I didn’t hate it, but it just wasn’t Fallout: New Vegas, and I walked away a little disappointed after hoping for a new Fallout-like game.
Some of the major elements from Fallout just weren’t there:
Fallout provided neat perks/traits that substantially-impacted how one played; that’s a signature part of the series. The great bulk of the perks in The Outer Worlds were things like small percentage increases. They didn’t have a significant impact on how the game played out.
The weapons didn’t “feel” very different other than across classes, with the exception of the “science weapons”, so there wasn’t a lot of variety in gunplay over the course of a game.
While the world was open in that one could technically always backtrack, there wasn’t much reason to do so.
Most of the content was in “cities”. Yeah, sure, there was wilderness, and maybe that added a sense of scale, but it was mostly just filler between cities. If you’re wandering around in Fallout: New Vegas or Fallout 4, there was interesting content all over to just stumble into. One only really got that in cities.
Not a lot by way of meaningful, world-affecting decisions. Okay, you can also criticize Fallout 4 on these grounds, but if you were hoping for a Fallout: New Vegas…
There were some things that I did like. In particular:
It was pretty stable and bug-free. The Fallout series has had entrants from a number of teams, but one consistent element has been a lot of bugs at release.
A few days ago, EA re-released two of its most legendary games: The Sims and The Sims 2. Dubbed the “The Legacy Collection,” these could not even be called remasters. EA just put the original games on Steam with some minor patches to make them a little more likely to work on some modern machines....
No games that lead to players being pissed at other players, even outside of the confines of the game. I’ve had that happen with, for example, Secret Hitler, so no Secret Hitler....
I really don’t like Monopoly. It’s very widespread in the US, I’d guess one of the top three games, but it has a lot of technical failings as a board game.
I think that it’s actually a really good example of why popular American board games are not that fantastic. Europe has a stronger board game tradition, stuff like Settlers of Catan. I really didn’t appreciate how bad things were until I spent a while poking at European games.
Monopoly has a hard-to-predict game time. One thing that a lot of European games that I’ve looked at do is to have a fairly-predictable amount of time a game will last. That makes it much easier to plan fitting a game into a schedule.
Monopoly eliminates some players from the game early. They then have nothing to do while the rest of the players continue to play.
Monopoly tends to wind up in a situation where a losing player will know well in advance that they’re going to lose. Yeah, they can concede, but it’s not a lot of fun to play the thing out.
There’s a limited amount by way of strategy and it’s not very sophisticated. There aren’t a lot of variable paths that one weighs against each other. When it’s not your turn, there’s not much you can be planning or doing, just watching the person whose turn it is play. This gets more annoying the more players are in the game.
It has a high RNG dependence.
Most of the actual tasks you spend time doing aren’t very interesting. Linley Henzell, who wrote the roguelike Crawl, has a famous quote, something like “everything you do in a game should be an interesting decision, and if it isn’t interesting, it should be removed from the game”. I think that that is a very true element of game design. The banker counting out money to players or players paying rent or whatever is just drudge work – they aren’t making interesting decisions.
The game was originally designed by a Georgist as an educational game to argue for a land value tax. It wasn’t principally to entertain.
I really wish that a new, better game would replace Monopoly in the US as the big non-ancient (checkers, chess) board game.
Ironvest.com (nee blur.com, nee abine.com) also provides a “masked card” service (which can be independently useful, as it can have a bogus name and address, useful if you don’t want someone harvesting that). Used to be with cash payments that vendors couldn’t build that kind of database. That being said, they charge an annual fee for their service, and your bank may provide free temporary numbers. And not every vendor will accept their masked cards (or those prepaid cards from stores), I assume because those vendors want to link them to your identity. There are legit reasons for vendors to want to do that, like to reduce fraud, but if you don’t want your name in vendor databases, it’s a way to avoid it.
I used to play RTS games like Warhammer, then got into Heroes of Might and Magic and its spin-offs like Pennon and Battle. I’ve also played XCOM 2 and Age of Wonders 4. Any other must-play series you’d recommend?...
Unciv is a free, open-source reimplementation of Civilization V. It doesn’t have all the eye candy and music and such that the series is famous for but as a result of not having it runs responsively on a phone.
I mean, it’s not beautiful, but for strategy games and other high-replayability games, I don’t find that eye candy buys that much. Like, I feel like a good strategy game is one that you should spend a lot of time playing as you master the mechanics, and no matter how pretty the graphics, when you’ve seen them a ton of times…shrugs I think that eye candy works better for genres where you only see something once, like adventure games, so that the novelty is fresh. But what you like is what you like.
If it’s too complicated – and the game does have a lot of mechanics going on, even by strategy game standards – Illwinter also has another series, Conquest of Elysium, which is considerably simpler, albeit more RNG-dependent. I personally prefer the latter, even though I know Dominions. Dominions turns into a micromanagement slogfest when you have a zillion armies moving around later in the game. Especially if you have one of the nations that can induce freespawn, like MA Ermor. Huge amounts of time handling troop movement.
It might be more tolerable if you play against other humans – I mean, if you’re playing one turn a day or something, I imagine that it’s more tolerable to look at what’s going on. But if you’re playing against the computer, which is what I do, it has more micromanagement than I’d like.
Trying to optimize your build is neat, though. There are a lot of mutually-exclusive or semi-compatible strategies to use, lots of levers to play with, which I think is a big part of making a strategy game interesting.
