hedges based on the mercurial tendencies Valve has shown in the past

It's a bit hard to get excited about Valve hardware announcements now. There have been spectacular first efforts with the steam machines, steam link, steam controller, and index, followed by a honeymoon period of cool new features and then discontinuation.

I'd take some convincing to believe that I was going to see Valve work for more than a few months on optimising the experience and game support.

NKD wrote on Apr 24, 2021, 01:33:
Narrative games are like walking simulators and visual novels?

Narrative games should mean anything that tells a story.

For the purposes of this con it seems they're looking for games that are focused on "pushing the boundaries" of narrative, plus it's heavily skewed towards indie studios, and the game selection is heavily skewed towards visual novels, walking simulators and adventure games.

I guess that makes sense - people don't buy a AAA game to have their expectations subverted.

I understand the intent of the message, but I had to laugh at:

in no way do we condone granting or purchasing player items in exchange for money

Like the only thing I will get for money this decade is a spin of the chocolate wheel.

This game has needed a remaster much more than any of the other remastered games I've played lately. The gameplay is timeless but it would be difficult to get a group of people together who would all overlook those graphics.

Space HoRSE was a passable tribute but had its flaws and disappeared after a while.

It looks like the IP of this game might be owned by the designer's kids now? That's a nice change from the profits going to a corporation with no real connection to the game.

I had a Dell laptop when they were offering modular graphics cards circa 2005.

There was a big song and dance about how many options this was going to open up, but by the time the laptop was deprecated, there were still only the two original options (AMD or Nvidia).

Maybe I'm losing touch, but every time I've bought hardware it's outlasted the architecture on which it was built, and the new generation has some new form of PCI/USB/whatever that makes upgrading within the architecture unappealing.

Orogogus wrote on Feb 26, 2021, 04:16:

Saboth wrote on Feb 25, 2021, 21:58:
I picked it up, but is this one of those hyper-stressful games like Darkest Dungeon or Dark Souls? I love Lovecraftian stuff, but I don't like brutally punishing games so much these days. I get enough brutal punishment at work.

I never got very far into the game, but I don't think it's like that. I think when you die, you start a new character and can keep some incremental progress. And I think the Lovecraft stuff leans more towards his dream stuff than straight horror and insanity.

I'm not sure quite where you draw the line between dream stuff and insanity, but insanity features quite a bit, both in the characters you encounter and as a game mechanic. I think that was part of the draw of the game; something seems normal to start with and you're second-guessing the whole time, waiting for the moment that you discover that they're made of wax and slowly melting in front of you, or they offer to trade you their still-beating heart in exchange for a box of contraband.

Sunless Sea doesn't seem like a very forgiving game at first, but eventually you can find a good balance between progress and (relative) safety, and there are some options to make the game a bit easier. I found it far less stressful than Darkest Dungeon, though there were some tense moments!

Riahderymnmaddog wrote on Feb 10, 2021, 19:49:
It is pretty sic, but I will wait until it's released on Steam.

Joke aside, as a "cloud-streamed app", it's questionable whether it's even "on" the EGS in the first place. I wonder whether this is to take advantage of rendering hardware or if it's a copyright protection measure.

Solid bundle, especially for the price of the high tier, and even more so if you have fellow board gamers to play with online (sadly it doesn't look like Pandemic includes a proper multiplayer mode). I've quite enjoyed playing the LotR card game solo on Steam, and after the original dev studio closed it's been picked up and getting maintained again.

That headline "half of U.S. adults don't know that Facebook does not do original news reporting" apparently means "51% of U.S. adults are aware that Facebook does not do original reporting and 42% are unsure," which is not that damning an indictment on media literacy. With something like 50,000 employees and more acquisitions than I can keep track of, even I'd be inclined to hedge my bets with an unsure.

I fell in love with Wingspan after buying it with some birthday gift cards. My boxed copy shipped with a 30% discount code for the Steam version (YMMV), which stacked with a recent sale.

I also picked up the Tabletop Simulator DLC to play a 5 player game last night, which was fine (despite mixed reviews on the store page) but took three hours to play. Maybe the three player limit in the Windows port is wise.

VaranDragon wrote on Oct 31, 2020, 03:10:
I've played through Half-Life so many times I don't even remember if I played through Black Mesa 1.0 I know I waited for it to come out for ages, and that's pretty much what I remember about it. Hmmm.

The highest praise I can offer for Black Mesa is that it was like playing the game as I remembered it (with all of the great moments and surprises), and not how it was. That said, I still haven't checked it out since they added Xen... if that plays like I remember it I'm going to have to reassess my praise.

Cutter wrote on Oct 30, 2020, 01:18:
This thing actually work for anyone? Doesn't work for me.

It seems to work OK for me after manually updating via the Windows Store. Not a big fan of the default view (what does Firefox: Moderate even mean?) but the advanced/taskman view looks rich enough to be handy.

