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7 votes
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Investigation: Who’s telling the truth about Disco Elysium?
16 votes -
THQ Nordic wants Remedy to change its mind about a digital-only release for Alan Wake II
5 votes -
Magnus Carlsen triumphs in Superbet Poland Rapid & Blitz 2023 after thrilling final round against Jan-Krzysztof Duda
6 votes -
What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
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.
10 votes -
Tildes Pop-Up Game Event: Demo Disc Days
Pop-Up Event: Demo Disc Days Today we are going to take a trip back to the 90s, when the best way to try out new games was to use a now-antiquated piece of magical circular plastic that you might...
Pop-Up Event: Demo Disc Days
Today we are going to take a trip back to the 90s, when the best way to try out new games was to use a now-antiquated piece of magical circular plastic that you might have gotten along with your subscription to something like PC Gamer, PlayStation Underground, or the Official Sega Dreamcast Magazine.
The demo disc offered gamers a small taste of a variety of different games, letting you try out the beginning levels of lots of different titles in hopes that you'd find ones you like and buy the full games.
One of the most iconic demo discs actually came with the PlayStation console itself, and featured its games laid out in a grid. This is the format we'll be exploring in this pop-up: it's our taste of the 90s, but with the games of today or yesterday or ten years ago.
Community Task: Together, we will create our own modern demo disc by filling in cells in the grid below. To fill in a cell, you must "demo" a game, which consists of:
- playing the beginning of a game,
- that you have never played before,
- for at least 30 minutes.
Choose an unfilled category below, find a game to demo that fits it, and report back here with your thoughts once you've done so! Once you successfully demo a game, it gets put into that slot.
At the end of the pop-up, we will have what may very well be the first demo disc of the 2020s featuring a spread of 42 games across multiple styles and genres!
Arcade RPG Strategy Puzzle Racing Platformer Simulation Casual (casual arcade) (casual rpg) 112 Operator Tricky Towers Tanuki Sunset Lunistice shapez Colorful Chippy (colorful rpg) (colorful strategy) Can of Wormholes You Suck at Parking (colorful platformer) Stacklands Story Rich (story rich arcade) (story rich rpg) (story rich strategy) Strange Horticulture (story rich racing) (Reserved) Lakeburg Legacies Retro Gunlocked (retro rpg) (retro strategy) Zombie Night Terror Vecter (retro platformer) (retro simulation) Dark (dark arcade) (dark rpg) Ring of Pain The Room Three (dark racing) (dark platformer) (dark simulation) Great Soundtrack (great soundtrack arcade) (great soundtrack rpg) (great soundtrack strategy) (great soundtrack puzzle) (great soundtrack racing) (great soundtrack platformer) X4: Foundations
Additional Info: The styles and genres have been taken from among the list of Steam's most popular tags (with a slight preference for things that give a more 90s feel). You can use Steam's search tool or Steam's library filtering to find games that fit two tags simultaneously.
If you don't use Steam, that's fine too! A game doesn't have to be "officially" tagged to fit its category. If you feel the game fits, then go for it -- no matter what platform you're playing it on. PC games are fine; console games are fine; emulated games are fine; web games are fine; phone games are fine. Any and all games are welcome on our demo disc!
Also, the game does not have to be a modern game -- just new to you. If the game is playable today and can be demoed, then it works for our demo disc!
Finally, it is fine to demo more than one game for the event. In fact, please do! We’ve got a lot of slots to fill!
Uh, what is this exactly?
It's a temporary event aimed at getting members of the Tildes community to individually participate in something built around a common theme or goal.
Check out the previous Pop-Ups for other examples:
Ludonostalgia! for ~games
Feelin' 22 for ~music
Twenty-Twenty Vision for ~movies13 votes -
I beat Breath of the Wild 100% in a single day
5 votes -
Director’s take – reflecting on the future of Overwatch 2
9 votes -
Planet Of Lana review: A gorgeous sci-fi tale that shoots for the stars …and just about gets there
7 votes -
MyHouse.WAD - Inside Doom's most terrifying mod
19 votes -
How I designed Fruit Ninja
9 votes -
The history of Halo 2 world records
7 votes -
What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
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.
13 votes -
What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
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.
7 votes -
Bungie tracks down another Destiny 2 cheat maker – Daniel Larsen was one of the pseudonymous developers involved in last year's Elite Boss Tech lawsuit
5 votes -
Crusader Kings III: Tours & Tournaments | Release trailer
3 votes -
Miasma Chronicles wants to be bigger and better than Mutant Year Zero – I think it's going to do it
3 votes -
Does adding story to open world survival games work well? An agonising deep-dive into the strange game that is The Forest.
5 votes -
Secret room inside popular game contains independent journalism forbidden in Russia
10 votes -
Townscaper and the design of cities
5 votes -
Darkest Dungeon II | Launch trailer
4 votes -
Kena: Bridge of Spirits
5 votes -
Getting Over It's biggest barrier was finally broken
4 votes -
Starbreeze Studios and Prime Matter have dropped another teaser trailer for cooperative heist sim sequel Payday 3
3 votes -
What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
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.
16 votes -
Amnesia: The Bunker | Gameplay demo
4 votes -
Planet of Lana | Release date trailer
3 votes -
Finnish newspaper hides Ukraine news reports for Russians – secret room in first-person shooter game Counter-Strike to bypass Russian censorship
7 votes -
What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
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.
