skulblaka

skulblaka, 4 dni temu

Repacks are sourced from the scene, and the scene cracks video games. The fact that you get free video games out of it is a side effect.

Could you explain what you mean by this? Are the cracks just done for fun / for clout? I do admit I have wondered what keeps people so reliably cracking new games. Seems like a thankless job.

skulblaka, 21 dni temu

My Steam Deck doesn’t serve me ads. Not even the on-boot sale pop up that desktop Steam gives.

skulblaka, miesiąc temu

Last Judge was the only boss so far that almost completely filtered me from the game and I think the reason why was because of how very little warning you get before the big spin. I think like an extra quarter of a second on that startup animation would go a huge way toward making her way less annoying. Took me two days to complete the fight because I kept getting so tilted by getting hit with the spin.

The runback wasn’t difficult at all but it was very annoying. You can avoid all enemies on the route except for a single drill fly, but it takes a whole 30 seconds or more to make the run back to the boss fight. Don’t fuck up your platforming though, the sand worms do two damage, so missing a landing means you’re stuck spending the first 10 seconds of the fight trying to Bind with your cocoon silk if you want to survive more than one single hit (two, if you found all the act 1 mask shards).

To be honest I ended up finally defeating Judge by strapping on the Pollip Pouch and sticking her full of poison straight pins. I regret nothing and I do not consider this to be dishonorable.

skulblaka, miesiąc temu

Go west and south when you find the rain

skulblaka, miesiąc temu

Sting Shard trap also works great, I just threw one of those at every minion spawn and then they die in one Needle hit after. If you stack poison on it then you probably don’t even need the follow up hit but I don’t remember if you can have the Pollip Pouch before this fight or not.

Sting Shard is great in general though. Does 2x Needle damage in a trap you can place in midair, can be poisoned with Pollip Pouch for even more extended DPS, is AoE-capable and can hit multiple enemies, and is cheap enough to refill at 7 shell shards. It’s been my primary red tool so far all game, though I just got to Act 2 recently and I’m hoping to find something better here.

skulblaka, miesiąc temu

I am firmly convinced that we will continue to receive sporadic Terraria updates until Red literally dies

skulblaka, 2 miesiące temu

Yep. I didn’t have a huge issue with them charging for new DLC. If the DLC is good then fine, devs gotta eat.

When they sunset content that I paid for and tell me it’s no longer accessible, that’s when I dropped the game like a hot potato. Should have requested a refund, actually.

skulblaka, 2 miesiące temu

I prefer to clown on them relentlessly and let them be aware that everyone thinks their opinion is stupid and childish

Allowing this to go unchecked or ignored is how we got here in the first place. “Just ignore the trolls” led to the trolls having actual societal inertia. It is no longer enough to just ignore them, they need pushback.

skulblaka, 2 miesiące temu

Paradox DLCs also classically add a ton of content every single time. Sure Stellaris kind of sucks as a new player because there’s $260 of content, but it’s perfectly playable and even good with only the base version and then you pick whatever new content you like as you want more of it. Rimworld has the exact same strategy and I don’t see people complain about that. They release a complete game without any obviously missing parts and then keep bolting on cool new extra parts for the next 10 years.

All that to say, yeah this is kind of out of character for Paradox. Which does have me concerned about this.

skulblaka, 2 miesiące temu

Only the most braindead of gamers has a chance of bouncing off a single Souls fight more than maybe a dozen times. Two dozen if you’re especially thickheaded.

The thing about Soulslikes - and Fromsoft games in particular - is that they teach you new things primarily by killing you with them. Once you know whatever the thing is that this encounter is trying to teach you, you can blow through the entire thing at level 1 and people do it all the time. And I do mean “people” and not just professional streamers. SL1 is a popular challenge run for souls fans, specifically because once you know all the rules of the game it becomes very easy.