Ant wrote on Sep 13, 2020, 04:26:
I have never even heard of "Extreme Rise of the Triad". Can we maybe find the release date answer on http://archive.org?

Sadly, the earliest the wayback machine seems to have for Blue's is http://bluesnews.com/q-july.html">July 1996. The few times Blue has mentioned in the following 12 months are generally not positive!

Title: "We have a social responsibility" to provide alternatives to game violence

You can still create threats and still have an aggressive experience but without necessarily opposing players to each other. That's a big difference.

It's probably the fault of whoever titled this article, but that did not live up to my expectations at all. "Alternative violence" is not the same as "an alternative to violence."

Slashman wrote on Aug 24, 2020, 13:46:
AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!

"AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!" yourself.

WannaLogAlready wrote on Aug 7, 2020, 21:54:
Wonderful, got it.
Seems to me this deluge of important free games from various sources started thanks to the EGS, am I right ?

The Humble Store has had some pretty well rated freebies - many of which were high profile Codemasters games - at least as far back as 2014 (see such as this Blue's post about a Tropico 3 giveaway), but GOG was there (albeit more intermittently) as far as their Broken Sword giveaway in 2011. Origin had their on the house program from 2014-2018 (though most of their freebies were so old that even GOG wouldn't headline them), and Uplay has been on the bandwagon since 2016 or so.

These used to mark anniversaries or other milestones to get publicity, but by 2016 or so both GOG and Humble were using freebies to get people onto their website when they launched a new seasonal sale. By that time Steam was already moving away from its headline discounts and flash sales in favour of gamifying the sales.

(I have no idea to what extent this might have been inspired by or made easier to negotiate with publishers in the wake of Playstation Plus (2010) and Games with Gold (2013).)

My opinion is that regular, high quality freebies had become pretty commonplace well before Epic even had developers working on the Epic Games Store.

The cadence and RRP of the games being handed out by Epic is certainly unlike anything I've seen on PC before, but I'm not convinced that anyone else's behaviour has changed significantly. Bethesda and Ubi's recent giveaways appear to be trying to draw attention because they can't get bring the press to conventions in these uncertain times.

Shouldn't we be celebrating that we're hearing something like this from someone who has a serious chance at disrupting the digital marketplace and making this happen?

Hearing this and seeing some collaboration between Epic and GOG seems like great news. Especially because of how well what he's saying lines up with that GOG have been offering with GOG Connect for a while now.

I get that it's two-faced to be saying this while claiming so many exclusive for the EGS... but Epic can't negotiate the sort of vision that Sweeney is talking about if the EGS has no market share.

I'm hopeful for a GOG Connect like announcement from Epic in the near future ("we've been talking to publishers, and if you own one of their games on Steam you can have it on the EGS").

Solemn-Philosopher wrote on Jul 20, 2020, 13:58:
I really like the GOG Galaxy Platform. I don't connect it to Steam, but I've been using it to bring together all the free games I've grabbed from the other various storefronts.

The Steam integration has been pretty patchy for me (almost never syncs achievements), but after adding all of the storefronts (and other purchases manually, if required) it's stopped me from inadvertently buying games I'd already received for free or in a bundle. I find it useful for that even if I use the Steam launcher for most of my activity.

I'm not sure why the subscription page is so mysterious, the full list of games is available on their July 2020 page without registration.

Interesting selection this month, none of them were on my wishlist but I'm looking forward to playing a few (especially Basingstoke).

Orogogus wrote on Jun 16, 2020, 15:13:

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Jun 16, 2020, 14:36:
Well, I just use the scroll bar + separate by assigned tags. That's not really the full answer you're looking for, the PgUp/PgDn thing is annoying, I agree, but You can at least separate your games a little by the Sort by Tags feature. Tags are assigned manually. Currently I have my list broken up into basically Finished Games, Backlog, New to Me, then you can hide those tabs here and there to speed up any searching you have to do. Installed is its own separate category on the left obviously, so that further breaks it down. But yes, the overall sorting and movement in the list needs to be improved. There is also the built in Filter in GOG Galaxy, but your mileage may vary with that. A bigger scroll bar would help, as would assigning PgUp/PgDn in list view. Galaxy does have a feedback button in there, under the top left Gear icon, "Share Feedback," I'd recommend sending them a brief polite note, I've done a couple for similar reasons.

Yeah, I've left feedback through the button. It just seems strange that I never see anyone else with this complaint. Everyone likes GOG Galaxy to see all their games in one place, but actually browsing through those games seems very difficult. I'm always wondering if I'm missing something.

If you have a filter on the tags you want, you can use the bookmark button (at the top, just next to back/forward) to save it as a bookmark that's visible on the left side of the screen. I have my to do list all tagged as "To Do" and then a filter on that tag bookmarked, so all I need to do is click it in the sidebar and I'm good to go.

My pile of shame is large enough that nothing other than my to do list and a few favourites really matter, so that design works pretty well for me.