since you brought up stardew and ac, fishing doesn’t need to be the main focus/gameplay of the game?

Far Cry 5 has fishing, can’t remember if there’s different fishing gear really.

Warframe has fishing, but it can take quite some time for a new player to get there. The “openworld” areas on planets have spear fishing you can do for faction rep. etc.

“Already?” :D

Man this game has been through some dev.hell, I guess. Seems like their kickstarter project promised this would have been out in february… 2013. Oh well, better late than never.

Never really played the OG Space Quest -games, mainly because I just don’t enjoy the occasionally brutal late 80’s/early 90’s Sierra -adventuregame design where games contain a lot of softlocks and instant death traps. I’d assume SpaceVenture has moved on from those practices, though.

Wishlisted. Thanks.

I only longingly looked at the screenshots of Sam&Max in some gaming magazine at the time, managed to get the game waaayyy later. But man was it worth the wait :)

You’re welcome! Also, there are still some more-or-less indie devs who keep the point&click adventures alive, afaik most, if not all from Wadjet Eye’s catalog are great, eg: The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, Strangeland, Primordia… worth checking out!

point & click adventure games? Some older ones can be aquired for cheap, or even free as some of them have been released as freeware.

some suggestions in no particular order, some are older (like, DOS old, but still good today, imo), some are 2010’s or so:

• TellTale Sam & Max -episodic games (3d, cartoony, comedy)
• Monkey Island -series, parts 1-3. (2d, cartoony, comedy, pirates, yarharhar) (Later games in the series are pretty finicky to get running/stay running.)
• Sam & Max: Hit the road (2d, cartoony, comedy)
• The Dig (2d, scifi)
• Full Throttle (has a modernized remaster) (2d, “scifi”, biker-theme)
• Flight of the Amazon Queen (freeware) (2d, ~40’s vibe, “retro-scifi”)
• Beneath a steel sky (freeware) (2d, scifi, comedy, some gore)

Ones that have some keyboard usage, but are mainly mouse driven (or can be mouse driven)

• Grim Fandango (modernised remaster, original doesn’t do mouse) (3d, latin-american land of the dead, comedy)
• Indiana Jones & The Fate of Atlantis (some occasional fights where keyboard would be preferred, most of these can be circumvented though) (2d, some comedy, ww2, I mean, it’s indiana jones)

The older ones can be played via Scummvm (https://scummvm.org/) - it’s basically a simplified launcher/runner just for adventure games.

I’m a bit two minds about Content Warning - on one hand, it’s simple to pick up and it’s definitely goofy and, fun? But lack of meaningful permanent progress kinda brings it down for me.

Essentially, you can do “fine” with the basic gear (camera, flashlights), but you get more views (ie. money) with better gear - assuming you actually can capture some footage the game-logic deems worthy. Lost items can occasionally be found in the spoopy-place later on, but not guaranteed. Also replacing/buying new gear is kinda expensive, and dead teammates cost money to bring back (but you can’t go to debt because of it, iirc, so that’s nice).

The runs, at least for us, are usually VERY short, like few minutes in and out. Your runs are limited by oxygen, health and amount of footage you can record - which is 30s. so make it count. So basically how the runs go:

1. find the first monster
2. goof with it and try not to die
3. okay steve died while goofing with the monster, but I got it on film!
4. RUN AWAAAY with camera set in selfie-mode and try not to die

Usually monsters can be found very quickly, sometimes it takes a while. But usually run is over in few minutes, the prepwork before taking a dive tends to take longer :D

AFAIK There are some “hidden puzzles”, like combine some bones or whatever to summon a spoopy secret monster or such, but I haven’t seen them myself, just seen some mentions about them occasionally.

Also, It has mod support too. We tried a few:

• longer/infinite film - initially we thought this would be great, but that just defeated the whole point, recorded footage started to drag on and on and on… Short film forces you to really asses the situation and only record peak footage, instead of meandering nonsense.
• More/infinite money - While it was dope to finally test the equipment we were usually too stupid drunk bad to be able to afford them, the items range from useless single use toy to needlessly expensive for what they are.
• More days - same, kinda defeats the point.
• free hospital bills - a good one, imo. The game is punishing enough as is.

Maybe a bit more durable dudes or longer/infinite oxygen tanks would do, dunno.

Doesn’t sound like a glowing recommendation, but in general I’ve never had bad time in the game. The runs are just over bit too quickly, but then again starting a new doesn’t take long either. It’s decent at minimum.

are you using some app to use fsr in older games, or is that just baked into the amd drivers/software now?

