- 0 Posts
- 277 Comments
We had a Mickey game that came with a dark maroon piece of paper with a bunch of Mickey poses on it, each one had a number or letter code (it would show a pose and you had to give it the code for the pose to start the game). The black ink on dark maroon paper was intended to prevent photocopying.
We also had this F1 racing game that had a bunch of F1 history in its manual and would ask F1 history trivia to get into the game.
The way I suspect some of them were made: get 10 random people, present the problem to them and ask each person what they think the solution is. Say no to the first 9, then say yes to whatever the 10th person guesses. If they guess something previously guessed, then keep prompting for more information until the solution is so specific even people on the right track will be confused by it.
Also add endless segments where several specific squares of the grid have mandatory items, something prevents you from systematically searching the entire grid, and if you go too far, you die.
It goes even farther than that: games in the 80s didn’t even necessarily have consistent designs that could be trained in the first 30 minutes. Especially the adventure games. They were also perfectly willing to let you lose the game in act 1 but not tell you about it until act 3, where the way they do “tell you” is you don’t have any possible solution for a problem.
Like if you don’t get that delicious pie plus another food source early on, you’ll either die of starvation or the yeti will eat you later in the game.
But if you know what to do, the game becomes trivial.
Lol King’s Quest was a funny journey for me. I started with KQV as a kid and was always curious about the previous games. It wasn’t until I got them all via abandonware sites as an adult that I realized 5 was the perfect one to start on because the previous ones all relied on vague text parsers to handle all the actions, ones where typing “grab stick” instead of “get stick” could be the difference between having a fun or frustrating time.
So you’re saying there’s now a version of KQIV that has an interface similar to KQV and involves no guessing which verb/noun they want specifically?
Though my record with point and click adventure games hasn’t been great since KQVI. I did beat both 5 and 6 on my own as a kid (getting the 100% win on 6 with no help still gave me a pang of pride when I thought of it just now, when all those pieces start fitting together), but find I don’t have the patience to solve similar games these days (even without the “sometimes punishes clicking the wrong pixel with death” that KQ liked to do). I never did finish KQVII, even. Action games were just more engaging.
Gambling, pretty much. They go all in on a bet that it will explode and make tons of money, take out loans based on that expectation, setting themselves in a position where either it is a major success or it is an utter failure, no in between.
The gaming market is so saturated these days that it’s kinda baffling this approach is still being taken. Like I hadn’t even heard of this game before this.
Ugh, game looks pretty good but I can’t stand that visual style anymore. I’m very appreciative of games that use voxels for environmental destruction capabilities but that smooth them out instead of everything looking like it’s made of giant pixels, like Enshrouded.
This one looks a lot better than minecraft for the environment (at least based on the trailer, not sure if they just used camera angles that hide the blocky look), but I was disappointed as soon as I saw the enemies/player characters.
No hate or judgement if you are into that, it’s just annoying when something sounds like exactly what I’m into but then features a pet peeve, especially when it’s something so central as the overall visual design.
Other threads have mentioned this game has a healthy mod community, any mods for making it look not like minecraft?
Personally, I don’t see how this guy’s project hurt them in any way, even if he was making money from it. That’s assuming each copy involved a purchase from them (and if not, that would resolve it IMO).
I disagree with the hate paid mods get, at least in the current economic model. Though even if there was a UBI, I think worthwhile work should be rewarded.
I don’t get any indication from the search that there’s a single unfixable issue, seems like various crash/freezing issues being reported over the months. I’ve only seen an issue where I needed to restart my system once in the year or so I’ve been on Linux, and that seemed to just be linked to one game (that I’ve since played without issue).
This is also the second time I’ve seen someone with a vague reference to an amd issue that is described in a way that sounds both profound (breaks for system) and mundane (by making it freeze once in a blue moon). And instructions to do a search that will give results but the implication is that they are about some massive single issue when the search term is going to give lots of unrelated results. Smells like disinformation to me, or rather trying to make nornal issues appear like massive ones.
Replace “amdgpu” with “nvidia” or “linux” with “windows” and there’s still tons of results.
