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I’ve been doing that here lately, just bouncing from game to game to game. Despite having hundreds of games in my Steam library, just feeling burnt out I think. Trying to move back to my unloved boardgames more to switch it up some. Sometimes you don’t need to force it, take a break and find something else to do for awhile until the interest comes back.
I just played it and beat it. It was good and has a great soundtrack, it’s just a shame that you can really only play the game once. I kind of wish there had been some sort of randomization mechanic added to it so that you didn’t play the same story twice and had a different crew each time. Otherwise though, an interesting little game that had me hooked.
Played it at launch and I’ve never had the desire to jump back into it since beating it the first time. I never had major issues with bugs or anything, the story was just on rails, there was no point in jumping back into it to play the same story all over again. Like yea, I guess they changed some systems and mechanics, but whatever.
The PS5 in general has just felt like a nebulous console. I don’t know if it’s just me not being as connected to console gaming anymore or what, but there’s no PS5 games that are “must play” or anything that I’ve seen/read/heard hype about that has made me really interested. Partly there was the Covid years where it was apparently facing shortages and during that I just switched my mind off to the idea that I’d ever buy one. It’s been out for years now though, but nothing about it makes me care to move on from our PS4 that’s still chugging along.
I started playing one of the Gacha games a few months back now, Watcher of Realms, I think the only reason I started was because it showed jiggling boobies in a trailer. The name is goofy and the story is almost non-existant, the gameplay isn’t terribly deep, but has some nuances to it, it’s like a tower defense RPG game. It’s kind of dumb as a game because it records your playthroughs of scenarios that you can then use later on to “Auto-fight” for you as you frequently have to grind for different shit. So you basically set the game on auto-pilot and stop playing the game. I’ve been playing for something like 6 months now, but I’ve been committed from the start to never pay a single dime for it and I’ve stuck with that the entire time. Granted, I’ve put way too much time into the game and, if time is money, I’ve wasted a bunch that way, but I’ve never actually paid for anything in currency. Cheap skate 4 life. I honestly don’t know why I keep playing, knowing what the game is setup for, but I still log in day after day.
I can definitely see how it encourages players to spend money, there’s so many mini-currencies within the game that obfuscate what you need to do to earn this or that hero or get whatever thing you’re trying for, but ultimately the incentive is to buy shit to get further along. In this game though, the rates are so goddamn ridiculous that you’d have to be an impatient jackass to pay the rates they want for simple things that don’t even give any guarantees of better performance in the game. On the one hand, I thing games like this are evil for trying to take advantage of people, but on the other, if you’re that stupid and that rich that you have money to burn on a game like this… maybe throwing your money away on digital stuff isn’t the worse thing you could be wasting your money on (like real world drugs or donating to Trump or something stupid like that). But yes, for kids who haven’t mentally developed yet, there probably should be some sort of protections for them, since they’ll pay for dumb shit at the drop of a hat.
This was a really interesting video on how modern wargaming is used by the military and its links to the recreational scene, I just got done watching it yesterday. I think Quinns, in typical fashion, seems to try to moralize a bit much, especially with his pointed questions, but then does a good job of coming back around to show the other point of view, though I think the overall view he had seemed negative. He tried to present both sides at least.
He did recognize the need for militaries in general, but then seemed to equate any use of wargaming as resulting in deaths, which was automatically bad. I think some of the wargame professionals made pretty good cases for why it was justified and how “wargaming” is a bit of a misnomer, it’s more a way of contingency planning and working through possible scenarios you might encounter, so wargaming just helps prepare for different scenarios by showing the range of actions that players/actors might take in a given situation. They’re mapping out probabilities using human psychology, along with boardgame and videogame mechanics.
I think the ending portion where he called on gamers to “do something” about making wargaming ethical was kind of whatever. As if the gaming community was any sort of unified bloc that could even do anything about it. Something like that would probably require like a wargamer’s guild or union that added some sort of restraints on the kinds of projects they would work on (only scenarios that minimize casualties) or something like that, but that sort of defeats the purpose of trying to map out probabilities, since you’d purposely censor certain probabilities from your line of thinking. I think wargamers will just continue to do whatever they’re doing.
I grew up playing FPS shooters like Doom, Quake, Tribes, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, etc, but I had avoided Fortnite for awhile because it just seemed like a kid’s game, whatever. Then my oldest son started getting into it and we’d play matches together, and suddenly I felt out of my element. The addition of building mechanics adds in a whole other element that you don’t really have to think about in other games. Granted, it’s not realistic being able to build shit that quickly, but whatever, it’s a game. And seeing some of the skill involved with these people running/gunning/building elaborate forts and the sort of battles that play out between two people gets insane sometimes.
