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Cake day: Feb 10, 2024

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If you love roguelike games, I suggest playing a great one that was directly inspired by the original: Nethack.

If you want fancier graphics, Shattered Pixel dungeon.


Yes. I loved the tension-filled atmosphere as a backdrop for not knowing what threat was going to get me, and the subtlety of the puzzle was brilliant.


Such a beautiful game.

One of my favorite parts was my first visit to the Lost Woods, and the experience of finding my way through. A darkened room and surround sound made it all the better.


Seems ironic for a project focused on access and preservation to adopt a closed messaging platform like Discord, that can and does lock people out on a whim.

I guess it might be a concession to reach as many gamers as possible. It’s an unfortunate situation, though. Maybe when we’ve stopped the killing of games, we can turn our attention to freeing ourselves from Discord.


Kind of like -ly and -hub in domain names, or -kit in software libraries? :)


I just put the installers onto a thumbdrive.

I hope you’re powering up that thumb drive every few weeks. Flash memory will lose charge if left unpowered for too long, corrupting your data.



“It is obvious to everyone: Elbrus processors are not yet at the level required to compete equally with the PS5 and Xbox, which means the solution must be unconventional.”

That unconventional approach could involve either simplifying games to the degree that Elbrus CPUs can handle (the Russian audience still has access to world-class games and would likely not play those ‘simplified’ games)

Oh, let’s not be hasty. Nintendo has had great success with underpowered consoles, and Tetris (Тетрис) is a shining example of this sort of thing. :)



You can select the text that’s over that background to make reading easier. Most of the article is below it, so you should be fine after a couple taps of Page Down.

Or use Firefox reader view, which cleans it right up. :)


The archive link:

  • Doesn’t have a tracker.
  • Works with scripts disabled (good privacy & security practice).
  • Will still be useful when nytimes.com eventually disables your gift ID or takes the article down.


They seem to have returned to it recently. Total redesign of power play. Thargoid war with titan battles (basically massive multiplayer raids). New ships. New frame shift drives. Colonisation coming soon.


I love the fact that classical and other instrumental music is still part of popular culture, and thriving, in no small part through the games we play every day. Thanks for posting this.


I wasn’t even aware that it was an MMO.

The entire galaxy is shared by everyone playing the game, in real time. You can encounter each other, fight, team up, or avoid each other, and your actions influence the state of the shared simulation. Definitely an MMO.

What am I missing?

The most recent thing you probably missed was the thargoid war, culminating in a battle with the titan that parked itself over Earth and took over the Sol system. You might compare it to a fantasy MMO raid, but at a much larger scale.

Colonisation is coming soon.


Elite Dangerous, because it can be as intense or chill as I want, it’s a remarkably good space sim, and I can easily opt out of PvP while still affecting the state of the galaxy.


Yeah, they stopped updating the legacy PC client, too. I suspect it’s in the same game world as your console, still alive and playable, but with no new content.

The new client is free, but also more resource-hungry; I guess they didn’t have the budget to get it working on consoles.


I’m a little disappointed not to see Elite Dangerous nominated for Labor of Love. The game is ten years old, and the developers have recently been bringing in new features like it was still new.


Yeah, they did. I wasn’t a fan of every part of Cyberpunk 2077, but I have to hand it to them: the gameplay was pretty solid compared to the mess I read about at launch. They even made the player controls responsive and reasonably nice to use. That alone was a huge improvement over The Witcher 3.

(Geralt, I’ll never forgive you for all the times you stepped forward into danger when I pressed back to avoid it, or decided to fiddle about with a candle when there was something more important for your hands to do, or moved like a lumbering sloth instead of… well… a witcher.)

I’m optimistic about this one.


Will Astro’s Playroom or Astro Bot run on an emulator yet?

I would consider buying one or both of them if ported to PC, but somehow I suspect that’s unlikely to happen.


In this case, replace /watch?v= with /embed/, but I don’t know if it works in every situation.




This is unsurprising, but nevertheless interesting, because it seems to disprove a naïve assumption that I’ve seen repeated over the years: that Tencent doesn’t influence the game companies it invests in.



If this turns out to be a solid performer, the price could make it the best midrange value since AMD’s Polaris (RX 480). Let’s hope Intel’s build quality has improved since the A770.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N371iMe_nfA


The comments I’ve read from current-generation Arc owners have given the impression that their Linux drivers are catching up to AMD. Here’s the latest info:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-battlemage




Did you attempt to close your account following the HK tournament controversy?

