What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
November 2024's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.
| Steam Page | Opencritic | Steam Recent/All | Operating Systems | Steam Deck | ProtonDB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Warhammer 40,000: Darktide | 74 | 83/69 | Win | ❌ Unsupported | 🟨 Gold |
| Persona 4 Golden | 88 | 95/97 | Win | ✅ Verified | 🟨 Gold |
| The Lamplighters League | 71 | 93/72 | Win | ✅ Verified | 🟨 Gold |
| Cassette Beasts | 86 | 94/95 | Win, Linux | ✅ Verified | ✅ Native |
| The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales | 69 | 91/92 | Win | 🟨 Playable | 🕙 Awaiting Reports |
| KarmaZoo | 77 | 90 | Win | ✅ Verified | 🎖️ Platinum |
| Hexarchy | N/A | 66/83 | Win, Mac | 🟨 Playable | 🎖️ Platinum |
| Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator | 65 | 77/78 | Win | 🟨 Playable | 🟨 Gold |
Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?
I was looking into getting a whole bunch of mods for Fallout and Skyrim and it seems like Nexus is the only game in town. I am not really in the mood to go back and forth 600 times between client and webpage to click on every time I wish to try a collection. I wouldn't mind it if they just severely throttled my downloads, they could just run in the background. But if I have to click the mouse thousands of times every once in a while, I'd rather not mod any game, to be honest.
And although I understand that this is a service and "there is no free lunch", the price they are charging in Brazil is too much for me to be okay with paying. A month of Nexus costs R$51.82, which is 12 bucks more expensive than a month of WoW. I really don't wanna be a "choosing beggar" here, as I know that it is not Nexus's fault that my currency is worth shit. But if there's a cheaper alternative I'll have no problem whatsoever paying for it.
Hi and hello all and fellow southpaws,
With the increasing option to pick from genders between characters (unless heavily tied into story and designed that way) it feels like the next option would be to have left-handedness become an option.
As a lefty I always felt a little "left" out (pardon the pun) in games as soon as I saw a gun or weapon being held in the "wrong" hand.
I know CS2 makes the option available if you dig a little, which is a great start.
So my question is, do you know of any other games that deserve a call out for already having this? Games that might need this (character fantasy) or just a shout out in support of the idea, feel free to discuss below.
Cheers!
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
...for another Tildes Backlog Burner -- the event where you try out games you've always wanted to play (but haven't yet -- for whatever reason).
The Backlog Burner for November 2024 will officially begin in two days on November 1st.
If you're new to the Backlog Burner, check out our previous events to get an idea of what's going on:
Backlog Bingo is a backbone of this event, so it's of course back and better than ever! u/Wes has made some new tweaks to his amazing site, and we've also further developed our category sets.
For this event, you can choose between two different official Bingo lists:
If you participated last time, clear your old card and start fresh with a new one. If you're new to the event, simply go to the Backlog Bingo site to generate your card.
If you are interested in participating in the Backlog Burner, please comment in this topic. Anyone commenting/replying here will automatically be added to a notification list for the Backlog Burner, unless you specify otherwise.
Technically the event starts in two days, so you have time to roll your cards (if you're playing Bingo) and plan out what you'd like to play for the month. That said, if you're eager to jump right in, and start early, I certainly won't stop you!
Let's get ready to burn through these backlogs!
Your "backlog" is all those games you've been meaning to play or get around to, but never have yet. This event is an attempt to get us to collectively dig into that treasure trove of experiences, scratch some long-standing itches, and knock a few titles off our to-play lists.
It runs every May and November. New discussion topics will go up once a week during those months.
You do not need to sign up in advance -- the topics are open to all. If you would like to be included in the notification list, comment in this topic to be added.
That's it!
Optionally: you can play Backlog Bingo which is a fun way of cutting down the choices you have to make and playing games you might not have normally selected on your own.
Nope! Not at all.
There aren't really any requirements for the event so much as this is an incentive to get us to play games we've been avoiding starting up, for whatever reason. Play as much or as little as you like of a given game.
Try out dozens for ten minutes each or dive into one for 40 hours. There's no wrong way to participate!
Yes! Each discussion thread stays live for a full week, so feel free to make multiple comments in the topic as you play different games. This isn't considered noise -- it's considered valuable participation in the event!
Important: All data for your Backlog Bingo card is stored on your device, not the server. Clearing your browser data will irrecoverably delete your card.
If you've already created a card and wish to start over, click the Edit Rules button in the header to access your card settings. Then click the Reset button, and confirm the prompt. This will irrevocably delete your present card, allowing you to start fresh.
All data is stored by your browser in local storage. There are no accounts, and nothing is sent to the server, so it's privacy-friendly by design. This does mean that you are responsible for not deleting any browser data on wescook.ca, either manually or through automatic cleanups performed on browser close.
Backlog Bingo is open-source, and licensed permissively under MIT.
In Standard Mode, each square on the bingo card corresponds with one single game. Duplicate games cannot be entered into different squares. A winning card would have a row of five different games that each filled in one square.
