He was once a DRM from around the way… Steam-y

They are cancelling the preorders because the RRP for the game is going to be much higher than when it was initially announced due to game price inflation

One big issue is that military service is mandatory for men only so they feel they are being disadvantaged doing it while their women counterparts are getting degrees and established in the job market. That part seems like it could be solved by making it compulsary for both sexes like Israel does - assuming they want to keep up military service. I don’t see how they can stop given their neighbours.

Is there any strategy for this level apart from kiting the enemies into your line of sight while you are shielded from the centre cube? Maybe the WAD could be tweaked. Cool project though!

Got 5 days left to finish Indiana Jones before the GamePass subscription times out.

The EU and Australia seem to be inching towards serious legislation relating to MTX. Hopefully they can serve as an example.

The government need to get involved and relegate MTX. I agree they are responsible for hosting the platform and developing the systems in the case of CS skins. It’s ugly but Valve are behaving as a rational business actor in this scenario.

Anyone have the archive.org (or any other paywall side-stepping software) link for this article? I don’t want to sign up for NYT,

Balatro is my current go-to game. Not sure if it is patient gamer material since it came out relatively recently but it is cheap and on all platforms. Poker themed maths game.

Xonotic is mint can’t recommend it enough! has replaced Quake 3 for me

They probably have some checklist which has vague definitions of “glamourising” gambling. I reckon this game unwittingly strays into the red tape in its presentation along with the poker theme (like I’ve said elsewhere it’s more a maths game than a poker game). The music and lights despite being atmospheric and ambient probably have some similarities to fruit machine like environments in the sense the music is repetitive and there is flashing visual feedback.

Edit: Should say it’s still B.S. to rate it 18. Just that I can imagine ratings boards can’t apply independent thought/logic.

Kamiya going back to Capcom is huge news

It’s really more like a poker themed maths game. Would probably be good for a kid to pick it up. (They may or may not turn into a poker pro later in life too!)

It’s a shame this gets 18+ while the MTX fuelled FIFA games all get 3+ ratings.

I’ve owned this game for years and I love RTwP combat in games like PoE and Baldurs Gate (first two). You’ve convinced me to give it another try!

I found when they used that same device to explain the ending of Hellblade 2 really unsatisfying.which is a shame because I’d really enjoyed the journey.

I love Obsidian writing and quest design but the gameplay for this one looks bad from the trailers. Like a UE5 asset flip.

I hope I’m wrong. Will play for sure if it’s on gamepass.

The engine itself is clearly optimised to build fortnite and everything else needs to bend it to suit any other style of game.

You are paying with your time though

I enjoy how old your picks are for the more modern games too! HoMM3 is a stone cold classic.

Love my DS! Took a picture of some of my favourites for a mastodon thread earlier but will share here -

I’m not convinced by your approach but I respect that you’ve put a lot of thought into it. I guess my main issue is that it seems some parents don’t think about it at all.

People need to understand that the internet is a public space. Family PCs should be in a shared space like the living room and kids need to have parental controls enabled on their smart phone. Beyond that, yeah people need to get thicker skins when it comes to social media (including steam in this).

I believe the Switch version does not require an online account either.

I also quite enjoyed Warrior Within but then again I liked Jak 2 as well. I wonder what happened in that “Shadow the Hedgehog” era to make all these good mascots go bad…

PS3 is probably the last gen to support a lot of local coop games

Persona 3 OST for me

Still Wakes The Deep was a fun Lovecraftian horror from this year. Unique setting on a North Sea oil rig with an authentic Scottish cast. Also didn’t overstay its welcome at roughly 4 hours length; I believe it’s on GamePass.

Is it not a timed exclusive on PS5? I don’t think I can buy it on my Series S at the moment

VR always seemed like a gimmick to me. I ended up with a wii instead of a PS3 or 360 as a teenager and it made me bitter and resolved to avoid anything like motion controls or gimmicks in future purchases.

Not that the wii was a bad console but I ended up playing the virtual console and gamecube backwards compatibility more than anything else.

Are we in a golden age for Sonic games? I started gaming the generation after the mega drive / genesis so missed the original run. When I was growing up I remember a lot of cringe releases like Shadow The Hedgehog where they seemed to be going for a Jak & Daxter 2 type angle and missing the mark. I did eventually go back and play the first two original games as an adult.

The past few years there seems to have been a run of solid releases for both 2D and 3D games that are getting good reviews and seemingly respectable sales. I think I’m going to pick up Frontiers or this one on the Series S after I’ve finished Metaphor: ReFantazio as a pallet cleanser to see what I’ve been missing.

I’ve been playing Metaphor. Huge Atlus fanboy so I’m biased but I’ve loved this game. Think I’m nearly done, got all companions and over half of them are maxed out. They’ve done a bunch of reveals (which were very telegraphed especially if you’ve played some of the SMT games). Got one final dungeon to do from what I can tell but at the start of the cycle.

Combat is much better than Persona due to using press-turn. I’ve found the S-Links are much more streamlined than in P5 as well, with the stat requirements to progress some of them being reasonable with regards to where you are in the game. I think the time passing mechanic is the best it’s been since P3 tbh.

If I had to nitpick: The soundtrack is fine but not as good as most other Atlus games. Also enemy variety could be better especially if you are doing all the side dungeons.

Overall I think this game is excellent though.

I’m playing on Series S and it gets really rough in the later levels like the snowy mountain city

Why wouldn’t they want to enrich their lives with my high IQ takes arriving directly into their hands with a notification sound??

It’s a typical Japanese developer mentality of “if it ain’t broke” (even if it is broke). You see the same thing from other high profile devs like From Soft. I think the country also still relies heavily on fax machines.

Personally I’ve been enjoying the game despite the performance woes but I can see how it would ruin someone else’s fun. You have to wonder about why it is so hard to implement anti-aliasing in their engine…

I think one issue is that UE5 has all of its out-of-the-box toolset geared towards making a fortnite type game since that is Epic’s main focus at the moment.

Couch co-op was great during gen 5/6 but after that I stopped playing multiplayer.

This studio have struggled with technology making every subsequent game to Until Dawn because Sony loaned them some talent to get that one over the line

DF is reporting some serious frame rate issues. Similar to the Links Awakening rerelease.

It’s a case of voting with your wallet for most people. There are degrees of DRM that people are willing to put up with; where some people would rather go for DRM-free games on GOG, others are happy with one launcher like Steam and some others will accept each game launching its own launcher from within a meta launcher/store front.

To be honest it’s a matter of personal preference and I try to be in the 2nd group but I don’t mind what other people do. Again, personally, I dislike the idea of being apathetically brow beaten into signing up for dozens of services for the convenience of companies which provide no utility to me. Sometimes these launchers actively harm the experience by disabling steam launch options or bricking the game completely if you don’t live in the right country.

Extremely bare bones playthrough would be just doing Yakuza 0 and then 7. Those would give you an overview of the two main gameplay styles the series has to offer.

If you want to play more then you probably want to finish the brawler games first before moving on to 8 since it has spoilers for the whole series.

The Judgement games are also good so you might want to try the first of those to see if you like it. Story is completely isolated from the Yakuza games though so I’d investigate this at your leisure.