A few tips I haven’t seen anyone bring up yet:

– If you see a game on sale, it will be on sale again. Don’t get baited into buying something you won’t actually play for years.

– Please oh please learn to use the Deck’s quick menu performance options. When people complain about the Deck’s battery life, what they forget is that unlike a Nintendo Switch, it’ll just treat everything like it’s “docked” unless you tell it otherwise. It’ll munch through that battery as quick as you let it, so extending it is your responsibility. The easiest way to do that is to just set a power limit (even the max of 15 watts will help) if a game is running fine. A lot of basic 2d games get by just fine on 3 or 5. Half-rate shading is the other major option. Basically it’ll render some things at half of their normal resolution, sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it isn’t noticable on the Deck’s screen. With 3D stuff, get the performance overlay up and start dropping the the wattage if the framerate is high enough, or the game’s video settings if it’s not. Ideally just drop both, that’s how you’ll really save the battery. I just drop a lot of games right to “low” settings unless it looks really awful and go from there.

– In a similar vein, framerate limits!! Console games are nearly always locked to 30 or 60 frames per second for all sorts of reasons. In the Deck’s case you’re again thinking about battery life. While you can sometimes argue for framerates higher than a screen’s refresh rate, on the Deck it’s not really justifiable, there’s no good reason to pass 60. Some games play just fine at 30 so lock it to 30 if you can tolerate it. Or, the Deck’s secret weapon… 40fps. Normally you’d never do that, because it doesn’t line up with the screen and things get weird, but the Deck’s screen can actually just drop to 40hz to compensate. Due to some odd math 40fps is actually much closer to 60 than 30 in practice while still saving a lot of battery life.
BUT… BUT BUT BUT, the Deck’s system-wide framerate limiter has problems. Input lag problems. Hopefully you don’t notice and don’t give a shit but if you do, oh god, so much input lag. Thankfully the vast majority of games have their own 60fps locks that don’t have this problem (to the same extent) but for the 40hz thing you need to just deal with it.

I mean… Phillips heads are hood for what they’re actually designed for, which is, uh, to strip really easily so they don’t get over-tightened. Which is irrelevant if your manufacturing is precise enough.

I do wonder what an indie equivalent to these games would look like. I worry that I’d feel like they were just imitating Remedy.

I wanted to counter this but I can’t. Most of the mascot platformer-esque games now are imitating some other, older mascot platformer. A Hat In Time just doesn’t have any real gimmicks. IDK if Pumpkin Jack does (I really need to try it at some point). Maybe Froggun but I imagine it has even less of a story and it’s more of a puzzle game?

Hmm… While it’s nothing like Outer Wilds and infamous for probably being the most obtuse video game ever created, I wonder if you’d like La Mulana? Metroidvania about being an archeologist where you sort of need to actually peice together the culture and history of the civilization you’re studying to move forward sometimes. It’s style of storytelling is closer to FromSoft (hence the obtuseness) but still.

While it’s probably not quite what you’re looking for, have you seen Carrier Command 2? Because it’s pretty damn cool (and overpriced unfortunately)

I really wish Blur actually did well back when it was around. By far the coolest take on a Mario Kart-like game I’ve ever played.

Whatever the hell Burnout was, too. Please god just give me classic Burnout again.

You… you do realize MW5 is single-player and definitely not a “gatcha game” right? And has a pretty robust modding scene? And has a clan-based sequel coming up in a new engine?

…Also Goddamn how is ot that no one has managed to make something like Theif again outside of Gloomwood (which is admittedly rad as hell?) I only managed to play Theif recently and it’s still one of the best stealth games ever. Modern games need to learn how to leave the player alone for a while and let them cook.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Immersive Sims because, like, in theory they’re a lot of people’s dream games, right? Yet their actual audiences are small. Part of that has to be down to setting, for the same reason Blade Runner was never big, but… that can’t be it, right?

And why did people start calling Tears of the Kingdom an Immersive Sim? Is… Are classic Roguelikes immersive sims? Is Dwarf Fortress an Immersive Sim? Obviously not, but the definition we’ve given ourselves is too broad and what we actually consider a “reall immersive sim” seems too limited.

Well, there’s another Quake 3 clone attempt every few years and every time no one cares. Diabotical made me especially sad because it shook the forumula up in some very smart ways and the Wipeout game mode needs to be stolen by pretty much everyone (and won’t be).