Another interesting aspect of it is all the cross-marketing that goes on, you’ve got almost every major franchise represented in some way, shape, or form. It reminds me of Ready Player One. It sounds dumb, but Fortnite is probably the closest thing to a Metaverse that we currently have. I mean, hell, Emperor Palpatine somehow returned in between the movies in Fortnite (a dark day for Star Wars fandom).
It’s kind of insane the amount of work people will do for free, just for the hell of it. I mean, just thinking of my own small world of tabletop RPG gaming and the number of people GMing and writing up stuff that they just give out for free is kind of heartwarming. It’s this weird drive to create and make storytelling worlds that other people can get lost in. I’ve worked on projects like that before and put shit tons of time and effort into them, not even considering that anybody might ever want to give me money for them (though likely it probably wouldn’t even be legal in this case without working directly with Bethesda and getting into licensing and such). Sometimes it’s just fulfilling to get lost working on a project that you love.
Incredible game that can be a little jarring for people who are probably expecting something like Baldur’s Gate 1&2, Fallout 1&2, or some other kind of isometric killfest RPG. It essentially turns the dialogue into 90% of the game, but the dialogue is so damn good that it doesn’t matter.
It also takes getting used to damage, as sometimes you can “die” in seemingly random ways. I was on a rooftop, I think trying to reach for a scarf or something, and failed my roll. That caused me to apparently get so depressed that I lost the game. I can’t remember which stat/trait it was but I think there’s a morale or mental trait you have to watch out for too.
Pirate this game if you wanna give it a try, don’t ever buy it. This is what the developers have advocated for and it actually fits right in with parts of the game itself.
There’s so many games that I picked up that I’d played through/completed in my childhood, but they’ll likely forever show as unplayed in my Steam library. I’ve been slowly going back through my Steam library chronologically though, to try to at least reduce my unplayed games amount, and also to at least check out games I might’ve missed. I’m not forcing my self to actually finish the games, just play them for at least a few minutes, maybe mark it for follow-up later, but the point is to reduce my unplayed games list so I don’t feel as bad about it.
I loved RTS games back in the day, played through all the Command & Conquers, Warcrafts, Starcrafts and all that, but then gradually it felt like the genre starting morphing into DotA and other games and I just sort of moved on. I was mostly single-player, though got into multiplayer later, but remember it being so fucking nerve-wracking and having to click hundreds of times a minute and trying to optimize everything, I’d be so worn out after playing. My best game I ever remembered playing was Starcraft 2, there was one match where multiple players tried ganging up on me in a FFA match, it was obvious they were coordinating, and I somehow fended them off and took the game. It wasn’t an important game or anything, but that was one of the fond memories I have from that time in my gaming life.
I think I eventually just shifted over to turn-based strategy instead and I don’t know if the genre ever really returned from DotA.
We kind of dealt with that for my Dad, but it was never really an issue. My brother just assumed control of the account and that was that. We already had all the access info, so it wasn’t like we had to ask them for anything. We just got it setup on this new Family thing yesterday though, so I can actually access most of his games again (for some reason on the old Family Sharing, his games got blocked out).
The one thing I don’t care much for in PalWorld is building structures (walled structures), it feels kinda janky and restrictive at the moment. Which it hasn’t been a major part of the game so far, but it’s one of the few things that’s bothered me about it. Otherwise, it’s been a breath of fresh air compared to Pokemon’s recent outings.
Seems interesting, I hadn’t heard of this before. She seems to have to imagine an image of a thing to get the control to register, like a cricket jumping to make her character jump, which actually seems more difficult than just playing with a physical controller or keyboard/mouse, since I don’t think I actually “think” about making those sorts of movements. It seems like it would be cumbersome having to imagine the movement everytime, but maybe it becomes 2nd nature for her while she’s playing like this.
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Had (maybe still have?) the physical cartridge for this game and remember playing through when it was out, though can’t remember actually beating it. I don’t actually remember much about the game apart from the art style, though it hadn’t struck me as particularly groundbreaking, other than that sort of investigative game hadn’t been a wildly popular genre on Nintendo systems before. I remembered PC games that had used those mechanics, but it hadn’t really been a thing on consoles at that point.
Seems like they were already planning on stopping the project anyways, Valve’s DMCA just happened to come while they were already deliberating on it:
While we were discussing the project’s future internally recently, we already came to the conclusion to stop the development of the project due to the current state of the code being unusable anymore with s&box’s recent major engine changes, and that we overall moved on from it.
Sadly, this means this DMCA takedown is the nail in the coffin. We cannot bring it back and we’ve hit Valve’s attention, it seems like they definitely don’t want us to use their IP (which is totally fair and legal from them).
Epic and GoG I’ve not bought a single thing from either of them, that’s all free shit. For Steam, most of that is stuff that’s been accumulated from Humble Bundles and just from having an account for ~20 years now. If I were to just quit my job and game full-time for the rest of my life, there’s probably more games to play in my collection than I have years left to live.