Unfortunately, “Elden-likes” will likely end up like 99% of “souls-likes” where all they do is copy the surface level stuff (“hard boss fights! Bonfires!”) instead of actually iterating on what made From’s games so well designed.

I do 100% see where you’re coming from too. I just think that people shouldn’t include Elden Ring when listing trend-chasing games that lazily slap “it’s a big open wooooorld!” onto an existing linear franchise. Elden Ring’s systems were designed really well around the bigness and openness of its world, unlike something like Sonic Frontiers or any of the MMO-single-player UE5 stuff coming out of AAA studios. And they even had the decency to build a whole IP around this new, distinct gameplay formula instead of making it Dark Souls 4: This Is What Dark Souls Is Now.

Like, maybe you don’t like red wine, fair enough, but at least Elden Ring is serving the red wine alongside a steak instead of alongside a bowl of Lucky Charms or fettuccine Alfredo.

What a perfect analogy.

But you could always run past enemies in Dark Souls, and it was a much more relevant gameplay pattern in those games that didn’t put a Stake of Marika right in front of the boss door. I think the open world adding nonlinearity to the Souls system was really elegant, since getting stuck on a boss meant you usually had something else interesting to do while improving your skills and/or grinding for stats. You still can bash your head into the boss over and over until you finally solve the skill issue, of course, and Stakes of Marika make that a lot less frustrating. But if you were in the situation in DS1-3 and decided “no, I want better numbers before I try again” you just had to go grind trash to level up and that’s it. At least the “go fuck off and farm souls” option in Elden Ring is fun when doing so is clearing minidungeons and evergaols and maybe seeing new loot.

Ubisoft doesn’t get to earn “woke credits” for this game. Regardless of how they epic owned the racists and Elon on social media, they’re still Ubisoft.

God I hope all this backlash backlash about owning the people that are complaining about a black guy in japan doesn’t end up translating to “buying this Ubislop is praxis!”

Who am I kidding, of course it will.

Problem with that is, if the xbox is a PC with sideloading capabilities (instead of being a much harder thing to engineer: a true “console experience” that just adds Steam), then all Sony’s current games can be pirated on the thing. Future titles would have whatever lock and also probably Denuvo, for sure, or Sony could just stop putting their games on PC. Sony probably wasn’t seeing a future where anyone but “sweaty PC nerds” would be playing Steam games in their living room with controllers, and Microsoft has the perfect opportunity to say “alright, whatever. We lost the exclusives arms race to Nintendo and Sony so let’s just do what we do best and maintain the biggest gaming platform in the history of the medium but make it as easy for Joe Rando to use as an Xbox 360 was”.

Microsoft has such an opportunity to learn the right lessons from the Steam Deck - make good convenient hardware with a lot of compatibility, slap a user-friendly interface on it, and do nothing to stop tinkering and customizing other than making it easy to restore back to stock.

The comparison to GeForce Now is wild, because that’s a service running “your” games on someone else’s hardware. Of course Sony can walk up to NVIDIA and say “fuck off, we don’t authorize you to run God of War for your users” and NVIDIA will say ok we won’t run God of War anymore.

Steam distributes game installers. Sony can’t make Valve produce a special version of Steam for the Xbox that tells its store that it’s on an Xbox, especially if the Xbox in question is literally a windows PC with a UI skin and a lock on administrator access. I can run Steam right now on my android phone via winlator and download+install a Steam game.

What Sony could do is patch restrictive DRM software into all their games that checks the hardware info and fails to boot if you’re on “an xbox”.

It’s more that there’s not really any other use case for dual GPUs (without SLI/Crossfire) other than using those GPUs for stuff other than graphics processing. That means AI or crypto-mining in a VAST number of cases, with very very tiny subsets of users doing stuff like passthrough GPUs to a VM.

If the next Xbox home console is running full-ass Windows instead of a walled DRM garden, and then they partner with Steam for easy swapping between the “Xbox/Gamepass” UI and Steam Big Picture, that’s the best console. As in, like best console ever.

It’s FOSS at least, but when a Discord replacement kinda needs all the users on the same server (one of the subtler evils of discord is using “server” to mean “chatroom”), you’re still in the hands of the master company’s decisions regarding their instance. The only theoretical protection from corporatization on Revolt is that when they do start shilling Revolt Ultra (and locking features behind it), someone else can fork their codebase but must still convince “the community” to migrate - including new accounts, reconnecting to all friends, communities moving to the new fork (likely without their history coming along for the ride)…

Matrix is feature-bare at the moment, but as a federated platform it is more tolerant of Matrix Dot Org going corpo. It’s the same situation as what’d happen if Lemmy.world or Mastodon.social started piping in ads and subscriptions - bad, but not platform-killing. Revolt is basically analogous to Bluesky, with Matrix as Mastodon. Bluesky obviously won the fight over Twitter refugees. I think Mastodon would have had a chance if they had polished up onboarding and focused on ease-of-transition a couple years before Twitter imploded. Hopefully Matrix devs do that push before Discord finally gets to the tipping point where people are willing to actually go somewhere else. It needs to have Discord-level convenience and quality on screenshare and group audio/video rooms on day one of Discord imploding to have any chance. To have a good chance, it needs to be as good as or better than Discord Nitro, for free, on that day.

I think one thing Matrix does better than Discord and Revolt is allowing p2p file sharing as an option, in addition to serverside hosting. File size limits in a chat client are a lot more tolerable when it’s “whoops, we don’t want you uploading a 2gb video file to our servers… But would you like to send it directly? Your contact will need to accept the download.” As a general rule, chat apps being more p2p means they’re more sustainable (because the servers don’t have ballooning storage requirements) and more private (because with p2p e2ee communications, nobody but one of the peers can share your data with anyone). P2P is notoriously hard to wrangle for group chat situations though, or validating 5 clients per user like how people use Discord. Also, resilient data is often considered a downside in social situations- people like being able to delete and edit their messages. Yes, someone could already be screenshotting/archiving their Discord chats but a p2p system would have everyone automatically doing it.

