No way that holds up when challenged. Gacha games alone prove existing work.

Vampire Survivors’s Ode to Castlevania DLC

It’s so fun to see them actually get to use the IP VS was inspired from, and the DLC is absolutely a love letter to all of Castlevania, including some of the more obscure characters in the lore. The DLC has roughly double the content of the base game, with at least three big “unlock/events” locking more layers of content behind them. Tons of new playable characters, tons of new weapons, one new massive map with its own unique mechanics and progression, and so much classic Castlevania music and remixes. Totally worth it.

Nope.

512+256=768, 768+64=832… minus 7 for system data and general overhead maybe? That’s my best guess, but that’s a really odd size.

I feel you, but there’s some good news! There’s an indie games team working on a game that’s Air Ride combined with the Chao Garden from Sonic Adventure.

Star Garden:

First announcement on the lead dude’s main youtube channel

Kickstarter trailer

More recent video about it on the main dev’s channel

Literal millions of us (myself included) voted “correctly” for Harris. Blue no matter who. We did our part for your petty ass purity test and we’re still getting fucked.

Must be nice to live in a world where people only experience the results of who they voted for.

Zandronum was the Doom server browser of choice, at least 4 years ago or so. Even will auto download the mods the server is running (if the admin configured things right).

Updates are usually automatic (at least in the modern days with Steam), and DLCs are optional.

DLCs are also usually a paid affair, unless they’re explicitly referred to as “free DLC”. Not sure if you worded it that way or not, came to this post after you edited the title.

You could set up a mail forwarding rule in the web client to forward all incoming mail to your primary email.

Nothing quite like dumb workarounds for Microsoft bullshit.

The faster sail and having the wind automatically change to be the direction you’re sailing are both features I’ve seen people use with randomizer mods for the GC version, but I don’t know if they’re available without randomizing treasures.

In the bloom-ified remaster OP is playing, there is a double speed sail you can get, and once you get the bombs you can fight an optional mini-boss to get the abilty to warp.

Sailing is still monotonous though, if you aren’t in the mood to just vibe to the music.

They also streamlined the section of the game where you have to search high and low for triforce pieces. It was a hell of a slog in the original GC version.

Holy shit, how did I forget Wipeout and Zone of the Enders in my list? Great picks beyond those too.

Thanks so much!

A lot of great ones have already been mentioned: (Old School) Runescape, Bastion, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Braid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Celeste, Chrono Cross, Chrono Trigger, Crypt of the NecroDancer, Cyberpunk 2077, Deus Ex (2000), Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2, Doom 2016, Earthbound, F-Zero GX, FTL, Hades, Halo, Hi Fi Rush, Hotline Miami, Jet Set Radio and JSR Future, Kirby (any of them), Legend of Mana, Mother 3, Neotokyo, Nier: Automata, Pizza Tower, Quake, Ratchet & Clank (any of them), Risk of Rain 1 and 2, Shadow of the Colossus, Shantae (any of them), Shatter, Shovel Knight, SimCity 3000, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic CD (Japan), Sonic Mania, Sonic Rush, Stardew Valley, Tower of Heaven, Transistor, Trine, and VVVVVV

Here’s some that haven’t been mentioned yet:

Ape Escape

• PS1 game, soundtrack by icon of the 90s era Japanese House music scene, Soichi Terada. All of his tracks are bangers. I’ve seen the soundtrack described as House, Jungle, and DnB. Probably my favorite game soundtrack ever, but that’s probably nostalgia talking.
• Soundtrack: Game Rip, Fan Remastered or Originape Soundtrack/Official Soundtrack CD (Note: Terada has released his own remastered tracks in the 2020s since the Originape CD, but they are split over multiple albums and I’m too lazy to track them down at the moment)
• Standout tracks: Peak Point Matrix/Galaxy Monkey, Primordial Ooze, Thick Jungle- Woods, Dark Ruins, Crumbling Castle, Specter’s Factory- Outside, Time Station