Oh come on, I see right through your posturing to be allowed to open an all-dolphin game dev sweat shop. Stop it, it’s a waste of money because the whales always interfere and get the dolphins to unionize after the dolphins earn their programming degrees and then they go out and write emulators (because obviously we just close the shop). One of these days they’ll get in contract with the penguins and might start pumping out Linux distros!
Can’t say I’m surprised by any of this, everything about the guy screamed to me that it would be a shitty experience. They are using purely business things to attract users: paying big for exclusive titles (eg mini monopolies that force interested users to their platform) and giving games away for free. Neither of those require a decent experience, so no shit they cheaped out on that. Those who are just in it for the money are far more likely to end up at a “ah fuck it, it works good enough, ship it” point than someone who wants to build something good, knowing people will come if it’s good enough.
It also makes it obvious that they’ll lean right into the enshitification as soon as they think they have that marketshare captured. So personally, I hope they don’t fix that shit, because it won’t indicate that they are becoming better but just that their strategy and tactics have improved while the end goal remains the same.
And tbf, that end goal might be about control instead of money, so only approved video games can be played. Oh right, they already did that with UT because it might compete with their fortnite cash cow.
Personally, I like my PS5 because I don’t really gaf what any games do with my PS5’s kernel. It’s my way to play games that I’d never touch on my PC (even before switching to Linux, kernel anti-cheat/DRM was a dealbreaker).
Actually kinda ironic because Sony is the company that made me not trust shit companies install on PCs for security purposes after their rootkit (also stopped using autoplay because of that). But between the three console options, Sony is the least shitty today.
That said, I’m not sure I’ll be ever getting another console because I still do most of my gaming on my PC while those games collect dust.
Doesn’t the new switch still use a control stick design that can suffer from drift, despite it being a solved problem?
looks it up Ah ffs, they probably didn’t because they thought replacing the mounting rack and slide with magnets was more important, and powerful magnets might interfere with the other sensors (though if the magnetic field isn’t moving, I think any effects could be compensated for).
I own or owned every one of their consoles other than the Wii (though can play the games on the wii u). No more, between their pricing (especially on recycled content), wastefullness (all that excess plastic for a case that holds a tiny cart because a small box makes their prices even harder to stomach), and legal bs (going after modders, emulators, and the used game market via anti-piracy bricking depending on what the previous owner of the game did), fuck them.
I’ve been enjoying Tales of Maj’Eyal lately. It’s a roguelike, though you can set it to give several lives or infinite lives. But I’ve been enjoying just going until I die and then rolling a different build. You usually only die because you get overconfident and I’ll leave figuring out the specifics of that to you :)
It also has over 1100 achievements if you like chasing those.
I played a lot of games this year, but there were main ones that “stuck” more than others. I’m a patient gamer, so most of these aren’t new releases.
I was playing a lot of Satisfactory earlier in the year. Not much more recently but I know I’m not done with that game. I started a second save to organize things better, though not sure how well I’m accomplishing that. Though this second one uses more trains while the first one had more of a road setup, including a raised highway to access the oil area in the south east. Still nothing like some of the megaatructures I see in other builds online. I try to plan for expansion, so don’t tend to “finish” buildings, but rather build up a frame that can be added to in any direction. I’d give the game a 9/10 overall.
Another game I got into for a bit was TCG Card Shop Simulator. It was fun for a bit but then dropped off hard as the novelty wore off. I think that’s how “pretend to work a job” games generally go for me. Fun and satisfying at first, but then repetitive and unrewarding later on. I’m going through something similar with Ship Graveyard Simulator 2 right now, though I’ll get to that. I’d rate it about a 6.5/10, though it feels like an 8/10 at first before dropping off to more like a 4/10 once it gets old.
I’ll give Healed to Death an honourable mention, even though I moved on from it pretty quickly. It’s a great concept IMO, since sometimes I want to do a “healing the raid” type activity but don’t want to invest the time into a MMO to get there again. But this one isn’t just playing the healer, you also need to manage a constantly revolving party’s gear and switch them to follow mode (where they do no attacking even if they are ranged) to move them out of the fire during fights. So it’s basically healer simulator but your party is always the worst. If they (actually it’s one guy I believe, so impressive job even if it is lacking overall) added better AIs that didn’t need to be micromanaged, it would be much better. I’d give it a 4/10 in its current state but it could be a 9/10 with better execution.
