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

I’ve mostly thought about playing Balatro, but haven’t gotten around to it as I’ve only watched numbers go big in Untitled Space Idle (idler/clicker/absolute-timewaster).

It’s been a slow gaming week for me. :D

edit: maybe I should actually elaborate a bit on the idle-game.

Essentially: you have space ship, space ship must fight other space ships, which get tougher and tougher the further you go. As you go, you research, build, etc. more things to your ship to make it sturdier, deadlier, and faster, then reset and do it again, but BETTER. Rince and repeat, the usual idle-game loop.

There’s so many different ways to make the ship better - but you’re gonna need them all anyway, having multiple systems you can/need to level up, but usually can’t do so in one go is just a time sink.

It’s a simple game but if you identify as “scandisk/defrag watcher”, it’s for you.

aww, that’s a bummer, I’ve been eyeing that game for quite a while and it does seem interesting.

even the minimum requires gpu raytracing? It’s forced on? o_O

TIL that actual game studios sell their games on itch.io. I thought it was just solo/indie devs’ place :o

gamers nexus - basically anything they review gets dissected to absurd detail.

But in general I still prefer to crossreference multiple sources if I’m thinking of getting [whateverthething]

all of those look like they’re made with heroforge https://www.heroforge.com/ - or similar.

At least with heroforge you actually get a physical miniature

(edit: to be clear: no nft’s at heroforge, they just print miniatures, which you build/design with their site. that’s all)

Similar thoughts here. I was playing it on fairly high end pc as well from day 1 (wasn’t really patient with it… yea…) - Sure there were some funky glitches (eg. occasionally T-posing nude on bikes) here and there, but nothing game breaking. But that’s not to say those things didn’t happen to others, but I’ve understood the game was an absolute shitshow on ps4.

it’s a pretty cool “wallpaper generator” or animated video insert for whatever video project you might have. Pretty, no actual gameplay, but neat toy software.

I dunno, probably not worth it for someone who has it on consoles, but as someone with no consoles newer than gamecube, I’ll wait for a discount.

Curse is pretty great, imo. The higher resolution cartoon style doesn’t feel as “vintage” as the first two games.

But, how do you want to fight, insult lemmy-commenting? You comment like a cow! /s

Atlantis would have made a pretty good movie too, imo.

I’ve only seen movies up to Crystal Skull, and… I dunno, not up to par with the 3 first ones. No idea what has happened since.

unless the new game is any good.

so far I’ve only heard that it’s closer to “immersive sims” with stealth gameplay than what machinegames generally does. While I do like me some sneaky-stealth games, they tend to devolve into quicksave/quickload very quickly. Who knows, but I’m waiting for some less edited letsplay footage and sales if it seems like I’d like it.