Bless.

Fairly confident I wound up with some malware from a “GOG” download from one of the sites in the megathread. I’ve already formatted and the files are long gone but I’ll tuck this link away for the future.

Fascinating. As much shit as I talk, I did discover a lot of good games via those discs. The Blades of Exile franchise, for example, really stands out as a series of underrated early windows RPGs.

Balatro, Loop Hero, all three of the noteworthy Mihoyo games, Sword of Convallaria - I’m going to get flak for including gacha games, but these ones are surprisingly well designed and written games, despite predatory monetization practices - Stardew Valley, Dead Cells, Vampire Survivors…

I think we’re kidding ourselves if we ignore that Among Us was a genuinely good game, despite being notorious brainrot zoomer bait.

I’m not sure why we shifted the goal post to mobile games, but the point stands.

Edit: I had to come back because I remembered how much I enjoyed Monster Hunter Stories on mobile, and the mobile version is actually the most complete version.

Hades 2, Silksong, and the FFTactics remake, all of which came out in the last like 3 weeks.

I’d genuinely call the first two 10/10s, and the only thing stopping me saying that about all three is FFTactics’ commitment to staying true to the original, as they kept some features, qualities and even bugs moving forward that are jank in the modern era, but keep the game feeling more authentic.

Ah, I see you have never picked up a “1000 best games for Windows” CD.

There are a lot of low quality games to complain about. There are also a lot of high quality, new games to experience. 10 years from now, the low quality games will be forgotten, while the high quality games will be looked back on, fondly. Posts will be made comparing the “high effort, high quality games from 10 years ago” to the modern slop, and the cycle will repeat…

But this doesn’t confirm my bias’.

Metal Hellsinger was one of the more inspired experiences I’ve played in the past several years. Really sad to see a studio making genuinely quality games have to shutter.

Seconded for Dark Cloud 2 specifically. Game is incredibly good.

Funnily enough, I’m on a stock Pixel 6. I flashed custom firmware onto my Pixel 2XL back in the day, and the gain wasn’t super worth it. My phone before that, some Motorola brand, I flashed custom firmware onto and it helped a lot with features I wanted and bloatware removal. But, let be real, save being in the Google ecosphere, the Pixel is as stripped down baseline as a phone gets. And since my job is all-in on the Google apps, I have to be in that space anyway. At some stage, it just doesn’t feel like there’s much of a point.

This is such a dishonest question, I barely know where to begin.

You know, fundamentally, I don’t hate Gamepass as a concept. “Netflix, but for videogames” is an idea I can get behind, as it widens the audience for something I love by lowering the bar of entry. There are plenty of people out there that benefit from being able to play a few games here and there without needing to commit hundreds of hours to $100 purchases.

But Netflix has overstepped with price hikes and ads, and I’ve cancelled my service with them. That Microsoft thinks it can charge some ~$40CAD a month is pure hubris. I hope they learn quickly that, at that price point, the enthusiast market will happily cancel and just buy their games outright, and the casual market will decide it’s an expense they don’t need.

Because if they’re shuttered, the company/people that make the company have the opportunity to go somewhere else and do something better. I’ve disliked everything they’ve produced since they were purchased by EA, so I’ve come to think the publisher holds them back.

I mean the last Bioware game I played and enjoyed start to finish was Dragon Age: Origins, so… /shrug.

I accept that ME2 was a good game, but I couldn’t get into it. It felt too much like a shooter, too little like an RPG for me. And don’t get me started on DA2. “ANOTHER WAVE!” and character customization being kneecapped, or completely removed in the case of your party members, left me quitting it after some 3-4 hours.

Inquisition was okay, but I still lost interest after some 6-8 hours. It wasn’t “bad,” but it was still an okay game wearing a good games skin.

Bioware losing the creative freedom to explore characters outside of the mainstream that the saudi’s are going to permit them to write/create is a real problem. As a marker of political freedom of expression and as a stance against the fucking fascists that are rapidly encroaching on people’s rights, this is a huge step in the wrong direction. But I won’t mourn any specific games. Honestly, I hope they get axed, so they are given the opportunity to go indie and/or get picked up by a better producer/studio.

The last Bioware game I genuinely enjoyed was Dragon Age: Origins, which was the last thing (mostly) developed before the EA buy-up. I’m sure it’s scary for the employees, but I suspect this is good for Bioware in the long term.

and the Switch port was (apparently) never fixed…

What’s the supposed issues on the Switch port? I only owned the game on Switch, and I didn’t have any issues playing through it.

I’m already playing Hades 2 and FF Tactics comes out tomorrow.

So that, I guess, then probably nothing. /shrug.

Steam sales lose their luster when they’re so frequent.

An absolute masterpiece of a game. What starts off as a “cute rhythm game” very rapidly evolves into some of the most immaculate gameplay design and in-game storytelling I have ever seen. I “joke” often than the final boss is the tears in your eyes, but it’s a lot less of a joke than you would imagine.

If you like rhythm games, emotional storys and ludonarrative harmony, I cannot recommend this game enough.

A friend of mine once described this kind of behaviour as acting like “welfare moms.” While there’s a certain level of sexism there that I am sure she really didn’t mean in the moment, I get the point she was making: parents who sit at home scheming up the next excuse to call social services on that other parent that they pretend to like but also keep an air of superiority about. And that’s all it is. Convincing yourself that you’re better than everyone else not by lifting yourself up, but by tearing others down.

It’s commen behaviour in narcissists, too. Contrary to popular belief, narcissism is often found in people with low self-esteem. They try to validate themselves by bringing everyone else down below them. It seems like obsession with another person outwardly, but it’s still self-obsession: “this person made me look bad, but they’re so much worse than me. I need to prove it (even to myself).”

The cost of food and shelter driving people homeless and hungry is evil. The cost of Nintendo products causing people to play fewer Nintendo games is rude and unfortunate.

I’m just pissed off at all this misdirected frustration. We should be lobbying governments to manage grocery and real estate megacorps, and instead we’re creating YouTube videos about Nintendo being evil because the price of an individual game went up $20. The gap between unfettered corporate greed of UHC causing suffering on scales previously only seen in wars against Nintendo getting an extra $20 here and there if you want to keep up with their products isn’t even a fucking comparison.

And I’m tired of pretending a completely unwelcome and tone deaf price increase is “evil.” I hate paying more for videogames as much as the next gamer, but the cost of living has increased by 50% in basically every metric. Rent, food, power, gas, restaurants, movie theatres, snacks, alcohol… Literally everything I spend money on has gone up between 25-50%. Nintendo is the first asshole in the video game industry cocky enough to up their prices by the same amout, and suddenly, “The Switch 2 is EVIL.” Really?

Listen, I am not a fan. $10 for a tech demo that should be packaged in is insane. But pull your head back and look at the wider picture instead of coming in here with these terminally online takes. If you can’t distinguish between “evil,” (like health insurance corporations condemning millions to chronic pain and, in extremes, death) and “shit I wish wasn’t so expensive” (like a singular brand of videogames) then maybe it’s worth figuring out where the nearest patch of grass is.