Dude… That level is amazing. But there’s soooo much more, even if you don’t have a TON of PlayStation nostalgia. It’s just a really good platformer. Best non-Nintendo 3D platformer I’ve played, by far.

This game was decent, but I feel like Astro Bot just blows it away in every single aspect.

Yeah people seem to know about Hugo Boss and Volkswagon, etc. working for the Nazi Party, but maybe they don’t realize why?

I think Skyrim is when many gamers realized this. The quests in Oblivion were better, and aside from that, it was just more of the same.

If you’re looking for that dopamine hit for finding hidden paths/areas, then check out pretty much any From Software game.

Depends on the game. Demon’s Souls is the most punishing… But Dark Souls 1 was pretty brutal as well. Not only did you lose all of your souls upon death, but you would lose your “humanity” as well, lowering all of your stats significantly and you can only cure it with a special item. Shit was pretty annoying. Elden Ring did something similar with the whatchamacallit rune thing in the top left corner that deactivates when you die, but that was more forgiving.

To be fair, you can just return it on Steam if you play less than 2 hours. So you can try every single game first if you really wanted to.

VOLCANO!

I remember the opening cutscene blowing my little mind

Oh they absolutely will though. No fucking way they would force themselves to compete with a free (and probably better) version of the same game.

In which case they will 100% force this to be taken down.

Great game

LOL that’s hilarious. The game looks legitimately fun, so I picked it up, but I had no intention of playing it online. Maybe now I’ll check it out hah

Yeah how dare you pay $9.99 one time to gamble all you want! If you’re gonna get those dopamine hits, you better be spending real money at the tables!

Don’t a lot of people use GrapheneOS?

Cry about it… Astro Bot was fucking awesome.

Have you played Astro Bot? It’s phenomenal. It is the best non-Mario 3D platformer ever made. And possibly in the Top 3 if you include Mario.

I understand being upset if your game didn’t win, but your game came out the same year as Baldur’s Gate 3. I mean come on, you had to know…

Hell yeah!

Yeah, Steam Deck (with the back buttons, and the insane customization you can do with Steam Input) probably has the best controller.

But the haptics and adaptive triggers of the DualSense give it a slight edge imo. Unless your game uses a mouse, then it’s SD all the way.

I think they’re referring to the touch pads and how well they work as a replacement for a mouse. Way better than any other controller.

Yeah. I have a STEM degree and work in a STEM field, and it’s a bummer to see just how… not well rounded people’s educations are. Otherwise intelligent people that seem incapable of critical thinking.

The most recent version of Steam on the Deck addresses this if you go to the “Non-Steam Game” page. It gives you the option to install Chrome and add it as a non-steam shortcut with one click. It also has a short note about how you can easily do it with any app in Desktop Mode, and that they’re working on a way to do that within the Gaming Mode interface.

Not ideal, but they’re working on it. Also, would prefer Firefox obv.

What store was broken?

Edit: I ask which store, because while I prefer CLI for updating and maintaining packages on my main device, the Discover store has always worked perfectly fine for me. And if you’re using it on the Steam Deck level (SteamOS is immutable), then you don’t really need to understand what a Flatpak is any more than you understand what an .exe is. Think if them as literally the same thing for your purposes.

And if anything, maintaining and updating programs is way easier than Windows as it does it all automatically.

Lol I literally did that twice yesterday with two seperate games…

But yeah, I also have a PS5, and it’s great to just hit X and go.

Get him an OLED Steam Deck instead. I don’t know why anyone would get a ROG, especially if you’re just going to put SteamOS on it.

I second Bazzite. It’s been a phenomenal experience on my laptop.

Interestingly, I was messing with BoxBuddy a week or two ago, and looking at what distroboxes were available to install, and there’s a SteamOS container on there. Not sure if it’s official or what, but I was able to run games on it (though absolutely unnecessary).

I take it you’re not a fan of Systemd

I loved WC3 because of the Hero mechanic. It made it added just enough RPG to it… You could usually resurrect your Hero, and if I recall, you can upgrade to make the cooldown faster. Been so long though and I didn’t play the unfortunate remake.

Yeah, I never got into MMOs (probably because WoW got big before I had a disposable income lol), so RTS was also my scene back then. I dabbled in SC, and played WC2 at a friend’s house, but WC3 is where I really cut my teeth.

That game was so much goddamn fun to play online (dial-up, don’t pick up the phone mom!). I remember getting caught every now and then in some kind of surprise rush that I had never seen, so I’d save the replay of the game and watch back to see how they did it, and then try it out against other people… I think I learned some kind of wyvyrn rush with Night Elves that way, if I recall correctly. Shit was tight. My memory is shit, I can’t believe I can recall that. There were so many crazy strategies I picked up that way.

That was the golden age of RTS gaming. For me at least. Good times.

This is true. But things aren’t black and white, there are degrees. For example, there is a big difference between private corporations, and publicly listed ones. The former at least allows for possible decency. Sometimes. Usually not.

I can even understand not getting into WC3.

I cannot. Could be nostalgia talking, but WC3 was the pinnacle of the PC RTS gaming era imo. WC3 and AOE2.

It only really makes sense when the remaster is trash (like GTA I guess). Otherwise, all I can see it doing is increasing sales of both the original and the remaster…

Honestly… I would say that the game fits with the theme of the original post, and explaining it would ruin the magic.

I will say that not only do the mechanics change based on the story, but there is an entire asynchronous online system where users help other users (that they will never see or meet in game) to construct be infrastructure to make travel for others (they will never see or meet) easier.

Then those mechanics feed back into the actual story. It’s kind of wild.

I know it’s a divisive game, but I will say it’s a masterpiece imo. Even if only for those mechanics.

And yes, the controls change based on how the load you’re carrying is balanced. I believe the definitive way to play is the Definitive Edition on PS5 with the DualSense controller since the adaptive triggers become harder to press as your load increases.

Oh no, are they really going to use AI to translate a Falcom RPG? That’s fucking heresy. The scripts in those games, are one of the things that set them apart from other JRPG schlock…

I love that shit!

And, typically, it seems as though they put a lot of care into the localization. This is super disappointing if true.

I get that these scripts must be massive but I’d rather wait an extra 6 months or whatever, if it means the NPC dialogue doesn’t read like ChatGPT.

Edit: I realized that this thread is all about going in blind, and my comment could be construed as ruining that. I despise spoilers of any kind (and my brain seems to seek them out so as to troll me), so I’m very sensitive to that. Apologies.

Death Stranding would like a word…

I’ve recently been eyeing the case for that game on the shelf and thinking about going back to it, but it’s been so long since I last played that I 100% would need to start over again. I had gotten prob 20+ hours so it’s a lot to lose. But I remember the story being pretty mindbending, and there being some interesting mechanics.

As long as Valve remains a private company, and Gabe remains in charge, I don’t see them getting too shitty.

But if they go public? Forget about it.

Playing the original Half-Life is like a formative gaming memory for me… It had been such a massive leap from your DOOM 2s and Dukes Nukem. I was super young though, so I don’t know how much I cared about the narrative.

HL2, on the other hand…Now that I remember vividly. I remember having to use five CDs to install it because Steam had literally just been invented (for HL2). Having to create a Steam account and log into a service to play a game was so foreign at the time lol…

Might be time to re-play.

This might only be true for people who played the original when it first came out (or at least, were playing video games at that time, and are used to the dated graphics).

Also, to add to this: if you haven’t played Portal and Portal 2, then you need to do that now. Like possibly even before HL