I’ve also been playing this, even though it’s well out of what I normally play. I’d describe it as being closer to an ARPG than a MOBA, and for both better and for worse, it feels like a roguelike version of mid-seasonal gameplay in ARPGs. Couple of buttons on relatively short cooldowns backed up by buildcrafting meant to make those buttons utterly broken with lots of good opportunities available. There’s okay variance between runs. Buildcrafting is super flexible in general, you can move all of your ability upgrades around to other abilities at any time with no cost, you can even give almost everything to friends in co-op.

Not all is good. The game was review-bombed at launch due to the metaprogression and cooldown changes from the demo, and honestly, that was probably correct. The balancing work and the per-character XP requirements ruined some of the fun that the demo had. The worst was hotfixed within a day, even adding a compensation system for demo players, and progress is like 3X faster now, but it still feels like it’s too slow and not fluid enough. I sorta settled on having a “main” in a genre that’s more fun if you swap between characters to keep things fresh. The devs will probably find a solution sooner than later.

There’s some other problems like the performance absolutely tanking in lategame regardless of what you’re playing on (my trusty RX 580 performs about as well as my friend’s RTX 4080, and that’s a pretty universal complaint), there’s some multiplayer bugs like a boss attack that only the host can survive, some questionable balancing here and there, one of the 8 characters feels unfinished (Shell), but overall it’s been pretty good, fills a pretty unique role and the problems don’t really detract from what I’m getting out of it.

Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge is also free for the week. Decent slow-burn game for a particular type of frog enthusiast.

Even with the current thumbs up/down people get it wrong. Give it a thumbs up but write a scathing review.

I’ve done that and it’s a result of not having more options than good/bad. Always the same cause: I really wanted to write a 3* review for a game that has a lot to praise but its core is fundamentally flawed, but Steam doesn’t let me give a 3*, so I try to correct for the review score bracket I think the game should be in.

For the benefit of people that can’t watch this horrible video:

This is really about them being able to change the already extremely vague terms of service and you having no recourse other than voiding your purchase if you don’t like it. There is some focus on a gun thing early on, but it’s just an example where they flip-flopped multiple times over the years based on vague wording in the ToS that was changed after the fact. Commercial modded server owners were the main ones that had to make changes because of that rule, often taking guns away from players that had them, but it’s generally enforced very inconsistently.

But the main thing they’re focusing on in the lawsuit is the mass deletion of legitimately bought Minecraft copies when they stopped Mojang account migration in 2023 (everyone that didn’t migrate then no longer owns Minecraft according to Microsoft; no refunds). That, too, was effectively a one-sided ToS change. And to make matters worse, the old ToS had an explicit clause that you could keep playing the game in singleplayer even without agreeing to any new ToS.

This lawsuit is being done in Sweden. I don’t know if this kind of ToS/contract validity has actually been tested there before.

I think this is the first time I ever watched a video at 0.5 speed. “this was done due to retention purposes for the video to maximize spread potential”. Yeeeaaaah. No. Checked reddit, it’s downvoted to the negatives over form. Checked a different place that would be all over this, entire topic is discussing the form and there’s not one mention of what it’s about because nobody got that far. The exact kind of person that might take time out of their day to join a class action is not going to watch this garbage. I think it’s good to have this tested, but I straight up don’t trust this guy. Supposedly maximizing views while getting zero information through to anyone is not going to help the cause.

They already implement instant bank payments in a lot of countries where there’s a reasonable consumer-to-business solution for it. I know at least Sofort/iDEAL/Bancontact are supported just fine in their respective countries.

Yep. It would be incredibly bad if they did automatic bans for any key they don’t recognize, but it’s technically possible.

Edit: from what I’m reading it apparently just refuses to let you in with unrecognized/non-MS keys. Yeah that makes a lot more sense.

You can, but most everything that would let you run your own boot-time code is supposed to end up in the TPM event log, which the TPM is happy to attest to with its unique/uniquely bannable attestation key. Not too difficult to set it up so that no attestation = no access.

This type of attestation is far from perfect for a lot of different reasons, and it would be really impractical to automate bans with it, but I guess it’s a tool they see value in.

Another World/Out of This World. Short game, but also a 1991 game made by one dev and one composer in two years, and artistically it still holds up fairly well even today.

The new owners are so trustworthy that they weren’t even transparent about who they are. In the comments of the original announcement they defend that with:

This post wasn’t about Chosen — it was about Robin and the legacy he built over 24 years. We’re the new owners and ultimate decision-makers at Nexus Mods. We’ll share more about ourselves when we’ve earned that right. For now, we’re focused on listening, learning, and making modding even easier, and yes, you’ll see us around in the community being active.

I can’t say I find that statement to be particularly trustworthy given it’s coming from an NFT bro.

Dual nominations for Paper Mario: Sticker Star & Paper Mario: Color Splash. The only thing I really remember about them is that I played them and they left me without any feelings about them whatsoever.

