Repacks are sourced from the scene, and the scene cracks video games. The fact that you get free video games out of it is a side effect.

Could you explain what you mean by this? Are the cracks just done for fun / for clout? I do admit I have wondered what keeps people so reliably cracking new games. Seems like a thankless job.

Totally understandable because I feel exactly the same way about Morrowind. Rock on brother.

As someone familiar with System Shock 2 but had never played the first one because it looked just a bit too crusty for me, the remake is a banger of a game that seems by all accounts to be a pretty soulful recreation of the original. I do recommend it, Nightdive did good work here.

My Steam Deck doesn’t serve me ads. Not even the on-boot sale pop up that desktop Steam gives.

I used to do the same but load everyone down with remote mines. The AI knows how to chuck a mine but it does not know how to detonate it.

So once one of the player characters finally detonated a mine somewhere, the explosion chain reaction would get kills clear across the entire map.

there are instances that are impossible to escape like entirely impossible

I expect to see the 100% no hit speedrun hit the internet by the end of the month

That already happened and they already C&D’d it according to someone else in this thread

Sting Shard trap also works great, I just threw one of those at every minion spawn and then they die in one Needle hit after. If you stack poison on it then you probably don’t even need the follow up hit but I don’t remember if you can have the Pollip Pouch before this fight or not.

Sting Shard is great in general though. Does 2x Needle damage in a trap you can place in midair, can be poisoned with Pollip Pouch for even more extended DPS, is AoE-capable and can hit multiple enemies, and is cheap enough to refill at 7 shell shards. It’s been my primary red tool so far all game, though I just got to Act 2 recently and I’m hoping to find something better here.

Go west and south when you find the rain

Last Judge was the only boss so far that almost completely filtered me from the game and I think the reason why was because of how very little warning you get before the big spin. I think like an extra quarter of a second on that startup animation would go a huge way toward making her way less annoying. Took me two days to complete the fight because I kept getting so tilted by getting hit with the spin.

The runback wasn’t difficult at all but it was very annoying. You can avoid all enemies on the route except for a single drill fly, but it takes a whole 30 seconds or more to make the run back to the boss fight. Don’t fuck up your platforming though, the sand worms do two damage, so missing a landing means you’re stuck spending the first 10 seconds of the fight trying to Bind with your cocoon silk if you want to survive more than one single hit (two, if you found all the act 1 mask shards).

To be honest I ended up finally defeating Judge by strapping on the Pollip Pouch and sticking her full of poison straight pins. I regret nothing and I do not consider this to be dishonorable.

I am firmly convinced that we will continue to receive sporadic Terraria updates until Red literally dies

I’m not buying it strictly because I can’t support Konami firing Kojima from their team and then trying to parade the corpse of his projects around to get more free money. It stinks of the same bullshit that Disco Elysium does where no matter how good the game is, it is an objectively moral choice to pirate it instead of paying the publishers for it.

Yep. I didn’t have a huge issue with them charging for new DLC. If the DLC is good then fine, devs gotta eat.

When they sunset content that I paid for and tell me it’s no longer accessible, that’s when I dropped the game like a hot potato. Should have requested a refund, actually.

Paradox DLCs also classically add a ton of content every single time. Sure Stellaris kind of sucks as a new player because there’s $260 of content, but it’s perfectly playable and even good with only the base version and then you pick whatever new content you like as you want more of it. Rimworld has the exact same strategy and I don’t see people complain about that. They release a complete game without any obviously missing parts and then keep bolting on cool new extra parts for the next 10 years.

All that to say, yeah this is kind of out of character for Paradox. Which does have me concerned about this.

You’d be surprised, this isn’t nearly the first one of its kind.

Special shoutout to the Deep Rock Galactic board game which is genuinely pretty awesome.

Dwarf Fortress is, in fact, in a museum.

I find it offensive that the only effective way to combat this is to fight fire with fire and also make a big bitchy noise about this like the conservatives love to do. I have better things I would rather be doing with my life. But such are the times we live in I suppose.

