Defense is tricky in fighting games. Often, if there are too many good defensive options, it punishes players for being aggressive, and can lead to high level matches where each side spends the whole time trying to goad the other into a counter attack.

For instance, I don’t play it, but I recall Invincible has some technique to break away from a combo, but you sacrifice some of your own health for it.

A lot of early negative reviews were from the difficulty. On top of ammo starvation, there’s also some modern action game mechanics: You can dodge and parry enemy attacks (in a tank control manner), and also have a very difficult mechanism to execute “critical hits”, spending just one bullet to kill an enemy in one hit.

The end result I got was, you can’t just always go for crits. But if you never do, you run out of ammo fast. Melee combat is an option too for weak enemies. So, for every fight, there’s a bit of decisionmaking on how to conserve resources.

This guy had a great analysis video, complete with interviews with victims, of toxicity towards female entry into male spaces. He goes historically into how video games were first age-neutral, then Nintendo made them “toys”, and toys were for boys, slowly leading to the space having a toxic exclusivity problem.

One of the best bits (which I unfortunately don’t have a timestamp for right now) is when he talks about his own experience as a kid, and how he inadvertently tried to exclude a family member when she started playing the game better than him.

For reference, Nacon published Robocop: Rogue City. Will do my best to keep an eye out for this publisher and blacklist them from now on

I reaaally want to hope that gamers will be smart enough to take their anger to the right place: The legislature that pushed these bills. But knowing most of them, the anger is all going to go to Sony.

This would be referred to as Divide and Conquer fallacy. Trying to make SFM/Roblox users feel attacked, when the comment only directly criticizes use of generative AI in artwork.

Defend your own position. Don’t try to group others into it if they’re not interested.

I’ve made SFM films…and his sentiment seems fine to me.

So the rumor that I heard (unfounded YouTube video, sadly) is that Sony had an issue with people running refund scams. People with usually-offline PS5s would buy a game, install it on their PlayStation, then pull the network cable, and request a refund on a secondary device. They get their money back, and then can play the game infinitely afterwards.

So, the fix is that a newly purchased PlayStation game must check in at least once after the 14-day refund period has ended. Once they’ve done that, it becomes a permanent license that can be played offline. In the YouTube video I saw, they claimed some people had reproduced this explanation.

Now, this sounds somewhat plausible to me. But if anyone were to reply “Bullshit, they’re backtracking” I wouldn’t fight you on it. We’ve certainly seen some controlling, domineering shit from game makers.

I will say that the specific case of military gamers is a key one. It’s very bad PR to give them a hard time, and they are usually offline wherever their base is. So, there’s often some investment in giving them some path to keep playing, which is what makes me more convinced in the rudimentary explanation.

I ended up installing some not-low-end gacha games, and felt pretty impressed at how well they could run and even have some moderate combat complexity for how shitty touch controls are.

Zenless Zone Zero, for instance, has a lot of the combat built into dodge timing/character swapping, and little work put into movement and camera controls.

Because hacker patches are untrustworthy, and may do far worse than lower your FPS, like install Bitcoin miners. I have also not seen reliable, well-documented, cross-game proof of the “lowers your FPS” claim. There have been cherry-picked claims that are often muddied with other patch work, as well as known poor implementations of Denuvo.

I want to support devs. I don’t want risks of malware. I don’t see any discernible issues when installing Denuvo games. I have never been given one salient, convincing argument about Denuvo being bad, just relentless downvotes.

I very much want to make an alternate /games community where whining about Denuvo is banned, not because I like such censorship, but because it seems to be the only way to chat with normal, nuanced people about new releases.

When it’s tied to rented games through PS+ membership, I think that makes sense. But this appears to apply for paid, owned digital items.

If SKG keeps momentum in the EU, and possibly even under current consumer laws, this might end up being illegal.

That’s pretty huge to me too. My main use would be with Moonlight, an open source version of Steam Link, and if it can’t connect to that Android TV to begin with, it’s worthless.