But there is no easing-in to learning new things in Dark Souls. You will get flattened into paste by some bullshit without warning, and it is up to the player to figure out a) why they died, and b) how to prevent that. Throwing yourself at the same brick wall 200 times with no change in strategy is a losing prospect no matter what game you’re playing, souls or otherwise.

The essence of “gitting gud” is literally just stopping for 10 seconds to think about why you failed last time. If you’re capable of that - and 99% of gamers definitely are, it’s a core component of game design - you’re capable of not only completing but excelling in Soulslikes.

People have been jerking off how difficult Souls games are for a decade and a half now and it’s never been true. Souls games are just rhythm games that don’t give you the rhythm onscreen. Find that rhythm (through observing patterns, and especially through listening to the boss fight music) and you’ll first-clear every single fight.

skulblaka, 2 miesiące temu

That’s fair.

I’m sorry, I just can’t stop myself from launching into this spiel every time I hear a comment like your first one. There’s a huge swath of gamers that I feel like would actually love my favorite game if they weren’t scared away from it by gamer circlejerk. It’s not my mission in life to defend Dark Souls to people who don’t care about it, but I often assume that mantle despite myself.

At the end of the day though it’s just a game about self reflection and personal growth, and I like that.

skulblaka, 2 miesiące temu

I made it all the way through Dark Souls 1 and 2 and about half of 3 before I even knew that was a thing. I was getting curbstomped by Dancer of the Boreal Valley and went online looking for discussions about her. Lo and behold:

this video is a re-upload because it looks like the original was removed

Tl;dw - Dancer’s song is in 3/4 time instead of 4/4 and she dances with her music. This gives her a crazy pattern that people always get got by because what feels like an opening actually isn’t. In order to defeat her you have to listen to her song and learn to dance with her.

Once I learned that it opened up an entire new world of understanding across every soulslike game I played and immediately halved my average number of boss attempts. No joke. Not every boss can be beaten blindfolded by just listening to their OST but it’ll give you good timing cues for the fight more often than it doesn’t.

skulblaka, 2 miesiące temu

This is a pretty textbook example of the Scunthorpe Problem.

skulblaka, 2 miesiące temu

Dwarf Fortress is, in fact, in a museum.

skulblaka, 2 miesiące temu

I find it offensive that the only effective way to combat this is to fight fire with fire and also make a big bitchy noise about this like the conservatives love to do. I have better things I would rather be doing with my life. But such are the times we live in I suppose.

skulblaka, 3 miesiące temu

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/29e4872f-319f-4b35-92ca-e49f4c413219.jpeg

skulblaka, 3 miesiące temu

The actual text of the EULA states:

"You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with the foregoing restrictions Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part.”

So no, it’s not misinformation, Nintendo is straight up telling you legally that they can and will do this. This is not a hypothetical. They may not have done it yet but there is no uncertain terminology around their ability and willingness to do so. The fact that they can even threaten this in their EULA is a huge warning flag that everyone in this thread is correct to be upset about.

skulblaka, 3 miesiące temu

Less AAA trash fires and better access to actual passion projects because they aren’t being drowned in a sea of mediocrity?

This is an absolute win on all sides

skulblaka, 3 miesiące temu

I buy things in early access for just such a reason. If it looks like something I’ll like, I’ll buy it early to support development. If it’s great then great. If it falls through then I’m out a bad investment of like, $10.

I’ve got probably a hundred indie games in my library that I’ve supported in exactly such a fashion, from raw pre-alpha to 1.0 release to post-release content update or dlc. They aren’t all winners. But many of them were worth the cost of investment and then some.

skulblaka, 3 miesiące temu

From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s basically a sandbox. Imagine if F:NV had no main quest but allowed you to create your own faction. You’re just unleashed onto the wasteland to do whatever and let everyone else respond to it.

That is to say, much of the fun comes from building drug running bandit empires.

skulblaka, 3 miesiące temu

Family share is actually great for this now.

It used to be that if anyone in the group was playing any game it would lock you out of playing anything else on the main account without kicking them off.

