Valve tried trackballs with the Steam Controller but ditched them for trackpads that emulate trackball physics. They found small ones felt bad but big ones were too bulky and heavy. Clearly they like that idea, since every controller-like thing they’ve designed since includes pads.
If you haven’t done so already, I suggest you start taking notes while playing the game. You’ll need to keep track of what you have to come back to a place for.
I recommend you avoid games with continuous movement early on. Moving with joystick feels very bad until you get your VR legs. Also get the Lab, Valve’s free VR minigame collection.
Today’s game is Team Fortress 2. This one’s going to be a bit short, due to just not being able to get many screenshots for it. For years it’s been an annual tradition of mine to play this game on Christmas Eve. Though I’ve stopped playing it for a while, it’s fun to go and kick back in some matches and mess around,...
This game is timeless. It was released in a time when the arena FPS was on its way out and server browsers were still the norm for PC online multiplayer, yet it has hardly aged.
Did you know you can throw objects in Portal 2? You pretty much use your player camera as a cannon to fling objects by letting go of them while moving your view. This is not intended, so clever throws can just bypass or break some puzzles....
I haven’t logged into Steam for several days now. All my gaming recently has been rRootage, which I recently rediscovered after looking around on Flathub for unrelated software....
Today’s game is Pokemon Platinum. My steam deck decided today was a lovely day to have a stroke and crash so hard the power button won’t respond. Seeing as how I had a whole day with nothing to do and with me being in a Pokemon mood the last few days, I elected to play Platinum to get a Sinnoh dex to add to my Unova Dex....
With hindsight, I view this generation of the Pokémon series as an awkward transition to 3D. It’s pretty apparent in the graphics and UI that Diamond/Pearl/Platinum are essentially upgraded GBA games. 3D effects occur only sparingly, and I remember the backpack UI bizarrely having an iPod-style scroll wheel on the touchscreen.
The following generation got more adventurous with the 3D and started using the DS touchscreen more effectively. The “sprite puppet” effect in Black/White looked janky as heck but I honestly loved it anyway. The character sprites in Cassette Beasts worked similarly, which I guess is another reason I liked that game.
Also, man, the pacing of battle animations and UI is so slow in this generation.
Today’s game is Silent Hill 2 Remake. I had a whole post typed but accidentally closed the tab before submitting. I finally finished the Hospital after two days of putting it off. I’m hoping the prison will be swift and painless because that part is terrifying with the large open ceilings, even with the Chainsaw....
We are always allowed to admire oddly hi-fi graphics. I love shaking the vodka bottles in Half-Life Alyx. The liquid inside waves and bubbles and if you hold it up to a light source, the light glows through!
This is hardly news. Path of Exile has server queues at the start of every major launch. I think it’ll be great news if absolutely nothing goes wrong with the launch.
My build for Settlers league was the most fun map blaster I’ve ever made. I made a melee witch (occultist) with Viper Strike that could one-shot entire packs and some map bosses! Just running up to a pack and slapping it and running off.
It was absolute garbage at bossing, though. The survivability was softcore/10.
I had another day where i just kind of Wanted to take things easy, so i booted up minecraft Wii U edition after discovering i had a ROM backup on my external SSD. So i fired it up in Cemu along with the latest version and booted into a survival world how i would when i was younger. Easy mode, bonus chest, and the Gamma cranked...
I just got finished with beating Riven for the first time. I adored the way the game seeped into my real life with pages of notes about the world I was discovering. Are there any other games that can match this feeling? That really work best when you have a journal in hand?
Her Story is a detective game that starts with you sitting at a computer, not even knowing what mystery you’re supposed to investigate. You have to search through the computer’s database for police interview footage to figure that out. Then you have to figure out the answer to the mystery you think you need to solve. The interview clips have a lot of details for you to track and link together. I had to make a big chunky note for this game and even had to implement a system to keep track of the likelihood of the statements.
If you want more point and click adventures, try the Submachine series, which was originally in Flash but now remastered as a ten-game compilation called Submachine: Legacy. The developer trained as an architect, so you get to admire intricate, hand-drawn architecture porn. It starts off as a typical 00s Flash room escape, until you realize it was all a… hallucination. You realize that you’re actually going to explore a vast, utterly lonely underground world as you try to track down the only person who seems to know how to get out. Teleportation and parallel universe travel come up a lot in the series, so keeping notes will be useful. Incredible dark ambient soundtrack, too.
I left my computer to go out with friends to have wings. I was thinking about the puzzle I left behind on the trip there. I was trying to draw the patterns on my phone while we waited. This game gets into your head.
