Well honestly, I’ve got enough Steam games to last me the rest of my life probably. If I ever really get the urge to play Okami again and it’s still not available here, I’ll explore my yo-ho-ho options. Still, I’d rather throw them the $5 the price regularly gets down to on Steam for the convenience.

Still waiting for the first to be available on PC in Korea. It’s weird. They registered it here, then never released it. No clue why not.

I’ve already gone through it twice on PS2 and Wii. One of my favorite games of all time.

I don’t mind. Fewer choices. It’s only on Epic? It doesn’t exist.

Because, like many, you can’t remember the name of that game, but just about everyone knows about Palworld.

I generally hate racing games. The one I do remember playing a lot was 1990’s Stunts. It was an early polygonal game. You could make your own tracks. It’s was pretty ahead of its time.

I have an XBox 360 controller lying around that still works great. I have a couple DS4s that still work great even though the rubber started coming off the analog sticks. The one Dualsense I bought crapped out after a single year of moderate use.

Yeah, I might get back to it sometime. It is a mish-mash of so many video game tropes I love. It was just one particular instance where I forced myself through a dungeon as fast as I could, got frustrated with the boss and died a couple of times, finally made it, and wasn’t fast enough to beat the NPC that just completely ticked me off and made me put it down. Those monk trial things really tested my patience for a bit there, too.

Long, long puzzle dungeons that encourage you to race against the NPCs. I hated that mechanic so much, I never finished the game.

Playing through Baldur’s Gate 3 now, and I see what they did. It’s sex up front. Within the first couple of hours you’re boinking your interest. It’s not until act III - potentially dozens of hours later - when you get to the actual romance part of the relationship. It’s an interesting take. At least with the couple of romance plots I’ve seen.

Ahh yes, definitely. I should have said that isn’t strictly a traditional shmup. Bangai O definitely has many elements of shmups, but the level design and many of the mechanics are quite unique to it.

I actually played a bunch of that Star Wars vector arcade game at my local bowling alley. Yes, I am old…

Starfox never did it for me like Space Harrier. I’m not sure why. The primitive 3D maybe. Space Harrier creature design is just plain bizarre and intriguing.

I love Space Harrier. There are a handful of other third-person, on-rails shooters (Sin and Punishment), but nothing recent that I’m aware of.

Also, Bangai O on Nintendo DS is insanely fun. I can’t think of any other games where slowdown is a necessary mechanic.

Pop quiz: four of the top five most anticipated games are Doom, Gears of War, Perfect Dark, and Assassin’s Creed: what year is it?

Getting Cicret Bracelet vibes from this one.

History can’t sue you into oblivion for copyright infringement.

Godot is awesome. I hope all the attention that has been spewed upon them thanks to Unity’s fuck up doesn’t spoil it.

libgdx

Which is a game dev library for Java, so OP was right.

I guess it’s about time I got around to playing the first one, then.

For fun, we just tried to kill the guy in the image. He’s supposed to be one of the most powerful wizards in the entire world or something. Surprisingly, we succeeded. It was only his simulacrum. The attention to detail in this game is amazing.

Exactly. If people missed playing those games so much, they’d be playing those games. NES games are trivial to emulate.

And this is the ultimate in survivorship bias. Super Mario 3 is often touted as the best game of an entire generation. There are a lot of mediocre NES games.

You don’t miss those games, you miss being a kid playing those games.

The Talos Principle 2. It’s a cerebral, first person puzzle game by the makers of Serious Sam. The first one was amazing! One of my favorite games. The reviews make it sound like this one is at least just as good. It’s not even that old and already 40% off.

Can’t recommend that one without also recommending Ico and especially Shadow of the Colossus before it. Shadow of the Colossus may be my favorite gave ever even. It’s so good. I really wish Sony would release all three on PC or something. I still haven’t played The Last Guardian because the last Playstation I owned was a PS3.

Yup. I waited something like a year for Elden Ring to go on sale. No problem waiting again.

