bermuda

@[email protected]

not the country or the triangle :)

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What are your favorite video games that force you to pull out the pen and paper?

Ever since the language puzzle in Tunic that got me to fill up 6 pocket sized pages of notes over multiple days while trying to puzzle it out as I tried to and, eventually, succeeded at translating the in-game “paper” manual, I’ve had a craving for games that force you to pull out a notebook and take notes/puzzle things...

bermuda,

Seconding the witness

bermuda,

I hate to white knight for OP here, but did they ask for advice?

bermuda,

If I find I’m not enjoying one of them, I’ll mark it “dnf” and hide it from my library

I think this is what the commenter above is getting at. You say you want to play the game, but “dnf” means “did not finish” which alludes closer to just checking it off a list.

And, I’m just curious here, what happens when you get to a game that doesn’t have a traditional win state? Like multiplayer only, or some sort of factorio “endless” management game. When do you mark it done? Is it always “in progress”?

bermuda,

You didn’t even answer the second half of my comment…

bermuda,

Isn’t “boomer shooter” more of a 1990s, cubic / low-res graphics thing? Doom 3 came out in like 2005.

bermuda,

None of what you said has effectively anything to do with my comment. It’s like you knew somebody would point out the usage of “boomer shooter” in the title and had a canned response prepared.

Yes I know what boomer shooters are and what games they’re based on. I’m just saying they typically have low quality graphics that a game like doom 3 does not have

USB battery bank recommendations?

In need of a rechargeable battery bank I can keep in my car and use to charge my phone. My car is a little older and has one of those cigarette lighter things. Only problem is it doesn’t charge the phone, it just keeps it from dying, which is inconvenient for my current setup. Looking for good ones for the price, and hopefully...

bermuda,

long story short, with the position of the only spot where I can put my phone holder without it falling off (trust me i’ve tried a dozen other spots), the charger would be either on my lap or over the steering wheel and i’m not super comfortable with that.

bermuda,

position of the charger in the center console doesn’t work for where my phone fits best.

bermuda,

nickel*

bermuda,

I disagree but I’m too intellectually lazy to bother with a well thought out response

bermuda,

Klaus Kinski

bermuda,

I’m not a payday person so I have no horse in this race, but this is still such utter horseshit. The more games that continue to do this where it is completely unnecessary, the further away the date is when devs stop doing this bullshit.

but I do believe you will have to have a connection in order to play cause it’s made in the Unreal Engine, it’s using cross-progression, crossplay, I do believe we need you to be online," said Listo.

this person should be a politician

bermuda,

…you can play it with bots? That’s kind of how any 4 player co-op game works lol. I don’t remember Left 4 Dead 2 being online only when I wanted to play by myself. Payday 2 already has a whole community of people who play the game by themselves. In fact I believe you can even disable the bots and do the whole maps solo.

‘What seemed like science fiction is already here’: why it’s important to talk (seriously) about neurorights (english.elpais.com)

The risk, explains Yuste, is that the same tools which – in medicine – can help improve people’s lives, can also end up violating the information stored in the brain. “Although the roadmap is beneficial, these technologies are neutral and can be used for better or worse,” he notes. This isn’t only about securing...

bermuda,

that doesn’t make the site design good, that just means you know how to bypass bad site design.

bermuda,

female friend of mine met me in CSGO and CSGO was what prompted her to sell her entire PC setup and quit videogames so I definitely can see that happening.

bermuda,

It’s pretty broad but I have met some truly awful human beings playing Minecraft. the “community” as a whole is… fine? for a game community, but the individual pockets you find can be truly horrifying. Hell, even in so-called “friendly” communities you can meet some pretty terrible people. People treat their servers like little fiefdoms, and all the toxicity with a fiefdom comes with that.

bermuda,

Having used FaceIt anticheat for… well, faceit on CSGO, I really doubt it will. In order to run the AC, you have to give it some very high level permissions compared to many other apps and then have it be running as a totally separate window before you even open the game. It’s notoriously buggy, but the bad thing is how much permissions it has and how intrusive it is. While FACEIT the company didn’t sell my system information, there’s nothing stopping the BattleBit folks from doing so.

bermuda,

the size of the team making the game doesn’t automatically make it okay to sell your personal information