But they eased up on it now so you can both play at the same time as long as you aren’t playing the same game at the same time.

So just make a burner account for you or for your kids and family share the library to it and now you don’t even have to go offline unless everyone in the house wants to play BG3 simultaneously.

skulblaka, 3 miesiące temu

[…] because they don’t allow you to run older versions of games.

They do if the dev makes it available, I’m looking at four different versions of Terraria in the beta menu right now that stretch back four major versions. I’m pretty sure a couple games in my library somewhere have their entire update history in there, though I can’t think of one to name off the top of my head right now, that’s not a feature I use very often. [Edit: Rift Wizard is one that does precisely this, I knew I had at least one in here]

This is not true of all games, but it could be, either directly by game devs without Valve even having to care, or via pressure by Valve by just making older versions available whether the devs want it or not. I think the latter option is probably the better move, but there’s technically nothing stopping the former other than the game devs themselves.

There’s also a valid argument that making downpatching very easy would be a huge boon to piracy. This is a reasonable talking point no matter which side of that fence you sit on. It would also probably benefit modding as well, which I think is a more objective good but some game developers or more likely publishers would probably disagree.

skulblaka, 3 miesiące temu

I’ve played quite a lot of Nightreign.

In co-op you have fully infinite lives, your teammates can pick you up at any time and even if they fail to do so you’ll respawn back at a grace. If you fall over in a boss fight you have an unlimited timer to be picked back up and automatically rez at the end of the fight even if they don’t do it.

In solo you’re fighting a boss intended for 3 players and if you die twice the game is over completely.

Co-op, even with randoms, is much much easier by an order of magnitude. I’m usually a solo player in most games and thought this would be awful for me, it isn’t at all. Map pings are plenty of communication for most matches. It is, however, definitely better with friends on a voice call.

skulblaka, 3 miesiące temu

Regular enemies fall over like wet tissue, yeah.

Big boss fights in particular (and some of those in particular, in particular, looking at you Maris and/or Gnoster) often have either a gigantic AoE attack that is very difficult to dodge when you’re the only source of aggro, or else charge across the entire arena after every attack and have you spend half an hour in the fight, 27 minutes of which was spent just chasing the guy across the map. Not impossible, but very annoying.

But 90% of what makes coop easier in my opinion is just having a spare body around that can pull aggro so you can heal. Elden Ring base bosses were designed around being able to be beaten solo so they usually have big wide windows where you can get a breather if you need it. Nightreign bosses have much less of that because they expect you to be running 3 deep. Nerfing their defenses helps with the solo DPS race but it doesn’t really solve the problem that these fights were designed from the ground up for a team who is able to rotate aggro. Nightreign bosses were designed with a sort of raid-boss mentality.

I think if this game were going to be appropriately balanced for single player they would need to go in and edit a lot of the main bosses’ movesets. But that was never part of Nightreign’s design philosophy and trying to shoehorn it in now isn’t doing them any favors in my opinion. This is the equivalent of a World of Warcraft player complaining that they can’t solo all the endgame raid bosses. Sure, you can’t. They weren’t designed to be fought solo. We could try to nerf them down to the point that you can fight them solo, but then it’s no longer a raid boss, you’ve lost the essence of why people wanted to come to this fight in the first place.

Also, are the enemies designed for multiplayer, except in scaling? Everything I’ve seen looks like standard Fromsoft stuff, no weird abilities that just fuck over solo players.

Compare base game Morgott and Nightreign Morgott and I think you’ll see what I mean here. Boss enemies are much more cracked out with longer combos and shorter downtime than in Elden Ring proper, because the developers expect you to be trading aggro with your teammates to give yourself a heal break.

skulblaka, 4 miesiące temu

I prefer modern toxic over 2008-era XBL lobbies though.

Maybe that’s just me. But I get a lot less annoyed by a “GG ez” than I do by an 8-year-old shouting seven consecutive minutes of racial slurs into his mic at the top of his lungs.

skulblaka, 5 miesięcy temu

I was skeptical about it. I saw a lot of it being compared with Final Fantasy and I’ve been largely pretty disappointed with most Final Fantasy offerings since X.