No, this is worth treating with just as much disgust as if it was what people think “mobile ads” means. It’s ads in the client, on mobile. Desktop discord “quests” and nitro upsells and flashing graphics on a “shop” button that shouldn’t exist in the first place are ads too.

I mean yeah. Game consoles are DRM-riddled computers shackled into being toys. Being able to crack one open and turn it into something that can be used in non-manufacturer-approved ways is a cool scene in its own right.

This is “hacked” in the console modding parlance. It’s not about gaining access to someone else’s Xbox to do something nefarious, it’s about running software that Microsoft doesn’t want you to run on your xbox, including pirated games. “Jailbreak” is a synonym for “hack” or “softmod” in this scene.

Anti-cheat is always malware (or at best it’s DRM), that sometimes reduces cheating in games.

The frustration existed mostly as mockery from people that didn’t play Pokémon anyway, and didn’t suddenly start playing Pokémon when XY came out.

Nah, at the time I was also like “holy shit why do you want game freak to go 3D?”. And I say that as an unrepentant Colosseum/XD stan. Black and White’s unique animated sprite style was absolutely gorgeous on the DS and still is.

I wish they never had gone to 3D. Black and White still look gorgeous to this day. Leave 3D to Stadium/Revolution style battle arena games and keep letting your incredibly skilled traditional pixel artists doing what they do best.

Holy shit, that “monkey” screenshot isn’t something being “faithfully represented from the original”? The original thing didn’t have that, but the new 2023 reboot did?

Who up slayin they spire

Just use an ouya controller

Tell that to the Gamecube and Wii U eras. Funny that those are also all-time peaks for game quality, Nintendo is better at making video games when they’re struggling.

There’s also just grammatical stuff that looks better in text. “In the future, it’s player driven” would conversationally flow perfectly well, but as written text the tense of “it’s” doesn’t line up with the statement being about the future. Hence the present tense being corrected to future tense.

the game is a slot machine. It’s a purely aesthetic slot machine (zero ads, zero MTX, zero premium currency, zero paid DLC), but it turns out “does it look like casino gambling” is the concern, not “is it actually something that you can ruin your life over because it preys on gambling addiction”

It looks like the dev is just gonna sigh and accept the garbage “age rating” system, and let LBAL stay on the store as a “mature 18+ audiences only” app.

The current weakest one is a bazooka.

With SteamOS getting patches specifically to make it work as the main OS on third-party handhelds, that’s less of an argument now. What’s left is the absolutely insane price point of the Deck.

Native 4k output instead of a crappy upscaler or a RetroTink which costs more alone than this Analogue product. N64’s native composite is laggy and hideous on a flatscreen TV, you need something like this or a retrotink or a CRT to make the games look good. Even if the Analogue couldn’t play ROMs off an SD card (it can, if Analogue’s previous products are any indication), you could just stick a Summercart in it.

I personally am a ride-or-die CRT player for my retro consoles, but big CRTs are getting rarer and living rooms less accommodating. And N64’s library has a ton of absolutely killer party games that are best experienced on a big TV with your friends, not a dark retro cave on a 20" CRT the way SNES RPGs are. If someone I knew wanted to go a “step past” emulation, I’d absolutely recommended this thing as the second shopping list priority. In order (imo):

Real N64, Real CRT, Summercart/ED64X7 (most authentic, and also cheapest if and only if you can source a CRT that fits your needs)

Analogue 3D, HDTV they already have

Real N64, RetroTink, Summercart/ED64X7 (more expensive than option 2 even if they already have the console and summercart lol)

Real N64, RetroTink or CRT, buying real copies of games at jacked-up collector prices

Balatro Mobile Maker works because the game’s engine (LOVE 2D) is designed from the ground up to be multiplatform. It’s trivial to “port” compared to other engines.

Work required for ROA1 level of “workshop characters” is exponentially higher in the new art style and engine. When/if this game gets Steam Workshop, it’ll probably end up with more “tweaked/cloned” characters than totally new wacky MUGEN stuff like ROA1.

Reminds me of Heretic’s Fork.

Yeah, waiting on Hades 1’s full release was easy since it was EGS exclusive for the entire early access phase. This one’s gonna be harder to dodge until it’s done.

Almost anyone who works with pathfinder/paizo could have instead worked with D&D/Wizards. Owlcat etc made their choice specifically to not work with Wizards.

Obsidian’s last open world game, The Outer Worlds, was best described as “whelming”

Or the EGS phase was just glorified beta access like Hades.

FighterZ is an actually good fighting game in the style of MvC or Street Fighter though, not the same 3d drivel with copy paste movesets and terrible game balance usually associated with anime tie-ins.

https://maddymakesgamesinc.itch.io/celeste64

There. Instead of a useless blogspam “article”, here’s a link to the game.

Monster capturing RPGs are a “genre” but Palworld isn’t in that genre at all. Palworld is a survival game with mons instead of robotic automation.

I’ve seen them in the wild, I live in the bay area. They look worse than in the pictures. The brushed steel catches every speck of dirt and oil. It’s like they’re driving a damn crock-pot.

detecting it is the problem. If the software is truly being run on the monitor, not the PC, it’s not something Riot can detect, unless they want to just ban anyone with this display connected to their PC (and monitor EID can also be spoofed).

I was checking this out expecting a Switch Lite form factor with the specs of a weaker Steam Deck - the perfect indie machine (a real Switch is stuck on outdated unmoddable versions of indie games).

The $1300 price tag was a damn jumpscare lmao