Our group got Lethal Company - and promptly refunded, none of us really felt it. Later “Content Warning” was given free, which we got and still occasionally play, it’s okay - if a bit jank. We’ve been discussing about this one, but it just screams streamer/youtuber-bait to me, and while it is exceptionally fun to watch good streamers having a banter and laughs. I dunno if it holds as well for us, it kinda feels like we’d play it once or twice and then drop it entirely.

Visually the game is on point, though. The southpark-esque “canadian” way the robot-characters talk is hilarious, and the slight eye movements really sell it.

oh I wasn’t going to go on a rampage about fake pixels or anything, honest question about performance. Kinda wild it tanks that hard beyond 1440p. There’s few games where I run DLSS even if performance-wise it isn’t neede - just because it does better job with antialiasing than whatever TXAA/TAA/FXAA/whatever postprocess AA there usually is. A lot less crawling pixel edges in fine details etc.

Also, just heads up if you ever intend to go for Arkham Knight - IIRC the good ending requires finishing all joker stuff (incl. the collectible trophies). I got no time for that nonsense so just watched the ending on youtube after getting bad ending. :D

Arkham City is great! Plays well, sounds dope, looks still pretty darn good. The artstyle is still a nice balance between realistic and stylistic, which doesn’t age as hard as realistic, imo.

Got to ask, FSR really needed? Shouldn’t this run at 4k even at fairly modest/toaster-ish pc now? Or does FSR provide better antialiasing results than whatever the game does without it?

Once upon a time I did 100%'d Arkham Asylum, but bailed out of that plan on Arkham City - the amount of collectibles, challenges and secrets was just too much. (And then Arkham Knight came along and turned it way past 11, didn’t bother to finish the game because screw those Joker races.)

No matter what sensitivity my mouse is set to I seem to get stuck when turning. On a controller I can turn completely in a circle, but not with a mouse unless i’m missing something.

are you using running in circles as a benchmark? as a one continuous loop that is not going to happen with a mouse unless you have infinite desk and arm lengh. Generally mouse users do circles in segments: turn a bit, move mouse back to center and repeat as nescessary.

If you’ve mostly used controlles, yea, m+kb is going to feel unnatural. Same applies in reverse too. Different worlds - it can take quite some time to get familiar with the other.

seems like the fans of the game didn’t really stay with it :P

oh DERP, how did I even forget that one.

and the hand kinda is reminiscent of the sausagedog from it too, different devs though.

edit: aww poo. there apparently was a demo but it doesn’t seem to exist anymore. :/

the character models were as weird looking as you’d expect from the era

Oh sure! Love the lowpoly/pre-rendered backgrounds aesthetic. The aliasing thing I mentioned earlier is just a “petpeeve” of mine, I can’t stand the jagged edges / lack of antialiasing. The rough pixel edges of the modes look so out of place when the pre-rendered backgrounds are so smoothly antialiased.

Though, there’s an argument to be made that when playing in modern high resolution, the character models are a lot sharper than the upscaled/blurry backgrounds :D

Some of the puzzles are obtuse to the extreme, and silly. There’s one that’s almost legendarily bad, so it has that bit of history if you’re interested lol.

I guess same goes for pretty much every point&click adventure game, sometimes you just need to be in the same “headspace” as the puzzle designer to get it, otherwise you just don’t.

But, sure I’m down for some history of a bad puzzle! I love obscure tidbits of old games.

oh man, The Longest Journey has been on my todo list for eternities. Ages ago I was being a pixel-peeping-perfectionist and I hated the aliasing on the character models - but now that ScummVM does the game perfectly I really have no reason to wait… but… here we are.

Since the game is dear to you, how about some motivational sales pitch for it? Why should I drop everything else and go play the game right now? :D

same deal, favorites change according to mood, but there are overall few mainstays:

Indiana Jones & The Fate of Atlantis.

It’s a childhood favorite I return to every now and then. It’s a point&click adventure, and to me it’s essentially the 4th (and last) Indiana Jones movie. :D

Apart from one or two bad bits the game pulls, it’s otherwise pretty logical from start to finish. 3 different paths from mid to late game, and mostly good voice acting (for the time). I know the game by heart at this point, but still it feels fun to play, every time. Nostalgia-goggles probably play a big part.

Cyberpunk 2077

I know it’s a divisive game, don’t care, works for me. The bleak vibes of the game just speak to me. Have played it through several times since launch, occasionally still find new things here and there. Not the deepest rpg around, but a good action-rpg with neonlights.

