When leveling, I often prioritize BP and if I need more of the other stats I equip the badges that use 3bp for 3 hp or fp.

I often save the star points to use Sweet Treat which is a reasonably reliable heal if you can get good at it. In certain situations I’ll use the other star powers for high damage.

I regularly switch which characters I’m using and their builds depending on the enemies in the area. Do you need high single target damage or AOE? Are there fliers? Are there spiky things?

Gombella is not bad early game and Koops is quite good IMO. Koops can hit all grounded enemies at once, which is very useful AOE, and Goombella has some decent jumping single target damage.

I feel like a lot of this advice also applies to Expedition 33.

You should only need to use tattle at most once per enemy type, I’m not sure why you would use it after that.

Minecraft copyright doesn’t cover the entire genre of block-based sandbox pixel art games. Minecraft isn’t even the first in that genre, even if it’s the most popular by a wide margin.

Unless Microsoft can prove that one of the textures started by copying a Minecraft texture, or that substantial bits of code are copied from Minecraft, there is no claim.

Honestly after reading Antheas’ story I’m inclined to believe his side. (Linked in the article: https://ba.antheas.dev/bazzite-postmortem.html)

I’ve had sudden breaking changes in my Bazzite install that seem like they should have been easy to catch in testing, I’ve been surprised by some of the seemingly random gnome tweaks that come pre-installed and I’ve seen them equally randomly appear and disappear, and I’ve seen Kyle Gospo be rude and aggressive in the support discord.

Plenty of Steam games are DRM free and will launch just fine without Steam installed

I too prefer to buy from GoG, but I often add my GoG games to be launched through Steam as non-Steam games so I can take advantage of features like Proton and Steam Input.

If I want to take advantage of certain features Steam only offers to games you buy through them, I will buy through Steam instead of GoG. Usually when I do this it’s for multiplayer or save file syncing reasons.

Steam features you can use with non-Steam games:

• provides SteamInput which allows me to use any game controller in any game with a lot of configuration options. It’s the best tool for that purpose I’ve ever seen.
• provides Proton for playing Windows games on Linux (and I do 99% of my gaming on Linux these days)
• provides VR headset drivers and tools for using different VR headsets with games not designed for them
• provides a TV and controller optimized interface (“Big Picture” mode)

Steam features exclusive to Steam games:

• updates games automatically
• backs up my saves and syncs them across devices
• provides multiplayer server infrastructure making it easy to play with friends
• provides modding infrastructure, although not all games use it
• provides tools for managing which version of a game you have installed

?

Steam does have warning labels for games with DRM, or at least popular shitty DRM options such as 3rd party launchers.

Example:

Notch sold the game to Microsoft long before it was ever a complete game.

I know it’s a bit fuzzy with Minecraft since it’s constantly getting updates, but I find the claim that Minecraft was “incomplete” before selling it to Microsoft is a big stretch.

Version “1.0” came out 3 years before the Microsoft sale, and at least to me, the game felt “complete” long before 1.0

These things always have light isolation issues. It’s why the google glass failed and why Apple and Microsoft tried to do AR based on a VR headset instead of glasses like this.

• Steam multiplayer networking
• Steam Input

In smash bros, turn the launch multiplier all the way up and turn on sudden death mode so everyone starts at 300%.

Go to one of a few levels (the underground area of Hyrule Temple works, the underground area of Skyworld is better, but it’s best if you make a custom stage)

Getting hit once will send you bouncing around the screen! You only ever die if you get unlucky. It’s hilarious, and we call it “Pinball Mode”. I’ve made a couple custom stages to improve on the experience.

Occasionally I will prefer Steam to take advantage of Steam matchmaking

What’s the difference?

I add non-Steam games to Steam just so I can use Steam Input for controller rebinding

Analogue Pocket also supports 3rd party emulator cores, so you can very easily play ROMs or even other consoles.

Ps5 controller is like $70, the Steam Controller has more features than that, and the OG Steam Controller was pretty expensive. I’d be shocked if it’s under $100. I’m expecting it in the $150-$200 range. But we’ll see, I’d love to be proven wrong

The controller is going to be closer to $200

It’s much better for games that were designed around VR in mind.

Some of my personal favorite recommendations:

• Beat Saber
• Super Hot
• I Expect you to Die (trilogy)
• Half Life Alyx
• The Myst and Riven remakes

I just checked and I’ve gotten over 100 hours out of mine so far.

It’s kinda scary that Europe is so willing to let all of their private messages go through an American data broker company that is well known for doing sneaky things to get data they aren’t supposed to have.

