We all know it. The boss/area/section of any of your favorite games/well liked games that gives you pause whenever you consider replaying it. An area or boss that sucks so much to go through that you may even reconsider entirely. Who/what hurt you?

For me it'd have to be either Pontiff Sulyvahn from Dark souls 3, or Nyx from Persona 3. Pontiff just straight up sucks to fight. Unless you're a parry god, it's just nonstop aggression with seemingly few windows, and then the second phase kicks in and you're just skewered endlessly. I can't hack it. Did it once, never again. For Nyx, besides being a long and grueling fight, it loves to pull out the ol' Marin Karin making you pull out the ol' Diarahan. Can't do it. There's a reason I emulated it. Thank god for save states.

See title. I thought this might make for an interesting topic and I can't see one like this in the search, so...

What sorta got me thinking about this - a couple days ago, I noticed that Dying Light 2 got a sizeable update, with a pretty heavy emphasis on changes to the game's parkour mechanics. I absolutely loved the first Dying Light, as well as both Mirror's Edge games - parkour and other kinds of momentum-driven gameplay are my jam - so that got me curious enough to check it out again, for the first time in a year.

I played for a few hours, got some of the way in, and... felt pretty underwhelmed. It certainly feels better than it did last time I played, and the change to retain momentum during parkour moves does feel pretty nice... but it still feels far too slow and floaty to me. It feels awkward and unresponsive to me. On top of that, the combat updates - while I actually appreciated DL2's changes to the combat over DL1's (a major gripe I've always had with DL1's combat is that sometimes zombies take just one or two hits and sometimes they take twenty, and I have never been able to detect any kind of pattern to it - combat level, game progress, weapon damage, etc., none of them seem to impact it so I have no idea what's up with it), playing it again now... left me feeling pretty disappointed.

I booted up DL1 for the first time in a while the next day, just intending to compare how it feels - and I've since found myself drawn several hours into it. Even in the first half hour of the game, where your climbing's super slow and everything, it feels so much more snappy and reactive - it feels good. And while my previous gripes with its combat are still present, it feels so much better to me now than DL2's does (for the most part - fighting human enemies still sucks). I can't quite put my finger on what it is, but there's just something really visceral and satisfying about it that DL2 doesn't have.

As I've been playing DL1, as well, I've been thinking about its story again. As much as it's maligned for its story, I think it's actually a really interesting subversion and deconstruction of expectations in a lot of ways - while that could be a thread (or video essay, I've thought about it) of its own, the way I see it: despite how the intro and story set him up, Crane actually fails pretty hard at being a hero until towards the end. I mean, the very first thing he does is take a crowbar to the back of the head, get bitten, and get someone else killed. It's a pattern that continues throughout most of the game (and even The Following, I'd argue, even though I don't care for it much). I find it pretty memorable beecause of that, even if it falls flat in some places.

Meanwhile, Dying Light 2... I honestly couldn't tell you much about the story? It didn't leave any kind of impact on me at all. I'm not really the kind of person who plays games for their stories very often (unless it's something like Ace Attorney where that's explicitly the point), and I have to admit that I went into DL2 with low expectations to begin with (I held off getting it at launch because of Denuvo, by the time I did pick it up reviews were already fairly negative; and I tend to view "your choices really matter!" in advertising as a huge red flag so that wasn't a good sign either), but even so. It might be in part because I actually quite liked DL1's ending - I found it pretty refreshing for a post-apocalyptic zombie game - so DL2 throwing that out didn't sit well with me from the get-go (also part of why I'm not too keen on The Following, but that's a different matter).

Overall, it just sorta left me thinking about how... even though I'd tried to go in with tempered expectations - all I really wanted was a fun zombie-flavoured parkour game, where climbing and jumping and swinging and stuff felt fluid and rewarding - I still found myself left feeling pretty hollow about it, even after an update that allegedly addressed some of my biggest issues with the game. It's especially frustrating, because the Inner Circle (I think that's what it was called, I can't remember - the second city map) is really, really cool and I would absolutely love to just aimlessly run around it... if the movement didn't feel floaty and awkward. Stuff like climbing to the top of the VNC Tower felt exhilarating and awesome - I could catch a glimpse of something excellent there, but it was so outweighed by everything else.