I stopped playing Blizzard games after that incident, because I’m not willing to populate the servers of a game company that punishes people for saying a few words in support of human rights. (I might eventually return, since Microsoft has replaced their upper management, but I’m not in a hurry.)

I never deleted my account, though, so I’m afraid I can’t offer another point of view on your situation.


These posts have become a “guess the game” game for me. I look at the thumbnail first, make my guess, and then open the post to see if I was right and maybe get a little story along with the answer. :)


Then… Why not just price it correctly to begin with?

I can’t speak for the people pricing these things, but suspect the answer has to do with whales, perceived value, shareholders, regional economics, and various other things.

I agree that lots of games are overpriced, though.


I saw this too late to claim Monster Train, but I applaud you for sharing your leftovers. Some of us don’t have much of a games budget. Thanks for doing this!


It’s about volume.

Selling a thing to a million people for $5 makes more money than selling it to a thousand people for $70.

They’ll most likely return the price to $70 before long, so they can pick up a few whales who miss this sale and aren’t patient enough to wait for the next one.


It’s not about whether you benefit from clicks; it’s about how the post affects the community.

Unlike a text post, a bare link to a video cannot be quickly assessed by readers to determine what lies inside. Instead, it demands that they follow the link to some other site and sit through at least part of the video, before they know whether it contains anything of value to them. Multiply that by the roughly 32 thousand members of this community, plus uncounted others who browse without subscribing, and it equals an enormous waste of other people’s time.

I think it’s fine to post a video that’s likely to interest or inform people, especially if it shows something better than can be expressed in text. But in future, I hope you’ll include at least a summary of the content, and ideally something worthy of conversation: your insights, criticisms, questions, or other thoughts on the subject. That way, the post would have a good chance of reaching the people to whom it matters while respecting everyone else’s time, and be a decent contribution to the community rather than low-effort noise.

For what it’s worth, I agree that GOG is good. :)


If you wanted to participate in this forum, you could have at least outlined your thoughts here, in text.

Posts like this one categorically earn a downvote from me, for treating us like a click farm.


I’m approaching a thousand hours in Elite Dangerous. Quoting myself from a week or two ago:

It’s different to most other games, by not being goal-oriented except for the goals you set for yourself. No main quest line dictating progress. No mandatory tasks. No win condition. Instead, it drops you into a simulation of our entire galaxy roughly 1300 years in the future, where humanity has mastered hyperspace travel and spread through hundreds of star systems.

(To give an idea of the simulation’s scope: Around 85 million systems have been recorded by players so far, and those are a vanishingly small fraction of what’s out there. Space is big.)

I like that it offers a variety of activities to fit whatever mood I might be in on a given day. I can hunt pirates, mine asteroids, engage in a bit of piracy myself, find and collect bio samples, infiltrate rival settlements, venture into vast unexplored areas of space, discover Earth-like worlds that nobody has ever encountered before, defend humanity against hostile forces, photograph beautiful stellar phenomena, rescue stranded survivors, customize and finely tune my ship to perform beyond its original specs, team up with friends, pledge to a political power and expand their influence, or chill out as a space trucker and haul cargo to earn enough money for my next upgrade. It can occupy all my attention, or just be relaxing entertainment while I listen to music or an audiobook.

It’s an MMO in the sense of having a large game world (galaxy) shared by all players in real time, but PvP is optional. One mode exposes you to other players, while another limits you to NPC encounters. You can switch between them at will.

One warning: A space ship has more than a few controls to learn, and they’re better suited to a game controller or HOTAS than a keyboard and mouse. I use button combinations for almost everything beyond basic flight controls, since there aren’t enough buttons on a controller for everything.


You’re talking about different things. I love a well-crafted puzzle, but that’s not what most people mean when talking about game depth.


Meta-comment:

To the people who come into point-of-view threads like this one and downvote what other people took the time to share, how about describing your own experiences instead? It would make Lemmy a nicer place to be, and might even add something of value to the discussion.


Seems like a lot of people step away for a while only to return to it. I had hundreds of hours before taking a break, came back with new hardware, and have been playing hundreds of hours more. At this rate, it might end up overtaking Civilization as my most played game.