Strange that the Xbox and PlayStation controllers are now more open and reusable.

Mini Metro is a small, fun goal-based building game. You are given subway stations and must build lines between them, optimizing for different destination types, high passenger rate, etc.

I’ve played a lot of the games, but I bounced off RE1 since it’s a little bit stricter about resource management.

The remakes of 2, 3, 4, are all meant to be great entry points. If you like, 7 is also a good entry since it followed the poor reception of 6, and basically “soft-rebooted” with a completely different venue. For the most part, RE’s base story isn’t much more complicated than “Umbrella is an evil pharmaceutical corporation that makes monster viruses”, so there’s no strong need to follow an order.

I may be biased, but I think the story is faster and flows much better in Final Fantasy 7 original than remake. I think the long thread of hype for remake lead them to make way too much unnecessary “content” to bloat the size of the game, so they could justify 3 AAA games plus DLC around them. That can depend on whether you can put up with the older graphics.

If you’d like a JRPG from the same era that runs well on the Deck, another to consider is Trails in the Sky. Their remake is very true to the original, so there’s basically no urgent need to play one over the other.

Motivation from a character often pushes me to prioritize one game when I have many in my backlog. A key example of this is the Ace Attorney games, especially when compared to another mystery game like Return of the Obra Dinn.

In both games you’re solving a mystery, figuring out what happened. In Obra Dinn, you see the “happen” and fill out forms for which person was who, and how they died. But you’re not going to stop anything terrible from happening - that part’s done.

However, in Ace Attorney, every case has the same premise: Some poor fellow has been accused by an overeager justice system of murder. Worse, circumstantially it does seem likely they did it - and no one believes their story. As their defense, you prove them innocent AND drag out the evil miser who landed them in that situation, solving the mystery as you go.

In one of my favorite cases of the trilogy, the defendant was photographed in the act of stabbing the victim by a witness who was behind a fence. The accused was the only person at the scene, arrested on the spot, bears a cut on her hand from using the knife. When questioned, she willingly admits to killing him. Only reason you take the case is that she has no apparent motive, and her sister begs you to do it, feeling she couldn’t ever do such a thing. And yes: She’s innocent. Unraveling that mystery is one thing, but unraveling the motives to figure out how to help these people is another.

I put it in all caps because I’m referring to the 2016 reboot. It tries to be fast paced, but even though the Slayer is silent they’re pretty successful in giving him an angry, rebellious personality.

There’s something that activates my child toy brain having a vehicle large enough to deploy another vehicle. Even Sea of Thieves, being able to have one player steering at the helm, while another is placing treasure down below, while another is deploying the rowboat from the back, gives quite a sense of ownership. Needless to say, trains often fulfill the same desire.

Onirism. GOD, that is an enormous game. There are JRPGs I’ve finished with less playtime, even being a completionist.

For reference, it’s an adventure shooter with dozens of weapons, boss fights, giant levels across numerous locales, vehicles, etc.

It is also very glitchy and basically still an early access title, but I still found it worth the asking price for being so ambitious as an indie.

I refuse to buy into the lie that EVERY minor inconvenience is an assault on social justice. That kind of absolutism is designed to waste social energy in a world where far more visible and important harms are frequent. Ending the feeding of gambling addictions, addressing memory hoarding, and encouraging fresh IPs are all to me far more important issues.

You need to accept there’s a large population of people in this community that have not, and will not, be convinced by the Denuvo arguments. I even tried to engage others on the subject to dissect their views and potentially further the discussion, and all it got was multiple paragraphs about what they were NOT going to say, and refused to talk about. The debate is over, and not by my choice. It is literally just annoying now.

I mean, I’ll oppose any Xbox Game Pass because Microsoft has proven itself untrustworthy.

But I’ll bite; I don’t necessarily oppose the structure of a monthly fee for game rentals. Still, it really should be closer to the $10-$15 range, at max. Many people will claim the USA has suffered inflation, but I think a lot of that has just been price collusion on essentials. The minimum wage is the same.