I think that Dwarf Fortress has a higher learning curve, but if you’re wanting a strategy game that has a gentle learning curve, I agree, Dominions probably isn’t the best choice. It also doesn’t have a tutorial/introduction system – it’s got an old-school, nice hefty manual.
Hmm. “Strategy” is pretty broad. Most of the new stuff you have is turn-based, but you’ve got tactics stuff like X-COM and strategy stuff. If we’re including both real-time and turn-based, and both strategy and tactics…What do I enjoy? I tend to lean more towards the milsim side of strategy…
https://store.steampowered.com/app/394360/Hearts_of_Iron_IV/. Another Paradox game. I think unless someone is specifically into World War II grand strategy, I’d recommend Stellaris first, which I’d call a lot more approachable. Real time, grand strategy. I haven’t found myself playing this recently – the sheer scope can be kind of overwhelming, and unlike 4X games like Stellaris, it doesn’t “start out small” – well, not if you’re playing the US, at any rate.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1489630/Carrier_Command_2/. Feels a little unfinished, but it keeps pulling me back. Really intended to be played multiplayer, but you can play single-player if you can handle the load of playing all of the roles concurrently. Real-time tactics.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2008100/Rule_the_Waves_3/. Lot of ship design here, fun if you’re into gun-era naval combat. Turn-based strategy (light strategy), with real-time tactics combat. Not beautiful. There is a niche of people who are super-into this.
I agree with the other user who recommended Steel Division 2. If you’ve played Wargame: Red Dragon or earlier Eugen games, which are really designed to be played multiplayer, you know that the AI is abysmal. I generally don’t like playing multiplayer games, and persisted in playing it single-player. Steel Division 2’s AI is actually fun to play against single-player. Real-time tactics, leaning towards the MOBA genre but without heroes and themed with relatively-real-world military hardware.
XCOM-alikes. I didn’t like XCOM 2 – it felt way too glizy for me to tolerate, too much time looking at animations, but I may have just not given it a fair chance, as I bailed out after spending only a little time with the game. I have enjoyed turn-based tactics games in the X-COM series and the genre in the past – squad-based, real-time tactics games. Problem is that I don’t know if I can recommend any of them in 2024 – all the games in that genre I’ve played are pretty long in the tooth now. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1620/Jagged_Alliance_2_Gold/ is fun, but very old. https://store.steampowered.com/app/254960/Silent_Storm_Gold_Edition/ is almost as old, has destructable terrain, but feels low-budget and unpolished. There were a number of attempts to restart the Jagged Alliance series after 2 and a long delay that were not very successful; I understand that https://store.steampowered.com/app/1084160/Jagged_Alliance_3/ is supposed to be better, but I don’t think I’ve played through it yet. https://store.steampowered.com/app/240760/Wasteland_2_Directors_Cut/ and https://store.steampowered.com/app/719040/Wasteland_3/ aren’t really in the same genre, are more like Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, CRPGs with turn-based tactics combat. But if you enjoy turn-based-tactics, you might also enjoy them, and Wasteland 3 isn’t that old.
If you like real-time tactics, you might give the Close Combat series a look. I really liked the (now ancient) https://store.steampowered.com/app/2916170/Close_Combat_2_A_Bridge_Too_Far/. The balance for that game was terrible – it heavily rewarded use of keeping heavy tanks on hills – but it was an extremely popular game, and I loved playing it. There are (many) newer games in the series but they started including a strategic layer and a round timer after Close Combat 3. These improved things in the game (and if you like a strategy aspect, you might prefer that), but I just wanted to play the tactics side, and don’t feel like the later games every quite had the appeal of the earlier ones. Still, they’ve certainly had enough to make me come back and replay them.
For some reason, Warno didn’t grab me and Steel Division 2 did. That being said, I may not have given it a fair chance – I bailed out on it after a short period of time, probably because SD2 was also available at about the same time. It is true that it’s one of the few options out there with a late Cold War setting, like Wargame, so if you like that setting over WW2 – which is refreshing – it’s certainly worth looking into.
IIRC, one thing that was a little disappointing was that the unit database was a lot smaller than in Wargame: Red Dragon – I’d kind of taken that, which had been built up across multiple Wargame games, for granted.
I’ve been playing some retro games recently (PS1 and prior) and I’ve been discovering a lot of games that I never thought I would enjoy. Particularly 90s arcade shmups and arcade style sports games....
I think that Tetris is probably the oldest game that I’ll play some implementation of occasionally. I don’t know if I’d call it my favorite, but it’s aged very gracefully over the decades.
Bethesda has said that they aren’t going to do one until after the next Elder Scrolls game, so if anything in the Fallout world is going to come out on any kind of a near-term schedule, it’s going to have to be via someone with available bandwidth licensing it.
I’d imagine that one run as many tanks as one wanted.
One limiting factor is that scent isn’t going to immediately change when you change your virtual environment. I’d guess that emitting the vapor close to your face, maybe running a hose up towards it, would help. Probably want some kind of exhaust to purge the previous smell from the room. My guess is that the reason that the reason that a “booth” is used in the submitted article is to minimize the airspace surrounding the user and thus clearing time.
Second, some form of computer control. Maybe some device that has relays controlled via USB. A relay is an electromechanical switch that can can cut power to an atomizer on and off, could run it to the atomizer.