So... Yeah. I dunno, I thought this'd make for an interesting question. Have theere any been any sequels you've played that left you feeling underwhelmed, in comparison to the previous game? If so, why?

alright maybe some part of me just wants to ask this so i'd have an excuse to waffle about dying light and its story a bit but still i think it's an interesting topic nonetheless
EDIT: formatting

The history of the web is littered with with many a dead image/video hosting service. Echos of their existence plague older forums in the form of broken links and images. It seems like they all follow the same path, starting up as the new "simple" service that just hosts images, no fuss. But then as interest grows, so do costs, and the service owners have to scramble to monetize. Generally this is done by stuffing the place full of ads until everyone leaves. Alternatively the owners are stubborn and stick to their guns, until they inevitably have to shut down due to drowning in costs. When they do shut down, millions of assets are lost and the graveyard of broken images across the web grows some more.

https://gfycat.com/ is the latest notable victim of this.

With all the recent social media turmoil, there as been lots of exploration of alternative sites, and all of them have to overcome the problem of hosting media in one way or another.

Tildes obviously does this by avoiding it entirely which, while a very effective solution, is just handballing the problem elsewhere. Users will still want to post images and videos but they will just have to find alternative hosts. Over time those hosts will die and Tildes posts will be filled with dead links.

Mastodon has similar problems,the biggest cost of hosting a mastodon instance is the storage and bandwidth required to facilitate media posts. And there's a real danger of an instance incurring high costs if a particular post becomes popular and is hotlinked on a big centralised social media site.

It seems like a really tricky problem to solve, something peer-to-peer could sort of solve the costs created by traffic peaks but has problems when there is many small files viewed by few individuals each.

Are there any other solutions out there? Web3, IPFS? Or is it just not that much of a problem, do we accept that media on the web is ephemeral and will be lost after a while?

Hey y’all, welcome back to the second weekly game jam thread.

Whats a game jam you may ask. Well imagine if you locked a group of game developers in a box for box for some quantity of time ranging from a few days to a few weeks and told them to compete with each other by building something around a theme and then judging whatever each other came up with, that's a game jam.

Now you may ask why would anyone play these things besides the other game game jam entrants. I don’t know about everyone else but despite being one of the younger users on this site I can’t help but feel like I have to work very hard to find any sort of magic in my life and I keep telling myself if I just keep playing more games and scraping and scrounging at the fringes of the industry I can find the magic again and be happy for a little bit.

Its actually a little scary sharing these games with you guys. I know its unreasonable to get emotionally invested in tiny games I did not even make but it does make me happy that people are taking an interest in this thread. Here is what I have for you this week.

HeartBeat

Platforms: Windows, HTML5
Genres: Rhythm

Do you remember that one part in that one game that you like, during the final boss fight when the heroes theme is reprised and layers are added to the song for each stage of the boss fight and then the vocals kick in and its awesome. Here in game jam land our motto is “All killer no filler”, we like to skip to the good part and this entry from Boss Rush Jam 2023 fits the bill. Its the final boss battle of a rhythm game and features an unusual control scheme that takes a few tries to get the hang of. Let me know if this game jogs any memories of boss fights.

e-scape

Platforms: Windows
Genres: Simulation

If you talk to a gamer that has been around for awhile they will have a story to tell you about a game that they used to play that has since been shutdown. Its always the same story. They see an article out of the blue that the game they used to play just announced a shutdown date. They log in and like a traveler from an antique land, are greeted by a ghost town filled with statues of champions and kings soon to be buried forever at the command of a datacenter sysadmin.

That is e-scape, look on its works, ye mighty, and despair!

This week was both nostalgic and somber for me and that leaked into this weeks selection in a big way. I really do look forward to seeing peoples responses to this thread though and I hope to keep doing these threads for the foreseeable future.

PREVIOUS WEEK NEXT WEEK

(I'm not looking for simple lists of YouTube channels that you like.) _{even though I'm about to dump a list of channels that I like}

There's a lot of YouTube cooking content. I was wondering what you look for in that content, and what you want to avoid?

I don't have a particularly coherent answer - I like a mix of content.

I do like plain and simple information, or informative content that gives details about technique or science or why a thing is done the way it is. Examples of this would be America's Test Kitchen, or J. Kenji López-Alt or Helen Rennie, or French Cooking Academy.

