Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

Isn't it?



I bought Watchdogs day 1 back in the day. Fool me once.

They replaced the gamer devs with activists

And now you see the results

Nope.

It is the dogs who are watching you.

Downloaded FF7 Rebirth (freaking 160gb and I hope it's justified with the usual FF eye candy) like a month ago. Still haven't bothered to turn it on. It just feels daunting.

Then booted Xanadu Next from my backlog.. and it's been a BLAST!
Who knew an N-gage(!) game from 2005 would feel this refreshing.

I played Xanadu Next on Steam.

It is indeed a charming game. I had loads of fun with this little gem.

We're in such a drastically different online/gaming landscape than 20+ years ago that I don't think you can overstate the impact it has on how we judge games now vs then.

Just about every game I bought when I was younger was me just looking at the back of the box, or asking a friend or someone at the game store. Now people have consumed 50hrs of content, opinions, livestreams, reviews, breakdowns, alpha/beta/early access testing, dev blogs, and seem to know a companies financials, before they even boot a game up. That combined with the 900000 other ways we can all occupy ourselves in front of a screen, we're not even living in the same world as back then lol.

If a game sucked when you were 13 you just left it in the drawer and got something at blockbuster that weekend and went about your business. Now people pay their bills perpetuating the content rat race that imo is built on negativity for engagement. So yeah some new games suck but is it really that the games are that bad? Idk

At this point??? Welcome to Dec 2019.

He? Many stupid people died without help from Fauci. Not enough I admit.

Its all been downhill since Monopoly.

@Vrye I still miss your chipmunk.

Marvel Tokon is incredible. What a time to be alive for fighting games.

When's mahvel?

Every era of gaming had their busts. I was watching a series on the Virtual Boy the other day. You mentioning Blockbuster made me think of it, I remember seeing one you could rent and then it feels like it was never there again. There was also the bargain bin junk pile at Walmart full of trash titles (fun video on some of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0agxQv2gSls).

Personally though, it feels like games in the 90s and early 2000s there was always something new. I remember the first time I cut a mob in half in Shadow Warrior, when I heard someone on the radio in Half Life, picked up a monsters gun in Halo, summoned a ton of skeletons in D2, met the butcher in D1, saw boobs in Duke Nukem 3d, the list goes on. Even now, I play titles I missed then like Ultima Underworld and feel like the game has so much more character. I hadn't played Thief in years and the remaster being announced got me playing it again, the sound design, tools available, and level design just feels like it's put together with so much passion and care.

It's kindof an unfair comparison, because games in the 90s and 2000s were a new thing and today it's harder to make wide scale innovations compared to then. OTOH, it feels like a lot of games that I play today just kinda fall flat. I finish them, move on, don't think about them again. I just play to finish it rather than actually enjoy the little victories along the way. It feels more like a compulsion. Some exceptions, of course, like I mentioned before. Sometimes all the pieces are there, like I should like it, but something just feels dead about it. We mentioned it earlier, Dark Messiah and the ability to kick mobs off, hearing them scream on the way down, that's such a small part of the game as a whole but it's a little detail that makes it feel alive. Stuff like that just feels like it's missing from most modern games.

That and writing feels to me way worse across the board. The stories just aren't as engaging, but that isn't just video games, it applies to a lot of TV and movies also.

Online games are their own shitshow too. I used to play CS with friends and straight up quit because of the toxicity. I like ARPGs a lot also, but it gets old with how micromanaged they are today, feels like you can get a build going then it gets nerfed and you have to start over. In prior eras, patch cycles were slower, nerfs happened but they felt more limited, now dev sees something make big boom, can't have that, now little boom.

It's probably less that they are "that bad", there were a lot of trash titles in the 90s and early 2000s, it's just that they aren't good enough to justify the time investment for me.

There are plenty of amazing new games nowadays just as there were plenty of crap games back then. And us having grown up and gained literary & gaming experience means there's much less novelty left for us in videogames compared to our way younger selves.