Is it weird that I think of Halo 3: ODST as one of the real detective games? Not because it’s particularly dedicated to being that, but because the default ending of the game is that you don’t solve the mystery and leave unsatisfied. You’re just some grunt and what’s actually going on is above your paygrade. Learning the truth is a bit of a pain in this ass but it’s also basically half of the game’s story. I think it was a really ballsy move for what it’s worth.

“It feels like there’s thousands of us competing for a handful of jobs,”

Isn’t that pretty much it? Everyone wants to make video games. All of the sudden everyone wants to invest in video game development because they realized there’s money in it. But video games are a big commitment for consumers (compared to most consumables), we literally only have so much time to dedicate them and there’s SO MANY GODDAMN GAMES. Like, an Eldritch horror inducing amount of video games if you have FOMO. And that’s still a drop in the ocean compared to all the people who want to make video games. Hundreds if not thousands of cool games go completely unnoticed by basically everyone every month, seemingly.

There’s a bizarre sort of supply / demand triangle going on.

Oh that’s absolutely why. If they dumped everything at once people would play what they wanted to play and drop the subscription. By doing this people come back.

If Nintendo doesn’t keep NSO as-is for their “Switch 2” people will be EXTREMELY pissed, but it’s Nintendo, they’re fine with that.

Sounds to me like you just don’t want to think that hard, which is fine, I usually don’t either. Half of the time I just play Doom .wads

BG3 specifically: It’s D&D 5e, so… yeah It’s gonna be complex.

Complex systems more generally:

The best way to learn about any complex system is to bite tiny chunks out of it and ignore the rest, even if you know stuff is interconnected. You’ll never learn everything at once, so don’t try. Eventually you get bored with the little bubble you’ve carved out for yourself so you move over and learn about some other bit. You don’t even need to care about whether you’ll understand everything eventually.

Good article, I’ve been wondering why people are calling it populism…

Is this not all kinda well-known information?

Oh no!! BallisticNG is a wonderful game, shame that Switch players won’t be getting it.

Que people arguing about GNU’s importance / self-inflated importance or whatever

God the religion vs. faith thing, I’m glad to see someone articulate it. It’s bizarre to me how many people are seemingly super hardcore into their religion as a social club, but if you observe them closely they come across like “believing it” is just a game they play for the sake of staying in.

Well, for a practical example, my Ryzen 5 5600x and Radeon 6600xt combo is juuust out of the running for games coming out right now, I’d say. The VRAM limitations at 8GB are becoming apparent and there’s been a few instances where the 5600x struggles in games that hit CPUs hard. But I’d say that’s because there’s been an oddly big jump in system requirements, recently.

…I mean, it’s more like the web browser makes it easy to use the Tor network. The network is the slow part. Your requests are getting ping-ponged all over the world intentionally taking the long way around.

I mean, I’ve used it. It works. But I don’t get why you would bother most of the time. It’s slow as hell and while I’m generally fairly concerned about my privacy there is a point where I can’t be bothered.

I’m this person and god do I wish I wasn’t, sometimes. So many games have been way less interesting than they could’ve been for me because for me, fun is learning to play the game well. I’m not sure what frustrates me more, the way people who don’t have that attitude say “I play games to have fun” as if I don’t, or me looking at the recent LoZ games as failures design-wise because they’re too easy to cheese.

The Ally is what you’d want. Laptops aren’t really all that portable if portability is the goal. The Deck would be better from a “pick up and play” perspective but if you use Game Pass it’d be worth it to pick up the Ally instead, obviously.

The thing that comes up at the bottom has two buttons: Accept and customize. If you click customize you can choose what to accept and what to reject, and it defaults to rejecting everything.

Allowing you to reject it all is bad site design?!?

Sure, but they mentioned Diablo and the first game in particular is definitely a descendant of Rogue.

First thing’s first: Luciole is right. Making hardline categories doesn’t work and you’re better off coming up with properties games could have. But if we’re gonna go down this route:

Dwarf Fortress adventure mode is one among a few games (Stoneshard being another?) that go for… an open-world with fairly traditional rogueish mechanics?

Hardcore Diablo, alongside other ARPGs and stuff like Tales of Maj’Eyal and Rift Wizard, I’d call “skill rogues”? If we’re not gonna care whether they’re turn-based or not. Games where you have a bunch of skills to unlock with cooldowns and very little importance placed on map loot.

Calling everything that isn’t turn-based an “action rogue” seems wrong. Like, Barony? Sure it’s real-time, but it’s seriously the classic Roguelike experience, except in first-person and co-op now. It’s rad as hell.