8 votes -
Ding Liren wins 2023 FIDE World Championship in rapid tiebreak
5 votes -
Review: Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is the best Star Wars game since Knights of the Old Republic
6 votes -
What even is an MMORPG?
4 votes -
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon | Official gameplay reveal and release date trailer
7 votes -
Microsoft's $68.7bn (£55bn) deal to buy US video game company Activision Blizzard has been blocked in the UK by the Competition and Markets Authority
13 votes -
Magic publishers sent Pinkerton agents to a YouTuber’s house to retrieve leaked cards
22 votes -
Stellaris: Galactic Paragons expansion will give council leaders tons more personality on May 9th
7 votes -
XKCD 2765: Escape Speed
14 votes -
World Chess Championship game 8: More drama, Ding Liren misses big chance
3 votes -
What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
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.
10 votes -
Kenyan player expelled after pretending to be a woman to win lucrative prize
7 votes -
Steam Eastern Games Fest
5 votes -
The Gostok (interactive fiction)
5 votes -
World Chess Championship 2023 thread - Ian Nepomniachtchi vs Ding Liren
Anyone else following the world chess championship? Background info (feel free to skip if you're already familiar with this): After reigning champion and world #1 Magnus Carlsen declined to defend...
Anyone else following the world chess championship?
Background info (feel free to skip if you're already familiar with this):
After reigning champion and world #1 Magnus Carlsen declined to defend his title, the winner of the Candidates tournament 2022, Russia's Ian Nepomniachtchi (world #2), faces the second place finisher in the Candidates, China's Ding Liren (world #3). The championship match takes place over 14 games from April 9-April 30 in Astana, Kazakhstan. As of today, April 13, the score is even at 2-2 after 4 games.
Ian Nepomniachtchi (aka "Nepo") won the Candidates tournament in 2020-21, which was split in two due to covid. He proceeded to challenge Magnus Carlsen for the title in late 2021. Both players performed with computer-like precision for the first five games. Game six became the turning point, when Nepo made a serious blunder which allowed Carlsen to eventually convert the game to a win in what would turn out to be the longest game in world championship history, lasting more than 7 hours and 136 moves. After this grueling loss, Nepo's play seemingly collapsed, allowing Carlsen to take a comfortable win with games to spare.
However, Nepomniachtchi would bounce back to win his second Candidates tournament in a row in 2022. When it became clear that Carlsen would not defend his title, the runner-up of that tournament, Ding Liren, became the second player to compete for the title.
Ding has been a top 5 player for years, with 2018-2019 being his best period yet, when he reached world #2 with well over 2800 Elo, and was undefeated for 100 games of classical chess. This is his first appearance in a world championship final, and also a first for China as a nation.
Russia, of course, has a long history of world champions, dominating the chess world for most of the 20th century. Nepomniachtchi, who is a critic of the invasion of Ukraine, competes under a neutral FIDE flag in this match.
This is only the third time the reigning champion has not defended his title since the first world championship in 1886. Bobby Fischer famously disagreed with the match regulations proposed by FIDE, chess' international governing body, and refused to defend his title in 1975. He subsequently retired from competitive chess and didn't re-emerge until the 1990s. The other instance was Alekhine in 1948 -- he had died two years earlier. (There was also a time in the 1990s when the reigning champion, Garry Kasparov, broke with FIDE and organized his own world championship, but I won't get into that complicated story here.) This is the first time a world champion has continued to play competitive chess while refusing to defend their title.
Nepomniachtchi comes into the match ranked as the world #2 (2795 Elo) while Ding is #3 (2788). The abdicated king of chess, Magnus Carlsen, remains #1 (2853).
How to watch
If you want to watch live, the time zone is a bit unfavorable to European and American viewers, as the games start at 3PM Astana time (11 AM Central European summer time, 2 AM Pacific). You can follow the games without commentary here: lichess chess24 chess.com. There's several streams with grandmaster commentary available. FIDE has an official broadcast, but my favorite is chess.com's coverage, which features commentary by GMs Anish Giri, Daniel Naroditsky and David Howell.
For live computer analysis that's stronger than what you can (likely) get from running a local instance of Stockfish on your own computer, check out Sesse (which is just Stockfish running on a decently beefy server setup).
If you want shorter after-the-fact recaps, there are several Youtube channels catering to differing levels of chess skill, including:
- Powerplaychess (GM Daniel King)
- FIDE (GM Daniil Dubov)
- Gothamchess (IM Levy Rozman)
- Agadmator
- Chessnetwork
And probably at least a half-dozen more.
Who's your favorite to win it all? Does the fact that the clearly best player in the world refused to compete make the whole thing uninteresting to you? Will Nepo crumble again like he did against Carlsen, or will Ding's inexperience with world championship matches be his undoing?
6 votes -
WW1 horror Amnesia: The Bunker delayed again, but only by a week – now due to release for PC on 23rd May
5 votes -
We asked the Olympics why their official esports are so weird
19 votes -
What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
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.
6 votes -
freeciv21 (a civilization like strategy game and a fork of freeciv migrated to C++) releases first stable release 3.0
10 votes -
Blinks are useful in VR, but triggering blinks is tricky
11 votes -
Microsoft crackdown disables emulators downloaded to Xbox consoles
7 votes -
The games I wish I never replayed
9 votes