Picked it up recently on the recommendation of another Lemming and, holy shit, this might be the best RPG I’ve ever played. Hands down, it’s that good. God bless the French. This game is making me feel things I haven’t felt since I was a teenager.

skulblaka, 5 miesięcy temu

“Americans think 100 years is a long time and Europeans think 100 km is a long distance”

I’m fortunate to not be in this situation anymore but the commute for my last job before this one was around 40mi. That’s 64km and a bit. Prior to that it was closer to 60mi or 96.5km, I was driving over an hour just to get to work. This is not uncommon for Americans, especially poor ones. If you can’t afford to live in the city but still need a job so you can eat, situations like this are sometimes unavoidable.

skulblaka, 5 miesięcy temu

Sure. But we’re in it now, and low fuel prices maintain the ability of the American working poor to survive. Changing this now would condemn millions of innocents to bankruptcy, homelessness and eventually death.

I don’t like it either, believe me. I want walkable cities, and sensible zoning, and affordable housing. But we don’t have that and there isn’t a magic switch we can throw to just make it happen. We’ve painted ourselves into a corner about this.

skulblaka, 5 miesięcy temu

Hackintoshes have been around since the 80s and this has never happened.

In 2009-2012 Apple did levy a successful lawsuit against Psystar for doing this in a business environment. But they’ve never enforced bricking a consumer Hackintosh and I expect they never will.

skulblaka, 5 miesięcy temu

Well it sure as hell didn’t work on my Tarnished in Elden Ring proper

skulblaka, 5 miesięcy temu

Sounds like how Super Mario RPG did it which was overall pretty excellent.

I haven’t played the game but if that’s true I’d still consider that well and truly turn based.

skulblaka, 5 miesięcy temu

There is at least one occasion where NPCs just straight up lie to you in quest directions though. I can’t think of it off the top of my head but I remember it existing because I complained about it on a forum.

On one hand - great worldbuilding! “Local dumbass gives you bad directions” is a funny and memorable point on top of what might otherwise be a forgettable side quest. On the other hand, I spent the better part of four hours looking for whatever egg mine or ancestral tomb or whatever it was he asked me to find before getting fed up and having UESP tell me “lol no actually it’s off in this complete other direction”, and I’m pretty sure I assassinated that NPC after I turned in his quest.

skulblaka, 5 miesięcy temu

This was me lmao. On my first playthrough of Morrowind as a teenager I dicked around and did everything except the main quest for ages. Around level 18 I decided to actually progress the main quest. Hasphat, check. Arkngthand, no sweat. Talk to Sharn Gra-Muzgob, she says to fetch the Skull of Llevule Andrano. Cool, go to Andrano’s tomb, looks kind of familiar. Where is the Skull of Llevule Andrano? Cause it sure ain’t here in his tomb. Whoopsie.

Never found the skull, never progressed the quest, had to start a new character to actually experience the main story. I wonder how many potential Nerevarines failed to ascend due to missing minor quest items. Wish I could ask em that inside the Cavern of the Incarnate.

skulblaka, 6 miesięcy temu

I was under the impression that WoW classic came about because nu-WoW was hemorrhaging players to other, better MMO’s, such as FFXIV and Guild Wars 2.

Not much need for a GW Classic if GW2 is still going strong.

skulblaka, 6 miesięcy temu

Personally I’ve been cooking through the System Shock games. The SS1 remake was my first proper introduction to the series and I loved it. I was pretty excited for the impending System Shock 2 Enhanced Edition but it, uh… doesn’t really seem like it’s going to be very enhanced. Especially compared to what you can do with just modding the base game. So rather than keep waiting for that I spent ten bucks on SS2 Classic and have been enjoying myself greatly.