Interesting. Optimizing the factory for your immediate current needs sounds very tedious, because those needs change all the time. I instead optimize for expandability and adaptability. The factory game genre isn’t for everyone, but if you are interested in some tips:

My solution is usually something like:

• really long line of basic resources (usually a belt of smelted copper and a belt of smelted iron, eventually adding more stuff and adding more belts of iron and copper as supplies are needed)
• when I need thing 1, I make a little package that builds it, drawing resources from the line with splitters so the excess can continue down the line
• thing 2 is an independent little package farther down the line
• When it’s time for thing 3, I build copies of the packages for building thing 1 and thing 2 as necessary to feed the construction of thing 3, again as separate feeds splitting off the main resource line
• when it’s time for thing 4, its again independent of the production of things 1-3, except they are splitting off the same main resource belt
• If the resources on the main belt are insufficient to feed all of those machines, one of three things needs to happen: 1. Add more raw resource processing until your belt is full and backed up at the beginning 2. If that’s not enough, upgrade the belt 3. If you don’t have a belt upgrade available, build another main resource line and use splitters to rebalance it onto the main line

This construction allows for easy expansion without having to destroy anything. I typically don’t disassemble anything unless it’s actually a problem for some reason or I need the space. This is especially important because you often need some basic components like the level 1 belts even into the late game.

Also, once you unlock robots, you can literally copy-paste, just select an area to upgrade all belts/arms/etc. in, and a lot of other neat tricks that drastically speed things up.

And one last peace of advice: Overproduce everything and let belts backing up balance out the resource distribution. Then if you discover that belts that previously were backed up are now sparse, figure out why and optimize it, usually by adding more production of whatever the missing resource is.

Ultimately throughput is all that matters. Loss of throughput because you don’t need something isn’t wasteful. Loss of throughput because you aren’t producing enough of something is a problem to solve. Things that don’t affect throughput don’t matter and aren’t wasteful.

That’s funny, I love Slay the Spire, but I have mixed feeling about Balatro.

Balatro is addicting in that once I start playing I don’t want to stop, and yet after playing for a few hours I couldn’t say for sure I had fun at any point the whole time.

Playing Balatro feels like exploring the backrooms to me - just infinite bland nothingness.

Yeah I’ve seen people try to balance things perfectly in factorio, but my strat is always to overproduce and let belts getting backed up balance out the throughput.

Deus Ex Human Revolution and Mankind Divided do a similar cyberpunk vibe to Cyberpunk 2077 but with better gameplay and plot IMO.

I’m curious how you play factorio because when I played there was very little refactoring, just adding more and more onto the assembly line.

That being said, that genre of game is absolutely not for everyone.

I tried downloading the BF6 free demo and I had to jump through a bunch of hoops trying to get it to run just to find that because the last time I used my EA account was a decade ago, my Steam account is banned from their servers until I go through customer support to unlock it.

Their Game Preservation Program (the thing the subscription is nominally for) is games that they maintain, so they probably do need to license them. And they do need a dev team to work on it, even if they do take advantage of things like existing community mods to make the job easier.

Does it have a 3D display?

My experience with PvPvE games is they tend to be incredibly toxic, with some people just trying to get started, and others picking on them for fun.

I have several friends who vow not to play PvPvE games again after bad experiences in games like Last Oasis and Worlds Adrift, although they were interested in playing both of those games in a PvE format.

Personally I find the extra danger from considering other players “another type of enemy” to be interesting. But also those types of games tend to breed to most toxic communities.

I’ve gotten macOS to run in a virtual machine.

I think I used https://github.com/sickcodes/Docker-OSX

New Super Mario Bros. (For the Nintendo DS), in the multiplayer battle mode.

There is a multiplayer mode where you fight over collecting stars in 6 different maps, using the main game’s mechanics and powerups.

In one of these maps, there are bullet bill launchers. One of the powerups is a mini mushroom that makes you tiny, and when you are tiny you just harmlessly bounce of enemies when you jump on them instead of killing them. That lets you ride the bullet bill, repeatedly bouncing off it. The multiplayer maps loop, so you do this indefinitely, and every time you get back to the launcher, it will add another bullet to your train.

My brother and I would deliberately avoid collecting stars, and instead try to make the longest bullet train and try to stay in the air as long as possible.

Many games that have multiplayer and singleplayer options run singleplayer by hosting a server and then joining it.

Cyberpunk 2077 is also good for this IMO. Sometimes I deliberately avoid fast traveling and just drive to my destination to take in the sights on the way.

If V didn’t have the chip in their head they’d be dead already

Smash Bros. Melee

At least for my playstyle, tools have become essential for boss fights, and I’ve run out and had to grind for resources for them twice. Especially when you get to the point where you are basically just doing boss fights and rarely, if ever, fighting a normal enemy.

Hollow Knight (more so than Silksong tbh)

Night in the Woods (not the same vibe as the games you mentioned but absolutely a “had a bad day” vibe)

I don’t know if you could have chosen a worse example. The sexual ads in cyberpunk are part of the worldbuilding and statement about society and capitalism. They absolutely are necessary to the story.

I’d rather they add an easy mode than globally nerf the difficulty

Also Silksong released at $20, which is a price point people are often waiting for older games to hit.

Regardless of semantics, Silksong is the only game I’ve played since it released.

This is the “metroidvania” genre part of the game but, it’s not for everyone.

That being said, both Hollow Knight and Silksong make the exploration a lot more streamlined than in older metroidvanias with the map features. When you don’t know where to go, check your map and look for paths that lead to areas that aren’t filled in yet. When you get a new power, see if you can remember any locations where that might be useful.