Something you’re missing IMO is… sandbox-ness? Like the “skill rogues” don’t have a lot of systems that can interact in weird unexpected ways. Nethack is the quintessential systemic sandbox. More modern examples would include Spelunky and to a much greater extent Noita. There’s a lot of overlap with totally different genres here- Immersive sims inherit some of Nethack’s sauce, and so does Dwarf Fortress (as in Fortress Mode).

What the heck even are DoomRL and Jupiter Hell? They’re turn-based but built to almost feel like they’re not. I feel like they’re their own special thing in a way.

At some point I realized that the solution to this little problem is Emacs org-mode. It’s just sitting there waiting for people to use it.

For anything that you really can’t get on Linux:

People have probably told you that Wine is the way to use it anyways, but maybe no one’s mentioned Bottles which makes using Wine dead easy. Most of the time you can sort of just open up Bottles, run the installer for the software through there, make sure Bottles knows where the .exe is for the actual program is and you’re good to go.

You’re missing the point.

If I strip all the DRM BS from my software (not just games, it’s a big problem with ebooks, music, etc. as well) I actually own this stuff. I can hoard it away on a hard drive, use it without anything like Steam or any online service, I don’t need to ask someone for permission to use this thing that I bought and actually physically have with me any more. Or in the case of ebooks, I can actually use this file I’ve got sitting around on whatever device I wish, because I bought the book. It’s mine. They don’t get to tell me what I can do with it.

…And frankly, while I don’t “pirate” software because I agree that people deserve to be paid for their work, the single greatest advancement of modern technology is that things can be freely copied. We went from copying books by hand, to printing presses, to now being able to distribute them at no cost whatsoever beyond the infrastructure of the internet. If that makes a lot of typical business practices untenable, I think we should let them be untenable and figure out how to respond to that rather than nerfing the single greatest invention of the modern era just to make sure some capitalists stay happy.

Emacs literally calls it’s Vim emulation Evil mode :)
In all seriousness though, I say Emacs mostly because being a Lisp machine, it’s turing-complete. There’s web browsers in Emacs, PDF readers, email clients, EXWM is literally Emacs as your window manager.
Also what I’ve realized recently is… Vim keybindings aren’t even that great beyond being modal, anyways. Some dude made an Emacs plugin called Xah-Fly-Keys that makes it modal, but works off of what commands are used often rather than how Vim does stuff like making the “go to the end of the line” key $ for some reason. With Emacs being something you can sort of just live in, I can bring my workflow into it rather than praying that what I’m using has vim key support.

(Fuck I’m participating in the editor wars, fuck my life)

I just wish people weren’t so adamant about the whole “no spoilers” thing with it. It sort of soured my time with it when I finished the intro and was kinda just like… oh, it’s the Majora’s Mask thing. That’s the big mind-blowing twist people are talking about.

I guess what I’m saying is thanks for just talking about what actually makes it so unique / impressive.

Does Cogmind count? Because even when I see people discussing games like it, which are already pretty niche, it never comes up. That’s tragic, because oh my god, just read some of these articles. This developer is obsessive and even if you don’t get too deep into Cogmind it’s an incredible toy to just screw around with and just see what happens.

Honestly, the game I like the most that deserves the praise the most is so obsessively discussed by it’s own developer that I think they should speak for themselves: https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/index.html

It’s really, truly underrated. No one talks about it, even when traditional Roguelikes come up, despite the absurd amount of effort poured into it.

Specifically the article about designing “information warfare” into the game way back in 2014 (it’s still being developed) is a great example of how much is going on in this little ASCII game: https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2014/11/information-warfare/

I guess what I could add is that surprisingly enough Cogmind actually has a story, a pretty dang extensive one, and the fact that it’s sort of just hiding away in places you might never see blew my mind.

Also, that despite having as much depth as Dwarf Fortress (just more focused depth), the interface and controls aren’t completely inscrutable. because thank god, it actually has mouse support.

I actually wrote a Steam guide for Patho 2’s intro, because just to warn you, it’s so obtuse that people bounce off of it: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2847019516

…Ok, not gonna lie, the basic premise of Xenoblade 3 comes across to me like to warring societies of Souls Hollows, and while that’s almost certainly wrong it sounds rad as hell. Armies fighting because they literally need the life of their enemies to live, never stopping to consider that by not allowing themselves to die they doom the world itself, eventually no one’s left. Or something along those lines. In any case it feels like it’s setting itself up to actually say something significant about the world.

I really want to see someone get Doom running in Emacs. I’ve tried to figure out if anyone has but of course what actually comes up is “Doom Emacs” which is a specifically customized version of it.