Unnamed Space Idle

I’ve been on this idle/timewaster for way over a year, slow progress raising the numbers all the time. Sure it’s a bit low on gameplay, but absolutely neat little game to occasionally click few times when watching some longform content or so.

Just a hunch, but have you seen how rabid some nintendo -fans are? If a word of the lawsuit got out some whacko’s could try something. Ref. “Zelda-game got only 8/10? Send death threats to reviewer.” mentality.

fextralife

Sometimes it feels like fextralife is filled only with stub articles.

me: “Hmm, I wonder about [a thing] in [a game]”

fextralife’s entire article: “[A thing] is a thing in [a game]”

brilliant, thank you.

Electronic Arts games have mtx. Full stop. Expecting anything else is delusional. Sure, it’s a great day when, in modern times, they release a game without any. But, you know, hell freezing over first and all that.

edit: and even without mtx, I’m not sure they make games anymore that even remotely interest me, probably, I haven’t checked in a while. Last I checked was ME2, iirc.

Yea nah, for it to take off it needs to be short and memorable, “2d wave-survival autoshooter” is just word salad and too cumbersome to use, imo - it’s more of a short description rather than a name.

Ye. Ut99 weapons were pretty much all great. Personally I didn’t really like the goo gun, but others made it an absolute beast. The sniper rifle ended up being hilariously good at range and stupidly deadly at close range as headshots seemed to trigger on any hit above belly. The buzzaw throwing thing was nifty for the bouncing shots, but iir the headshots with that required hits to the forehead… Which still cut the heads off from the neck. Felt weird that

I guess the default pistol was a bit weak, but dual pistols was decent upgrade to it.

if you enjoy stealth games, sure!

The main idea is that Styx is smaller than humans, so direct combat is never an option. Stealth takedowns, traps and such are the tools here. The enemies are delightfully stupid: sure, once you’ve been spotted they give you a chase and smack you about, but they also go back to their patrols if you manage to escape and hide for a bit. The usual “huh, must have been the wind” thing.

Gameplay can be a bit quicksave/quickload if that’s how you want to play it. Levels are generally huge, but end up somewhat being obstacle courses with few routes which zigzag around the direct path through them.

The games are a bit “eurojank”, sure, but imo, very enjoyable. But I am the kind of gamer who takes hours per level just so they can knock out EVERYBODY in the level, without raising alarms, just because that’s fun to me, so I might be a bit biased. :P

All in all, since you already got them, give them a whirl? The first levels tell you pretty fast if you like the gameplay or not.

I JUST started replaying Styx -games, can’t wait for this one!

I’m kinda torn between Unreal Tournament’s (ut99) sniper rifle, flak cannon and the instagib variant of the shock rifle.

high-fps abuse looks GREAT! I honestly thought the SDL sourceport (?) that’s existed for years already had that, but apparently not.

Might have to revisit the game at some point

hand holding

what manner of degeneracy is this

I’ve played 2k21 and 2k23, both pretty fine for casual/beer golfing with friends while absolutely trash talking to them in voice chat. It’s pretty great… but:

The absolutely only reason I got 2k23 was because the 2k21 had stayed full price ever after the 2k23 released, so those of my friend group who didn’t already have the game didn’t (understandably) want to cough up 60-70€ for the game. Once 2k23 got a reasonable sale, we all got that as it was more affordable - but functionally identical to the older game.

I’m going to assume the same pattern will repeat, and it’s only because of the in-game mtx which they want you to buy AGAIN, for basically the same game but with different number in the title. To my beer-gaming group the mtx stuff is entirely irrelevant, we just play with whatever gear the game gave us from the get go, this isn’t equipment-race.

Played this ages ago when it was in closed-beta. It was… okay-ish? Hella grindy tho. Decided to wait a bit until they did more to the game, only for the game to go behind epic (IIRC) - and now I see a steam forums post it’s going bye-bye? It moved to steam at some point? O_o

I guess the grindy game was pretty hard sell considering Monster Hunter exists.

tbh, that’s quite a bit more than what I would have expected - especially for a game what I thought was more or less a counter-strike variant where the whole point is the pvp experience.

So… I’m completely outsider to this game (and series), and… is there actually much lore/story to these characters - or better yet, lore/story that anyone cares for or matters for the game?

