Valve tried trackballs with the Steam Controller but ditched them for trackpads that emulate trackball physics. They found small ones felt bad but big ones were too bulky and heavy. Clearly they like that idea, since every controller-like thing they’ve designed since includes pads.

If you haven’t done so already, I suggest you start taking notes while playing the game. You’ll need to keep track of what you have to come back to a place for.

I completed Psychonauts recently on my PC. There’s a Linux native version as well, and both it and the Windows+proton versions seemed to work… adequately. It’s pretty janky, which I mainly attribute to it being an old PC game.

Trying to finish Psychonauts after several years of playing it on and off

It’s actually spelled “chamberrr”

I recommend you avoid games with continuous movement early on. Moving with joystick feels very bad until you get your VR legs. Also get the Lab, Valve’s free VR minigame collection.

I don’t think it has ever gone on sale.

This game is timeless. It was released in a time when the arena FPS was on its way out and server browsers were still the norm for PC online multiplayer, yet it has hardly aged.

Still alive, are we?

Petition to name A Short Hike the best open world game.

Bastion 👍

If you liked Pseudoregalia, why not try the other N64-style 3D platformer released in 2023 with a goat protagonist trapped in a dream, Corn Kidz 64? Yes, this is a particularly specific coincidence. It features great humour, extremely cartoony animation, and polished movement. It’s very much quality over quantity.

I also “completed” Dead Cells and went “yeah, that’s enough.”

Anyway, my games.

Completed games

• Neon White
  • Run fast. Puts you in the speedrunning grindset. Corny anime plot. Unnecessary dating sim elements. The addictive gameplay carries it.
• Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer
  • Retro-style FPS with stylistic suck but still with lots of in-universe and IRL soul. Takes the piss out of edgy teen boy fantasies. This is an essential part of the Hypnospace Outlaw canon.
• Gauntlet Slayer Edition
  • It’s Gauntlet but modern. Fun dungeon crawling online co-op with friends.

Games that aren’t reasonably completeable

• Shotgun King
  • Chess but the only piece you have is a king with a shotgun. It was fun for a bit, but I quickly lost interest.
• Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed
  • Kart racing. Cool maps that change over time. Less bullshit than Mario Kart. It has a hint of more “hardcore” racing mechanics, so it felt like I had more agency. It’s a 2013-era PC game with a surprising amount of jank to make work properly.

His pandemic project in 2021 was making 139 games!

I wishlisted PVKK from seeing its earlier trailer. I’m also aware that Buckshot Roulette is well-received but haven’t played it myself.

rRootage

Legendary bullet hell from 2003. Thank you Kenta Cho

With hindsight, I view this generation of the Pokémon series as an awkward transition to 3D. It’s pretty apparent in the graphics and UI that Diamond/Pearl/Platinum are essentially upgraded GBA games. 3D effects occur only sparingly, and I remember the backpack UI bizarrely having an iPod-style scroll wheel on the touchscreen.

The following generation got more adventurous with the 3D and started using the DS touchscreen more effectively. The “sprite puppet” effect in Black/White looked janky as heck but I honestly loved it anyway. The character sprites in Cassette Beasts worked similarly, which I guess is another reason I liked that game.

Also, man, the pacing of battle animations and UI is so slow in this generation.

Path of Exile has you clearing out the entire pantheon. Then the main campaign is over and you begin the post-game part, which is what actually matters.

We are always allowed to admire oddly hi-fi graphics. I love shaking the vodka bottles in Half-Life Alyx. The liquid inside waves and bubbles and if you hold it up to a light source, the light glows through!

My build for Settlers league was the most fun map blaster I’ve ever made. I made a melee witch (occultist) with Viper Strike that could one-shot entire packs and some map bosses! Just running up to a pack and slapping it and running off.

It was absolute garbage at bossing, though. The survivability was softcore/10.

I played the demo during Next Fest. I found it fun. It reminds me of games like (1) Keep Talking and (2) Papers Please.

My friend kept pestering me to try the game in 2009. The first thing I did in Alpha was die in overworld lava.

This is hardly news. Path of Exile has server queues at the start of every major launch. I think it’ll be great news if absolutely nothing goes wrong with the launch.

Back to you, Steve.

I’m not familiar with the games you mentioned, so I went to check them out. And look what we have on the Steam store page!