Final Fantasy Legends III / SaGa 3 Jikū no Hasha: Shadow or Light

• Originally on Gameboy, Japan only remake on DS (fan translation patch exists). This is really a game in the SaGa series, but was released under the Final Fantasy name internationally for marketing purposes. Characters don’t have levels, their stats change based on what they do. Enemies also drop meat and parts that you can apply to a character to change their class, with some unique mechanics for different types. Features a time traveling stealth bomber, THE TALON, that may possibly be the only airship in gaming with a working toilet. DS Remake is generally better, but it kills overworld exploration by turning it into “select an adjacent POI” instead of free roam.
• Soundtrack: Gameboy, unfortunately I can’t find this version with track names. DS Remake
• Standout Tracks: Setting off into the future, Holy Ruins (a criminally underused track in game), Oasis (has some odd animal sfx added in the middle in this remake version), Stronghold (imo, one of the best dungeon themes in gaming), THE MOTHERFUCKING TALON THEME (this is the GB version, as the DS remake loses the countermelody which imo weakens the track)

Ghost Trick

• Originally for DS, has been remade for just about everything now. It’s effectively a VN with fancy gameplay segments, and the music really helps carry the whole thing. Beautifully done sprite animation too.
• Soundtrack: DS, 2023 Remaster
• Standouts: Ghost Trick, Lynne- Red-Headed Target, Awakening, The Mystery Surges Ahead, Cabanela - Lanky and Loose Lawman, Jowd- Fated Jailbird

Gunpoint

• Old indie sidescrolling noir stealth game. The main gameplay revolves around puzzle solving by hacking buildings’ electrical systems. Hook that lightswitch up to the secure door lock. Rig that motion sensor up to short out a power plug and take out a guard instead of it just turning on the lights. Delightful jazz soundtrack.
• Soundtrack
• Standouts: Security, Circuitry and You, Subterfuge Shuffle, Cold Halls and Footfalls, The Five-Floor Goodbye

Megaman ZX

• DS sequel to the Megaman Zero series for GBA, but now with a Metroidvania twist.
• Soundtrack: ZX Tunes- Official remix/rearrange soundtrack
• Standouts: Innocence- 90s style anime opening, Green Grass Gradation, Rockin’ On, Brilliant Show Window, Cinq Ville - C`est Notre Espoir, Gauntlet

And I’ve spent way too much time on this comment. Here’s more not mentioned so far that I don’t have time to do a writeup for: Skies of Arcadia, Super Meat Boy, Tomba 2: The Evil Swine Returns, Uplink, XCOM (Original), XCOM (Reboot), XCOM 2 (Reboot)

Beautiful writeup. I miss the days when games shipped with data files in easily user-acessible formats.

Would not be the first time, although usually developers then go out of their way to make things more legally distinct.

Off the top of my head, the PS1 game Croc was reportedly originally pitched to Nintendo as a 3D platformer starring Yoshi (it was made by some of the team behind StarFox). They obviously reworked it a ton before it released as what it ended up as.

I don’t like subscription based software, and a subscription based game launcher is even more ridiculous. Especially when there are already free open source alternatives.

With the subscription aspect in mind, this reads to me like an advertisement rather than news. Probably because you just pasted in their literal ad copy instead of giving us any of your own thoughts about it whatsoever.

A big part of why I’m on lemmy is to get away from the “natural engagement” ad posts, so in short this sort of post isn’t something I want to welcome or encourage.

Personally, this post would have come across a lot differently if it was just the link to their site/blog post and even a few sentences about your personal thoughts on it. This comes across as a poorly done ad.

You didn’t “just share news”. You just shared an ad with effectively no further context.

Some additional context to my previous comment: I work tech in the financial industry. I have some experience with payment processors and the stupid amount of bullshit around all this stuff. “They could do both of these things almost instantly” is a big assumption holding the entirety of the weight for your argument.

Anyway.

50 Cent was doing a one off publicity stunt, not trying to ensure continued existence as a company. How many mainstream artists are still doing that? I shouldn’t have to say that this is very much an apples and oranges comparison.

Your other idea has legs, but it’s still suggesting that Valve try entering a game of financial chicken with Visa and Mastercard. Effectively infinite money. And in the meantime most users would just be pissed off at Valve for making it harder to buy anything. We’re already seeing people attack itch.io for not standing up instead of bei g pissed at the payment processors.

