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Cake day: Aug 20, 2023

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They used to think novels were bad for women in the 18th and 19th centuries bc they worried they were too dumb to separate fact from fantasy

https://archive.nytimes.com/op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-were-bad-for-you/


Maybe people near Tokyo are shittier about reviews? I dunno what to tell you. Guess I haven’t spent much time outside Tohoku.

First random city I scrolled to north of Tokyo (in Fukushima):


“Dishonoring” the chef makes it sound like there are still samurai running around. I don’t think substitutions at restaurants rise to that level.


When’s the last time you checked ratings on maps? I just looked at Sakata, a small city in Tohoku with no shinkansen line, and plenty of the ratings were above 4 stars. Seemed to be the same all over the place.

I don’t think japanese people are unique for leaving dumb reviews. Pretty sure you can find people in all countries saying shit like “store was closed when I went, 1 star”.


They’re technically not anymore. They used to be good old games but when they shifted to include a large percentage of modern games they officially became just gog.


I liked 1 enough until the first 2 chapters of all the characters were complete, but then it immediately felt like it hit a grind wall. With 8 stories it’s long enough already–why would they pad it out any further?





I’m guessing minecraft beats it. Or if you look at an individual player with thousands of hours it’s probably one of the mario speedrunners.


Titan Souls is a fantastic boss rush game where you die in one hit but the bosses only take a few hits as well. You only have one arrow to shoot and you need to go pick it up or stand still to recall it to yourself before firing again.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/297130/Titan_Souls/


Are these any fun or are they mostly products of their time?


This has pretty much been standard for borderlands games since the inception, as well as looters in general. You just have to shift your perspective on the loot-- starting out you pick up everything, then past a certain point you start ignoring common drops entirely, then you can ignore tier 2, etc.

The way to look at it is that as you level your character what was formerly loot becomes garbage :)


This is a timely addition to the recent discussion on this comm
fedilink

I’m pretty sure you can still find people playing Doom deathmatch online, although these days it might be more limited to various events rather than finding random folks online any given day. The modding community is still going strong after 30 years though


I actually thought kerbal was a bit older. Maybe it was the years of early access or something


I believe that’s roguelite. A roguelike should have zero persistent upgrades between runs (like Rogue did, unless there’s another term I’m unaware of).

ed: However, I think it’s relatively acceptable these days to lump everything in the rogue-ish genre into roguelike. The roguelite term is generally for more technical or nuanced discussions.


Looks like about 100 bucks a year, and more of that was in the early days of my account when I used to get sucked into sales (which also used to have those crazy huge discounts pop up for a game that lasted 8 hours) and before I had a giant backlog.

These days I almost never buy a game unless I want to play it immediately.


I’ve been wanting to play botw so I tried it on cemu awhile back but couldn’t get it to work. I’ll have to try it again and see if I can figure out what I was doing wrong.





Castlevania has always had a pretty heavy emphasis on movement abilities to access new areas

The -vania part always seemed a bit odd to me as well because of the history of the games, but it makes sense based on when the term became popularized. If someone had tried to coin a term for the genre earlier I think it would’ve been Metroid-like alone, specifically because the early entries of Castlevania didn’t really have any movement-based mechanics upgrades until SotN. Even things being locked behind item progression was only in Simon’s Quest before that (although it looks like Vampire Killer had some more open levels where you had to find keys). I’m not familiar with Rondo of Blood, which looks like it had some exploration of levels with the secondary character, but again without upgrading movement mechanics.

So you basically had Metroid ('86) and Super Metroid ('94) being quintessential examples of the modern metroidvania genre, whereas there were almost a dozen Castlevanias before SotN ('97) that were mostly linear.


I played so much goldeneye that when someone fired it up almost 20 years later the controls were still in my muscle memory. I played fps on pc even back then so I knew the controller wasn’t ideal, but it worked well enough.


I played through it again a couple months ago but when I went to check the DLC it looks like they haven’t ever done more than 35% discount even though they came out in 2017 and 2019. Meanwhile the base game has done 90% off in the past (also the current price). Guess they figure if you like it enough to go looking for DLC you’ll probably pay more.





The narration from that video has a poetic bent

I wake to the warmth of the waxing salt sun, and before I draw breath it sidewinds to the beetle moon. I muse on my many selves, think of the jewels I’ve loosened from the lime, and all the myriad forms space and time have lathed me to. I dream of the sky shelf and its cosmic tilt, the movers that ferried strangers across stellar gulfs and toward their numinous ends. The earth falls away to light and dust, and I dream no more. Now we become the specters that peopled the Caves of Qud.


Yeah it looks fun but I’m worried the learning curve is a little too steep to approach casually. I could see getting into it but it’d have to be at a time when I could really sink some hours into gaming time, like during some holidays or something.


I wonder what separates games from movies as disposable media, especially with games that are meant to be cinematic/telling a story. Like Spec Ops is loosely based on Heart of Darkness and has a strong narrative, but without that is just a sort of middling shooter. So once you know the story it doesn’t have a ton of replayability, but it’s still impactful in the way a good movie is.


Why not the free weekly epic giveaways as well? There have been some good games for free in the past


It’s cool watching people of different skill levels than you, not just the pros I think. Also when people take on challenges that take a long time, you can kind of skip through the vid at your leisure.

Plus sometimes you just don’t have the energy to game. It’s like Matt Groening said in that old Life is Hell comic (although about tv): Why is tv the best pal of all? When you’re tired, tv does the playing for you.


haven’t played it-- how do the mechanics change with the story?


sorry, badly phrased-- I was trying not to give away the mechanic. In the game the literal controls on your keyboard/controller get altered in order to advance the story


Maybe literally the only game that’s ever done storytelling through gameplay mechanics-- really cool concept


Real animals have friends. Beef cows are slaughtered at about 1 yr old, and they don’t keep them in isolation for a year



My last run I did with a shaman and put everything I could into lightning damage. It needed a 2 handed weapon so I basically just wandered up to bosses and thumped on them until they died in showers of sparks, while the AoE from the lightning arcs killed everything else around me. Plus I had a summon or two to redirect some enemy attention.