The actual text of the EULA states:

"You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with the foregoing restrictions Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part.”

So no, it’s not misinformation, Nintendo is straight up telling you legally that they can and will do this. This is not a hypothetical. They may not have done it yet but there is no uncertain terminology around their ability and willingness to do so. The fact that they can even threaten this in their EULA is a huge warning flag that everyone in this thread is correct to be upset about.

From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s basically a sandbox. Imagine if F:NV had no main quest but allowed you to create your own faction. You’re just unleashed onto the wasteland to do whatever and let everyone else respond to it.

That is to say, much of the fun comes from building drug running bandit empires.

Family share is actually great for this now.

It used to be that if anyone in the group was playing any game it would lock you out of playing anything else on the main account without kicking them off.

But they eased up on it now so you can both play at the same time as long as you aren’t playing the same game at the same time.

So just make a burner account for you or for your kids and family share the library to it and now you don’t even have to go offline unless everyone in the house wants to play BG3 simultaneously.

Regular enemies fall over like wet tissue, yeah.

Big boss fights in particular (and some of those in particular, in particular, looking at you Maris and/or Gnoster) often have either a gigantic AoE attack that is very difficult to dodge when you’re the only source of aggro, or else charge across the entire arena after every attack and have you spend half an hour in the fight, 27 minutes of which was spent just chasing the guy across the map. Not impossible, but very annoying.

But 90% of what makes coop easier in my opinion is just having a spare body around that can pull aggro so you can heal. Elden Ring base bosses were designed around being able to be beaten solo so they usually have big wide windows where you can get a breather if you need it. Nightreign bosses have much less of that because they expect you to be running 3 deep. Nerfing their defenses helps with the solo DPS race but it doesn’t really solve the problem that these fights were designed from the ground up for a team who is able to rotate aggro. Nightreign bosses were designed with a sort of raid-boss mentality.

I think if this game were going to be appropriately balanced for single player they would need to go in and edit a lot of the main bosses’ movesets. But that was never part of Nightreign’s design philosophy and trying to shoehorn it in now isn’t doing them any favors in my opinion. This is the equivalent of a World of Warcraft player complaining that they can’t solo all the endgame raid bosses. Sure, you can’t. They weren’t designed to be fought solo. We could try to nerf them down to the point that you can fight them solo, but then it’s no longer a raid boss, you’ve lost the essence of why people wanted to come to this fight in the first place.

Also, are the enemies designed for multiplayer, except in scaling? Everything I’ve seen looks like standard Fromsoft stuff, no weird abilities that just fuck over solo players.

Compare base game Morgott and Nightreign Morgott and I think you’ll see what I mean here. Boss enemies are much more cracked out with longer combos and shorter downtime than in Elden Ring proper, because the developers expect you to be trading aggro with your teammates to give yourself a heal break.

I’ve played quite a lot of Nightreign.

In co-op you have fully infinite lives, your teammates can pick you up at any time and even if they fail to do so you’ll respawn back at a grace. If you fall over in a boss fight you have an unlimited timer to be picked back up and automatically rez at the end of the fight even if they don’t do it.

In solo you’re fighting a boss intended for 3 players and if you die twice the game is over completely.

Co-op, even with randoms, is much much easier by an order of magnitude. I’m usually a solo player in most games and thought this would be awful for me, it isn’t at all. Map pings are plenty of communication for most matches. It is, however, definitely better with friends on a voice call.

I was skeptical about it. I saw a lot of it being compared with Final Fantasy and I’ve been largely pretty disappointed with most Final Fantasy offerings since X.

Picked it up recently on the recommendation of another Lemming and, holy shit, this might be the best RPG I’ve ever played. Hands down, it’s that good. God bless the French. This game is making me feel things I haven’t felt since I was a teenager.

Gwyndolin in Dark Souls 1 is a semi major lore character and is trans(?)

Yes, but that doesn’t make it any less of an absolute scum sucking move.