Those guys sell USB devices with up to 64 relays. I haven’t looked, but it probably looks to the computer like a virtual serial port, takes text commands.
Then you need some kind of daemon running on the computer to send these commands at appropriate times.
And lastly, you need some way to trigger the daemon when the game is seeing some sort of event. Could monitor the game’s logfile if it has one and contains the necessary information – I recall some Skyrim-hooking software that does this – take a screenshot periodically and analyze it, or identify and then monitor the game’s memory, probably either a technique called library injection (on Linux, library interposers are a way to so this) or using the same API that debuggers use.
If the hentai game that your friend is after is Ren’Py-based – a popular option for visual novels, which many such games are – and the game includes the Python source .rpy files, which some do, then the game’s source itself could simply be modified. If it contains only compiled .rpyc files, that won’t be an option.
You’re going to need to obtain whatever scents you want to emit as well. You can get collections of essential oils – the aromatherapy crowd is into those – and mix them up to create blends that you want, stick 'em in the atomizer tanks.
One issue is that hacking it into an existing game is going to mean that the game isn’t intentionally designed around the use of scent.
Interestingly, Gorelkin emphasized that the console should not merely serve as a platform for porting old games but also for popularizing domestic video games.
Apparently state-subsidized efforts have not yet popularized appropriate domestic games on their own.
I mean, I like a number of old Nintendo games too. But I just cannot imagine putting this kind of work into something like this, where it’s almost certainly going to get taken down.
The worst is when people do things like create unauthorized sequels to games and that gets taken down. Like, you could have gone and created your own game with your own setting.
Like, I like the Metroid series too. But if all the people who like the series enough to have created unauthorized sequels in the series had just used a different setting and characters to make their Metroidvania, we could have had a fantastic unencumbered series.
There has got to be some kind of simple compression that the Game Boy processor can handle in real time that will let it push a typical frame in the datarate available. Maybe use run length encoding, as it looks like most of those images have large flat color areas.
Playing as a Ghoul (with customizable design and even skin texture) is an endgame experience, as the related quest only starts at level 50. Ghouls will have ‘dozens of alternate ways’ to specialize their character, according to the developers....
Hi I am planning to buy a controller with a good d pad. I have been eyeing these two gamesir g7 and t4 cyclone but don’t know their platforming performance. Cheers
D-pads are the one aspect of a controller that I wouldn’t worry about much. I’ve only ever had one controller that had a D-pad that I wasn’t happy with, a Logitech in the mid-1990s that had a screw-in mini joystick on the D-pad. That rolled to the diagonal too easily.
thinks
Maybe the old NES controllers, which had a relatively-hard, non-rounded D-pad and could be tough on the fingers for long sessions.
I guess one could prefer the PlayStation-style or XBox-style D-pad position, though I’ve never had issue with either.
Do you have something in particular that you’re concerned about regarding D-pads? I’d expect pretty much anything out there to be fine, myself.
I assume that early access games are in the running when they exit EA. Presumably, that’s when they’re at their strongest. Doesn’t seem to me like it’d be fair to treat them as being entered when they enter EA, as they aren’t fully developed yet.
Alexey Pajitnov, who created the ubiquitous game in 1984, opens up about his failed projects and his desire to design another hit.
He prefers conversations about his canceled and ignored games, the past designs that now make him cringe, and the reality that his life’s signature achievement probably came decades ago.
The problem is that that guy created what is probably the biggest, most timeless simple video game in history. Your chances of repeating that are really low.
It’s like you discover fire at 21. The chances of doing it again? Not high. You could maybe do other successful things, but it’d be nearly impossible to do something as big again.
They usually are free to play with predatory monetization mechanics. That was especially back in 2016 when thanks to these games, the mobile gaming revenue outpaced PC and console gaming revenue.
When the market is flooded, any paid title has an incredibly difficult time standing out.
If that’s true, that it’s simply an inability to find premium games, but demand exists, that seems like the kind of thing where you could address it via branding. That is, you make a “premium publisher” or studio or something that keeps pumping out premium titles and builds a reputation. I mean, there are lots of product categories where you have brands develop – it’s not like you normally have some competitive market with lots of entrants, prices get driven down, and then brands never emerge. And I can’t think of a reason for phone apps to be unique in that regard.
I think that there’s more to it than that.
My own guesses are:
I won’t buy any apps from Google, because I refuse to have a Google account on my phone, because I don’t want to be building a profile for Google. I use stuff from F-Droid. That’s not due to unwillingness to pay for games – I buy many games on other platforms – but simply due to concerns over data privacy. I don’t know how widespread of a position that is, and it’s probably not the dominant factor. But my guess is that if I do it, at least a few other people do, and that’s a pretty difficult barrier to overcome for a commercial game vendor.
Platform demographics. My impression is that it may be that people playing on a phone might have less disposable income than a typical console player (who bought a piece of hardware for the sole and explicit purpose of playing games) or a computer player (a “gaming rig” being seen as a higher-end option to some extent today). If you’re aiming at value consumers, you need to compete on price more strongly.
This is exacerbated by the fact that a mobile game is probably a partial subsititute good for a game on another platform.