I was coding Indie games when it came out. The number of clones in the community was just disgusting. There was even more than one Flappy Game Jam. If Flappy Bird can be credited with one thing, it’s that it made a whole bunch of inept coders think that they too could get rich by making super simple mobile games.

Tametsi

Tametsi just barely eked out being my most played game of 2023 over, duh duh duh!! Elden Ring. Yes, it took me longer to finish a $1 Minesweeper clone than to finish a massive Fromsoft Soulslike. Haha!

I bounced off Crosscode hard. Which sucks because I wanted to love it. The pacing and difficulty were all over the place. And making the puzzle dungeons a race between you and other characters just made me hate them. I want to stop and think! After dying to a particularly nasty boss I was trying to beat as fast as possible so I could maybe eke out a win in the dungeon, I ended up cranking the difficulty all the way down, and was the last out of the dungeon anyway. I put the game down and haven’t looked back. That was about 25 hours in, and nothing of consequence had occurred with the plot by then, anyway. I might go back sometime and see if it gets better, but it left me pretty sour.

I love the entire 16 bit era, and JRPGs, and action RPGs, and Crono Trigger, and difficult games, but Crosscode just took all those elements and somehow made them unpalatable to me.

I’m enjoying it, but after a certain point I feel like I had to consult a guide. Late-game stuff is expensive!

Elden Ring and Stardew Valley ate a decent chunk of 2023 for me. And are both amazing games in their own right. Totally different, though.

I didn’t play anything really bad this past year, but I did bounce off Crosscode pretty hard after expecting to love it given I’m a sucker for early JRPGs and the 8 and 16 bit eras in general. It’s a well made game, just overlong and featuring some tedious and frustrating mechanics.

Hey! Exactly like Skyrim on PS3 at release. Nostalgia!

I finally just started playing. I’m 50 hours in and nowhere near done with it. Don’t tell me there’s more coming!

The game writes itself! Sega needs to do this.

I was thinking something more like a sci-fi, existential horror film where Harrier is the only force preventing the utter ruination of the universe by an endless horde of Lovecraftian monsters, and his loneliness and indestructibility drives him to extremes, but the Iron Man-esque angle could work, too.

I am so ready for a Space Harrier movie.

It’s amateurish that their store advertised games to me that were unavailable to me. I’m no code whiz, but it can’t be that hard to chuck in an if (region == false) then !advertise; Valve and GOG don’t seem to have any problems with that.

I have no issue with them giving away free games. Too bad that and the paid exclusives don’t earn them a loyal customer base. Maybe if they’d put more effort into their store. Like maybe not advertising region locked games to regions where they’re not available.

GOG is great. I have an account and have bought a few games there when I think of it. I just wish they had Souls games.

Humble isn’t trying to compete with Steam or Epic, and they don’t engage in the anti-consumer practice of paying off developers for exclusive access to games.

I’m aware of the complexities of software development. If Epic seriously wanted to compete with Steam, they really should have tried harder to provide a better service instead of trying to buy loyalty through free games and exclusivity contracts.

I don’t doubt it, but I’ve been a pretty regular user since 2009, and I’ve never had a game advertised to me on the front page that wasn’t available in my region. In fact, there are games I want that I know aren’t available on Steam here, and the only way to get to the Steam page for them is by using a proxy or VPN. I definitely can’t buy them with my account. It seems pretty amateurish of Epic to advertise unavailable games and to even let me click “buy” before telling me I can’t buy it. Maybe they’ve fixed that by now, but whatever. The paid exclusivity bullcrap showed me where their priorities lie.

I was up for a Steam competitor. I signed up for the Epic store a few years back. Tried to get the first free game. It wasn’t available in my region despite being plastered all over the store in my region. The exact same thing happened the next month. Both of those games were available on Steam in my region at some pretty low prices by then.

Then, Epic started paying for exclusivity, making games not available in my region at all. I had at least deleted their stupid app by then anyway. Fuck Epic entirely.