The only problem with your piecemeal approach is that some features like cloud streaming sound unappealing from a distance (many people would comment “It can’t possibly technologically work! Anyone saying they’ve tried it is lying!111”) So having some way in which it becomes an extra element can get people to value it more. The base layer could even allow for about 1-2 hours of the “Streaming X” layer as a trial.

As a reminder, for anyone kinda interested in this but hating Microsoft, the lite Indie Pass exists.

The price surge put some more nails in the coffin for me, but my breaking point was firing the team that made Hi-Fi Rush, their ONLY GOTY contender.

Other nails in the coffin came from learning just how much the Azure team does to lick Israel’s boots in their genocide.

That was also the only factual assertion I made. I posited a guess afterwards, and drew potential conclusions afterwards.

You’re free to analyze my assumptions, which I label as assumptions, as incorrect, and give a further explanation of why one thing is true and another is not. But if you’re entering an argument refusing to make statements, OR supporting/negating suggested statements, that’s pretty much the definition of arguing in bad faith. Your arguments don’t “stand on their own” if you’re not open to discussion of their potential flaws.

If you don’t want to comment, just keep your hand off the Post button. No one hates you for that.

It says a lot that Bioshock’s hacking minigame was derided though. I can’t fully explain why, but the implementation in Pragmata feels much more engaging. It manages to build it less as an obstacle out-of-combat, and more of a reward in-combat, while also not needing that much thought process to apply it decently.

Hell, I’ll admit, I don’t care much for Nintendo now but I’m also not going to invade topics about Tomodachi Life to insist every Nintendo fan boycott it because of what they did to Garry’s Mod.

I think it’s valid to point to exceptionalism in the reasoning.

Excuse racism as an analogy here; but if a homeowner complains “That young man has been loitering around that corner store all day! He’s up to no good!” then a good cop (yes, I know) should rightfully point out “So, that young man is black. To be clear, your issue is with loitering, so you also have an issue with that white boy that’s loitering around another corner store, right?” If the homeowner’s response is “I didn’t say that!!” then it suddenly becomes telling as to why they have a favorable view of one circumstance and not another, even if they’re not verbally stating “I don’t like black kids!”.

You said they’re both “bad”, but by lack of mention, it sounds like you’re not boycotting Steam’s, and if I had to guess, it’s due to effectiveness; so long as it can be circumvented, you don’t especially care, right? For the purposes of the argument, circumvention and performance are two very distinct concerns. If it can be shown that Steam DRM also affects performance, what would be your opinion then?

I definitely recall part of the setup of Denuvo involves the developer having to call into it on many phases of the game running. But I specifically remember there was a contention where one dev decided to call it every frame, which thrashed some part of the computer, and even Denuvo engineers themselves said that’s a bad idea. It’s more likely something like a common event, something like a player getting a kill, or even loading between levels.

We’re all going to be competing on data about exactly how much Denuvo affects performance, when even common accessibility technologies and other modern game features have effects too. To me, it’s a simple question of whether it’s smooth and playable, and especially in Capcom’s case I can say performance has generally been good.

So what should be the word we use for “media that depicts positive social ideologies?” Apparently “woke” includes the definition “while being super preachy about it.”

Of course, in that split, it’s also common people will call something “preachy” when a gay guy is there, and doesn’t even waste the viewer’s time. It happened to that horrible conservative animated show, as well.

Funny thing is, I knew a long time ago it was a boomer shooter. I was miffed that it boiled down “detective work” to gunning down whole rooms of people.

But, on a second look, I’m surprised to see there’s a lot of genuine worldbuilding, exploration, and conversations to go into the mystery! Sure, gunning down hordes is still used as the central play, but I like when it’s not overly reductive.

