I never said I thought everything was ok? My point is that things are not ok for reasons that have nothing to do with people being too stupid, it is a lazy lament with no foundation in reality in terms of describing why people are suffering.

Please come back after you’ve worked in any customer service position interacting with the general populace. Plenty of smart folks out there, but just as many people that absolutely are not.

I have, people are enraging sometimes but also people are fucking stressed as hell these days, I think overall people try to get along as best they can, even when working customer service where you meet insane people and need to rant about them after work because it breaks your brain how stupid they are from your perspective…. but that is life, a lot of people are hurting at least in my country (US). I don’t blame people for falling apart or making stupid choices because they don’t have the energy or alacrity left in their bodies after work to function.

Yeah there are assholes, I am not some naive fool who trusts everybody, but I am sorry I just aggressively don’t agree with this endlessly repetitive narrative that the average person is a lazy, dumb piece of shit. I know people like that, but the real ones, who could have lived a much easier life but chose to be an asshole just because, are actually pretty rare.

Plenty of people are landscapes of trauma (like me) even just from the trauma of always being stressed about money, and I just don’t feel like when that pushes people to do stupid irrational things that that really is an indicator those people were stupid, morally deficient or lacking in industriousness.

The only real tangible thing is IQ

Look at how much work that sentence is doing! Damn, you just shut down several entire categories of science and culture devoted to understanding what intelligence is in all its complex varieties of form, well done!

It doesn’t matter where you live, we are all the same species of animal and the brain in our skull that we like to lament as stupid when we make general statements about the intelligence of the public around us is an extraordinary thing.

I get people’s cynicism and I am kind of annoyed people think I live in a fairytale lol, I just see humans around me trying to live their lives and being mediocre humans…. and the intelligence of mediocre humans is nothing to dismiss.

People are smart as fuck, conservative and hateful ideologies do make people behave like idiots but I mean I don’t fault the human brain for getting brainworms when the brainworms are firehoused (one might say trickling down at a rapid rate) at everyone by the wealthiest people in the world 24/7.

Also yo are you seriously looking for me to give you the average IQ of the population around me? This feels like two steps from getting out calipers and measuring people’s skulls to determine their intelligence. I agree, let’s NOT stick our heads in the sand.

If your child is too young to understand parody or irony (or just get that when you say “somebody copied your favorite character and is using them in a way that isn’t genuine to the character”) why the hell are they being exposed to…. Garry’s Mod?

None of this makes any sense.

Ok, the intelligence of the most average person I know is still plenty intelligent. I don’t only know geniuses or something, it’s just I don’t feel like the normal human beings I encounter on a daily basis are deficient in intelligence. What makes people awful is usually their beliefs not their intelligence.

The human brain is FARRRRR too powerful of a biological adaption to get manipulated so transparently in this way by imagery in one context with imagery in another. It is an absurd ask to say that people would be “dumb” enough for their brains to do this and no except in neurodiverse cases (which is cool!) the human brain doesn’t work like this.

Yeah probably but literally that is so fucking insulting to me that companies/copyright behave this way, the human brain is extraordinarily complex, the idea that seeing a character recreated in a sandbox by a 3rd party modder could “warp” my thinking about Nintendo characters or games is basically a slap in the face by Nintendo.

Like… if you see a dumb meme with Mario in it, do you think “huh, maybe I shouldn’t buy Nintendo games, Mario is tarnished forever for me” …?. No, and what makes me think that is *this bullshit. I will never give Nintendo money because of the way they behave like this.

I mean I have a steam deck so I have no reason to get a switch or anything so whatever no big loss.

It’s hilariously pathetic that a bunch of lawyers convinced the people at Nintendo to waste their time doing this shit.

There is zero percent overlap between janky Garry’s mod custom assets with Nintendo sales of their polished AAA games except to probably drive sales of Nintendo games to a degree.

Any opinions on how this mode currently stacks up on its own? (Not just a fun distraction from the main game).

I mean I get it, auto-aim can be frustrating, especially if you can’t find a game you like that doesn’t have it, but on the other hand a bit of good auto-aim de-emphasizes just being extremely good at aiming which makes every other aspect of the game more important and satisfying to master, which I think you can make a good argument for being a good thing when it is done right.

Not gonna lie I definitely get schadenfreude from embracer turning out to be shitty when so many gamers condescendingly laughed in my face when I pointed out embracer buying their favorite game was a bad thing and not something to be excited about (I remember fans in the comment section saying they were so excited about embracer buying a game that they bought stock in embracer like it was a cool sports team or something lol).