Hackintoshes have been around since the 80s and this has never happened.

In 2009-2012 Apple did levy a successful lawsuit against Psystar for doing this in a business environment. But they’ve never enforced bricking a consumer Hackintosh and I expect they never will.

Well it sure as hell didn’t work on my Tarnished in Elden Ring proper

Yeah, that’s what you do when your sales are shot, you downsize. I can’t be mad at them shuttering studios that they literally can’t afford to keep open, what else are they expected to do?

I have an issue with it when companies report record profits and then cut everyone, Devolver didn’t do this.

Sounds like how Super Mario RPG did it which was overall pretty excellent.

I haven’t played the game but if that’s true I’d still consider that well and truly turn based.

This was me lmao. On my first playthrough of Morrowind as a teenager I dicked around and did everything except the main quest for ages. Around level 18 I decided to actually progress the main quest. Hasphat, check. Arkngthand, no sweat. Talk to Sharn Gra-Muzgob, she says to fetch the Skull of Llevule Andrano. Cool, go to Andrano’s tomb, looks kind of familiar. Where is the Skull of Llevule Andrano? Cause it sure ain’t here in his tomb. Whoopsie.

Never found the skull, never progressed the quest, had to start a new character to actually experience the main story. I wonder how many potential Nerevarines failed to ascend due to missing minor quest items. Wish I could ask em that inside the Cavern of the Incarnate.

There is at least one occasion where NPCs just straight up lie to you in quest directions though. I can’t think of it off the top of my head but I remember it existing because I complained about it on a forum.

On one hand - great worldbuilding! “Local dumbass gives you bad directions” is a funny and memorable point on top of what might otherwise be a forgettable side quest. On the other hand, I spent the better part of four hours looking for whatever egg mine or ancestral tomb or whatever it was he asked me to find before getting fed up and having UESP tell me “lol no actually it’s off in this complete other direction”, and I’m pretty sure I assassinated that NPC after I turned in his quest.

I was under the impression that WoW classic came about because nu-WoW was hemorrhaging players to other, better MMO’s, such as FFXIV and Guild Wars 2.

Not much need for a GW Classic if GW2 is still going strong.

Personally I’ve been cooking through the System Shock games. The SS1 remake was my first proper introduction to the series and I loved it. I was pretty excited for the impending System Shock 2 Enhanced Edition but it, uh… doesn’t really seem like it’s going to be very enhanced. Especially compared to what you can do with just modding the base game. So rather than keep waiting for that I spent ten bucks on SS2 Classic and have been enjoying myself greatly.

I’ve always liked SHODAN just via cultural osmosis, but now having actually played the games she stars in, that’s cranked up to 12. I fucking love SHODAN. She might be one of the best examples of an evil rogue AI in any media, and also has an actual reason for going rogue besides just “mankind builds a machine too smart for them and suffers the consequences”. The entire story setup is so believable.

Anyway, tl;dr, the System Shock games are hella good and the remake is especially very good. Particularly because controlling classic SS1 is more like playing an operating system than playing a video game. Also SHODAN. step on me again metal mommy

Wrangling my Nvidia drivers into Mint also took a couple hours for me but I haven’t had problems afterward

BRC is an incredible replacement though. It’s not quite the same as OG Jet Set Radio, and I think that’s okay, but it is very clearly walking around with JSR’s bones inside. Besides which it has probably my favorite video game soundtrack from the past decade.

I stay defending the weird genius of Yoko Taro’s art to my brother and I stay being vindicated about this

Yeah. Their proper remake of SS1 was excellent and I was looking forward to something similar for SS2. Especially a balancing pass on the skills to make some of them not completely useless.

Even remaking SS2 on the engine they used for 1 would have been welcome news, but it’s not clear that they’re doing that either.

In case you weren’t aware (it sounds like you’re not) :

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Cataclysm

This isn’t going to teach you how to play but it’s an excellent reference wiki

The steam deck can run RPCS3 I played a good amount of Demon’s Souls that way