In microeconomics, substitute goods are two goods that can be used for the same purpose by consumers.[1] That is, a consumer perceives both goods as similar or comparable, so that having more of one good causes the consumer to desire less of the other good. Contrary to complementary goods and independent goods, substitute goods may replace each other in use due to changing economic conditions.[2] An example of substitute goods is Coca-Cola and Pepsi; the interchangeable aspect of these goods is due to the similarity of the purpose they serve, i.e. fulfilling customers’ desire for a soft drink. These types of substitutes can be referred to as close substitutes.[3]
They aren’t perfect substitutes. Phones are very portable, and so you can’t lug a console or even a laptop with you the way you can a phone and just slip it out of your pocket while waiting in a line. But to some degree, I think for most people, you can choose to game on one or the other, if you’ve multiple of those platforms available.
So, if you figure that in many cases, people who have the option to play a game on any of those platforms are going to choose a non-mobile platform if that’s accessible to them, the people who are playing a game on mobile might tend to be only the people who have a phone as the only available platform, and so it might just be that they’re willing to spend less money. Like, my understanding is that it’s pretty common to get kids smartphones these days…but to some degree, that “replaces” having a computer. So if you’ve got a bunch of kids in school using phones as their gaming platform, or maybe folks who don’t have a lot of cash floating around, they’re probably gonna have a more-limited budget to expend on games, be more price-sensitive.
Today, 15% of U.S. adults are “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they own a smartphone, but do not have home broadband service.
Reliance on smartphones for online access is especially common among Americans with lower household incomes and those with lower levels of formal education.
I think that for a majority of game genres, the hardware limitations of the smartphone are pretty substantial. It’s got a small screen. It’s got inputs that typically involve covering up part of the screen with fingers. The inputs aren’t terribly precise (yes, you can use a Bluetooth input device, but for many people, part of the point of a mobile platform is that you can have it everywhere, and lugging a game controller around is a lot more awkward). The hardware has to be pretty low power, so limited compute power. Especially for Android, the hardware differs a fair deal, so the developer can’t rely on certain hardware being there, as on consoles. Lot of GPU variation. Screen resolutions vary wildly, and games have to be able to adapt to that. It does have the ability to use gestures, and there are some games that can make use of GPS hardware and the like, but I think that taken as a whole, games tend to be a lot more disadvantaged by the cons than advantaged by the pros of mobile hardware.
Environment. While one can sit down on a couch in a living room and play a mobile game the way one might a console game, I think that many people playing mobile games have environmental constraints that a developer has to deal with. Yes, you can use a phone while waiting in line at the grocery store. But the flip side is that that game also has to be amenable to maybe just being played for a few minutes in a burst. You can’t expect the player to build up much mental context. They may-or-may-not be able to expect a player to be listening to sound. Playing Stellaris or something like that is not going to be very friendly to short bursts.
Battery power. Even if you can run a game on a phone, heavyweight games are going to drain battery at a pretty good clip. You can do that, but then the user’s either going to have to limit playtime or have a source of power.
I mean, the problem is kind of fundamental. They have a competitive multiplayer game. Many competitive multiplayer games are vulnerable to cheating if you can manipulate the client software; some software just can’t really be hardened and still deal with latency and such reasonably. Consoles are reasonably well locked down. PCs are not, and trying to clamp down on them at all is a pain – there are lots of holes to modify the software. Linux is specifically made to be open and thus modifiable. You’re never going to get major Linux distros committing to a closed system.
Frankly, my answer has been “Consoles are really the right answer for competitive multiplayer, not PCs.” It’s not just the cheating issue, but that you also want a level playing field, and PCs fundamentally are not that. Someone can, to at least some degree, pay to win with higher framerates or resolution or a more-responsive system on a PC.
My guess is that the most-realistic way to do do games like this on the PC is to introduce some kind of trusted hardware sufficient to handle all the critical data in a game, like a PCI card or something, and then stick critical portions of the game on that trusted hardware. But that infrastructure doesn’t exist today, and it’s still trying to make an open system imperfectly act like a closed one.
I think that the real answer here is to use consoles for that, because they already are what game developers are after – a locked-down, non-expandable system. In the specific context of competitive multiplayer games, that’s desirable. I don’t like it for most other things, but consoles are well-suited to that.
My own personal guess is the even longer run answer is going to be a slow shift away from multiplayer games.
Inexpensive, low-latency, long-range data connectivity started to give multiplayer games a boost around 2000-ish. Suddenly, it was possible to play a lot of games against people remotely. And there are neat things you can do with multiplayer games. Humans are a sophisticated, “smarter game AI”. They have their own problems, like sometimes doing things that aren’t fun for other players – like cheating – but if you can rely on other players, you don’t have to write a lot of complicated game AI.
The problem is that it also comes with a lot of drawbacks. You can’t pause most multiplayer games, and even when you do, it’s disruptive. If you’re, say, raising a kid who can get themselves into trouble, not being able to simply stand up and walk away from the keyboard is kinda limiting. You cannot play a multiplayer game without data connectivity. At some point, the game isn’t going to be playable any more, as the player base falls off and central servers go away. You have to deal with other people exploiting the game in various ways that aren’t fun for other players. That could be a game’s meta evolving to use strategies that aren’t very much fun to counter, or cheating, or people just abusing other people. Yeah, you can try to structure a game to discourage that, but we’ve been working on that for many years and griefing and such is still a thing.
Writing game AI is hard and expensive, but I think that in the long run, what we’re going to do is to see game AI take up a lot of the slack. I think that we’re going to to see advances in generic game AI engines, the sort of way we do graphics or sound engines, where one company makes a game AI software package that is reused in many, many games and only slightly tweaked by the game developers.
