I honestly understand the way part of this cycle goes - but I always felt it could be prevented with easy “abandon to competitor” paths.

Like, Xbox tried this with Game Pass. People warned that it would just get more expensive, and y’know what? I ignored them. It was a valid option, because as soon as they did increase prices, I just stopped paying them and took my gaming elsewhere to indie games. People with this playbook choke when they realize they’re in an industry with real competition.

Of course, many other industries like social networks no longer have that safety net preventing the full enshittification cycle. That’s in part due to regulators handing over the whole hog for 5 cents worth of lobbying bribes, to the point we have MANDATORY OS-LEVEL DATA COLLECTION being openly pushed by legislators.

You can get some of the appeal of Flash games at Itch.io. Many people compile their little free games for Unity’s web player.

Because hacker patches are untrustworthy, and may do far worse than lower your FPS, like install Bitcoin miners. I have also not seen reliable, well-documented, cross-game proof of the “lowers your FPS” claim. There have been cherry-picked claims that are often muddied with other patch work, as well as known poor implementations of Denuvo.

I want to support devs. I don’t want risks of malware. I don’t see any discernible issues when installing Denuvo games. I have never been given one salient, convincing argument about Denuvo being bad, just relentless downvotes.

I very much want to make an alternate /games community where whining about Denuvo is banned, not because I like such censorship, but because it seems to be the only way to chat with normal, nuanced people about new releases.

It looks like the individual games get most of the discount, so one can pay $10 for each one if preferred. These games don’t go on sale often, either.

Point: The series and genre has evolved

Conclusion: The first of the series was not as good as it could have been.

There have been many games since that provided an interesting evolution on the formula. Sometimes, just by throwing away needlessly obtuse bits of the original. And only by traveling back do we see: Yeah, it broke a lot of molds. But some of those molds existed for a good reason.

Stopping people from pausing, giving the most obtuse explanations, putting near-invincible enemies so near your starting point - generally not good design steps even when building up something challenging for players.

And worse: Every critique of it had to be filtered through “git gud”. Yes, its push for high difficulty was a good thing for gaming advancement. But people tried to excuse EVERY issue the game had through that filter. A dad that wants to pause the game to care for his crying baby does not need to “git gud”.

There is sadly no workaround for in-home streaming. In my case, I connect controllers to my Android TV, which is easy because they (Xbox, PS, Nintendo) all use basic Bluetooth profiles. Then, I use those controllers to open the Moonlight or Steam Link app, at which point they’re forwarded on.

This wasn’t an issue when the Steam Link was a physical piece of hardware made to work with their controller, but that’s been discontinued.

Take the ambition, but not by stealing the name.

Most “female version of” media I’ve seen ends up being derided, in Marvel, in games, etc. Take the fun concepts you’d feel from seeing this Bond parody, and ideally use it to build up a fresh, cohesive character from scratch - an experienced spy who gets chewed out by her superiors for getting drunk on the job and banging too many women, but gets the job done well.

When it’s tied to rented games through PS+ membership, I think that makes sense. But this appears to apply for paid, owned digital items.

If SKG keeps momentum in the EU, and possibly even under current consumer laws, this might end up being illegal.

That’s pretty huge to me too. My main use would be with Moonlight, an open source version of Steam Link, and if it can’t connect to that Android TV to begin with, it’s worthless.

Strange that the Xbox and PlayStation controllers are now more open and reusable.

I enjoyed the game, but I found myself wishing I’d felt any of the same emotional beats others did. The first few dramatic moments were impressive, but later parts of the story basically did nothing for me.

This entire post is the title of a short light novel series about anthropomorphic honeybees.

You are talking about marriage, though. If both didn’t agree to it (eg, arranged marriage, or coerced) they should split. If they agreed to it but under different expectations of sex, they should talk it over, and in all likelihood they should split.

He’s not saying sex should be guaranteed, but if people have already taken an agreement the agreement should either mean something, or be anulled, with no specific preference to either.

Mini Metro is a small, fun goal-based building game. You are given subway stations and must build lines between them, optimizing for different destination types, high passenger rate, etc.

Obviously, we shouldn’t need to detail “villains bad” in media, but with so many of them having “from the ashes” plans, I’d like to see more heroes deconstructing their approach like this.

I’ve played a lot of the games, but I bounced off RE1 since it’s a little bit stricter about resource management.

The remakes of 2, 3, 4, are all meant to be great entry points. If you like, 7 is also a good entry since it followed the poor reception of 6, and basically “soft-rebooted” with a completely different venue. For the most part, RE’s base story isn’t much more complicated than “Umbrella is an evil pharmaceutical corporation that makes monster viruses”, so there’s no strong need to follow an order.

I may be biased, but I think the story is faster and flows much better in Final Fantasy 7 original than remake. I think the long thread of hype for remake lead them to make way too much unnecessary “content” to bloat the size of the game, so they could justify 3 AAA games plus DLC around them. That can depend on whether you can put up with the older graphics.

If you’d like a JRPG from the same era that runs well on the Deck, another to consider is Trails in the Sky. Their remake is very true to the original, so there’s basically no urgent need to play one over the other.

Motivation from a character often pushes me to prioritize one game when I have many in my backlog. A key example of this is the Ace Attorney games, especially when compared to another mystery game like Return of the Obra Dinn.

In both games you’re solving a mystery, figuring out what happened. In Obra Dinn, you see the “happen” and fill out forms for which person was who, and how they died. But you’re not going to stop anything terrible from happening - that part’s done.

However, in Ace Attorney, every case has the same premise: Some poor fellow has been accused by an overeager justice system of murder. Worse, circumstantially it does seem likely they did it - and no one believes their story. As their defense, you prove them innocent AND drag out the evil miser who landed them in that situation, solving the mystery as you go.

In one of my favorite cases of the trilogy, the defendant was photographed in the act of stabbing the victim by a witness who was behind a fence. The accused was the only person at the scene, arrested on the spot, bears a cut on her hand from using the knife. When questioned, she willingly admits to killing him. Only reason you take the case is that she has no apparent motive, and her sister begs you to do it, feeling she couldn’t ever do such a thing. And yes: She’s innocent. Unraveling that mystery is one thing, but unraveling the motives to figure out how to help these people is another.

I put it in all caps because I’m referring to the 2016 reboot. It tries to be fast paced, but even though the Slayer is silent they’re pretty successful in giving him an angry, rebellious personality.

Bye Sweet Carole was a little bit of a disappointment to me; I liked the idea of a Disney-based horror game. But its story was often pretty incomprehensible, driven along by the protagonist constantly falling asleep/waking up in odd locations, as well as not having one gameplay system that it sticks with well.

There’s something that activates my child toy brain having a vehicle large enough to deploy another vehicle. Even Sea of Thieves, being able to have one player steering at the helm, while another is placing treasure down below, while another is deploying the rowboat from the back, gives quite a sense of ownership. Needless to say, trains often fulfill the same desire.

Maybe it’s a weird late-set form of nostalgia, but the one for Wakfu always got to me.