I think the big counter example to that is Fortnite. Battle royales were already pretty successful, and then Fortnite (previously a fort zombie defense game) pivoted to a battle royale, and the rest is history.

So it’s hard to say it can’t be done. Certainly most of them are a waste of time.

Apologies; didn’t read that far when I saw it. But to be fair, your exact quote was “Requires Windows”, not “Requires Windows or Linux”. You’re sort of the odd one out on macs.

Wait, what? The game is Steam Deck verified. How does it require Windows?

One thing I appreciate about the game is the natural enforcement of rules. Usually, in a game we see strict, coded enforcement: You’re not punished for attacking a teammate, you either physically can’t, or you’re removed from the game when it’s demonstrated to be intentional.

In Arc Raiders, if there’s no witnesses, you CAN get away with murdering another player. It comes with risks, for instance people could hear and deduce the situation. I think having that as a possibility actually makes the friendly interactions feel more positive. It’s more of an intentional choice.

There’s perhaps something interesting to say about game design mechanics there - where something exists in the game but is not actively rewarded or encouraged nor punished.

Yeah, but that doesn’t support indie devs.

Do you seriously pirate indie games? Against AAA there’s at least a sense of inflammatory rebellion. What’s the thought process there?

I’m not uniformly opposed to subscriptions as a concept. That almost goes as far as “paying money for products is anti consumer”.

Even when it comes to a smaller sum, I see the attraction to companies: It’s reliable revenue, which makes business and payment of employees more stable.

That said, it relies on the consumer constantly knowing they have the option of leaving without “lock in” persuasion, and the product being decent value. Obviously, we’ve seen hundreds of anti-consumer subscriptions.

There’s certainly been some industry-wide brain drain, especially when it comes to low-level engineering. When you think about the memory-level mastery people exhibited to get things running on the PlayStation 1, it feels incomparable to today.

Those people enjoyed being pioneers and recognized that was the only way to achieve their dream; but they’re also valued so highly today (picture publishers willing to buy out entire other publishers to get hold of a game engine), chances are they will never have a simple job.

Worse, some MBAs don’t even recognize their value; and wrongly believe they can be easily replaced. There’s probably some ecological comparative example where a great oak is central to the ecosystem of a whole country, and a business developer claims “We can bulldoze that for farmland and import fertilizer, right?”

Is that a frequent concern? I know high spec devices sometimes have issues with ultra framerates or wide monitors, but generally between the Lost Planet and RE Engine Capcom has done pretty well making their own engines.

When I played Trails in the Sky, I felt a lot of my FF7 nostalgia coming back. It got a remake which has been very faithful to the original; while you start combat with some dodges/swings in the overworld, most fights inevitably come back to turn-based.

This might be too pointed a memory, but I remember trying a demo for that game, and somehow having the basic attacks involve cat-like repetitive swatting from the chibi characters put me way off.

I also want to feel really intrigued and connected with a story to play a JRPG. “Generic lore” doesn’t do it for me.

Dead by Daylight.

The idea evolved out of turning horror games into multiplayer. As balance adjustments were made over time, the horror element was depleted and most of it is based around pathing between obstacles as a slower character, against one very powerful melee-based character.

It’s certainly fun and bearable in its current form, but: The objectives based around “escaping the killer” tend to result in lopsided results (eg, one player that hid and escaped feeling proud, while a very good chaser gets few points since they died). The game is not accessible to players intimidated by horror, and some effects even trigger certain phobias or bodily resistances (eg, The Plague causes some empathetic vomiting issues to some people) Plus, some players taking the killer role sometimes associate a bit too much ego to their result (they do badly in matches, and blame the game, stating “I’m Michael Myers, dropping bits of wood and puny flashlights shouldn’t phase me”)

I tried the demo for this game, and it was a lot of fun. Capcom is one of few that can still get those basic creative formulas out well.

I could be biased towards it for being a fresh IP in a world of remakes. It’s still hard to justify a $70/$80/$9000 price tag but I may be ready for this one.