In Golf Mode, duplicates are not only allowed -- they are encouraged! The purpose of Golf mode is to try to find a single game that will fill multiple categories at the same time. For example: Stardew Valley might fulfill You got it on sale, A solo-dev project, and Has romanceable characters all at the same time. A winning card would have all twenty five squares filled, but possibly only six or seven different games.
That is the "wildcard" or "free space."
In Standard Mode, there are no requirements to fill it. You can choose any game you want! Anything goes!
In Golf Mode, it does not need to be filled. Because Golf is all about stacking up categories on a single game, any game used in Golf would fill it automatically, meaning it has no real function. As such, the square will be pre-filled for you if you play in Golf mode.
Absolutely! The Backlog Bingo app reads in simple JSON files which define the available categories. We've created a couple prebuilt lists for this event, but you're free to tweak our categories, or create completely new ones. You could even use them for books, anime, movies, recipes -- anything!
If you are interested in learning more, you can find documentation on the wiki, and use an example JSON category file. You can also ask for help in the topic!
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Hello,
I am struggling with a relatively useless personal issue, I am finding it very hard to play the aforementioned game mentioned in the post. My close friend has this heralded as his favorite game ever (tied with Majoras Mask) and possible one of the best of all time, and since the remake came out he very graciously lent me his copy. I have just gotten past the first major boss (Hooktail I think his name is) and just playing this game feels like a chore.
The combat is very slow, the dialogue is so overly childish, the story is your typical Nintendo fan-fare story. Even the music, which Nintendo does a great job most of the time, I find just average. I find the Rogueport theme music to be overly obnoxious for some reason, and too grating to my ears for a central city/hub which you're visiting a lot.
I really want to know what I am missing out on that makes this game so beloved by people other than pure nostalgia because I just can't see it. I know it's completely fine to not like games, but I feel a game as acclaimed as this should usually be liked by most people, and I think I usually fall into the subset of that lol.
Ironically enough, this is the same friend who introduced me to FromSoftware and I have loved all of their games.
Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!
Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”
Rules:
If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.
All previous Save Point topics
If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.
My general question ... where do you folks go when searching for replacement parts for aging technology, particularly pertaining to game consoles? I've come across iFixit, and of course there's Amazon and eBay as well, but I've been having some difficulty finding a particular part.
My specific issue is, I have an old Dualshock 4 (model CUH-ZDT2U, with PCB/motherboard model JDM-055) that is on the outs. It started experiencing some stick drift, so I took it apart to clean the contacts in the joystick housing to the best of my ability. In doing so, one of my kids managed to get a hold of the controllers' guts and break off the vibration motor wires from the board.
So, after taking the board and chassis to a local Makerspace, I got the wires soldered back onto the board. So far so good! However, the stick drift is still an issue and the vibration connection isn't that great. So now, I'm hoping to find some replacement parts - namely, a replacement board with the chassis and motors included.
One of the main reasons why I'm trying to refit this old controller, rather than replace it outright ... is because my wife bought the controller (and the PS4 it came with) as an anniversary present years ago. I'm the sentimental type and I'm trying to keep as much of this old controller going as I can, Ship-of-Theseus style. In addition, these controllers don't come cheap - $70 seems to be the basement these days for a new, in-box controller.
I've taken a swing at purchasing replacement parts off eBay - however, while the controller models matched, the board models did not. iFixit has the exact parts I need, but they are out of stock and their stock is inconsistent. I found another site - Fasttech.ca - that purports to have the same parts, but looking around online I've found a fair bit of discussion surrounding this site and the fact that it may be less-than-reputable.
Any advice on where else I might be able to look for parts?
Can you even call it microtransactions anymore?
Here's the link to the store page.
I have never bought a cosmetic in any game, ever, but this is absolutely insane to me, especially for World of Warcraft which usually had somewhat measured pricing on their real-money cosmetics (everything has always been below €25 to my knowledge) - that it's fully cosmetic is debatable though, seeing as you now have an auction house and mailbox wherever you are. Not all that game changing to be sure, but it's definitely a small advantage over those that are not rich in money or in-game currency.
There is an argument to be made that it's a way to influence the economy in the game - another gold-sink to reduce the huge wealth gap between players (it will cost nearly two million gold to reach the Battle.net balance required). However, two million gold is not that much.
I'm not quite dusting off my pitchfork over it, mind you, but still. And I just wanted to share to maybe foster some quality discussion on tildes about microtransactions maybe?
Thanks for the tags @mycketforvirrad, didn't really know what to put.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
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The server operates on a soft whitelist. Anyone can log in and walk around, but you need a Tildes account to gain build access.
Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!
Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”
Rules:
If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.
All previous Save Point topics
If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.
Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom was one of the best metroidvanias with a retro flavour and an excellent hand-drawn art style and fantastic music of the current console generation, an entry in the Wonder Boy series of games. While completing the game gives you a sequel teaser, it had since been reported a long time ago that the development team at French studio Game Atelier had decided not to go forward with plans for a sequel, citing the overcrowdedness of the market for (2d?) metroidvanias.