I’m not familiar with the games you mentioned, so I went to check them out. And look what we have on the Steam store page!
Reviews
“It shares some of the feeling of Her Story, albeit featuring today’s technology and with less of a focus on the crime angle. But it has the same small moments of revelation, all of which come together to form a story in its own neat yet meandering way.” Rock Paper Shotgun
Today’s game is Portal 1. I didn’t really have time to start the Hospital in Silent Hill 2’s New Game+, but i wanted to play something. So i downloaded Portal 1 and played through a few of the challenge maps for the Gold Medals. I’ve been meaning to get the achievements out of the way at some point anyways. I got Gold in...
About that blood. Valve forgot to remove it before submitting the game for age ratings, and despite multiple updates over the years, they’ve never bothered to address this. Also, I wish Portal 2 had hard-mode remix chambers like 1 did.
All (action)games I know of don’t have real and proper surface collision detection, except some physics games. Just an example: If my Char hits something or someone the weapon goes straight through without any physical reaction, it just counts the damage I’ve done. Are there any games out there, in which physics are...
There are high-polish VR shooters, like Half-Life Alyx, Boneworks, and Vertigo 2, which obviously care about where your hands and other body parts are. Boneworks attempts melee combat, but it’s pretty janky. In Half-Life Alyx, you use your hands to rummage around junk to find resources. In Vertigo 2, if you get hit by arrows or thrown spears, you have to pull them out of your body, and there’s a section where you steer a boat.
LocoCycle, despite its appearance, is not actually a racing game, but an action/adventure fighting game that happens to take place on the open road....
I recommend it, but in response to the first part of your comment, I guess it depends on what parts of Pokémon you dislike.
Mechanically, I see the combat as more matured and nuanced. Battles are almost always 2v2. It uses a board game-inspired system where you pay action points to use a move; you gain 2 each turn, plus a bonus one when you hit with type advantage. The type system has interesting interactions: advantaged moves apply status effects, which give you setups for comboing moves together, instead of nuking opponents with double damage. For example, lightning ⇒ earth turns the target into glass, then metal ⇒ glass spreads damaging shards onto the battlefield. The game cuts down the grinding as well, with your character gaining levels instead of your monster tapes, so you can get to using a new tape with no catch-up grind at all. Stickers are a powerful evolution of the move system. You can freely move stickers around and they can appear with rare mods, ARPG-style, that customize how the sticker works. As an equivalent of Pokémon abilities are passive stickers, which trigger with certain conditions, which let you “program” a tape. There’s also an impressively robust fusion system that comes with an interesting strategic tradeoff: you get bigger stats in a fusion with your partner but lose action economy.
The game’s plot is a fresh one that breaks the standard formula of creature collectors. There’s a side quest that makes a nod to the usual “gym leader series”, but the plot is focused on discovering the mysteries of the island you’re stuck on and finding a way home. There’s a memorable and surprising cast of characters and a clear anti-capitalist message (you fight vampire landlords). I like the worldbuilding, too. It avoids the usual uncomfortable questions surrounding creature collectors, like notably the whole capturing and fighting part — you record images of monsters to tape and transform into them instead.
I find the monster designs imaginative and distinct. The roster is must less focused on elemental animals and more on folklore and cryptids, which ties into the overall plot of the game. The boss designs are also really cool, but that’s a spoiler.
Also, there are mods.
There might be reasons you still won’t like Cassette Beasts. The combat is still turn-based. The post-game is pretty thin, though I suppose this update is expanding that. You have to collect crafting materials to trade with NPCs for stuff, but only a few materials are scarce enough to care about. The game is pretty easy on the default difficulty, but there are settings to make it harder.
I got my Steam Controller the day they were released and still use it. The stick has never drifted, though I also prefer to use the left pad for most “left stick” purposes. The real problem I’m having with the stick is that the rubbery coating on top is rubbing off, which is kind of gross and makes it harder than it should be to use it for an extended time. Good thing pads never drift! The rough texture of the pads has stayed remarkably well; no smooth and shiny spots.
Mine also has the usual things after almost a decade of use. The A button feels a little soft and the right trigger sounds a bit clangy. The body is plastic faces screwed together. It’s a tiny bit creaky but remarkably sturdy, with no flex spots other than the back keys, which are pressed with the flexible parts of the battery cover.
Overall, it’s lasted me a good long while and I expect it to go longer. I even bought a backup from someone after they were discontinued.
They have mentioned before that they gave up on episodic development, which tacitly ditches Episode 3. The episodes ended up not being that much easier or faster to make and in a time when PC games in retail was still kind of relevant, it was a pain to make, distribute, and get shelf space for.