I don’t have it, I think it changes up the game quite a bit and thus is more geared for someone who has played the shit out of the base game.

I do think Slay The Spire and Monster Train are basically must buys for the genre as boring of answer as that is. They both just have so much depth to their mechanics, and depth of mechanics is everything in this genre.

Motor Town, I am hopelessly obsessed because I am an easy mark. Give me a game with realistic driving mechanics and tire grip modeling that doesn’t force me to go around in circles on a closed race track but rather lets me roam around an open world doing taxi jobs and other stuff and I will become utterly obsessed.

Especially on my steam deck the fact that I can just jump in and out of playing or set my car to autopilot and put the steam deck down while I do other stuff… it is the perfect chill cozy game for me because I can interface with the game any way I want from chill autopilot jobs to pushing 120mph while trying to weave through traffic and keep the car on the road.

It doesn’t run amazing on the steam deck, but it runs well enough the benefits of being able to walk around/chill on the couch while playing outweigh the occasional performance hiccups.

The best way I can describe Motor Town is like if old school Top Gear made a driving game where you can absolutely drive around like it’s Euro Truck Simulator and follow the rules, or you can throw a monster engine into a vehicle and drive it like an utter fucking madman. There are vehicles all the way from sports cars to dump trucks to tow trucks to 18 wheelers so when you get bored of one driving style you can just jump in a different category of vehicle and mix it up.

I don’t know, the prices aren’t really a sale on any of the games I see popping up and honestly in terms of mechanics I still don’t think you can beat Slay The Spire and Monster Train.

edit Vault Of The Void and Tainted Grail look good too, Chrono Ark as well.

Ohh I played those so long ago during a really difficult time of my life, they were definitely a fun escape and the story felt well suited to a point and click.

Isn’t it amazing this capability was basically right there from the beginning of mobile gaming?

It really shows badly corporate business practices utterly destroyed the ability of mobile gaming to innovate and improve as a medium for years and years. We might as well be almost 10 years behind where we should be in the evolution of the mobile gaming scene and it is honestly appalling.

I am so glad we have options like your gamesir x2! I use an Xbox controller just because I already had one, actually for awhile I was using a wired Xbox 360 controller which would sometimes work for games that weren’t even designed with controller input because compatibility is so good with 360 controllers lol.

How do you like the joysticks and buttons on the gamesir?

I am really curious how this turns out!

Go play Xonotic for awhile and you can bathe in buttery smoothness no matter the computer you are playing on. The computer could be your shoe in fact or the back of your hand, it will run at 60fps either way.

Yes you could feel sad it doesn’t have a larger player base and isn’t the new competitive shooter everyone is obsessed with but it is also true that Xonotic is like pure unfiltered reaction and adrenaline compared to almost any other shooter especially modern ones. If you want to feel that smoothness of motion Xonotic can give it to you in spades in the way only a quake derivative multiplayer fps can.

What we all have to keep this laser centered in our minds when we talk about this is that for the ruling class, recessions are an essential part of the process of increasing their chokehold on society.

Capitalists want everything to periodically catastrophically collapse and go up in flames, without it the easily exploitable field of workers would grow into a mature forest with unions and other mechanisms that gradually grew in power to ensure the fruits of worker’s labor were distributed in a remotely fair way.

Make no mistake, they WANT a recession and honestly I think they are probably confused they haven’t been able to instigate the early arrival of one yet.

…is god just chatgpt? It is sure starting to feel like this timeline is being written by a shitty AI

Well, Xonotic of course

Imagine how much innovation and creativity could have come to mobile gaming if we didn’t let shitty exploitive business people turn it into slot machines and abusive drugs.

We had this entirely new type of device get put into every single person’s pocket on earth who could afford one and… it didn’t even meaningfully affect the future of gaming except for making it more toxic and predatory. It is a stunning failure if you take a step back and think about it. Surely even if the big players mucked it up, the narrative we constantly tell and retelll about capitalism is that smaller nimbler companies would step in to the void, make good mobile games and force the genre forward….

……but nope it’s just a fucking void

There isn’t even really a reliable community of critics and curators to help point players to the best games, which is crazy when everybody with a smartphone is a potential new gamer.

No war but the class war

Beyond All Reason is a Spring Engine game which is an open source rts engine that has been in development for probably a decade and a half at this point.

It’s pretty common for Xbox controllers to get stick drift especially if they are older. Controllers that use “Hall effect” sensors for the joysticks apparently don’t have this issue but I am not sure there are any affordable ones I can recommend. I am not sure how common it is for Xbox controllers to just have a stick straight up die, that sounds much more unusual and maybe like something that is more prone to happen with a third party controller?