I remembered this recently and decided to look up what the studio is working on now. To my surprise, a new game by them has already been announced, and a demo is live on Steam. The game is called Otherskin and is... a Metroid Prime-like? My jaw dropped to the floor when I heard that - these game devs sure know their ambition!
Otherskin is a 3D action platformer metroidvania. You play as a woman who is stranded on an alien world filled with ruins of a bygone alien civilization and are tasked on eliminating the Corruption™ (yes, that's really what it's called). You progress through the game world by absorbing and copying abilities of enemies you defeat - I'm thinking Kirby or Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. Or, well, any other kind of metroidvania game. The major difference between this game and Metroid Prime is the 3rd person perspective.
Grappling hook, wave beam, bombs, your favourites return. It's not all copy-cat though. The very first ability you acquire is a super-jump that makes you fly very high into the air. The movement in the game is great and the environments range from dark, corrupted and gloomy to bright and wonderful. The combat feels dynamic - while you're using your super-jump ability, you can briefly slow down time to shoot at enemies while falling. You can also insta-switch between different weapons with the mouse wheel.
I'm curious to see how the final game will turn out. The demo has you lose your copy abilities after returning to the hub, for you to have to collect them again from the same enemy in the next level - although this likely doesn't apply to weapon upgrades, only copy abilities like the super-jump and grappling beam. I'm also perplexed that it is a metroidvania game without a map system. Maybe we will see one in the full game? It certainly has me intrigued and looking forward to more.
A while back I asked for some advice about running a haunted Beaver Dam game, and a few people popped up to ask why I wasn't trying out a narrative RPG system instead of using classic DnD.
Well, you got me. After some discussion (particularly about the painful amount of time to conduct a high level fight in 5e), we're going to try out the Dungeon World system instead. I've never run a TTRPG like this, and I'm rapidly working through the rulebook to figure it out. But rules only take you so far, there's a lot of learning that only comes with experience.
So for those of you with experience, I ask you: What do you wish you would have known before running a narrative TTRPG?
In some games like Terraria or Horizon Forbidden West, you can have a "fake" set of armor on top of your "real" set of armor. The "fake" set defines how your character looks, while the "real" set determines your stats. This isn't a common thing in a lot of games, but in basically any game with different outfits with stats, I hear this being a requested feature. Whenever someone mentions this feature in a comment, people will chime in that it's cool and they wish [insert game here] would add it. The Horizon devs being one example of a studio who heard about this from the community of their first game, Zero Dawn, and added it to the sequel.
I really don't like this, even having it available as an option for single player games. Let me explain...
I think it really ruins the whole point of stat changing equipment in games. A big part of video games with customizable equipment and builds is designing a build and a character appearance that you like. Do you want to be slow with powerful attacks? Do you want to be fast with weak attacks? Do you want balance?
I'd argue that making a set that looks good while balancing the stats is another one of these things that adds to meaningful character creation decisions. Do you take the insane armor, or the really decent armor with worse stats that looks cool? Find a cool hat the character you're roleplaying as totally would wear? Oh, it has worse stats than the helmet you were using... But it weighs less! Maybe you can use a heavier chest plate to compensate for the stats you lost?
This also makes armor that both looks cool and has great stats into very valuable items that players want to get.
Of course for PvP games, having the type of armor that a player has on instantly give away their power level is important. On a Minecraft server, if you see two hostile players, one has leather armor, and the other has full netherite, you know the netherite guy is going to have better gear.
You might think this only matters for PvP games, but not allowing this mechanic in mostly single player games also adds a lot to the game, since you'll likely either see friends play the game or watch videos of other people playing the game. Each armor being intrinsically linked to certain stats creates a link between what you know that armor does and what kind of player would use that armor. In Elden Ring (which also has PvP, but bear with me), if you see someone wearing Bull Goat (the heaviest armor with the best stats), or wearing nothing but a jar on their head (to get worse defense but faster dodge rolls and some buffs to consumable throwing items), that tells you a lot about their play style just looking at their character's appearance. If both of these people could wear whatever armor they wanted and make the functional armor invisible, I would have no idea what build they had.
Using armor that looks good but has bad stats can be a fun flex to show you're good at the game, and choosing to have terrible fashion in exchange for stats is hilarious, as per this ProZD skit. That concept is a fun part of gaming culture I wouldn't want to see destroyed.
I'm currently building a basic MUD as a (very productive so far) learning exercise.
Obviously MUDs have the same mix of appeals as other RPGs do: exploration, progression, combat, PvP, online community etc.. But what in your experience is the key mechanic the game needs to nail to keep you coming back? When a MUD clicks with you, what itch is it scratching?
All examples welcome, even those that are not MUDs but may be applicable to MUDs.
Based on the previous topic, it looks like there are a few of us currently playing through this. I felt like we could use a dedicated topic on Tildes given that FIFTY different games yields quite the discussion surface area.
Use this topic to talk about any and all things UFO 50!
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The server operates on a soft whitelist. Anyone can log in and walk around, but you need a Tildes account to gain build access.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.