That said, I believe that when people complain about games being bad nowadays, they're usually referring to the big AAA titles. You know, the ones that are supposed to be safe picks. Back in the day, they used to be. Nowadays, people feel apprehensive about them (rightfully so) because they've been more disappointing than not, usually the result of there being so much investor money riding on the AAA title's success that the devs have to play it safe, afraid of experimenting or doing novel things, fill it with cheap psychological hooks & anti-consumer practices, dedicating less dev time to what makes the game actually fun... and all that rap.. well this horse has been beaten back to life then to death again a 100 times in that other thread

Yeah, my friends, after some struggle, I finally beat Palworld story mode.

Indeed, I made the right decision when I decided to rollback 5 game days and change my expectations.

Trying to beat it only with a thin cloth as an armor, and relying on evasion and dodges was just delirious. The last two fights are a spam fest of AoEs showering the entire screen.

With a thin cloth as an armor, we were talking about only taking 1 hits every minute. Any second hit was game over.

So, I invested in heavy defense, and manage to get pretty sturdy even with wallmart gear.

But it worked, and I got the recordings of my entire playthrough from zero to hero in 17 episodes, 8h30m total, what is a pretty good time to complete an entire game.

The only problem is the RNG... to record those 8h30m it took me entire july and half of august, but we got here.

Now, I will start a more relaxing series, only focusing the lore aspects of Palaworld, before my series of endgme.

♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ Bad dogs
♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ Bad dogs

Whatcha gonna do?
Whatcha gonna do when they bark for you?

https://www.polygon.com/steam-battlefield-6-refund-removed-modes/

Is his yacht big enough?

Lol are these part of the XI sponsors..

I mean... weird, but why is SE doing that. Maybe they trying to cover the horizon paid streamer.

https://www.youtube.com/live/xlN_fPjJMDo

He should buy another yacht.

Article is moaning that steam offering a customer a refund after publisher removed functionality post purchase "sets dangerous precedence" and is "unfair".

Article author needs to shove it.

Since when is it okay to remotely remove functionality post purchase then refuse refunds.

Its pretty dangerous spoiling the cattle.

The cattle deserve only the carrot and the stick, and they must be grateful for that.

It is time to arrest that yatch. What this guy did is not forgivable.

tHeY dIdnT rEaD tHe LiCenSe!!!1one

Capitalism at its finest.

I'm positive that somewhere in the fine print that no one ever reads this is covered.

Thats fraud, not capitalism.

Do you guys even play shooters? Game modes come and go all the time. This is pretty wild to me. The game is still fully functional, you just can't play Capture the Flag or Plunder at this particular time. You don't deserve a refund because of that. Hop into a different lobby. This is not going to become a thing.

No they dont

I can still play every de_, cs_, es_, gungame_, etc counterstrike map from 2001

I was gonna say CoD does the map/mode rotation thing every couple of weeks, so I assumed that was the standard across the genre. Since you're not gonna leave 453895 game modes active at all times for Solos/Duos/Trios/Quads.

No idea how it is for BF6 though.

If game advertises a certain functionality that functionality needs to exist. Obvious is obvious.

Online or no, doesn't matter.

It's false advertising, and cause for refund.

Gonna ask for a refund for FFXI as my Tetra Master disc no longer works

Specific game modes are typically not "advertised." The online multiplayer is advertised, but you don't see Team Deathmatch being featured in the ad. I'm looking at the Battlefield 6 Steam page, and I'm not seeing what modes I can play. There are some trailers, apparently you can fly a plane, there are some screenshots, there is ingame footage, but I'm not seeing a list of currently available game modes. Because again, they come and go all the time.

TetraMaster is no longer advertised, as much as I liked it.

Those BF6 modes are being advertised tho.

Eh, games with dwindling playerbases need to rotate modes or queue times get insane. I can see the argument that they shouldn't be able to take away something you paid for, but time gating events isn't exactly unusual for live service games. Holiday events are a great example.

It seems like a situation that would be difficult to create a firm rule on, because 'game mode' is such an abstract concept that applies to different games differently. I don't think that you should be entitled to a full refund in every case, but good on Steam for respecting the user's complaint and refunding them. Anytime CS uses discretion in favor of the customer, it reflects well on the business.

The game is 10 months old, this isnt exactly Concord or Maraton.

Hmmm - H3 Minimax came out on aug3 and its been.... a trip...