Cue montage of anime/visual novels that have the pretty protagonists relaxing on a hill with 5 wind turbines in the background behind them.

I wonder how many people would have said the same about reality TV host Donald Trump.

Though Highgiard probably deserves to be a failure, I have noticed these snap judgments too, and don’t often enjoy them.

I even see them the other way. A crowd knows a game for its notoriety, and they worship the amazing payoff at 30 hours. But, in the face of that positivity, no one is making good observations about how 15 of those hours were useless padding and the game’s main mechanics are severely flawed.

That’s not an observation that should retroactively pull down the score of a game that left impacts on people though. Analyzing flaws can help us work out how to improve sequels, or even patch games to help people dive further into them.

Alright, here’s a hot take:

I’m 7 hours into Clair Obscur. It’s intrigued me a little, and I know it has good reviews for excellent story, but nothing I’ve seen has wowed me. Should I give it a negative review?

If you want nostalgia for a remake of a game that came out close to the year 2000, I would instead recommend Trails in the Sky First Chapter. Unlike the dumb time travel ghost shenanigans, it’s actually a remake of an old JRPG. It tunes up battle mechanics, but also respects what worked in the first game.

Some games that came to mind for this thread were:

• Another Crab’s Treasure, a soulslike with some fun imagery, but also a great storyline about the poisons of late-stage capitalism
• Mouthwashing, the famous horror game where the monster is machismo and warped senses of responsibility
• J J Macfeld and the Island of Memories, also a pretty brutal game about a certain kind of social acceptance (I got this one wrong even late-game, which made its message all the better)
• Papers Please, giving you a highlight of the xenophobia developed at the border of nations in conflict
• Celeste, promoting self-acceptance through difficult platforming challenges

I have a novel planned about this. Basically, zombie apocalypse starts. People get infected, the lights go out in major cities and they lose radio contact, and the troupe of heroes, lead by a gritty survivalist, set down harsh rules for their camp to survive as long as they can.

Several months later after some harsh decisions and a few deaths, the radio hums to life again. Turns out, the city’s main antenna was damaged, and there was risk in fixing it. But, with some danger, life has proceeded as normal there; and they’re making steady breakthroughs on a cure for the infection. The government is active, finding who to help, and little of the “Brutal, tough decisions” of the survivor crowd were necessary.

Not much to add, but this was true from the beginning for me. I have “Roguelike” excluded from my Steam searches because around the time Hades got popular it was a source of so much slop where you’d spend most of your hours in the first two levels. Many of those games I hated were highly regarded.

This has been a common sentiment, enough that I’ve thought of making a video about it.

Running a desktop OS, catering to everything people need from their PC, from printing to fringe drivers to VPNs to package management, is a big task. I have long doubted that Valve is personally interested in taking on that task. They write SteamOS for the deck and machine, since their only real responsibility is playing games. People who try to install that OS for other things will see some Flatpak friction - but that’s fine, it wasn’t built for that.

I’d strongly recommend looking at some other distributions with broader group support. My recommendation is CachyOS. Bazzite has worked great for others, but as a general desktop user I sort of bounced off of it - installing some unusual apps ended up getting a lot of friction against its emulation layers. I believe both are based off the same sort of origins as SteamOS, so that may be the safest thing.

It maybe used to be more true, but these days even when someone posts a decent guide on de-bloating Windows, it can A) Miss something critical, leaving spyware telemetry running, or B) Become out of date one month later when a Windows Update manually re-enables all the things you turned off.

I would’ve appreciated it when I was on Windows, but now? I’m kind of just happy not to be constantly fighting my OS on things, even if I do get compatibility annoyances.

I mean by that logic, stop using Steam. It’s (marginally) possible for a company to get big, and not do terrible things. Just keep an eye on them and don’t become fully reliant on them.

Call this what you like. Echo effect (previous entry was bad, and so people avoid the very good sequel), $70 price tag…in my case, it was Microsoft nosediving harder than usual on all fronts, including literally bombing children, making it an easy decision to boycott them.

It’s sad to say while it was the default choice for a while, it seems like a lot of people are avoiding Ubuntu now.

Gaming is awesome on CachyOS; it’s very possible much of the better capabilities there can be installed on Ubuntu, but I don’t know how hard that is. I imagine most games would perform similarly by default.

I was always grossed/weirded out at all the social media presence wanting this game to fail. I agree it seems to suck out of the gate, but I’m never happy about it. The world needs more good games.

The suspicion I have with 3v3 is they know it feels empty, but had little choice due to performance issues, since effects/CPU usage scale with the number of players. If they keep optimizing, maybe someday we see 12v12 as our Heavy, Engineer, and Pyro gods intended?

In the time since Quake released, common rendering systems and resolution options on monitors have changed. ID’s solution to put it back on Steam was some gargantuan monolith wrapper that might’ve used Unity or something, and ties to an online ID, so that it could release on consoles. The open source community’s solution was to take the original, open-source engine release, and port it upwards. Playing through the recent Quake Brutalist Jam 3, a map pack using a set of reinvented weapons and altered enemies, they recommend you use the “ironwail” source port, which even has a native Linux build.

Far Cry 6 posed this kind of question.

The evil dictator has a Canadian politician backing him. Your rebels corner him on a ship as he tries to flee. Cowering, he shouts to you from a satphone: He made a deal with one of the rebel leaders. A HUGE payout, in exchange he leaves the conflict alive. Your friend even insists to you over the phone you should take the deal.

As noble and principled as it would seem to reject the money, there’s another look: That money could get medicine, weapons, a thousand things that could quintuple the rebellion’s chance of success, well beyond the simple idea of buying a yacht and clinking glasses.

In my playthrough, I took the money. It felt like a murky issue, admittedly. I also don’t know how effectively Melinda has actually followed through on charity.

Haven’t seen the charity yet, but Bill Gates runs a very successful charity too, doesn’t he?

I stopped Nier Automata midway because it felt completely awful. Then I was sternly motivated by someone to give it a full go and finish it all the way, and it got EVEN WORSE.

Stellar Blade, though, made the gameplay very enjoyable; and its writing, while following a very similar theme, didn’t feel nearly so excessively ultra-grimdark. It kept some core reveals for close to the end (I guess unless you were paying attention to what few audio logs amounted to more than just “They’re coming…! Agh! We’re all dead.”) but I liked the dilemma it posed.

My issue was, I did not feel the expected experience of “Each loop, you learn something new.” It was more like, every 7 loops, I might get into the thing I was repeatedly trying to enter; and then it might just be a bunch of random ancient messages that don’t teach me anything. On top of that, I really hated the ship controls, especially when they veer AWAY from the autopilot path to pull me directly into the sun. If the game had been remade without any physics system, and simple direct puzzle mechanics, I might’ve enjoyed it more.

I love the story of Final Fantasy XIV, but it can easily categorize as “One of the most expensive singleplayer games of all time”. On top of buying the expansions, you’ll need to pay for each month you play; and unless someone’s really speedrunning, that will start to add up. Worse, for a first timer setting up their account, their website and payment system is really stuck in 1998, making giving them money an obtuse task. And, while the story has its great moments and excellent side content, a depressing amount of it is extensive polite dialog with just simple quests where you move to a location and right-click on someone. I’ve finished Dawntrail, and am glad I experienced it, but I can’t blame anyone who sees it all as beyond them.