Valve can’t make purchasing through a different processor a requirement for some games but not others because Visa and Mastercard said “stop selling games with this content entirely, or we stop processing your transactions entirely”. So anything they do will have to effect all transactions.

I’m frustrated Valve didn’t do more, and that they’ve not made any public statements about trying to fight this, but Valve isn’t just leaving money on the table because they’re lazy or dumb.

Changing payment processors/engaging a new one is anything but a short term thing to implement. Otherwise Mastercard and Visa wouldn’t be in this situation to have this level of control to begin with.

This restated question is not the problem directly.

The problem is the entire discussion/concept of “exposure to a dangerous idea in a pretend context maybe might maybe make someone more likely to emulate it in reality” when there has been little to no evidence found supporting that concept. Additionally the non-proportional amount of concern given to videogames in relationship to this concept as compared to literally any other form of media.

If there was even one iota of connection between “exposure to horrible things in media” (or even “pretending to do horrible things in a pretend context”) and “doing horrible things in real life”, the world would already look considerably different than it does. Militaries would be using these games as “exposure therapy” for soldiers. We’d be seeing crime rates of all sorts shifting in accordance with the media industries. There would already be measurable impacts after the decades of these things existing.

And more so than any of that: This discussion has literally been happening for longer than any of us here have been alive. I’m tired of having it.

Please stop letting the vague idea of “but it might help” override the logic of “but there’s no evidence to support that except a vague gut feeling”.

Tell me again how you’ve not actually read up on the issues with crypto as payment processor.

This shit has already been tried and the issues discussed at length. I think it was Mullvad that stopped accepting BTC and did an extensive writeup on why.

In short: the constantly shifting conversion rates make this unsustainable, as even if they accepted payment in crypto, they have to pay their bills in fiat currency. So their choices are to have crypto prices change literally every page load to reflect the exchange rate, or to just eat extra costs when suddenly 0.51btc goes from being worth $5 when the user pays to being worth $1 when they try to use it for anything else. Even with constantly updating prices, the shifting rates screwing them will still happen. The costs associated with even offering it as a payment type outweigh the actual revenue generated by an extreme order of magnitude, and even privacy/crypto oriented storefronts see something like under 1% of users using the option when it’s available.

And that’s my understanding of the short version.

There’s a big difference between “prioritizing short term profit” and “committing commercial/financial suicide to make a point”.

Jesus Christ we can’t be back to this old chestnut.

We cannot, and do not, standardize society’s guard rails around the most extreme edge cases.

Leave it back with Jack Thompson in the late 90s-early 00s where it belongs. The horse has already been jellied by repeated blunt force trauma more than a decade ago. You’re just punching a horse shaped divot into the dirt at this point.

Short term profits? How are they supposed to make any profits if payment processors refuse to process payments to them? They can’t just spin up their own fucking payment processor.

Beyond that, how does limiting the sale of any products make them money?

I swear, were none of you people paying attention when this happened to the right wing ghouls in the lead up to the 2016 election? Nothing of value was lost (or would have been), but Visa, Mastercard, etc have already shown they aren’t above using their position in the transfer of money to enforce their will.

Edit: Can’t believe I forgot about the payment processors playing games with Wikileaks. For shame. Would have been a much better example.

The goblins being peaceful might be due to your combat level. Once you outlevel an enemy by a certain amount, they stop auto-attacking you and you have to initiate combat with them if you want to.

But it isn’t a PC with Xbox compat.

It’s just a portable PC with Windows Gamepass and some stuff toggled to make it easier to navigate using a controller.

So it’s been about two and a half years since I’ve played (before my daughter was born), so take this with a grain of salt. I think last big update I experienced was the addition of the Reapers’s equivalent of the Athena’s Fortune faction.

Unless they’ve changed how captained ships work, every time you log in your ship only has a basic set of resources (like 30 wood, 30 canonballs, 15 bananas, something like that). Stocking up from the outpost barrels was an every session start thing. The whole captained ship thing was originally just a way to save your ship cosmetics and adding a bunch of ship specific achievements. Also gave access to a convenient one stop sell location and some “captain” exclusive quests.