You will need games that have crossplay between PC and Xbox One so you can play together across different platforms. Multiple people have suggested Left 4 Dead 2, but that doesn’t have crossplay. Most of the shooters I personally play don’t have it, but there definitely are shooters with crossplay.
Here are my recommendations that have crossplay:
Borderlands 3 — Collect wacky guns, travel the universe, and shoot bad guys together. The previous games in the series don’t have crossplay.
…Yeah, that’s it for crossplay shooters I recommend. For crossplay games that aren’t shooters:
Overcooked! All You Can Eat — Chaotic co-op cooking. Work together to prepare, cook, and serve food in increasingly absurd scenarios: in the middle of the highway, on an iceberg, in a hot air balloon that crashes into a different restaurant.
Ultimate Chicken Horse — Platformer where you build the levels together and then race to the finish. You only score if someone died, so you need to make the level extra dangerous.
Moving Out 2 — Goofy co-op game where your group plays as a ridiculously reckless moving company. Carry furniture from the house and shove or throw it into the truck. No one will notice if you break all the windows.
If everyone is on PC, things will open up a good bunch. Old-school networked games generally still work. You can go FFA deathmatch in your old favourites or in newer arena shooters, like Warsow or Disco Dodgeball.
As the title says. PS5 is a pain in the arse for not putting patch notes on the console and I hate having to scour the internet to try and find what’s new in an update. Whether it be “join our Discord” or Facebook pages or hoping someone posts it in a subreddit....
If patch notes are announced in an official blog, it’s likely that it has an RSS or Atom feed. You can subscribe to the blog from an RSS reader and it’ll appear in the feed.
And if you haven’t heard of RSS readers before, welcome to the world of being able to subscribe to almost any website you want! The news and webcomics come to you, not the other way around.
Update: an example.
I open my reader (Inoreader), select “Add feed”, and enter https://www.teamfortress.com/. It detects the TF2 official blog and I select “Follow” to add it to my feeds. Now, when TF2 updates and patch notes are posted, I can refresh my reader to see the latest patch notes.
I’ve been out of the RSS metagame for a long while, so I don’t have any particular recommendation. I’ve just been using Inoreader on mobile as well for the past several years since it works for my purposes. There very well could be better choices out there but there’s no urgency for me to switch.
I need some suggestions on what to play. Single Player games only. Most of the games make me feel lonely and alone. In most of the games, the protagonist has to deal with the problems on their own, like Control, Crysis, Ghost of Tsushima, God of War (I liked the original 6 more than the new ones, even though the new ones had...
Honestly, my issue with it is that it gets mired in real MMO tedium when it didn’t need to simulate that. Stuff like running between NPC traders to trade your supplies up for good equipment and other stuff like having a gigantic pile of consumables.
And of course, I finish the final boss with all the best consumables still in my inventory. The game never pressed me to use them, so I always saved them for something more important. “Oh, that was the final boss. Guess I should have been eating more sandwiches.”
The plot and worldbuilding are still really cool. Just don’t get into MMOmaxxing.
Of course Atari’s new handheld includes a trackball, spinner, and numpad (arstechnica.com)
Clips from what I'm playing 🏌 4D Golf (sh.itjust.works)
Have you ever read Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott?...
Playing Tunic first time
Hi I am playing Tunic first time and looking to understand if I locked myself out of game content....
They're waiting for you Pioneer. In the test, chamber. (lemmy.world)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/23725633...
Clips from what I'm playing 🟥⚔️🟦 Beat Saber [CW: Flashing lights, VR perspective] (sh.itjust.works)
My gift for Christmas is sore arms from playing Beat Saber. It’s a serious workout playing high-difficulty maps....
Day 161 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I’ve been playing until I forget to post Screenshots (lemmy.world)
Today’s game is Team Fortress 2. This one’s going to be a bit short, due to just not being able to get many screenshots for it. For years it’s been an annual tradition of mine to play this game on Christmas Eve. Though I’ve stopped playing it for a while, it’s fun to go and kick back in some matches and mess around,...
What games have you sunk the most time into?
I was looking at my playtime for some games and realized I have over 450 hours in PlanetSide 2....
Clips from what I'm playing 🏀 Cheesing co-op levels in Portal 2 (sh.itjust.works)
Did you know you can throw objects in Portal 2? You pretty much use your player camera as a cannon to fling objects by letting go of them while moving your view. This is not intended, so clever throws can just bypass or break some puzzles....