Multiplayer games are always going to be around, short of us hitting human-level AI. But I think that the trend will be towards single-player games over time, just because of those technical limitations I mentioned. I think that where multiplayer happens, it’ll be more-frequently with people that someone knows – someone’s friends or spouse or such – and where someone specifically wants to interact with that other person, and where the human isn’t just a faceless random person filling in for a smart piece of game AI that doesn’t exist. That’d also hopefully solve the cheating problem.
Plus, there’s no point. Like, if you want to make a good KSP successor, lots of people were unhappy with what happened with KSP2 and would be happy to buy it. Why unnecessarily start a fight that risks the game?
EDIT: Hell, if someone made a good KSP successor, it’d be very near the top of my own purchase list. I really liked KSP.
And thus a piece of Eastern European folklore that was popularized in a novel by a Irish writer and then spread via mostly American movies became a Japanese video game series now at least partially developed in Spain and begets a play acted by Japanese female actors.
So, I have a not so unique problem. I want to build a PC with decent power and good Linux support but local parts are hard to get and importing is a mess....
I think that “best” is open to various interpretations.
The most-emotionally-impactful in the context of the game?
The most-graphically-impressive?
The best-integrated with the game?
I often don’t try and play the latest-and-greatest games, and while I’m sure that I’ve played games with thunderstorms in them, I can’t immediately recall any recent first-person 3D games…and I’ve kind of shifted way from FPSes in recent years. Probably the newest 3D game that I can immediately recall playing that I distinctly recall having thunderstorms – though I think that they were rain is modded Fallout 4; I was using one of the weather mods.
There are radstorms that impact gameplay by dosing the player with radiation, and I suppose could be considered to a different form of thunderstorm. These are separate from normal storms. Fallout 76 also has radstorms, but they are less-frequent and far-less-damaging than in (modded, don’t recall base game) Fallout 4.
I guess that that’d probably be the most-graphically-impressive that I personally can recall off-the-cuff. I’m sure that there must be some newer, fancier thunderstorms out there.
For impact…I can’t recall for certain whether-or-not there was actual thunder and lighting other than in cutscenes, though there’s certainly rain… But The Saboteur is an Assassin’s Creed-style game (I understand; I’ve never played more than a very small amount of those games) set in World War II Paris. The areas that are occupied by Nazi forces are mostly black and white, with a small amount of color, mostly red, and at least some of the time, it’s raining. The areas where forces have been pushed back look kind of like spring. I think that it added to the game’s atmosphere a lot.
There are probably some games that this would work well for, but I’m not sure that it’d be a great replacement the way a physical thumb keyboard is for texting or the like.
Most present-day games that I can think of that I play use the keyboard as a grid of buttons. They expect to have your hand over the thing – often the left hand, with the right on the mouse – to let you be able to push multiple buttons quickly.
I’m not usually doing much text entry, which is what I’d expect a thumb keyboard to work well with.
I’m also interested to know whether you think Paradox should make another Sims-style life sim, after nuking Life By You
I’d personally like a “The Sims”-like game.
But while I like the sandbox aspect of that series, I was never that into the actual gameplay.
Being able to make your own structures and interact with them is neat. I like games like that a lot. Dwarf Fortress. Rimworld. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.
But the actual gameplay in The Sims in that sandbox world doesn’t really excite me all that much. There’s not a lot of strategy or planning or mechanics to explore the interactions of. Watching your Sims do their thing is neat, and I’d enjoy having that go on while I play a game.
I can imagine a world where I have a lot of control over structures, with NPCs that are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree.
But I don’t have specific ideas as to how to gamify it well. I just know that The Sims hasn’t gotten there.
If what one wants is Sim Dollhouse, I guess it’s okay. I know one woman who really liked one entry in the series, bought a computer just to play it. I guess it’s a neat tool for letting people sorta role-play a life. There may be a solid market for that. But for myself, I’d like to have more mechanics to analyze and play around with. Think Kerbal Space Program or something.
I remember fondly the days of playing Heroes of Might and Magic II, never played HOMM3 or anything after, but as I looked at the latest and most “recent” heroes games… they’re all rated/reviewed SO harshly. Apparently, they never gained steam like the earlier titles. RTS seems to have the same issue, tapering off....
Turn-based RPGs I can understand, but “RTS” is “real-time strategy” – it’s intrinsically not turn-based.
You can get turn-based strategy games, but they aren’t RTSes.
It depends on what you’re looking for. There are more hard-warsim oriented games at Matrix Games, though a number of those are also available on Steam these days.
Hey folks, looking for something that scratches an itch. I love the Tales series, but dislike the active combat system. So I’m looking for something in the vein that is low combat or turn based tactical combat....
I’ve been kind of out of the RPG loop for a while, probably not the best person to suggest, and haven’t played the series, but I’m thinking that if you could expand a bit on that, it might help provide suggestions…I mean, not clear to me what you’re looking for that’s specific to that relative to other RPGs. Similar setting? A long-running RPG series with many entries? The combat system (absent the real-time aspect)?
You mention “depth of story”, so maybe something with a similar level of storytelling?
I wish that the Lemmy Web UI “suggest title” code would do one of:
Translate HTML entities to their Unicode equivalent, which is what the Web UI actually wants in that field
Change the Lemmy Web UI’s title field to support HTML entities.