TMNT: Splintered Fate is very similar to Hades (in fact, I’d call it a clone). I liked it but didn’t stick with it for long. 8/10.
Schedule I is another one of those “work that is fun at first but gets old”. Though they’ve added a bunch of stuff since I last played, so I will probably check it out again at some point. Game loop is basically find a spot, produce drugs, maybe modify them by adding shit to them, then selling them either directly or via a dealer. Then use the cash to produce more drugs or get new places (both areas to produce drugs and businesses to launder the proceeds, though I don’t know if laundering even makes a difference at this point), hire workers or buy vehicles and weapons. I believe they added competing cartels in an update since I last played, so it could be more interesting now. 7/10.
Then had a short period where I was interested in speed running, though mostly just against myself, since I’m nowhere close to the top charts on anything. Did a bit with Subnautica (best time to leave in rocket was under 10 hours now iirc) and Grim Dawn (I think I got my best Act 1 time to beat the record full game time lol). No rating for speed running in general (though it does not go well with ADHD unless you hyperfocus on one game), but Subnautica 10/10 and Grim Dawn 8/10 (it’s similar to Diablo).
Widget Inc was another, it’s pretty much an automation game without logistics, where each new production building rises in cost exponentially and prestiging to increase overall production. Apparently they just released a major update yesterday (looks like it adds enemies). Not sure I’ll look into it. 6/10.
Did House Flipper for a bit, which followed the job game pattern of being fun and engaging for a bit and then repetitive. At first, I intended to get the second game, but my interest in the whole thing waned before that. It was cool that they had Kame house in the game, with hidden dragon balls to find. 7/10.
Also was playing some Dark Souls this year off and on. I realized that there was a lot more to the world than just a hard path through tough enemies. Like there’s shops, blacksmiths, and a ton of hidden things. I also tried builds other than highly mobile swords builds and found 2H is actually easier because your hits often stagger the enemies (and do way more damage), so instead of dodging and timing carefully, you can rush in and overwhelm opponents, eliminating members of groups before the others can even react. Got stuck on the gargoyles, though there were some close attempts and I’ll probably get farther the next time I pick it up. 8.5/10.
I 100% Particle Fleet: Emergence. This game is great if you like systematically picking apart an opponent’s position. Took 15.8 hours to get 100% of achievements, though there’s also a bunch of other maps without achievements that I haven’t done yet and will return to when I feel the itch that those games scratch. 7/10.
I didn’t play it for very long but tried Breathedge, going for a subnautica kind of experience. It does feel like it, but I don’t think the game is tuned very well. I’m not sure if it changes later on in the game, but the part I was playing had me constantly returning to the start. I could go farther out as I upgraded, but progress felt stagnant and I gave up on it. The game did set goals at points of interest, but they were pretty far between and I felt like either I didn’t know what to do to extend my range that far or that it would be tedious as hell doing it the way I could see was possible. I’ll give it a 7/10 on the assumption that part of my issue was needing to git gud, but if I was right about it being the tedious route, I’d drop it to a 5/10.
Played a bunch of Dota 2 for a few months. They give you free dota plus access when you start, which gives access to some useful meta information, but then when it expires, the amount they want for a subscription is kinda high. I’ll give credit for coming up with a f2p system that can generate revenue without any p2w (between the dota plus and cosmetics), but the price turned me off and I didn’t feel like playing as much without that info. Maybe I’ll return to it eventually, as I did enjoy the game itself and like that the full hero list is free (unlike LoL with a rotating set of free ones, though I also don’t mind that monetization system, but I’m on Linux so LoL doesn’t really exist anymore). 7/10.
Stuck in Time is an interesting idle-ish game. You play a regressor, so a character for whom the world resets and plays out exactly the same (depending on your actions) each loop, and as you loop, you get better at doing everything. You give a series of actions to perform each loop and can tweak that list as you go for the next loop. 7/10.