Regarding PVP, natural “emergent” PVP has really dried up since they added in the hourglass (dedicated PVP match queuing) and the ability to server hop (lose all your sellable loot and active quest progress, keep the barrelled resources on your ship). So people up for scrapping usually hop servers until they find a popular and lucrative server event happening where there are likely to be other players. There already was the Reaper’s flag and emmisary to imdicate you were up for/looking for PVP too (both make you visible on the map to the whole server). So a lot of players left running around aren’t as bloodthirsty.

Also, unless they changed server limits again, each server has an absolute max of six ships. It’s a big sea for so few ships. Especially when we stayed around The Roar (volcanoey area at the east side of the map) we could go entire sessions without running into other players.

Man, I really hope it’s still around when I have the time to come back to it. Awesome game.

This is shockingly “public” considering there’s legal proceedings now.

What? There’s a big difference between “legal to sell as a compiled binary” and “legal to release as source”.

Since when have rights holders ever been held responsible for the actions of online players?

The only instances I can think of are when games exclusively target minors, like Roblox.

And in what crazy world would those scant responsibilities carry over to community servers after official support was ended?

What a cop out.

It’s been hours now (and a very busy day), but I swear that half of that comment (including that section) wasn’t there when I commented regarding safer seas.

But there’s no mark showing the comment has been edited either.

Scurvy must be eating me brain.

Good news! Over a year ago they opened a feature called safer seas where you can play without PvP!

I would be surprised if this didn’t hold true for many companies, especially when adjusting for inflation.

Thanks! That’s damn good for “best effort”! A convincing lead on what company it may be.

Personally, I still don’t think it’s time for immediate red alert, but I’ll have to keep an eye on things. Hopefully we’ll see some competitors like GameBanana step up to the challenge.

Wait, was it confirmed sold? The news post on Nexus fron this morning indicated that the existing head admin and CEO (of 24 years) was just stepping back (and not even away entirely), and had already put the year+ in of identifying two successors from his existing team.

I didn’t see anything regarding a sale, and the existing admin said quite a bit about taking this seriously from a standpoint of what’s best for mod makers and users and not best for business profits.

Edit: I’m not seeing any company name given because as far as I can tell, it wasn’t sold. It’s the same company, same employees, the person at the tip top is just shifting.

And since when is “comicbook dot com” a source for game modding news? Unless someone can show me something from a more direct or reputable source, I think this is just someone running with the most click bait interpretation of the nexusmods post.

Edit x2: Dormedas’s resetera link has some convincing investigation that the two people named as taking over the reigns may work for a company that provides esports training, and also consulting services for user generated content focused companies.

The fluff text in the terminals is what really got me about the repetition. Like you couldn’t write a few more similar paragraphs and shuffle them?

Enjoy while you can.

Don’t chase weapon upgrades and crafting research too hard. The minor stat upgrades don’t really effect much for the stupid amount of grinding required to get the exact right materials needed.

I found that the novelty of the game wore off pretty quick after I started finding what initially felt like handcrafted points of interest repeating for the third time. Apparently there’s a mod that tweaks the RNG to significantly reduce how often things repeat, because it’s really rough out of the box.

I made the same assumption, but I believe they stated it officially shortly after the game was first announced. Still dumb as hell though.

Probably update 2.00. They completely redid the game balance, about half of the damn RPG stat related mechanics, and reworked a decent chunk of the iconic weapon effects.

Notably, they removed the Overwatch sniper’s wall piercing. Intentionally. There’s mods to revert that.

AIEOU. MY ROFLCOPTER GOES SOI SOI SOI SOI.

All because the engine they used had an option for automatic text to speech for the chat.

I think that’s just a default Quake 4 engine thing.

Just be careful. If a quest giver gives you a time limit, like a letter saying “get here in one month”, they mean it. It’s possible to silently fail the main quest this way, but it’s also possible to get back into the main quest line via some other quest paths into it.

It’s all fairly complicated. Thankfully failing doesn’t stop you from exploring the world, interacting with NPCs, or doing other quests. You can always use the console to restart the main quest line quests when you’re ready.

Tyler McVicker has such a good connection with Valve that years ago they made a post on their official twitter calling him out by name to state that he had no exclusive or insider information, labeling him just a “passionate gamer”.

His youtube name was fucking Valve News Network. He swore to never cover Valve games again, which lasted all of maybe three months.