I mean…

The unfortunate reality is that both parties, the customer and the game company, are culpable and both share blame

Personally I don’t play any game with microtransactions.

I’m only interested in games I can purchase outright and then own*. If there’s large scale DLC that’s fine, great even, but if there’s some in-game way to spend money that isn’t restricted to a DLC button/section, then I’m not interested.

I want to play games, not be inundated by constant sales opportunities.

*I’m aware I don’t “own” most game due to the stupidity of licensing, and while I don’t love that, I can acknowledge it’s still a different and better thing that games that constantly push microtransactions

First off, I’m American, but I understand your decision. Elbows up!

Beyond that, gotta be honest I’m not a huge classic rock guy, so I don’t even recognize about half those names. But that’s cool; I like stumbling into stuff I haven’t before.

I know Harvest of course (it’s great but I agree on Neil’s voice). And the Guess Who are one of those bands I know the singles from, but haven’t really explored deeper than that. Likewise I have never really dove into Gordon Lightfoot but I like what I know of his a lot; I absolutely adore Sundown. Rush I’ve listened to a bit but I’m more a Yes guy when it comes to classic prog rock.

Beyond that I’ve heard of but haven’t heard anything by Tragically Hip and Great Big Sea, but the rest are new names to me.

I’d say if I were to try to find something at the intersection of our interests and you say you like classic rock and Iron Maiden, the most recent Pentagram album ‘Lightning in a Bottle,’ which is technically a traditional doom metal/stoner rock album, but to my ears I think sounds a lot like Maiden mixed with a real classic rock sound and just a touch of doom on top (and obviously Bobby Liebling is no Bruce Dickinson) would probably be my first thought… but they’re American (from my neck of the woods, actually) and I don’t want suggest crossing the metaphorical picket line, so maybe bank the suggestion as something to check out if we’re ever freed from the insanity of our current situation. ✌

Oh god, I listen to a lot of music, so get ready, and fair warning I’m kind of a metalhead (but I genuinely do listen to everything), lol. Here’s a quick rundown of my recent listening, with minimal notes:

Sear Bliss - Heavenly Down. melodic black metal with a trombone!

Within Destruction - Animetal. deathcore goes pop sensibilities; I really think between this album and Left to Suffer’s ‘Leap of Death’ we’re on the precipice of the birth of a new microgenre that does to deathcore what easycore did to melodic hardcore and metalcore.

The Weeknd - Hurry Up Tomorrow. I’ve been a Weeknd fan since his original three mixtapes dropped, and finally got around to listening to his latest.

Dayseeker - Dark Sun. metalcore-tinged synthpop.

Watsky - Intention. kinda hippie-drenched indie hip-hop?

Rioghan - Kept. melodic and slightly djenty alt-metal; I was really hyped for Jinjer’s new album before it came out but honestly Rioghan’s Kept kind of sounds like what I wanted but didn’t fully get from Jinjer.

and I also recently caught up on some classics that somehow flew under my radar:

The Devil Wears Prada - With Roots Above and Branches Below.

Whitechapel - This is Exile

Emmure - Goodbye to the Gallows

As I Lay Dying - An Ocean Between Us

and today I’ve been obsessively listening to:

Deafheaven - Lonely People With Power. just absolutely insanely incredible blackgaze post-metal.

If you’ve been listening to anything, I’d love to hear about it as well!

I’ve been so focused on active album listening lately that I haven’t been playing much, so I’m still chugging my way through Cyberpunk and Moonlighter currently, and enjoying both of them thus far.

Although I did pick up Furi while it’s 80% on steam, but honestly I only played it for a little bit so far so I don’t really have any opinions about it yet

Honestly the difference between 1942 and 1943 on NES is enormous. 1942 was okay, but 1943 was so much better in every way, especially sound (the audio in 1942 is awful).

If you enjoyed 1942, I recommend loading 1943 on an emulator for a spin.

I’ve never played any of the Battlefield games at all, tbh. I don’t even know what they’re about, really. Somebody convince me to try them!

But you know what game I do miss regularly? 1943. I just played the absolute hell out of 1943 as a kid, probably one of my most played NES games.

Hahaha yeah it took awhile for her to grow on me but I ended up pretty fond of her by the end of it.