I have to manually clean up titles myself on a not-irregular basis, usually because of various dash-like characters, like em- or en-dashes, or typographic quotes.
Oddly-enough, it doesn’t on lemmy.today’s Web UI, but it looks fine on beehaw.org’s Web UI. Not sure if there’s some sort of problem with propagating updates, or if it just takes a while, but I reckon that you’ve done the right thing if it looks fine now on the instance hosting the community.
Wow, this is awful. Some people reported that these ads are also very petty and not necessarily related to the game, like apparently Elden Ring shows an ad for a licensed mousepad when you hover over the game now…...
Yeah, same. If I were going to get a handheld console, it’s pretty much exactly what I’d want, but…I really don’t need another portable computing device.
I don’t have a problem with low-resolution artwork; I think that it’s often an effective way to reduce asset costs. But when a game makes it big, as Balatro has, I’d generally like to have the option to get a higher-resolution version of it. For some games, say, Noita, that’s hard, as the resolution is tightly tied to the gameplay. But for Balatro, the art consists in significant part of about 150 jokers. That’s not all that much material to upscale.
EDIT: And specifically for Balatro, I think that it’s worth pointing out that there’s a whole industry of artists who make (very high resolution) playing cards for print.
That’s a large variety of competently-done, high-resolution artwork.
Now, granted – Balatro doesn’t use a standard deck; it’s not a drop-in approach using existing decks, the way it might be with a typical solitaire game.
But it seems kinda nutty to me that there are artists out creating decks, but only selling them in small volume, and also video games that sell in large volume but don’t have much by way of card artwork options.
I recall someone who build some automated system to measure input latency on gamepads, who gathered data for a bunch over different interfaces, which is a subset of that. They had some sort of automated testing system, moved the controls automatically with a microcontroller-driven system.
looks
Neither of them are what I’m remembering, but it looks like multiple people have built input latency databases.
Everyone left out there that ever thought they might give gaming a shot did so during the lockdown, and they either stuck with it, or they realized it wasn’t a forever hobby for them
looks dubious
That seems like an overly-strong statement.
There’s a point where the whole world has access to video games. And we’re getting closer to that time. There are certainly limits on growth approaching. But I don’t think that we’re to those limits yet.
unique mobile subscribers in 2023, indicating a 43% penetration rate
That’s not even smartphones. And even smartphones can only run certain types of video games. There’s a lot of the world that still is constrained by limited development.
At the time of writing, the action game is in closed beta, and it doesn’t offer native controller support. However, it does have an option that players can use to play the game with a controller.
With that in mind, the game is likely to feature controller support when it releases on PC, as it is expected to be Steam Deck compatible.
However, you must keep in mind that since the game is still in early development, it doesn’t offer any key binding or customization feature.
Additionally, even with a controller on default settings, some key actions in the game may not be mapped, so you might encounter limitations during gameplay.
In the near term, if a keyboard can do what you want, if you can dig up macro software for your platform that can look for specific gamepad combinations and send keystrokes as a result, I imagine that you could make it work that way.
I mean, it’s not publicly-available either; it’s just available to a select group of testers.
I haven’t been following the game’s development. But my guess is that the devs are going to prioritize targeting the machines that they’re using to do development of the thing. They won’t be using a Deck to develop the thing. This probably won’t be the only tradeoff made, either – I’d guess that performance optimizations aimed at the Deck or other lower-end machines might be something that would be further down on the list. I’d guess that any kind of tutorial or whatever probably won’t go in until late in the development – not that that’s not important to bring new users up to speed, but it’s just not something that the devs need to work on it. Probably not an issue for this game, which looks like it’s multiplayer, but I’d guess that breaking save or progress compatibility is something that they’d be fine with. That’s frustrating for a player, but it can make development a lot easier.
Doesn’t mean that those don’t matter, just that they won’t be top of the priority list to get working. What they’re gonna prioritize is stuff that unblocks other things that they need.
I worked on a product in the past that had a more “customer-friendly” interface and a command line interface. When a feature gets implemented, the first thing that a dev puts in is the CLI support – it’s low-effort, and it’s all that the dev needs to get the internal feature into a testable state for the internal people. The more-customer-friendly stuff, documentation, etc all happens later in the development cycle. Doesn’t mean that we didn’t care about getting that out, just that we didn’t need it to unblock other parts of the the development process. Sometimes we’d give access to development builds to customers who specifically urgently needed a feature early-on and were willing to accept the drawbacks of using stuff that just isn’t done, but they’re inevitably gonna be getting something that’s only half-baked.
I mean, if it bugs you, I’d just wait. Like, they aren’t gonna be trying to provide an ideal customer experience at this point in the development cycle. They’re just gonna want to be using it as a testbed to see what works. It’s gonna inevitably be a subpar experience in various ways for users. The folks who are using the thing at this point are volunteering to do unpaid testing work in exchange for getting to play the thing very early and maybe doing so at a point where they can still alter the gameplay substantially. There are some people who really enjoy that, but depends on the person. It’s not really my cup of tea. I dunno about you, but I’ve got a Steam games backlog that goes on forever; it’s not like I’ve got a lack of finished games to get through.
