top. Maybe not as tightly designed as Threes!, but with just as much love and detail put into it and its presentation.

nekusoul, 11 miesięcy temu

Yup. Although it seems like Nintendo is believing it as well, considering they didn’t already shut the project down years ago. Either that or Nintendo just doesn’t want to risk a second Bleem ruling, legalizing emulation even further.

nekusoul, 11 miesięcy temu

A big problem with an unlocked framerate is the physics system, which you can generally solve in two ways:

1. You tie the physics to the framerate. Problem is that this introduces all sorts of weird behavior, caused by rounding errors and frequency of collision checks. For example, objects could start glitching through thin walls if their framerate is low because collisions are checked less often.
2. You run the physics at a fixed internal interval. This solves a lot of problem with the first approach, but also means that you have to put in effort to mask the fixed framerate through interpolation/extrapolation if you still want to keep the actual framerate unlocked.

So Wolfenstein New Order probably went with the first approach, made sure their physics system stays stable within a certain FPS range (30-60), and then locked the FPS beyond that.