And yes, I liked it more than any Pokemon game, but tbh I think it’s such a different thing that it doesn’t even feel entirely accurate to directly compare them in that way

This is exactly how I feel about it. It feels like the creators love and were inspired by Pokemon, but aren’t just making a carbon copy. There are so many Pokemon-clones out there, it’s great to see that Cassette Beasts merely took only the most basic foundations of Pokemon and truly built their own original game on top of that foundation, rather than trying to rebuild the exact same structure.

Tbh I didn’t intentionally do that, so I think there much be some kind of trigger on this sub to automatically cross-post?

(edit: and to be clear, I’m glad it does!)

If you want an unorthodox suggestion, Metal:Hellsinger is a rhythm-FPS that’s not like GOTY material, but it’s a lot of fun. Great for turning your brain off and just going vibe mode while you shoot a bunch of demons.

Yeah having already played D a couple years earlier, when Silent Hill came out it didn’t look like anything revolutionary to me, and replaying D had already shown me that cinematic horror only works the first time through anyway. Still don’t get the appeal.

I had good times on WoW for a long time, and a good time on a private UO server for awhile… Maybe I should look into a private WoW server. Blizzard (as it is today) is a shithole I don’t want to give more money, but my love for WoW as a property is undeniable.

I picked up Cyberpunk on the Steam sale so I’m just starting that. Aside from that, I’m kind of casually working my way through Coromon, which so far isn’t great but it scratching the Pokemon-like itch well enough. That said, if other folks were looking for a Pokemon-like to try, I’d recommend Cassette Beast a hundred times over before recommending Coromon.

East Coast USA, born and raised and lived in all my life. So no, not Australian.

I play almost every genre (minimal interest in sports games, admittedly), and my favorite changes all the time. But in general, here are some of my all-time top games:

Final Fantasy Tactics

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (people who think BL2 is better than TPS are wrong)

Spider-Man (PS4)

Hades

Civilization 6

Yeah I have no idea what fucking losers are out here downvoting people for their personal recommendations, but I can’t think of much worse basement-dweller behavior.

Eyyy I hadn’t heard that yet! That’s awesome, thanks for sharing!

Will do! I just started playing Moonlighter recently which is currently scratching that itch a bit

I haven’t ever played BPM, I’m sorry.

Celeste is 75% off and is a near-masterpiece of a game.

Portal 1 and Portal 2 are on sale again of course on the chance you haven’t yet hit these absolutely classic legendary games.

Persona 4 Golden is 40% off and is awesome, and Persona 5 Royal is 60% and is even more awesome.

Metal: Hellsinger is 70% off and while it isn’t a GOTY type game, it’s a hell of a lot of fun if you’re a contemporary metal music fan.

but my biggest recommendation is probably gonna be

Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale at 80% for only $3.99 (US) which is an completely underrated hidden gem of a game and a huge recommendation for anyone who likes quirky cozy-hybrid games or who, like me, spent way too long on the shopkeeper segments in RPGs like Torneko Taloon’s chapter in DQIV.

edit: why in the world would anyone ever downvote a personal recommendation comment? Weird behavior, fam

The inability to resize the Undertale window without using a third-party program like Sizer continues to be INFURIATING to me.

Undertale is a good game, but it just makes me so goddamn angry every time I open it to not have control over the sizing on my own goddamn monitor that I haven’t been able to finish it.

Who cares? The Blizzard that anyone actually had any positive opinions on died years ago. All that’s left now is a zombie corpse animated by the worst of capitalism.

Fuck Blizzard, let them die

Every single edition of Windows introduces new forms of bloat and new ways for MS to overreach and attempt to play corporate nanny over a user’s system; why the fuck would anyone willingly upgrade Windows when they have the chance not to?

This. I have nearly 3k hours in Civ6, but as soon as I heard 7 had Denuvo I took it off my wishlist and ignored it instead. Can’t believe they’re still pulling this insulting bullshit when the indie game landscape is so plentiful currently

I would have pre-ordered Civ7, but then they announced it has Denuvo so now instead of pre-ordering I’m just not going to buy it at all.

Fuck denuvo and fuck corporations who think their customers should just bend over and accept whatever bullshit they offer for the “privilege” of playing their game.

There is so much good indie gaming content these days, we don’t need these abusive mega-corp games.

Fun fact, that braindead player has just as much right to play the game and have fun as you do. Your gameplay superiority in fact does not entitle you to more of the game.