I have never done it but you can replace just the joystick part on the controller and that may be a cheaper route.

Also, if you are playing on a computer, software such as steam will let you define custom dead zones to be just big enough to eliminate stick drift and no bigger which helps a ton.

I have bought multiple Xbox x/s (wtf is wrong with your naming scheme Microsoft seriously) controllers over the years used on eBay at the lower end of the price range ($25ish). I try to find listings that state the controllers have no stick drift. I guess one of the controllers I bought had a bit more stick drift than I wanted but I fiddled with the dead zone (in my case through steam settings) and the problem went away. For precision stuff I use an armor-x pro to give my Xbox controller gyroscope aiming anyways :P

This youtube channel is a great resource on all things controllers, the guy might come off as annoying at first but the info is extremely good. https://m.youtube.com/@GamerHeavenOfficial

Absolutely, I honestly find the trope of penetrating into repetitive grey dungeon a really unappealing theme for an entire game but Shattered Pixel Dungeon just has such a tight core gameplay loop I end up enjoying myself.

Well there are elevators but they purposefully aren’t turned on until 10:30am after the morning upper management selection process has concluded for the day.

Helldivers 2 is a lot more focused on combat and fighting overwhelming hoards of enemies.

I confused, Deep Rock Galactic is almost entirely focused on fighting overwhelming hoards of enemies. Stealth isn’t an option since they aggro at you which seems like a significant difference though.

Sega doesn’t fit any of those buckets. No consistency except that they’re not consistent. You don’t know what a Sega title will bring. Like they rotate management every week.

Yeah this is a result of Sega’s management strategy where all the employees line up outside in the morning along one of the business obstacle courses. Whoever can run through the course fastest and collect the most coins gets to be CEO for the day. Is it chaotic and ableist? Yeah sure, but it does ensure that if a bear attacked the office that Sega employees would be well trained to deal with the emergency. Also, it isn’t THAT much less efficient than having utterly useless out of touch CEOs running the company who don’t give a shit about their customers or the artistic merit of what they are making. At least with this system sometimes the good thing happens amid all the chaos.

Does Sega spend inordinate amounts of money on building elaborate obstacle courses that have nothing to do with their core products? Yes, but remember all that money and more would just be going to CEO bonuses and stock buybacks for investors at a normal large company, building obstacle courses is comparatively a much more efficient and equitable way to allocate profits (not to mention there is a much smaller carbon footprint to building obstacle courses vs. yachts).

Some open source games I love

• Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead
• Panzer Marshal
• Shattered Pixel Dungeon

Long Live The Spring Engine

I keep watching clips of Helldivers 2 and it looks fun but I don’t understand why I would play it over Deep Rock Galactic, especially when the original Helldivers actually has splitscreen co-op.

So what does this game’s combat bring over Deep Rock Galactic? It seems a lot flatter and less tense.

I really want to see a good YouTube reviewer critically compare them.

Meh who needs this just go play Motor Town, stick a v12 in a tiny shit stick little car that absolutely can’t handle all the torque and do urgent taxi jobs. Yeah it is a realistic racing game with a good physics engine and well modeled tire drifting mechanics not an arcade game but when you are struggling to keep your taxi pointed straight because you are still burning out at 80mph in 5th gear while your taxi customers scream at you to slow down just try to tell me you are playing “Normal” Taxi.

I mean, I really don’t care about raw numbers that much here, in terms of the core gameplay loop DRG is essentially flawless.

I think one of the things many players love about DRG is the graphical style. It certainly facilitates the destructible terrain which is an integral part of the gameplay.

To be fair being better than Deep Rock Galactic is an insanely hard bar to clear.

A decent enough artist to get hired by Triple A can absolutely get plenty of work elsewhere, and it’s getting easier every day.

Citation needed, ESPECIALLY with regards to it “getting easier every day” to earn a decent living making video games… or as an artist in general.

I‘m playing Monster Hunter World a worrying amount…

I mean going outside and family are important or whatevvvverrr, but also there is no guarantee whatever reality we zoom off to when we die will have Monster Hunter World. Play the shit out of now don’t be a fool and put off the important experiences in life.

Tried this one out briefly definitely really fun game mechanics and I have heard the story is great.

Well, this is a perfect opportunity to practice feeling empathy for artists pursuing their dream which as we all know often requires biting the bullet and doing something like working for a big soulless company to get enough industry experience to do the thing an artist really wants to do.

Also a great opportunity to just practice empathy for fellow workers, we get nowhere without solidarity.