The store page is kinda confusing. I don’t think the line “Join forces with other players to take on the creeping night and the dangers within featuring 3-player co-op.” along with both singleplayer and co-op listed as valid playing styles is something most reasonable people would interpret the way that it really is: be exactly 3 players with external voice chat available because all other ways of playing the game will suck hard.

They’ve been sorta honest about that in interviews and such but those don’t have the same reach as their huge marketing campaign.

Started Digimon World Next Order on a whim after it was on a big sale last week. Not sure I can recommend it, and definitively not at full price, but it’s interesting to have a game that doesn’t know if it wants to be a modern game or a 2000 era throwback game in exactly the right ways. And well, it’s still about little critters that turn into big critters (and back), so I’m satisfied nonetheless.

That’s about right. That said, we also don’t know how long regular Switch/Switch 2 carts are going to last. The MaskROM used in the N64/DS and earlier eras is significantly more reliable when stored for a long time than the modern NAND Flash memory as used in the 3DS/Switch+. I suspect key carts won’t have any NAND Flash inside (they don’t need gigabytes of capacity just to store a game name + icon) and might physically last longer.

Of course, key carts are all going to drop to zero value practically overnight when Nintendo eventually pulls the plug, while real carts will die one by one.

We won’t know for sure what’s actually going on under the hood until the console is cracked wide open or there’s a devkit leak, but my speculative guess is that some details of the GPU are ‘emulated’/recompiled. PC AAA games tend to include lengthy shader pre-compilation wait times, console games don’t have that wait time because the shaders are pre-compiled by the developers when building the game, specifically for one piece of hardware. The games themselves then fully rely on those pre-compiled shaders. They’re going to need shaders that work with the Switch 2’s GPU, which is going to involve some kind of imperfect translation process.

AMD was able to design better hardware that works with older compiled shaders, as done in the PS5/Xbox Series (and Pro consoles). That’s not a super common feature, but I imagine that AMD is more motivated to keep Microsoft/Sony happy than Nvidia is to keep Nintendo happy. AMD’s graphics division might as well shut their doors if it wasn’t for the consoles, meanwhile Nvidia is raking in trillions from the AI boom and would rather forget about gaming.

It was supposed to be private between Mitchell and someone else in the scene. I don’t mean to say that it makes Jobst’s big claim true, just that Mitchell isn’t entirely absolved and Jobst wasn’t completely wrong on everything either.

The 118 page court judgment is online (I can’t expect anyone to read it) and in general, the court sides with Jobst on most things, it’s just that none of it really applies to the big “caused Apollo’s suicide” claim Mitchell actually sued over. That’s on a different level.

As it turned out though, Mitchell very much did joke about Apollo Legend committing suicide years before it actually happened. https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/video-game-champion-regrets-jokes-about-death-rumour-20240917-p5kbd9.html ( https://archive.is/sYEwg )

For what it’s worth, this game was formerly “Monolith”. Fantastic twinstick bullet hell shmup roguelite. Difficulty is somewhat on the hard side but it’s learnable.

For current exports, it’s some custom .csm/.csd file combo. Not sure if there’s any tools for working with it, seems like it’d be more annoying than just using a normal archive format either way.

It technically still exists in the game properties -> installed files tab, but it doesn’t really work. The backup files you get require you to be online to meaningfully restore and will trigger a patch to the latest game version.

Practically speaking it’s better to just make a copy of the game install directory manually, gives you a better chance of things working (even though most games require some kind of external tooling for that).

Aside from all of the problems with the game itself, I think they must’ve had one of the most unfortunate launch moments. Hero shooters had been pretty much on the downturn and then just before they launched, Deadlock went public and suckered quite a lot of the hero shooter audience into playing a full-on MOBA/FPS hybrid. And Deadlock is very quietly breaking all kinds of silly records for what’s technically an invite-only alpha (currently #8 on Steam’s most played with 137k concurrent players).

Looking at the slides in the original Japanese source, this tooling also has a whole lot of analysis options and can pull/push game data/positioning both to and from a real Switch or something along those lines. Integrating that much custom features into an off-the-shelf tool would probably take just as long.

Probably an anti-piracy thing. It’s pretty common in the console hacking scene for only specific versions to be vulnerable, or only have exploits released for a specific set of versions. People can get around it by looking for games released with specific updates on the disc/cart but it’s a pain.

Browsing through the PDF, I’m getting the vibe that their way of measuring “skill” is weird. They claim to use multiple methods of measuring, they list a few obvious ones that they’ve found to be bad, but they don’t say which ones they are using because “we are constantly iterating on our performance metrics to optimize the player experience per game-mode”.

Elo-like systems tend to adjust skill based on the chance of winning current match X win/loss, but they’re not (just) doing that. I wonder if they have a few weird metrics that look good on paper/in the lab but don’t feel good in play.