Reviews

“It shares some of the feeling of Her Story, albeit featuring today’s technology and with less of a focus on the crime angle. But it has the same small moments of revelation, all of which come together to form a story in its own neat yet meandering way.” Rock Paper Shotgun

Guess that means you have to play it now.

I left my computer to go out with friends to have wings. I was thinking about the puzzle I left behind on the trip there. I was trying to draw the patterns on my phone while we waited. This game gets into your head.

Her Story is a detective game that starts with you sitting at a computer, not even knowing what mystery you’re supposed to investigate. You have to search through the computer’s database for police interview footage to figure that out. Then you have to figure out the answer to the mystery you think you need to solve. The interview clips have a lot of details for you to track and link together. I had to make a big chunky note for this game and even had to implement a system to keep track of the likelihood of the statements.

If you want more point and click adventures, try the Submachine series, which was originally in Flash but now remastered as a ten-game compilation called Submachine: Legacy. The developer trained as an architect, so you get to admire intricate, hand-drawn architecture porn. It starts off as a typical 00s Flash room escape, until you realize it was all a… hallucination. You realize that you’re actually going to explore a vast, utterly lonely underground world as you try to track down the only person who seems to know how to get out. Teleportation and parallel universe travel come up a lot in the series, so keeping notes will be useful. Incredible dark ambient soundtrack, too.

About that blood. Valve forgot to remove it before submitting the game for age ratings, and despite multiple updates over the years, they’ve never bothered to address this. Also, I wish Portal 2 had hard-mode remix chambers like 1 did.

I’ll suggest Vertigo 2 as a worthy followup.

It really impressed me with its detail and scope as a mainly solo effort, by a developer who worked at Valve for a while. It’s a big, cinematic shooting adventure, like Half-Life, so the game calls itself a half-like! There are cool bosses, memorable characters, and wildly varied environments. The story is pretty much a flipped Half-Life: you’re the alien who got teleported in after a big science disaster and you’re fighting your way back home. Compared to Alyx, which takes places around a handful of city blocks, Vertigo 2 throws you around a much larger-scale setting, so it’s more like the Half-Life 2 kind of linear gallery of wild shit.

In the years since I finished Antichamber, my opinion of it has cooled somewhat with hindsight. The early game and some of the mid-game are full of dazzling, logic-defying spectacles, which is what draws you in, but the magic fades later on and you get a lot of puzzles with the block gun until the ending. The teaching style mostly works.

I hate the name “immersive sim”. What is being “simmed”? Why is it immerisve? Isn’t Halo immersive? I was immersed AF. And it’s simming at least as much stuff as Dishonored, I assure you. It’s such a dumb name, just words mashed together. Ditto for “character action game”. Unless your action game features exclusively rocks, it’s “character action”, that means nothing.

Genre names also annoy me. But there’s no authority to define a taxonomy of gameplay styles, so the vocabulary is built informally. I likewise dislike MOBA, metroidvania, roguelike, and soulslike. In the end, we just need the right sequences of letters to accurately represent the gameplay.

In the case of immersive sim, I believe it came from Warren Spector trying to portray how Deus Ex was different from pure action, RPG, and stealth games.

More action and environmental storytelling:

• If you want to play more Portal, try community-made campaigns! I recommend in particular Portal: Revolution, a prequel to Portal 2 that features a few new mechanics, and Portal Stories: Mel, which has basically no new mechanics but turns up the difficulty by making you combine mechanics in clever ways.
• Bastion — Action RPG with a rich story and lush art. A humble narrator tells the story of a place literally torn apart by war, and you play the kid trying to rebuild. This was the debut game from Supergiant Games, which later made Hades.
• Tunic — Mysterious, exploration-focused adventure. A little guy in a green tunic picks up a sword and goes on an adventure, but the game is in an unknown language and you only have a few pages of the manual. It’s like a metroidvania but your progress is based on knowledge.