I also like recipes that I can actually make. I prefer recipes that don't have a massive array of ingredients that I don't have. Examples are Brian Lagerstrom (I like the way he tends to use a limited amount of equipment and he gives alternatives for ingredients if he thinks some thing is going to be hard to get) Not another cooking show has some nice recipes (his grilled cheese and tomato soup is fantastic).

Some channels I watch have Michelin Starred chefs discussing a recipe. I like watching this because I can't replicate most of it, but I can get ideas for improving taste or texture. Italia Squisita has a lot of content, and some of their videos are comparing a traditional Italian recipe (and these are excellent) with an elevated restaurant version. The staff canteen is a bit frustrating - it's almost exactly what I want, but it ends up missing the mark a bit. But they talk to chefs, mostly in the UK, about being a chef or about a dish. La pâte de Dom is self-taught, but they have a high level of skill in pastry.

And here's a list of videos that I can't categorise, and why I like them.

The Biryani Expert (sadly, channel appears not to be making content any more) taught me that biryani covers a quite wide range of different dishes.

Sheldo's Kitchen He seems like a nice bloke, and his food looks really nice and achievable to make. Again, sadly, he doesn't seem to have made any videos for a while, and he was saying that he has a lot on. But he has a calm style and I liked his content.

Cool Daddy, YummyBoy and Street Foods TV expose me to a lot of food that I'm not used to. I can't recreate a lot of it (I don't have a camel I can cut up and cook but it gives me ideas for new ways to combine ingredients or new flavour profiles to try.

So, what do you look for in content?

(In this thread I avoided dunking on creators, because there's a few that I really don't enjoy but I don't think me yelling about them is good discussion. _{But I'd totally join in if someone created another thread}.

For me, I love seeing parts of missions occur before and after we (the playable character) are involved. Like how after a cut scene a character will contribute out that action.

It really helps with the immersion and continuity.

Share what you like to see!

I've been trying to work out which Odie Leigh song to post here and I can't decide, so here are five from a session that she's called the Treehouse Tapes. At the moment I'm a real sucker for this kind of thing - one person, minimal production, their own songs.

Odie Leigh - A month or two
Odie Leigh - Habits held
Odie Leigh - Take back
Odie Leigh - Nine lives
Odie Leigh - [Crop circles]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_fWR3klRKo)

(For some reason this really reminds me of the Michelle Shocked Texas Campfire Tapes which is a fantastic album but tricky to listen to because of the hateful things she's said.)

javascript:window.location='[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UU%27+ytInitialData.metadata.channelMetadataRenderer.externalId.substring(2)](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UU%27+ytInitialData.metadata.channelMetadataRenderer.externalId.substring(2)

This puts every video of a channel into one playlist. Makes listening to music channels so much easier.

I also use Pilgrim.

P.S. https://tildes.net/~tech/10ko/little_12ft_io_bookmarklet

For every big Steam sale r/gamedealsmeta does a Hidden Gems topic which is always one of my favorites to browse through. Given that the July 1 reddit fallout is upcoming though, I figure it's worth trying to roll our own version here too.

The purpose of this thread is for game discovery: surfacing games that are hard to find about elsewhere. As such, try to recommend things that are less well-known.

For general game recommendations of all popularities, use this thread. For general Steam Sale discussion, use this thread.

I recently digitized some old home movies from my grandparents and looking through the film I realize I recognize almost no one. This got me thinking, I should go through this with my mother to help me identify family members as she's probably the last person who knows who anyone is.

Obviously I can just make a document with notes ex: 2:53 screen right, great uncle john"
But I'm hoping there's a more elegant solution in which I can keep info with the file and not some auxiliary document that dosent live in the same place.

I could just dump all that info into Metadata but that's maybe the lowest quality solution.
The xray function of Amazon prime video is the example of the best solution in a perfect world. (if you don't know, when you pause or bring up the context menu on prime video, there's a bar that identifies everyone one scene with a matching headshot)

I actually looked into it and there's an API that amazon uses for this called "RecognizeCelebrities" and uses images to train the program to recognize faces and populate it's menu. I'm not sure if it's open source but even if it was, it's over my level to use it practically I think.

The last option I can think of is using a video markup platform like frame.io but that's not really a long term solution.

Any ideas?