I get that the date is a bit unfortunate all things considered, but… why do the character need to have a stated birthday anyway? Are there in-game birthday parties or what?

zstd is generally stupidly fast and quite efficient.

probably not exactly how steam does it, or even close, but as a quick & dirty comparison: compressed and decompressed a random CD.iso (~375 MB) I had laying about, using zstd and lzma, using 1MB dictitionary:

test system: Arch linux (btw, as is customary) laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U cpu.

used commands & results:

Zstd:

# compress (--maxdict 1048576 - sets the used compression dictionary to 1MB) :
% time zstd --maxdict 1048576 < DISC.ISO > DISC.zstd
zstd --maxdict 1048576 < DISC.ISO > DISC.zstd  1,83s user 0,42s system 120% cpu 1,873 total

# decompress:
% time zstd -d < DISC.zstd > /dev/null
zstd -d < DISC.zstd > /dev/null  0,36s user 0,08s system 121% cpu 0,362 total

• resulting archive was 229 MB, ~61% of original.
• ~1.9s to compress
• ~0.4s to decompress

So, pretty quick all around.

Lzma:

# compress (the -1e argument implies setting preset which uses 1MB dictionary size):
% time lzma -1e < DISC.ISO > DISC.lzma
lzma -1e < DISC.ISO > DISC.lzma  172,65s user 0,91s system 98% cpu 2:56,16 total

#decompress:
% time lzma -d < DISC.lzma > /dev/null
lzma -d < DISC.lzma > /dev/null  4,37s user 0,08s system 98% cpu 4,493 total

• ~179 MB archive, ~48% of original-
• ~3min to compress
• ~4.5s to decompress

This one felt like forever to compress.

So, my takeaway here is that the time cost to compress is enough to waste a bit of disk space for sake of speed.

and lastly, just because I was curious, ran zstd on max compression settings too:

% time zstd --maxdict 1048576 -9 < DISC.ISO > DISC.2.zstd
zstd --maxdict 1048576 -9 < DISC.ISO > DISC.2.zstd  10,98s user 0,40s system 102% cpu 11,129 total

% time zstd -d < DISC.2.zstd > /dev/null 
zstd -d < DISC.2.zstd > /dev/null  0,47s user 0,07s system 111% cpu 0,488 total

~11s compression time, ~0.5s decompression, archive size was ~211 MB.

deemed it wasn’t nescessary to spend time to compress the archive with lzma’s max settings.

Now I’ll be taking notes when people start correcting me & explaining why these “benchmarks” are wrong :P

edit:

goofed a bit with the max compression settings, added the same dictionary size.

edit 2: one of the reasons for the change might be syncing files between their servers. IIRC zstd can be compressed to be “rsync compatible”, allowing partial file syncs instead of syncing entire file, saving in bandwidth. Not sure if lzma does the same.

names of games I didn’t expect to hear to day. Only had Major Stryker shareware as a kid, played it a lot, along with Duke Nukum and some other old SW games.

But those games on massive tv? Pixels the size of cats.

Were you using any crt shaders or such?

doesn’t seem like it was all that popular game to begin with, so all things considered the number of affected users is likely to be like, 10 at best? And some of those are likely affiliated with the dev/publisher anyway.

But it sucks that these things still can get through the sieve to begin with :/

I just couldn’t stop buying the bg3 season passes, fomo-exclusive character skins and consumable magic item bundles to feed the one companion whose name escapes me atm.

/S

Imagine paying hundreds for beta-invite, to scalpers, and then get banned because account trading is pretty much always against TOS.

but then the whole contents of the news would be in the headline, you wouldn’t need to click then, and then they wouldn’t get to show you ads!

I get that they need ads to stay in business, but man the clickbait titles are still annoying :/

using a 3090, switched dlss to use the new transformer -model and it’s GREAT. Basically all smeared surfaces while moving are gone, wet pavement stays crisp while waking the rainy streets…

Kinda feels like the image quality which previously was “DLSS Quality” can be achieved with “DLSS Performance” now, just with higher framerate.

For laughs I tried the dlss -files with other games (The Ascent, PGA TOUR 2K23), and overall the visuals appear more detailed with less artifacting when using DLSS. Apparently the results could be even better if I tinkered a bit with nvinspector and enforced the “J” profile for dlss for the games, too.

Radiotower as a Service.

As a 3090 owner: ok, but largely meh & IDGAF.

Admittedly, I’ve only tried the FSR on a single game (Cyberpunk 2077), and while it looks cool & smooth, the input lag it generates feels horrid. While the DLSS FG might offer a bit lower input lag, it’s still more than it would be without FG, so… meh?

I didn’t like motion smoothing on TV’s, and (so far) I sure don’t enjoy it on my pc. Old man yells at cloud, etc.

Ask for a lot, try to appear less shit when ONLY asking a bit less

Or you know, business as usual