Speaking of toxicity in gaming, what happens if one of those sorts of people decides to make a game/visual novel out of it and price it at what he thinks the true value is?
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“So it turns out this $2,000 philosophy lesson is just the same retrograde gibberish supplement-hawking YouTube masculinity gurus post every day for free. Steam’s transformation into a platform really is complete.”
Delightful! I am proud of PCGamer
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So, I spent today setting it up so that I can run Windows on my Steam Deck. Not something you have to do - the SteamOS on the deck does a great job of running games. The one thing it can’t do right now though is locally run Gamepass games, which is how I play a lot of stuff.
So I set up a bootable 512gb SD card with Windows. It was very easy, doesn’t affect anything in the Steam Deck (windows can’t even see the internal drive), the speed seems fine so far too - slower writes, obviously, but still faster than my internet connection, but reads seem to be about the same as the internal SSD
If anyone wants to try it I used this guide. It was pretty much exactly what I assumed it would be (making the microSD card a windows-to-go boot disk) but having everything in one place was convenient). It’s all Windows stuff, no need to interact with Linux at all. You can try it for a couple of weeks without activating windows to see if you like it, but will eventually need a Windows Product Key if you want to keep using it.
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This video is an interesting look at Valve, a company I associate more with being a virtual holding house for games than I do an actual developer of games these days. They have a fascinating and possibly troubling corporate structure that allows for great work to be done while also pushing off any sort of social responsibility out in the world. I really think this video is worth watching if you have even the slightest interest in what Valve is.
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Watching it now - looks like interesting an channel overall too! These days I think of Valve as a place where people and ideas go to die. So many interesting designers, writers, and I assume developers, seem to go in and then never come out again. Maybe you hear they contributed to something, but they never end up getting to do work that seems on the level of what got them into Valve in the first place.
It’s distressing for a couple of reasons - one, obviously, I would like to play more games made by those people! Secondly, Valve is a money factory. Between DOTA and Steam they have an essentially infinite amount of money, but despite this seems incredibly risk averse.
It’s just become a landlord.
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It’s a great channel. They don’t update as frequently as I would like, but given the small size of the operation and how deep they tend to go, they’re quite impressive. I also appreciate their less serious videos, too, like the ones on Blaseball and Kabaddi.
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Since finishing Vampire Survivors I have been playing the new Loathing game, Shadows Over Loathing. The series is sort of a combination of JRPG turn-based combat mechanics, with a few adventure game mechanics thrown in.
What I find interesting about it is that it is designed to be a pretty frictionless experience - like it’s Quality of Life Improvements: The Game. You can pick it up for 5 minutes or settle in for hours at a time. Also, while it is sort of a parody game it is not a game that intentionally does the bad thing they are making fun of. Instead they play around with genre tropes and game design tropes. For example Shadows has not only an Arachnophobia setting (no spiders appear in the game) - it also has an Arachnophilia setting (SO. MANY. SPIDERS).
There are tons of gags, many, many dad jokes, and it’s overall just a pleasure to play. It currently has an overwhelming positive rating on Steam, and it’s predecessor West of Loathing has the same after being out for years. They also have a free to play browser game Kingdom of Loathing, which has been around forever, you can try to see if this might be your thing.
Oh, and the art style - black and white Sharpie-style drawings and everyone is a stick figure.
It is really something special.
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I haven’t thought about Kingdom of Loathing in forever! That brings back memories and makes this an instant addition to my wishlist.
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West of Loathing is cheap too - like 12 bucks!
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This is on my “definitely going to play” list now. They had me at “Authentically baffling 1920s slang”
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This is bat country! There will be a new Vampire Survivors update sometime today, with a new level and some relics and stuff. I started playing it here and there again just this week due to a mild case of Elden Ring Fatigue. Looking forward to the new content.
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Is he happy because of the update, or because no vampires are harmed in the playing of Vampire Survivors?
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I always figured that I was the vampire - surviving!
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Whoa.
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So, Steam Nextfest, their avalanche of demos is happening now. I have not had much time to go through and look at many, but one thing that caught my eye was a demo for the System Shock remake.
I loved the original Looking Glass game when it came out and decided to give it a try. It’s such a revered game that I figured there might be other olds out there that would be interested.