I’ve always liked SHODAN just via cultural osmosis, but now having actually played the games she stars in, that’s cranked up to 12. I fucking love SHODAN. She might be one of the best examples of an evil rogue AI in any media, and also has an actual reason for going rogue besides just “mankind builds a machine too smart for them and suffers the consequences”. The entire story setup is so believable.

Anyway, tl;dr, the System Shock games are hella good and the remake is especially very good. Particularly because controlling classic SS1 is more like playing an operating system than playing a video game. Also SHODAN. step on me again metal mommy

skulblaka, 6 miesięcy temu

Oh man, you think that was uncomfortable, try playing the VR version.

It makes you virtually kill yourself at least twice and implies mind control of the player.

Shit’s wild.

skulblaka, 6 miesięcy temu

Wrangling my Nvidia drivers into Mint also took a couple hours for me but I haven’t had problems afterward

skulblaka, 6 miesięcy temu

BRC is an incredible replacement though. It’s not quite the same as OG Jet Set Radio, and I think that’s okay, but it is very clearly walking around with JSR’s bones inside. Besides which it has probably my favorite video game soundtrack from the past decade.

skulblaka, 6 miesięcy temu

Perfect Dark, on the other hand, totally still holds up today in my opinion, and there’s a decompilation project that works great on PC and Steam Deck.

skulblaka, 6 miesięcy temu

Depends on the game I think. Guilty Gear is doing better than ever with Strive and actually has a decent population base for the first time. I do take some issue with the DLC character seasons but it’s hard to fault them too much for following what has become standard practice, and they’ve been continually releasing high quality content in every update. Their netcode needs some work but the game part of the game is pristine, it’s my favorite fighting game by a mile and as they continue to add in the rest of the old roster there’s becoming less and less reason to try and play the older Guilty Gear games.

skulblaka, 7 miesięcy temu

This entire argument can be made identically for Half-Life 1 and 2 requiring people to upgrade their PCs to be able to play them.

skulblaka, 7 miesięcy temu

I know more about Mario Kart 64 shortcuts now than at any time during when I was actually playing the game.

skulblaka, 7 miesięcy temu

Yeah. Their proper remake of SS1 was excellent and I was looking forward to something similar for SS2. Especially a balancing pass on the skills to make some of them not completely useless.

Even remaking SS2 on the engine they used for 1 would have been welcome news, but it’s not clear that they’re doing that either.

skulblaka, 7 miesięcy temu

In case you weren’t aware (it sounds like you’re not) :

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Cataclysm

This isn’t going to teach you how to play but it’s an excellent reference wiki

skulblaka, 7 miesięcy temu

Personally, I don’t really go out socially. Like ever.

So once a week or so when my friends go out to the bars and spend $50 on food and beers, I might spend a $20 on a game that’s on sale and get the same or better return on my time and money for it. If I buy a game for $20 and spend five hours on it and never touch it again, that’s about equivalent to a night out with the boys, both in dollars spent and in hours enjoyed.

I’ve built up a collection of indie games on this mindset and I don’t see any of it as wasted. If I get a lower return than $5 per hour enjoyed then I’ll refund the game or not recommend it for others. But I have a ton of games that have kept me well entertained for 3-6 days for the price of a beer and a kebab. I consider that good value.

skulblaka, 7 miesięcy temu

In a better timeline this is one of the many things a Neuralink could be good for

skulblaka, 7 miesięcy temu

I’ve never once had to wait more than 5 seconds to start loading in to a match no matter what time of day or night it is. Literally no other game has ever done this. They’re prioritizing their time-to-game over having actual players in your match, and this definitely means filling slots with bots. How egregious it is will depend on the time and day and current online player count. But when I’m instantly loading a full game of 10 people at 3am on a Tuesday I know something’s fucky.

Other people have done actual research into the matter but I had my suspicions, just from playing the game, by the third day or so after release.

skulblaka, 7 miesięcy temu

All the best games of the last 10 years have been built and published by teams smaller than 20 people.