Hello, not sure whether this is right place to ask, but I’ll ask anyway. I’m looking for mouse replacement, but I do need the mouse to be quieter than your usual “click click clik”, as I often use it in the evening in a room with other people sleeping. Usage is about 50:50 office and single player gaming, so I don’t...
I’m not familiar with this, but it sounds like it’s practical to just take a mouse, buy new mouse switches, swap them out, as long as you can solder. So if you’ve got another mouse that does what you want – and it sounds like you like the Logitech G305 – you can probably just modify it, if you’re willing to put in the effort. I’d read up on this further before going that route.
This post specifically deals with replacing the switches on a Logitech G305 to make it silent:
I recently played through a demo for a game called Pinball Spire on steam, and it put me in the mood for playing pinball games. Unfortunately, and I don’t know if this is just due to me having bad google-foo, there don’t seem to be that many on Steam that catch my interest....
there don’t seem to be that many on Steam that catch my interest.
I don’t know the situation on consoles, but on the PC…
I am not a pinball expert, though I do enjoy video pinball, but none of these are what I’d call the major PC pinball engines with reasonably-realistic physics, things that do a lot of tables. Look at these:
Visual Pinball. I was not able to get this working on Linux the few times I’ve tried or to successfully get access to the forums that distribute tables (some kind of broken registration system). This is, as I understand it, what a typical person uses if they just want to make and distribute a free table. It also has many bootleg implementations of commercial tables. Open-source Source-available, though only runs natively on Windows.
Pinball Arcade. IIRC, these guys used to have a license for some major physical table distributors, like Williams, and had it expire. I have this, and the engine hasn’t been updated in some time. I run a high-refresh-rate monitor, and IIRC it has a limit of 60Hz, probably because the physics engine also runs at that rate. I don’t think that it’s getting a lot of updates, and I had some trouble running it last time I tried. This would not be my recommended engine unless it’s the only place to get a table that you specifically want.
Zaccaria Pinball. Good if you want elderly pinball, pre-solid-state-electronics era, electromechanical pinball tables. They have some tables that they developed, not copies of real-world tables, that I personally like more than their real-world tables. They don’t have implementations of real-world tables for some major popular US manufacturers.
Pinball FX3 (less old than Pinball Arcade). Not bad, but replaced by the below Pinball FX.
Pinball FX (despite the name, newer). This is the only one off the top of my head that can do high-refresh-rate, and it’s also being kept current. It has a lot of stuff that I’d call fluff and would rather not have, like toys that animate more than on the real-world tables and sometimes obstruct your view, animations to wait through, and such. Also has some kind of online-DRM system that takes a sec at startup. Some of this can be turned off. Places a lot of emphasis on this virtual pinball basement full of virtual trophies. Has occasional very brief stutters for me. Many of the non-real-life board are wide, designed around a present-day portrait-orientation computer monitor, which feels weird but is more friendly to, say, a laptop with a fixed orientation monitor, though maybe not what you want if you’re going to set up a dedicated pinball computer with portrait-orientation monitor. Lots and lots of non-real-world licensed tables associated with movies and the like that I’m not really enthusiastic about; I would recommend trying those tables before buying them. This is probably what I’d look at if I were aiming to get one today, as the engine’s the newest.
I think that all of these let you download the engine and try out some basic play (IIRC Zaccaria has time-limited plays on tables that you don’t own, and Pinball FX has a rotating collection that you can try for free), so you can just install them and see what you like, but if you’re looking for a starting point with something reasonably modern and with a bunch of tables, these are probably where you want to look.
If you don’t have a strong preference as to tables and are also just feeling around for something to try, I personally like some classic real-life Williams tables, Medieval Madness and Tales of the Arabian Nights. Neither is too rough in terms of draining down the side channels, in my humble opinion. The Addams Family is also a popular table.
Note that if you haven’t touched video pinball for a long time – like, I played a few games in the late 1990s and then was away from it for a while), these engines also simulate nudging the machine and doing so is expected during play.
EDIT: If you’re willing to hit Reddit for information, /r/videopinball and /r/pinball exist; they were where I got some information back when. If not, there’s !pinball – not a lot of life yet, but, hey, each additional person adds to it!
EDIT2: My understanding from past reading of said forums is that Visual Pinball is considered to have the best physics, but is fiddly to get working and get tables working on (and I don’t think that this was said from the standpoint of someone trying to run anything on Linux, just Windows).
EDIT3: I would also recommend not purchasing a great many tables unless you’re sure that you’re actually going to play them. Yes, you can buy the equivalent of multiple arcades full of virtual machines at one swoop thanks to modern technology, but…I have tables on all of the commercial engines here and personally find that I play a very small percentage of the tables that I have. Pinball, I think, benefits from becoming familiar with particular tables.
It has an engine that permits recording and “rewinding” gameplay, with a lot of interesting quirks, like elements that don’t rewind. Puzzle platformer based on that.
It was a fascinating thing technically, and the creator did a lot with that capability. But IMHO it’s not otherwise exceptional, like graphically or such.
Xbox Sales Hit Rock Bottom After Historic 2024 Decline (9meters.com)
The Sims re-release shows what’s wrong with big publishers and single-player games (arstechnica.com)
A few days ago, EA re-released two of its most legendary games: The Sims and The Sims 2. Dubbed the “The Legacy Collection,” these could not even be called remasters. EA just put the original games on Steam with some minor patches to make them a little more likely to work on some modern machines....