“Funko did not request a takedown of the @itchio platform.”

Man, I fucking hate corpo-speak like this.

Yes, you didn’t personally make the request against itchio… But you hired this company to enforce “brand protection” and that’s what they did. So you did actually request the takedown, but you just did so by authorizing another party to make such requests on your behalf.

This is like a military General saying “hey I didn’t commit any warcrimes, I just gave the orders to my men to commit warcrimes!”

I’m not saying it’s exactly KH, I’m saying it’s in the action-rpg hybrid combat genre like KH. I don’t enjoy either of their combat. As for my experience, I completed the first KH game and I’m like 90% through FFVII remake, but it is a fucking chore every single time combat happens. I think basically all action-rpg crossover combat is shallow. I want them to give me either a fully satisfying action experience or a fully satisfying RPG combat experience, stop dicking around in this dumb compromise space

I just don’t want this half-assed combat. If they wanted to make this an action game, go full action and give us a DMC-like experience. If they want it to be an RPG, either stick to classic turn-based or iterate in some way that isn’t a shitty compromised half-step between two things, don’t give us this shallow Kingdom Hearts-like (but worse) half & half. I guess I’m in the minority on this but I personally find action RPG hybrid combat systems almost always unsatisfying; very few games offer me something that doesn’t feel like a cheapened knock off of some better game style.

100%. I literally keep falling asleep during combat being it’s so mindless and boring.

I hate the remake’s combat so much. So so much. It’s so fucking boring. God why couldn’t they have just kept the core gameplay mechanic the same?

I agree they don’t have to be anti-consumer to be pro-developer, but my point is that that is how they are approaching being pro-developer - by limiting pro-consumer features at the behest of developers. Or perhaps I should be saying more actively publishers, to be fair.

I gave what I see as a significant example in my original comment. Not being able to see comments or reviews from those who have purchased games through the storefront is a problem for me. If a game has a bug or problem, especially if it is one that could potentially be tied to or unique to the EGS version, I would like to know about it. That EGS currently doesn’t provide readily available user feedback when it frankly has been the standard as defined by steam, just doesn’t for me.

So you have to ask yourself why they wouldn’t include such a simple a rudimentary feature - the only result I can come up with is to appease developers who want to prevent being negatively impacted by bad reviews. Thus what we have is prioritizing the wants of developers at the expense of features which benefit consumers.

Some people prefer not to do business with entities whose business practices they don’t support.

Steam doesn’t engage in the same kind of strong-arming and anti-consumer practices, so it’s not exactly comparable, is it?

I say this every time Epic comes up but it remains the same.

Steam is the pro-consumer storefront. Epic is the pro-developer storefront. What Epic seems to fail to understand is that by being so staunchly pro-developer, they effectively become anti-consumer. And as a consumer, I’m just not going to spend money on an anti-consumer marketplace.

When Epic considers adding necessary pro-consumer measures like actual user reviews so I can hear how a game actual performs from real end users, then and only then will I consider Epic a real storefront viable for consumers.

I can’t decide if I’m proud or sad that this answer was buried so deeply into this post

You’re right; I have been unclear. Allow me to try to clarify.

My issue is specifically with the headline here using the word “political.” This implies, whether by design or accident, that this inclusion in the game is BioWare specifically making a political stance to push some sort of politically-motivated agenda.

This is, 100%, not the case.

BioWare is a subsidiary of EA; the only agenda they care about is making money. This is not making some kind of political statement; this is pandering to ensure free media coverage and to attempt to appeal to what they see as a currently valuable demographic. Fucking blast them to hell for that, blast them to hell for their poor writing—whatever. But calling this political is doing exactly what I stated before: allowing the conversation to happen on the terms of gamergate/right-wingers who insist that anything in the entire fucking world that doesn’t specifically cater to their own individual interests is somehow inherently “political.”

edit: typos

I understand that, but my point is that there is no shortage of shoehorned comic relief characters, or awkwardly placed fanservice, etc. Critique the actual fault at play, bad writing, rather than letting the gamergate right-wing nutsos have the benefit of having the conversation on their terms. Make the headline “DA:tV falls short in the writing department, here are some examples” and include the flimsy way the character is written as the valid critique. Games are going to pander to us, that is what I was saying; when we place special emphasis on this particular type of pandering all we’re doing is letting the right define the conversations we’re having.