More “genre pushers”:

• Puzzle games
  • Mosa Lina — It calls itself “a hostile interpretation of the immersive sim”. It’s an aggressively random puzzle platformer where the levels are random and the tools you have to solve them are also random. Mosa Lina is a puzzle game that wants you to be clever, not smart.
  • Viewfinder — First-person “photography” puzzles. The featured mechanic has a “wow” factor that rivals Portal’s: Take a picture of the level, then hold up the photo and click to copy the photo back into the level. The plot is pretty meh, but like the original Portal, it’s pretty damn short.
  • Baba is You — Push blocks and break rules. Blocks with words written on them define the rules of the game: Baba is you, wall is stop, flag is win. The rules themselves are puzzle pieces. If you can’t solve the puzzle, change the rules!
• Inscryption — You find an old, abandoned video game and load it up. It’s an atmospheric, spooky card game, hiding layers of secrets for you to discover. The less you know before starting the game, the better your experience will be. You want one-of-a-kind experiences? This is one of them.
• The Stanley Parable — Comedy walking simulator. You enter a room with two doors in front of you. The narrator says, “Stanley entered the door on his left.” What will you do? The Stanley Parable has many endings and it questions what video game narratives are really for.

The audio in the game is bonkers. Distant footsteps or floor creaking can really get you.

There are high-polish VR shooters, like Half-Life Alyx, Boneworks, and Vertigo 2, which obviously care about where your hands and other body parts are. Boneworks attempts melee combat, but it’s pretty janky. In Half-Life Alyx, you use your hands to rummage around junk to find resources. In Vertigo 2, if you get hit by arrows or thrown spears, you have to pull them out of your body, and there’s a section where you steer a boat.

FMVs? What a treat.

Does Half-Life 2 count? I played it years ago but fully replayed it over a couple of days to hear the new developer commentary. I never thought Valve would get around to making one for Half-Life 2, so I’m glad they did.

Path of Exile is one of those games where you never stop learning new things and the ceiling is always higher than you think it is.

Look at all that endgame content!

I got my Steam Controller the day they were released and still use it. The stick has never drifted, though I also prefer to use the left pad for most “left stick” purposes. The real problem I’m having with the stick is that the rubbery coating on top is rubbing off, which is kind of gross and makes it harder than it should be to use it for an extended time. Good thing pads never drift! The rough texture of the pads has stayed remarkably well; no smooth and shiny spots.

Mine also has the usual things after almost a decade of use. The A button feels a little soft and the right trigger sounds a bit clangy. The body is plastic faces screwed together. It’s a tiny bit creaky but remarkably sturdy, with no flex spots other than the back keys, which are pressed with the flexible parts of the battery cover.

Overall, it’s lasted me a good long while and I expect it to go longer. I even bought a backup from someone after they were discontinued.

I recommend it, but in response to the first part of your comment, I guess it depends on what parts of Pokémon you dislike.

Mechanically, I see the combat as more matured and nuanced. Battles are almost always 2v2. It uses a board game-inspired system where you pay action points to use a move; you gain 2 each turn, plus a bonus one when you hit with type advantage. The type system has interesting interactions: advantaged moves apply status effects, which give you setups for comboing moves together, instead of nuking opponents with double damage. For example, lightning ⇒ earth turns the target into glass, then metal ⇒ glass spreads damaging shards onto the battlefield. The game cuts down the grinding as well, with your character gaining levels instead of your monster tapes, so you can get to using a new tape with no catch-up grind at all. Stickers are a powerful evolution of the move system. You can freely move stickers around and they can appear with rare mods, ARPG-style, that customize how the sticker works. As an equivalent of Pokémon abilities are passive stickers, which trigger with certain conditions, which let you “program” a tape. There’s also an impressively robust fusion system that comes with an interesting strategic tradeoff: you get bigger stats in a fusion with your partner but lose action economy.

The game’s plot is a fresh one that breaks the standard formula of creature collectors. There’s a side quest that makes a nod to the usual “gym leader series”, but the plot is focused on discovering the mysteries of the island you’re stuck on and finding a way home. There’s a memorable and surprising cast of characters and a clear anti-capitalist message (you fight vampire landlords). I like the worldbuilding, too. It avoids the usual uncomfortable questions surrounding creature collectors, like notably the whole capturing and fighting part — you record images of monsters to tape and transform into them instead.

I find the monster designs imaginative and distinct. The roster is must less focused on elemental animals and more on folklore and cryptids, which ties into the overall plot of the game. The boss designs are also really cool, but that’s a spoiler.

Also, there are mods.

There might be reasons you still won’t like Cassette Beasts. The combat is still turn-based. The post-game is pretty thin, though I suppose this update is expanding that. You have to collect crafting materials to trade with NPCs for stuff, but only a few materials are scarce enough to care about. The game is pretty easy on the default difficulty, but there are settings to make it harder.

Hell yeah, Steam Controller

I’m so hyped to listen to the new commentary.

It’s Linux native