Icarus is a survival game on an alien planet that was teraformed and seeded with a bunch of earth life. You start out with stone age tech (though with a modern understanding, like you can build stone age tools for water purification). I like that, even though there’s oxygen on the planet, they still have you in a atmospheric isolation suit because the air contains microbes we can’t breathe safely (though no idea how it would be safe to consume food and water in those conditions, but hey, it’s still more accurate than most “visit alien planet with oxygen” fictions are which usually just do analysis that says it’s safe to breathe the air). The open world mode is very well done, a nice combination of freedom to do what you want plus missions to do something more specific for a reward or direction. I’ve more or less mastered the forest biome and have started branching out into the arctic biome. The wildlife can be tough to deal with before you figure out how to fight certain animals (like bears and polar bears), especially when you’re stuck with stone or iron age weapons. I almost rage quit the game a few times due to a scenario that spawns a bear, which then tends to stick by your corpse and gear. But there are multiple strategies to handle them, so I suggest sticking with it and even looking up how others do it if you’re really stuck (I did for bears, though they get easier to handle with shotguns). 9.5/10.
Nova Drift is a recent game I’ve been playing, a bullet hell roguelike, so far 2.8 hours in, it’s a lot of fun. 8.5/10.
And Ship Graveyard Simulator 2 is the latest in the job games I’ve been playing. It’s following the trend, as I’ve finished tearing down the biggest ship in the vanilla game and am now on the fence about whether to a) finish up the smaller ships I skipped along the way to the biggest, b) buy some DLC with more ships, or c) just move on from this game. I will say that it is more satisfying than other job games I’ve played, but at only 23 hours in, it’s hard to say if it will have more staying power than the others. 8/10.
And on my playstation, I’ve been playing through FFX remastered. FF7 was always the “main” FF in my mind, but I think I like the FFX gang better now. I’m not as into JRPGs and the turn-based combat as I used to be, but don’t mind it so much in this game. 9.5/10.
It’s a stupid argument to begin with. Trademarks should die with the original entitiy that used them. Neither of these companies have anything to do with the original brand but both want to cash in on its recognizability. Both should build their own fucking reputations. I hope they both go broke fighting over this.
Like for instance, when epic came out with their exclusive access titles being a part of their business plan, valve could have responded with their own exclusive access system and had a good chance of killing off epic and others in the process. Instead they just ignored it and people like me continued using them and didn’t even consider epic even when their anticompetitive actions switched to ones that would have benefitted me (free games), because I could see the shithole they wanted to bring gaming to if their platform achieved dominance.
I’m not very impressed that they used an optimization that blew up the game size 5x that they knew would only benefit a subset of users without even doing any profiling on it until 2 years after release. Good that they eventually revisited it, but someone fucked up making that decision in the first place.
One thing to add, prices can be manipulated in the short term to make or avoid certain options from getting into the money. They won’t do this to target specific individuals, but there’s a value called “max pain”, which is the price such that the most puts and calls expire worthless and the ones that are in the money pay out the minimal value, when all outstanding contracts for an equity are considered in aggregate, and prices trend towards those at expiry time.
The move equivalent to buying stock when you think it’s going to go up is to sell stock you own when you think it’s going to go down.
Or you can look at the series of actions, where buying when you think it’ll go up is just step 1, then step 2 is wait for it to go up, and step 3 is sell it for a profit, and step 4 is look for the next stock you think will go up (or wait and hold the cash if you don’t think any will).
In which case you can do step 3 if you own the stock, or step 4 if you don’t. Then, if it does crash (and the crash is stock prices and not the currency itself, like what happened to a degree in response to the money printed after 2020), you can buy back in at the bottom and wait for it to go up.
But if the fed pumps money into the system to prop up the stock markets, or the government bails out firms that might go under, then that money can be used to keep the stock prices high. And with the richest 1% owning such a high portion of the entire economy, if they have a lot of cash, they could also do that without any help from the feds (reserve or government).
So depending on how a crash is responded to, the best bet might be holding cash or avoiding holding cash. Or maybe investing in some good that holds value well.
However, holding stock might still be fine, assuming the equities you hold are able to survive the crash and everything that comes next. If you look at the historic crashes, the value does always return and pass the previous before crash value, at least on average. You won’t get rich playing it like that but you might not lose those unrealized losses unless you’re in a position where you have to sell.