I almost can’t believe it, but Google Tasks is finally kind of good (www.theverge.com)

For years, Google’s to-do list app Tasks was poorly integrated and underdeveloped. Recently, Google has combined all their reminder products into a single Google Tasks app that is accessible across Google products. While still lacking some advanced features, Google Tasks’ simplicity and integration make it easy to add tasks...

bermuda,

Sorta same. Pixel 7 here and it’s my first non-apple/samsung phone so I messed around a lot on it discovering features and I didn’t know about tasks. I knew you could set reminders in the calendar but I honestly thought it was a calendar-specific thing

bermuda,

I literally wrote about this in the post

Working parents, how do you find time to game?

I grew up an avid gamer. But now, among my 50-hour work week, helping my kids with their math homework, grocery shopping, and house chores, I’m no longer able to find enough free time to really dive into a game. I mostly play casual games that I can drop in and out of but forget about the 40hr+ games requiring commitment....

bermuda,

My dad’s a working gamer parent and he definitely struggles with it. He has a lot of time on weekends, but on weekdays he’ll usually only game for about an hour or however long 2 or 3 levels in the game he’s playing is. There’s times where he’s spent well over a month completing a game that me (a college student with way too much free time) completed in a week.

bermuda,

Seems you’re into puzzle games so I’ll recommend you that there’s an entire genre of minesweeper clones / inspired games on Steam. Some are straight up clones of the game, others are very similar, and some use the mechanics but twist them around in interesting ways. Good examples are Hexcells, Hexseed, Tametsi, DELETE, and GlobeSweeper. Once you learn the basic mechanics, they’re pretty hard to forget, and a lot of games borrow mechanics from others. When I started DELETE, for instance, the mechanics were a little bit different in some small ways, but I pretty much rocketed through the first dozen levels because of my prior knowledge of how minesweeper works.

Stray really disappointed me. I want a real cat game.

Just an open world survival game, only you’re a cat, dealing with regular cat problems. You have to hunt, avoid larger animals, compete with other cats, figure out which humans are dangerous and which will give you treats, judiciously spray things to maintain your territory, maybe mate and reproduce (your sex and fertility...

bermuda,

I agree, but I also agree with OP. went in expecting a cat game and it effectively was just a regular adventure game but you’re a cat. Not the other way around.

bermuda,

Yeah that’s what I was trying to get at.

bermuda, (edited )

Very disappointed nobody here has mentioned Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The only MGS game on PC (so far) without emulation and definitely one of the most fun stealth games I’ve ever played. It is pretty hardcore, but it’s also got a lot of sandbox elements meaning you can complete every mission in a multitude of ways. Don’t like sneaking up on dudes? Maybe try sniping. Don’t want to infiltrate a literal prison? If you’re quick about it and smart about it you can intercept the prisoner’s convoy before he gets there. The buddy system also means you don’t have to keep track of every little thing and can let your buddy do at least a little bit of the mission for you. The story is regrettably pretty batshit insane and kind of hard to understand, which is kind of normal for Kojima, but the gameplay is top-tier.

It appears that what I’m looking for is the 2016 reboot. Problem is, IO Interactive doesn’t want my money. They took the first two games off of Steam, folded them into the third installment, and charged $69.99 for it. This makes me feel morally obligated to pirate these games and see how good the “Peacock” experience is. So now I have it torrented and I’m waiting for another ten+ hour window when no one else wants to use the computer and I can devote every single clock cycle of my long-suffering i5-2500k to decompressing Hitman, and hope it doesn’t have a random error eight hours in like it did last night.

Having played all three IOI games, this is actually not as bad as you’re making it seem. Beforehand, if you wanted all three games it was probably around $120 considering the first two were heavily discounted after a couple of years. The Steam bundle was cheaper, but what 90% of customers ended up doing was buying Hitman 3 and then buying the levels from the previous two hitman games and playing those that way. Hitman 3 has far better graphics, controls, UI… you name it and they improved on it. Plus, each game is only between 5 and 7 levels long and is around 7 hours to beat.

So the developers saw that basically nobody was buying the first two games and said, well, here’s all three games in one and kept the price basically the same as it was before. I would understand buying it and then being disappointed that you spent $70 on 12 more levels you won’t play, but at the same time I think it makes far more logical sense to just treat it as one game.

