Reminder: steam deck verified has to do with the game launching and having gamepad support. Performance doesn’t matter that much. Wait until you see benchmarks before you make decisions, the game can still run like shit on steam deck

I recently watched Flow and with enough care and effort a movie doesn’t need dialog to be impactful and well done. There is often a large gulf between what is possible and what they’re going to do but I’ll be interested to see where this goes

Capitalism, HO!

Club House Games is an easy recommendation. 51 games that are classics around the world. You probably know how to play the majority of them already. Likewise a Nintendo switch online subscription is the price of a game for a year and comes with N64, GBA, GBC, SNES, NES, and Dreamcast games. Pokémon stadium 1/2, Ecco the dolphin, Kirby super-star saga, Kirby dream course are all good

I imagine Epic cares less about what the ESRB thinks and more about what the CCP thinks, seeing as Tencent has a major stake in Epic. China is generally anti-death in games

Epic’s official language for the game never features death. Characters are eliminated, you can meet the god of the underworld, but no character ever actually dies. Apparently the ESRB says it’s ok

Yes but a big difference is Call of Duty is an M rated video game whereas Fortnite is rated T. Fortnite doesn’t feature blood, death, or swearing. Does it matter that the same kids probably play both? That’s for the parents to decide

The game literally has scenes where “artful” camera angles hide full dong and tits. Climb down off your high horse and maybe we can get the furries to leave Baby Torgal alone

Correct. He plays one of the characters and they mocapped him for it

Conversely the worst is when that happens and a bad boss blind screws your run

It’s hard to offer strong heuristics for Balatro because you could theoretically build up to a point where you’ve got a crazy high multiplier but if your chips are low it doesn’t matter.

For example let’s say you’ve got a face card 4 of a kind build going with: Pareidolia, Zany, Smiley, Trio, and Family jokers. These give you (respectively) all cards are face cards, +12 mult for 3 of a kind, +20 mult for each hand (all cards are face cards), x3 mult, x4 mult for a total of 384 multiplier! On base 4 of a kind this is

60x([7+12+20]x3x4)=28,080

However if you were to drop smiley face (+5 mult per face) for scary face (+30 chips per face card) which by almost every heuristic is a bad decision your score becomes:

(60+120)x([7+12]x3x4)=41,040

Which is a way bigger score!

So while people can offer general advice like stack high chips on plasma, always go for total score multipliers, etc. sometimes you just have to evaluate your specific build and figure out the best play

Finally outside of decks like abandoned and checkered which are specifically made to get certain hands, there isn’t a “best” hand to go for. The highest possible scores I’ve seen all come from high card builds but most normal players won’t get those. I’ve won two of a kind runs, flush 5 runs, straight runs, flush runs. You just have to evaluate your deck and tarot cards to see your options

Generally some good advice is that Balatro is a math game first and foremost so you want to focus on things that raise your score the quickest. So adding chips is ok, adding multiplier is better, and multiplying your total is the best.

For example let’s say you are playing straights and you have a 10-6 with level 3 straights. So you’d have:

10+9+8+7+6=40

(40+90)x10=1300

So let’s compare how jokers impact that score:

Devious joker: +100 chips if you have a straight

(40+90+100)x10=2300

Crazy joker: +12 mult if you have a straight

(40+90)x(10+12)=2860

The order: x3 mult if you have a straight

(40+90)x(10x3)=3900

You can see those are very big differences! It’s also helpful to pay attention to the order of your cards. Generally Balatro cards are scored left to right. The most important thing is to take any card that multiplies any part of your score on the right so you can add as much to the score as possible, then you multiply that number

So in short: multiplier jokers are best, additive multiplier jokers are good, additive chip jokers are ok, and pay attention to the order of your jokers/played cards

For plasma specifically I’d focus on high additive chip jokers. While that’s normally bad advice, consider how crazy good a card with +50 mult on it would be. Now consider that a +100 chip joker is effectively a +50 chip/+50 mult (I know that’s not technically true but I’m illustrating a point). Also eventually you do hit a point of diminishing returns because plasma prevents you from having a super high multiplier or chips, so like every build, total score multipliers are the best

I prefer Sci-fi background noise so Surviving Mars is my favorite. Mass Effect is ok but I find it gets a little too cinematic and bombastic at times. FTL and Into The Breach, or really anything by Ben Prunty is good too

What I think is a bigger early game changer than blinds (at higher stakes mostly) is guaranteed jokers, and free jokers from tags. In orange+ I found rare joker tags impossible to take on ante 1 because you can’t usually afford it and sometimes you can’t pay for uncommons too. It was easy to get unlucky and not have a joker by ante 2 which can make clearing the small blind tricky. Now with buffoon pack guaranteed and more tags giving a free joker I think you’ll more reliably have 1 or 2 going into ante 2

Lots of great changes here! The standouts for me are:

Changed Rare tag - Now makes the rare joker free

Negative, Polychrome, Holo, Foil tags all make their respective joker free

Changed Orange Stake - Scrapped increasing pack cost Added new ‘Rental’ mechanic, Jokers have a 30% chance to have a ‘Rental’ sticker (stacks with eternal/perishable), making them cost $1 up front and $3 every round

Changed the first shop in every run to always include a normal Buffoon pack as one of the pack options

And of course:

Square Joker now has a square sprite

Yeah, the mods are pc only. Multiverse feels like it quadruples the size of the game. Not every single element of it is fully fleshed out but there’s some really cool and unique stuff. They add new ships, crew, quests, sectors, weapons, and secrets

Recently Spider-Man 2. I platinumed that game in 26 hours I think. The story is good, combat is fun, there’s collectables and side missions but each is part of its own side story. They give you plenty of info to find almost all of the secrets too

I would like to remind people that this is corpo speak. This is likely counting mobile shovelware monopoly, my little pony, trivial pursuit, clue, etc stuff. Plus there’s Transformers and we don’t know if they count only their own games or do they count something like the Fortnite crossover as a video game project? Hell I can name 4 active magic the gathering video games off the top of my head. It’s entirely possible they count certain magic expansions as their own thing if they’re complex enough (MH3, Assassin’s Creed, Final Fantasy)

My point is that this doesn’t say anything of substance, don’t read it as a reaction to anything in particular

Eh, I think you’d be surprised. It really takes a lot of time to get someone from new hire to productive member of a team. Even with the money to just shotgun hire new people and keep good fits it still takes time for them to understand the vision, tech stack, workflow, and culture. I honestly think software is an environment where finding and investing in good people matters more than money and that no amount of venture capital will fix that

Highly motivated developers with passion projects will always exist (Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Undertale, Dwarf Fortress). However producing high quality art in a corporate environment is possible, repeatable, and scalable if you acknowledge the inherent reality of creative development

A perpetual problem I have as a Scrum Master in the tech field is the business people’s inability to understand that nine women can’t make a baby in a month. There are just certain things where throwing money at it won’t give you any faster of a return on investment. More money doesn’t make better games faster, if anything it adds bureaucracy that impedes critical work. Most great video games aren’t capable of being produced on an annual basis and trying to hit your Q4 results over and over won’t magically produce high quality output

Oh shit! I loved Recettear! I think it’d be a perfect steam deck game but I highly doubt they’ll do the work to make it functional

Yeah, it’s available on basically every video game platform. This will likely be the only way to play it on mobile though. It’s an amazing game. I’d highly recommend it

Nope! All mainline Final Fantasy entries are independent! There’s common themes, elements, character names, etc. but you can learn about them from any of the games. Final Fantasy XVI is actually pretty different in tone from the past several mainline games so it’s arguably more distinct. That plus the active time lore system make it a great jumping in point in my opinion