What are your favorite board games? I'm looking for games that are satisfying and lead to a sense of accomplishment or fulfillment or connection.
No games that lead to players being pissed at other players, even outside of the confines of the game. I’ve had that happen with, for example, Secret Hitler, so no Secret Hitler....
Dwarf Fortress - Adventure Mode is Out Now! (store.steampowered.com)
Got any must-play games for strategy fans?
I used to play RTS games like Warhammer, then got into Heroes of Might and Magic and its spin-offs like Pennon and Battle. I’ve also played XCOM 2 and Age of Wonders 4. Any other must-play series you’d recommend?...
Doom is playable on PDFs (at least in Chromium-based browsers) (gbatemp.net)
Favorite retro games?
I’ve been playing some retro games recently (PS1 and prior) and I’ve been discovering a lot of games that I never thought I would enjoy. Particularly 90s arcade shmups and arcade style sports games....
Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev Larian Says Its 'Full Attention' Is on Its Next Game, 'Media Blackout' for the Foreseeable (www.ign.com)
Sony shows off conceptual immersive gaming tech that lets you stand in a TV box and sniff The Last of Us (www.eurogamer.net)
Putin's 'sovereign' gaming console projects detailed, found lacking (www.tomshardware.com)
Fan-made PC port of Star Fox 64 is out now (www.gamingonlinux.com)
Theres also a Lutris: lutris.net/games/star-fox-64/
I Streamed To A Game Boy (www.youtube.com)
Fallout 76 Ghoul Experience Detailed by Bethesda (wccftech.com)
Playing as a Ghoul (with customizable design and even skin texture) is an endgame experience, as the related quest only starts at level 50. Ghouls will have ‘dozens of alternate ways’ to specialize their character, according to the developers....
Please suggest budget controllers for kaizo mario..
Hi I am planning to buy a controller with a good d pad. I have been eyeing these two gamesir g7 and t4 cyclone but don’t know their platforming performance. Cheers
Greatest video game ever played?
The Game Awards 2024 Nominees Announced (thegameawards.com)
Game of the year nominees are:...
After the Triumph of Tetris, an Unsolved Puzzle (www.nytimes.com)
Why are most mobile games trash? (fedia.io)
They usually are free to play with predatory monetization mechanics. That was especially back in 2016 when thanks to these games, the mobile gaming revenue outpaced PC and console gaming revenue.
Apex Legends is taking away its support for the Steam Deck and Linux (www.theverge.com)
DayZ creator reveals a "Kerbal Space Program killer" with kittens and challenges license owners to sue him (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
Castlevania to get official stage adaptation by Japan's all-female Takarazuka Revue (automaton-media.com)
need helpbuiltding a PC, not sure where to ask
So, I have a not so unique problem. I want to build a PC with decent power and good Linux support but local parts are hard to get and importing is a mess....
New Windows gamepad keyboard will soon make typing on Legion Go, Asus ROG Ally more like the Steam Deck (www.notebookcheck.net)
Players are now less "accepting" that games will be fixed, say Paradox, after "underestimating" the reaction to Cities: Skylines 2's performance woes (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
What happened to the turn based RPG and RTS genres?
I remember fondly the days of playing Heroes of Might and Magic II, never played HOMM3 or anything after, but as I looked at the latest and most “recent” heroes games… they’re all rated/reviewed SO harshly. Apparently, they never gained steam like the earlier titles. RTS seems to have the same issue, tapering off....
Looking for a Tales-like RPG without active combat
Hey folks, looking for something that scratches an itch. I love the Tales series, but dislike the active combat system. So I’m looking for something in the vein that is low combat or turn based tactical combat....
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage First Look Accolade Trailer (youtu.be)
So excited for this!
PS5 Homescreen Now Replaces Unique Video Game Art With Annoying Ads You Can’t Turn Off (www.ign.com)
Wow, this is awful. Some people reported that these ads are also very petty and not necessarily related to the game, like apparently Elden Ring shows an ad for a licensed mousepad when you hover over the game now…...
Hit deck-builder Balatro is now available for mobile [VGC] (www.videogameschronicle.com)
What are the scariest games you've played?
I feel like I’ve played a good amount of horror titles, and I find I don’t really get scared much anymore....
Shmup suggestions
Recently I’ve been looking into expanding the number of shmups in my library....
Looking for a gamepad spec aggregation site
I’m looking for a website that aggregates specs for gamepads/controllers....
Five Questions About Gaming’s Future With a Video Game Analyst [Remap] (remapradio.com)
Deadlock: How to select or level skill on controller?
Is there a way to select or level up a skill on a controller?...
Wireless mouse with silent switches recommendation
Hello, not sure whether this is right place to ask, but I’ll ask anyway. I’m looking for mouse replacement, but I do need the mouse to be quieter than your usual “click click clik”, as I often use it in the evening in a room with other people sleeping. Usage is about 50:50 office and single player gaming, so I don’t...
Know any good pinball video games?
I recently played through a demo for a game called Pinball Spire on steam, and it put me in the mood for playing pinball games. Unfortunately, and I don’t know if this is just due to me having bad google-foo, there don’t seem to be that many on Steam that catch my interest....
Braid Anniversary Edition has ‘sold like dog sh*t’, creator Jonathan Blow says (www.videogameschronicle.com)
I asked what your fave controllers are, now. What is the worst controller you have used?
So. I have 2 I hate....