Don’t forget the first response that always gives the steps to solve a simpler version of that issue, almost like the responses are being copy/pasted from a guide by people who barely understand anything about it themselves.
Plus these days the number of solutions that refer to some setting that no longer exists in the location it did at the time the solution was written.
Meanwhile on Linux, I haven’t even had to search as much for solutions. Yesterday I installed a new desktop that I’ve never used before (KDE-Plasma) and was quickly able to figure out the changes I wanted to make because it’s designed to be discoverable and obvious. Whereas I’d say that Windows seems designed to make people either feel tempted to pay for a solution or give up and just do it the way MS wants.
I remember being annoyed that I had to install yet another launcher and make yet another account when I was installing portal. But I didn’t know at the time that this was the launcher to end most other launchers and accounts, or at the very least made most of that transparent other then adding an extra click to launch some games.
Iirc, Blizzard had just replaced the wow in-game patcher with a launcher (though I don’t recall if they had a unified launcher for each game, if they all had their own at that point, or if it was just wow), Oblivion had a game launcher, and I think there were a few others. Some of them even needed to be installed separately iirc.
Steam is nice because, being the launcher for most of my games, it’s just always open and helps organize my games. And it doesn’t feel like its main purpose is to make money, with everything else just being about opening pathways to that money. And even though it is meant to make Valve money, it’s the lack of blatant dark patterns and constant upsell attempts that makes it feel better than most of the rest of the commercial world.
They say that about the company that has <professional sports league> <insert next calendar year> which are even more forever games because (as I understand, not really a fan of sports games either way) the changes from year to year seem to mostly be rosters.
It looks like one exec thinking he’s dunking on another and will look cool hating the hated one, but from my pov it just looks like two of the asshole kids in the playground trying to one up the other, thinking the others egging them on are laughing with them instead of at them.
Also, EA made over a billion (non-GAAP) in FY2025 while Ubisoft lost $175 million (GAAP, so not completely apples to apples, but switching to non-GAAP won’t turn that loss into a profit, let alone 1 billion worth). Not that I like EA or anything, it’s just that they are doing a much better job of what ubisoft wants to do and don’t need edgy execs trying to dunk on companies they hope are more hated than they are.
So far I’ve been impressed with what AI can do with coding. I had it write some scripts for me on one of my previous work tasks and it did the majority of the code writing and even majorly assisted the debug process.
And now I’m using it for another task and it’s already improved significantly since the last one. You can now interrupt it if if gets stuck in some kind of loop and the required debug phases are fewer. Hell, it’s even reading between the lines of my prompts effectively and implemented a verbosity feature in a second script just because I had requested it in the first one.
With the first task, I was holding its hand as far as data structures and such were concerned. This time, I’m instructing it at a higher level. And while it does help that I can understand the code it generates, I said last time that it was good enough to start replacing interns, I think at this point it’s ready to start replacing junior programming positions.
One area that I’m glad to have my console is for games that I expect the publisher to include anti-consumer bs but I still want to play. I dont gaf if they install a kernel mode anti-cheat on my ps5, but I’ll never install that on my PC.
That said, I don’t spend much time doing that anyways and don’t have any plans to get another console in the future. And in case nintendo is listening, the switch 2 would have been an exception to that if you weren’t so lawsuit happy.
It’s because it was pretty much the Netflix of video games. Pay a subscription and you get access to a collection of games.
When it was 5.99 it was a no brainer. I think I cancelled mine around 13.99, though not because of the price but because I always forgot it existed and it tied me to windows. Switched to Linux and cancelling was a part of that transition.
Though depending on how much context they pull in from neighbours, you can get overfitting, like a character might end up with a different face depending on what’s in the background. Vague unreadable text could be replaced with random readable text that also heavily depends on what is seen elsewhere in the frame (assuming it’s trained on enough text that if doesn’t just make legible text illegible).
So while it can be deterministic, it can still be highly chaotic, depending on how exactly it gets implemented. And I’d guess that it’s a double edged sword where sometimes more context gives better results and other times less context gives better results. And I’d also guess that if you want to avoid overfitting, the amount of training data needs to increase exponentially with the number of inputs, assuming there’s enough neurons in the network to encode the necessary complexity.