mechanics that penalize you for opening treasure chests too soon.

Unlike all the other chests, the ones that “penalize you” have an event and prompt asking if you want to open them, and in a game about time travel, it’s not too hard to figure out what’s intended.

People generally don’t talk too much about things that don’t particularly stand out. If a game is bad, people will complain. If a game is good, people will praise it. If a game is middling, most people will just move on. Nobody’s going to start a discussion about a game that was vaguely enjoyable but not noteworthy, unless expectations were unreasonably high to begin with.

In the fiscal quarter ending June 2024, Microsoft reported over 500 million monthly active gaming users across all platforms and devices

I assume that includes Windows as a platform, which would include Steam users as well. It’s easy to look good when you include your competitor’s numbers in your own.

You also find Alluring Skulls before that, which can also be used to make the fight easier.

What’s weird is they offer preorder bonuses, but no preorders available 2 days before launch.

I mean I think preordering is dumb anyway, but this is even dumber.

Dead Cells is 50% off on GOG right now.

If you enjoyed Hades, you might like the new Ninja Turtles game, Splintered Fate. It’s definitely a bit more than “inspired by” Hades. Doesn’t quite hit the same, but it’s still a good time.

Travel in, then travel back out.

Gerry Rafferty’s most famous song?

That’s Kenny Baker

Just because someone doesn’t play games all the time doesn’t mean they don’t play games sometimes.

If you race 10 hours a week, but you watch racing 20 hours a week, are you not still a racer?

Israeli supremacists

A lot of the jankiness is gone in the later games. DS1 feels really clunky after having played DS2 and DS3.

It runs fine on Linux.

It’s true that most people wouldn’t know, and probably wouldn’t look that far into things before buying a game. Fortunately Steam’s refund policy is pretty good for this kind of situation.

That’s the key here. People who were willing to pre-pay for the game ahead of time are clearly not the target of the DRM, and yet they’re the ones choosing to cancel their purchase. It’s not pirates complaining because they want to play the game for free, it’s people who were looking forward to buying the game.

Who’s the indie company going under here?

That’s not a “new trend,” it’s been that way for a long time. Denuvo is a subscription model for publishers, and it doesn’t make sense to keep paying for it after the sales have already peaked.

Any game with the designer’s name in it is dumb to me. The worst example is American McGee’s Alice, mainly because the guy has a confusing name that makes the title sound especially dumb.

Why does Hayden look like he wants to consume my magical items?

HFW was so much worse for conversation animations.

There’s no way they’re giving you an “upgrade” for free. Don’t worry, as long as you don’t pay for it, you’re not getting the new version.

Boiling the frog and whatnot.

It’s easier to accept this annoyance and move on. And then the next one. And the next. Why bother fighting anything at that point? It’s easier to let them step on us and be thankful they’ll take our money for it.

At that point, what even is the purpose of defining it? It’s such a specific term that was designed to only apply to their hardware. It’s like creating a new word for a car because you added air conditioning to it.

Sure, they had the first GPU because they coined a term that only applied to one specific product.

The first PC that I bought myself has a TNT2 with 8mb of memory. I upgraded it some time later with a GeForce 2 and the difference was shocking.

And also the concept of your collection of souls being recoverable from your last point of death.

I know the “death bag” mechanic had been done before, but the disappearing cache is a core element of Soulslike gameplay that has been repeated so many times since then. It adds a sense of urgency and FOMO to the recovery of your stuff. If you die again, it’s gone for good.

The first GPU card sold to the public was the GeForce 256 in 1999

3dfx cards like the Voodoo and Voodoo2 were 3d accelerators that predated nVidia’s offerings.

And even from nVidia themselves, the Riva TNT was a GPU released before the GeForce models.

The Arc 7 series GPUs were aimed at gaming. They didn’t generally perform on par with the competition, and there were driver issues at launch. IIRC they just couldn’t run anything DirectX 9 or older, but performed ok on newer games.

I don’t know what the status on them is like now.

Canada also has better consumer protection laws, so Newegg Canada is typically better to deal with.

Newegg is a shop and a marketplace. Just like Amazon, they sell their own stuff, and they allow others to sell on their marketplace. If you buy a product from Newegg itself, it’s coming straight from Newegg, but other sellers will often just have stuff shipped to you from Amazon.

It’s still in Early Access, it hasn’t even officially released yet, how can it be a dead game already?

I should be able to do mine then. I haven’t used my PS4 in quite a while.

Ok but why does a game like Ghost of Tsushima need an anti-cheat to begin with?

I’m not even asking that they make their games specifically linux-compatible. I’m just asking for them to not prevent compatibility.

I understand making games only for Windows because that’s where the market share is. But going out of your way to ensure they won’t run on Linux is a dick move.

How old is FW 11?

A company like Nintendo definitely has a law firm on retainer. They’re paying them whether or not they’re being used. There’s no waste of money happening by going after “IP violations.”

A waste of time and energy, perhaps. But the lawyers are getting the same money whether they do this or nothing at all.

Not one of the types you were asking about, but Hades feels like it’s made for the Steam Deck, and it’s a great game (and also on sale)

For FPS games, Doom (2016) is one of the all-time single-player FPS games and runs great on the Deck.

In most soulslike games, you can usually sprint through most areas without ever fighting common enemies. I don’t recall any teleport in ER that you can’t just escape from.

Gaben is well-known for being a yacht aficionado, and owns several large ones.

Nintendo has had gyros since the NES. I swear it made a difference when we moved tge controller around!

The two hour limit is for automated refunds. Under two hours, you’ll get your money back with no questions asked. Above that, it’s on a case-by-case basis.

That brings back memories. I remember playing Spectron on the monochrome green monitor we had. I didn’t know the name of the game, and I was too young to care, but I always thought it was Space Invaders, which was not on Spectravideo.