Imagine my disappointment when I bought the first Hitman back in 2016 and discovered it was an episodic 5 level game for $60 fucking dollars. I think $70 for like 18 levels is a pretty damn good discount.

bermuda,

Seconding Far Cry, specifically 3 through 5. I haven’t played 6 yet so I can’t comment on it, but 3, 4, and 5 (as well as new dawn) are all pretty much built for stealth. You can always go guns-blazing but you’re punished a lot more for it, and silently killing all the guards is incredibly rewarding both in terms of mentality and gameplay-wise.

bermuda,

yeah I love the open world aspect of it, too. The ability to approach a mission from literally any angle just adds so many possibilities.

bermuda,

mmmm biscuits

bermuda,

there’s a known psychological phenomenon that people who play lots of tetris sometimes see tetris when they close their eyes and dream about it in their sleep

hybridhavoc, to gaming
@hybridhavoc@darkfriend.social avatar

Microsoft wins FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/11/23779039/microsoft-activision-blizzard-ftc-trial-win

From the article, quoting Judge Corley:

... the Court finds the FTC has not shown a likelihood it will prevail on its claim this particular vertical merger in this specific industry may substantially lessen competition. To the contrary, the record evidence points to more consumer access to Call of Duty and other Activision content. The motion for a preliminary injunction is therefore DENIED.

@gaming

bermuda,

Oligopoly, not monopoly. Monopoly implies there’s just 1 company. In gaming there is far from one company.

bermuda,

Threads has all your favorite social media users, such as corporate brand accounts, annoying Instagram influencers, and minor internet celebrities who aren’t funny.

What bubble does the author live in where this is considered standout journalism? Like, congratulations on discovering the internet. What rock have they been living in since 1995?

Actual Hidden Gems on Steam

I love obscure and overlooked games and want to share a bunch with all of you. Most “hidden gem” threads end up listing titles with thousands of reviews or that got some level of marketing. I aim to mostly avoid that. While you may see a few familiar games here, everything in the list below has under 1500 reviews on Steam...

bermuda,

One of my personal favorites is still Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages, a 2D spaceflight shooter with text adventure RPG elements. At first it starts of pretty standard but there’s such an incredibly wide array of customization options that it’s almost daunting. Plus the developers really embrace the comedy over the course of the game to pretty extravagant levels. I mean, you literally fight a boss who manufactures DVORAK keyboards.

bermuda,

i loved the environmental storytelling in the game. I think that’s Bethesda’s best development quality. Being able to walk to pretty much any building and find at minimum a skeleton with some props and at most a whole-ass computer log with its own little narrative was just so much fun.

bermuda,

I played the first splinter cell a few months ago. It was honestly really really fun and rewarding, but there were aspects that showed its age. Some of it was trying a bit too hard to be immersive and even on lower difficulties the enemies were brutally aware of their surroundings. There are also like two checkpoints a level and each level can take upwards of an hour depending on how slow you go. Otherwise I thought it was a really fun game and the sound design was out of this world for its time

bermuda,

your examples are so weirdly vague I think this post would get a proverbial “mega-boost” from some actual examples of video games.

And I can agree with a few of these but some of them seem so weird. Like, assuming that an episodic story automatically means each episode is self-contained with 1 major conflict is a really archaic way of thinking about episodes. In television, that all but died out in like 2002. And a fixation on things as opposed to people is actually what makes a lot of dystopic writing great. The removal of the “self,” can lead to a feeling of nihilism and can lead the viewer to appreciating how much of the world has lost its life.

Also, jokes on you, you probably don’t hate my favorite video game’s story because it actually has no story ;)

bermuda,

I went on my steam profile (note these are all PC games, but some are on console) and looked at all the games I finished in under 20 hours at least once and enjoyed so I’ll just list them here. It’s in descending order from most (20.1 hours) to least (68 minutes):

I put a star next to the ones I’d recommend in a heartbeat even without the 20 hour limit.