Clips from what I'm playing | rRootage: pure, abstract bullet hell (sh.itjust.works)
I haven’t logged into Steam for several days now. All my gaming recently has been rRootage, which I recently rediscovered after looking around on Flathub for unrelated software....
Godot Engine – 2024 Showreel (www.youtube.com)
Day 146 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I’ve been playing until I forget to post Screenshots (pxscdn.com)
Today’s game is Pokemon Platinum. My steam deck decided today was a lovely day to have a stroke and crash so hard the power button won’t respond. Seeing as how I had a whole day with nothing to do and with me being in a Pokemon mood the last few days, I elected to play Platinum to get a Sinnoh dex to add to my Unova Dex....
Day 144 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I’ve been playing until I forget to post Screenshots (pixelfed.social)
Today’s game is Silent Hill 2 Remake. I had a whole post typed but accidentally closed the tab before submitting. I finally finished the Hospital after two days of putting it off. I’m hoping the prison will be swift and painless because that part is terrifying with the large open ceilings, even with the Chainsaw....
Path of Exile II Queue Warning Issued as 1 Million Early Access Redemptions Are Hit - Insider Gaming (insider-gaming.com)
Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop, a space repair shop game with in-depth repair gameplay (manuals, diagnostic devices, parts and workshop appliances), released on Steam (store.steampowered.com)
Day 142 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I’ve been playing until I forget to post Screenshots (pixelfed.social)
I had another day where i just kind of Wanted to take things easy, so i booted up minecraft Wii U edition after discovering i had a ROM backup on my external SSD. So i fired it up in Cemu along with the latest version and booted into a survival world how i would when i was younger. Easy mode, bonus chest, and the Gamma cranked...
Vertigo 2: Into the Aether - Reveal Trailer (youtu.be)
'I want to acknowledge that we messed up': NZXT addresses concerns about its controversial Flex gaming PC rental program and commits to taking action (www.pcgamer.com)
This response is not nearly enough in my book.
What are some great games that require you to bust out a notebook and pen?
I just got finished with beating Riven for the first time. I adored the way the game seeped into my real life with pages of notes about the world I was discovering. Are there any other games that can match this feeling? That really work best when you have a journal in hand?
Day 140 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I’ve been playing until I forget to post Screenshots (pixelfed.social)
Today’s game is Portal 1. I didn’t really have time to start the Hospital in Silent Hill 2’s New Game+, but i wanted to play something. So i downloaded Portal 1 and played through a few of the challenge maps for the Gold Medals. I’ve been meaning to get the achievements out of the way at some point anyways. I got Gold in...
Are there games with real collision detection?
All (action)games I know of don’t have real and proper surface collision detection, except some physics games. Just an example: If my Char hits something or someone the weapon goes straight through without any physical reaction, it just counts the damage I’ve done. Are there any games out there, in which physics are...
Today's featured article on Wikipedia: PlayStation (console) (en.wikipedia.org)
Random Screenshots of my Games #53 - LocoCycle (lemmy.world)
LocoCycle, despite its appearance, is not actually a racing game, but an action/adventure fighting game that happens to take place on the open road....
What are your favorite "gotta go in blind" games?
Which games blow your mind, but only if you know nothing about them in advance?...
Bug Fables - 5th Anniversary - v1.2 New Content Trailer (youtu.be)
Path of Exile 2: Early Access Gameplay Trailer (www.youtube.com)
Monster catcher Cassette Beasts adds Steam Workshop support and a new battle mode (www.gamingonlinux.com)
deleted_by_moderator
Half-Life 2 - 20th Anniversary Update (www.half-life.com)
Half-Life 2 is currently 100% off for its 20th anniversary, plus a major update (store.steampowered.com)
Bonus: it also seems that the episodes have been rolled into the base game. Full details of the anniversary update....
Games to play with my late 40s brothers?
Hi...
Steam Game Recording is now out of beta (store.steampowered.com)
Balatro - Friends of Jimbo (Pack 2) | Reveal Trailer (youtu.be)
Are there any apps or sites that collate all the patch notes for games?
As the title says. PS5 is a pain in the arse for not putting patch notes on the console and I hate having to scour the internet to try and find what’s new in an update. Whether it be “join our Discord” or Facebook pages or hoping someone posts it in a subreddit....
GANGSTALK: A Horror Game from the POV of Your Stalkers (www.youtube.com)
Suggestions? Games that won't make me feel alone?
I need some suggestions on what to play. Single Player games only. Most of the games make me feel lonely and alone. In most of the games, the protagonist has to deal with the problems on their own, like Control, Crysis, Ghost of Tsushima, God of War (I liked the original 6 more than the new ones, even though the new ones had...