• 3 Posts
  • 278 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Mood.

    I’m not going to pay $45 for any game. If I’d known about the “never on sale, price only goes up” model they were using, I might have bought it back when it was $20, but I’ll just never play it now and I’m okay with that. There are literally hundreds of amazing games I already own to play, and if I had 100+ hours to sink into a game like this (I don’t, post-kiddos—for now, anyway), then I’d strike the earth for some Dwarf Fortress !!!FUN!!!, which I know I’ll enjoy.

    Or maybe finally get around to beating Baldur’s Gate 1… (I never made it past the early game… BG3 I’ll get to in the 2040s at this rate, ha ha!)

    Aside from people who just want to play football/CoD/D4/whatever multilayer game, I don’t understand why anyone pays full price for games. I’m glad they do, mind, since they’re subsidizing the development costs mean games get made, and I get amazing games for cheap.

    As a recent example, I nabbed MH Rise for cheap recently, and bounced off it. I might try again later, but it didn’t grab me. So glad I didn’t pay more than $15 CAD for it!






  • Brilliant. I should do that. I’m not great at skipping stuff to race faster, so the skull dungeon is really hard for me and I end up save scumming after most runs. I read about people getting to floor 200+, but I can barely get to 100 unless I waste a whole stack of staircases.

    Pausing time would make it a lot more relaxing.



  • Interesting seeing Hotline Miami make the list since I just watched a short video essay the other day explaining how OTXO is just a better game in basically every way.

    I’m still in the 80s working my way down the list, but I searched and OTXO doesn’t appear to be on the page.

    Edit: Conversely, I’m pleased to see Portal included instead of Portal 2. The Portal 2 goo was unnecessary and led to more boring puzzle solutions. Portal is a more pure, timeless game. And it has a lot of amazing mods… I should probably look into how to install Portal mods on the Deck…



  • Portal Pro I remember being great. So good that Portal 2 was a disappointment for me when it landed.

    I needed to cheat (watch the YouTube solution video) on a few solutions, iirc, too; not because they’re badly designed, just because I couldn’t wrap my head around the solution.

    It should be noted that a couple of the portal solutions need reasonably quick portal placement, so I don’t think it would be as good without KB+mouse. It took me a few tries to nail one of the techniques.


  • … Or pay them for it!

    There’s a prolific open-source dev that makes many plugins and themes for a widely-used OSS platform. He’s quite open when asked for new features if it’s something he’s already planning on doing anyway (with no guaranteed timeline) or if it’s not. But if it’s a reasonable ask, he’ll always mention that he can prioritise its development if they fund it. He even posts his current contractor rate; it’s quite transparent.

    I think more OSS devs should be more open like that. “Yes, I can do that feature request. Sounds like about 2-3 hours work. My hourly is $120 for contract work. Email me here if you’re interested and I’ll send a contract.”


  • Fake news. Harris had a high conviction rate for nonviolent drug offenses because she was allowing them to complete a program instead of serving time for a guilty plea. She had great results for reducing recidivism rates.

    Sure, the war on drugs itself is a problem, but Harris wasn’t locking people up for nonviolent drug offenses; that completely flips and mischaracterizes her work as a DA.

    But you’re just sea lioning anyway. I look forward to seeing how you move the conversation to another Russian/Chinese talking point in your inevitable reply.

    Edit: 4 autocorrect fails




  • Wireless game streaming is another reason to upgrade WiFi. I couldn’t stream anything from my wired desktop to my Steam Deck on WiFi from the ISP-supplied router. I just finished upgrading to a WiFi mesh network partly because of that… but I haven’t tested game streaming yet.

    I expect it should do great, though. My Fire Stick used to occasionally buffer even with ~1.5GB/hr content, but I just tried a 1080p remux at 15GB/hr and it worked great.




  • I have a slightly different perspective as someone just starting Rise as my first ever experience with this series.

    Holy shit, the tutorials are terrible. Massive info dump walls of text explaining too many systems at once, cryptic warning messages to confirm you want to dismiss the tutorials are extra confusing… And despite the massive info dumping, they don’t even tell you everything you need to know to complete the tutorial missions as you complete them. When you go to trap your first monster, there’s no tooltip to teach you how to use items in the “how to trap” explanation or NPC dialogue. I needed to google it.

    And no ability to pause in a singleplayer game? I googled some explanation about pause being on one of the menus, but I couldn’t find it. Thankfully, suspending the game on a Steam Deck pauses it, so it’s playable.

    Also, why was I given massively OP equipment and piles of loot just for logging in? The entire early game is now so easy that it’s not fun. I’m only 3 tutorials + 1 “real” mission into the game, so I’m going to try starting over without the EZ-mode loot and give it a second chance, but so far, I’m not impressed.

    If I’d bought this through Steam, I’d have refunded it already before the 2-hour playtime window closed.

    TL;DR: Terrible new-player onboarding has me questioning if I should push through.