It’s an interesting update that definitely needs more time time to bake. I am assuming that the demo only includes low-res textures, since changing the setting to Ultra seems to do nothing, which is ok - it’s not done yet and hi-res textures would make for an even larger download, so that’s fine. It does mean that everything gets blocky if you look to closely though. Hopefully it won’t be an issue in the full game.
The hacking mini-games start off with the original Pipe Dream style stuff, but adds some new mechanics as you progress, which is good.
There is a neat early Gibson-style cyberspace mini game, which I don’t remember from the original game, but is has been like 23 years, so I might have forgotten it. It plays a lot like Descent, and is an interesting addition (unless I forgot about it).
It has the problem that some games have with the models of things you have already killed jiggling around so much they seem like they might not be dead, which is not great - in some cases I have seen dead bodies go from standing to collapsing when I enter an area, which is irritating. Hopefully something they will fix.
Otherwise, it plays and looks like System Shock. It has the same environmental interactivity and immersive sim stuff going on, and I am free to fill my inventory up with bedpans if I so choose.
If you already know what the code to the first keypad locked door you find will be*, you probably want to give it a try before it goes away.
*If you are a fan of this type of game (and a huge nerd) you know what I mean
ETA: If you run across any demos that catch your fancy please post them! There are too many to sift through alone!
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I just spent a little time playing the Last Case of Benedict Fox demo. It’s a sidescrolling metroidvania style game with heavy Lovecraftian influences. The artwork is beautiful, and frequently creepy in a sort of cartoonish way. The sound design is great, too. Satisfying clicks and thunks when you interact with objects, scratchy a gramophone, and pretty good voice acting.
It looks like as you progress in the game, the mystery that you are working to uncover gets charted out on the load screen with pictures and notes, which is nifty. It’s done with photographs and notes. Lots of unhinged underlining and repeated circling. Very paranoid, very suitable for the genre it’s inspired by.
The gameplay itself is ok. You have this spectral companion that lets you double jump and grapple in certain areas, but it doesn’t seem to work consistently when it’s supposed to. I imagine that’s something that will get worked out before release, though.
The combat is just sort of ok in what I played, nothing special. You charge up a special meter with knife attacks, which allows you to then fire one shot from a pistol. There is different charge-over-time meter that you use for a throwing weapon and for parrying with your knife. I’m sure that there are other elements that get introduced through the game, but the combat just wasn’t that fun in the brief bit that I played. Which is too bad, because the game seems to have a lot else going for it.
I might give it another look after it’s released and has had a chance to get patched up a bit, but I doubt that I’ll even return to the demo. Right now, if I’m looking for a metroidvania-style game, I’ll probably check out Dead Cells. I keep hearing about the Return to Castlevania DLC and I’m intrigued.
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I like a lot of what they are trying- like melding the adventure style exploration and object stuff in the first part of the demo after the tutorial with action platforming. And it looks pretty!
But yeah, as you say the combat is not thrilling (although it was satisfying to blast the first flying glob thingy with my gun before it had a chance to do anything!). The movement is kind of mushy feeling too…like…Little Big Planet floaty.
I hope they are able to tighten it up. Wasn’t on my radar before, but definitely will look in on it again once it releases and see how it reviews. It also has the feeling of something that Epic might give away in a year or that might end up on Gamepass
Thanks for pointing it out!
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No “might”, it’s day one.
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I’ve tried a few more demos in Nextfest today, and the one that I’m playing right now is kind of amazing.
It’s a noir detective game that takes place in a procedurally generated city that looks like it came right out of Minecraft. The clues that you investigate through are surprisingly deep. You look through address books, city directories, scan fingerprints, and look at crumpled up notes in apartments you break into, and that’s just a brief start. You can crawl through air ducts in buildings to escape pursuit. You can get shaken down by street thugs. It’s really cool.
The demo gives you 90 minutes to run around in the open world city and try to solve a murder. I’m only about 30 minutes in and I’m dreading running out of time. The game is pretty polished in it’s current state, too. The only trouble that I’ve encountered is that the screen gets into this sort of fast bobbing from time to time. And the controller support isn’t fully implemented yet, but that seems pretty common across a lot of the demos that I’ve played today.
I highly recommend giving this one a try. I’m liking the graphics, even though I was never a fan of Minecraft. But they just work here. And the sound design is really good, too. Plus it’s just fun.
ETA: I think the screen bobbing was my character shivering because they were cold. I managed to complete a murder investigation and a side job on my second 90 minute playthrough. I’m really looking forward to the full game.
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