  • Mirror’s Edge ★
  • The Stanley Parable ★ (although may take you at least 20 to find all endings / easter eggs / secrets)
  • Deus Ex: Mankind Divided ★ (due to the fact that it’s the middle game in an incomplete trilogy, also recommend Deus Ex: Human Revolution but that’s more than 20)
  • Hotline Miami ★
  • Little Inferno
  • Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell
  • Dishonored ★
  • Myst
  • DOOM (2016) ★
  • Wolfenstein: The New Order ★
  • Portals 1 & 2 ★
  • Return of the Obra Dinn ★ (beat twice in 9 hours)
  • Kentucky Route Zero ★
  • The Henry Stickmin Collection ★
  • FAR: Lone Sails
  • Titanfall 2
  • DUSK ★
  • COD: Modern Warfare 2
  • Ghostrunner (didn’t like this but it seemed most people who weren’t me did so i’m putting it here)
  • Thomas Was Alone
  • Jazzpunk: Director’s Cut ★
  • Gunpoint ★
  • Orwell
  • Firewatch
  • Superliminal ★
  • Observer_ ★
  • SUPERHOT ★
  • The Beginner’s Guide
  • BattleBlock Theater
  • INSIDE ★
  • EDGE
  • Quadrilateral Cowboy
  • Journey ★

edit: saw u said “story heavy” so i removed some of the arcadey ones. Some of these aren’t exactly “story heavy” depending on ur definition but they at least have a story

bermuda,

i didn’t like the multiplayer

bermuda,

I mean it kind of already was, right? You could view specific tweets and a couple replies before a banner showed up asking you to sign in and preventing you from scrolling further. It did the same thing if you tried to click on certain things. I had a firefox extension to bypass it which worked wonders. I assume there'll probably be a new one for this.

bermuda,

They're probably referring to streaming. I don't know when this article came out, but considering they're talking about literally the first iPhone I guess we can assume it's 2007 or 2008, and Netflix started streaming back in 2007.

Apart from that, perhaps they're referring to when Amazon started offering movies to buy or rent online, but I don't know when they started doing that.

“Lying” in computer-generated texts: hallucinations and omissions (blog.oup.com)

There is huge excitement about ChatGPT and other large generative language models that produce fluent and human-like texts in English and other human languages. But these models have one big drawback, which is that their texts can be factually incorrect (hallucination) and also leave out key information (omission)....

bermuda,

Oh please, let’s stop humanizing this stuff by calling this stuff hallucinations, and lying

do you have a better word for it?

Oregon Finally Legalizes Pumping Your Own Gas After 72 Years (www.thedrive.com)

Oregon’s Senate has repealed a 72-year prohibition against self-service gas, with new legislation requiring gas stations to staff half the available pumps, while allowing the rest to be self-service. The bill, responding to industry staffing shortages, also prohibits charging more for full-service than self-service, likely...

bermuda,

I live in Washington. I remember one time crossing the border from Portland, Oregon to Vancouver, Washington. What's funny is that Portland has two rivers. The Willamette to the South and the Columbia to the North. The Columbia is the border with Washington. During that trip I stopped for gas, and figured that since I just crossed a river I must be in Vancouver. I got out and started pumping gas only for a guy in an orange vest to come screaming at me to stop like I was about to blow the place up, which is weird because as many of you know it's not that hard to pump gas? Turns out I was in the strip of land in Portland that's between the Willamette and the Columbia, and so I was still in Oregon.

Just a little funny anecdote about this whole situation.

bermuda,

Nice that he at least does it for people who ask. The geoguessr guy had a video on instagram recently where he posted some DM's he got from one guy and then straight up doxxed him without his permission :/

bermuda,

recently youtube shorts started recommending me "alpha male" andrew tate videos despite me constantly ticking the "don't recommend this channel again" posts and i guess in response spotify is now recommending me Karl Marx audiobooks

bermuda,

I guess he saw that appealing to the nerd demographic with tesla and spacex wasn't working so he shifted to the "total asshole" demographic. Like seriously, why is it so hard for him to say one nice thing???

bermuda,

some planet with life on it 10,000 years from now: "weird, that exoplanet's spin just changed"

Privacy-focused alternatives to duckduckgo (ddg)?

I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few months now and to be honest I'm kind of disappointed. I really appreciate the privacy concerns and the lack of tracking software. It got really annoying how Google would "recommend" things that it thought I was interested in when I wasn't interested in them, that kind of thing. But on the...

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