I mostly had fun, and felt the work they did to make Night City feel like a proper city, as opposed to the tiny village-sized “city” typical of open world games, really showed. (For example, the fact that people walking down the street had different ages, body types, and walking styles made it easy for me to forgive the occasional pair of NPC clones spawning next to each other.)

But yes, many of the activities/events offered by the game ended up seeming a bit pointless because their outcome was more or less predetermined.

Moreover, the RPG aspect of the game lacked depth, which seemed like a lot of wasted potential given that there were plenty of characters that could have been really interesting to get to know. Instead, the character development was nearly all Silverhand, nearly all the time, and I didn’t even have much influence over how that relationship developed.

Spoilers ahead:

What about Jackie? He was supposed to be my best friend, but I never had experiences with him to make me feel that way, and then he was gone in just a few scenes. What about Panam? She was so determined to make a difference in the lives of the people who mattered to her, yet she all but vanished once we bonded, after just a couple of missions. What about Judy?? Her personal mission-like encounter was really promising. We supposedly fell in love and were planning to leave the city together, yet for the rest of the game, we had no interaction but “dates” consisting of the same half-dozen lines of dialogue and two or three brief animations, repeated over and over again. I’m sure there are more examples, but I think I’ve made my point.

I think the biggest disappointment for me was the ending, though. And the other ending that I got by reloading and picking different options, and then the third ending, and the fourth. They all felt like such empty let-downs that I went online to read about the rest. [Edit: These might have been Phantom Liberty endings; I don’t remember for sure.] Surely there must be some good ones, right? Right?

The only vaguely satisfying ending that I found was a secret one that (IIRC) requires specific choices early in the game, and a very strong bond with Silverhand, and letting the game sit at a particular dialogue screen for several minutes without picking any option. The endings that players are actually meant to experience left me feeling empty. The great deal of time I had sunk into the game was for nothing after all. I guess that could be considered appropriate for a cyberpunk dystopia, but as an experience and a story, it left me feeling cheated. I wished I had my time back.

So, as I said, I mostly had fun playing it, and it had its share of highlights, but I don’t expect to ever play it again. I hope CD Projekt Red keep much of the technical progress they made with this game (I was so relieved that my character’s movement was responsive for a change!) and work more on character development and player agency in the next one.


Elite Dangerous is my go-to lately.

It’s different to most other games, by not being goal-oriented except for the goals you set for yourself. No main quest line dictating progress. No mandatory tasks. No win condition. Instead, it drops you into a simulation of our entire galaxy roughly 1300 years in the future, where humanity has mastered hyperspace travel and spread through hundreds of star systems.

(To give an idea of the simulation’s scope: Around 85 million systems have been recorded by players so far, and those are a vanishingly small fraction of what’s out there. Space is big.)

I like that it offers a variety of activities to fit whatever mood I might be in on a given day. I can hunt pirates, mine asteroids, engage in a bit of piracy myself, find and collect bio samples, infiltrate rival settlements, venture into vast unexplored areas of space, discover Earth-like worlds that nobody has ever encountered before, defend humanity against hostile forces, photograph beautiful stellar phenomena, rescue stranded survivors, customize and finely tune my ship to perform beyond its original specs, team up with friends, pledge to a political power and expand their influence, or chill out as a space trucker and haul cargo to earn enough money for my next upgrade. It can occupy all my attention, or just be relaxing entertainment while I listen to music or an audiobook.

It’s an MMO in the sense of having a large game world (galaxy) shared by all players in real time, but PvP is optional. One mode exposes you to other players, while another limits you to NPC encounters. You can switch between them at will.

One warning: A space ship has more than a few controls to learn, and they’re better suited to a game controller or HOTAS than a keyboard and mouse. I use button combinations for almost everything beyond basic flight controls, since there aren’t enough buttons on a controller for everything.



I recently started a game of Pirates! When I sat down to play today, the pirates were no longer the only ones spicing up their speech with arrs and ahoys. The merchants were doing it. The military were doing it. The nobles were doing it (awkwardly). The barmaids were doing it. Even the user interface was doing it. I thought at first that it might have always been that way, and just escaped my notice, but that seemed unlikely. Next I thought I might have accidentally enabled a game option for it, but I didn't remember reconfiguring anything. Then another possibility came to mind. It seemed like a long shot, but just in case, I looked up today's date. Sure enough, today is International Talk Like a Pirate day. This 20-year-old game apparently knows it, and switched every bit of its dialogue and writing into pirate speak to honour the occasion. I love this.
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