skulblaka

Learned about this for the first time earlier today watching Mortismal’s Divinity recap videos lol

I did know about Divine Divinity (which, fun fact, canonically features Lucian the Divine as your player character) but Dragon Commander completely missed my radar.

Man I really want to get into Mechwarrior but I’m just so ridiculously bad at the game and I have no idea how to get better.

I’ve tried to begin the MW5 campaign three times now and I’ve been priced out of existing every time, I take way too much damage and my repair bills vastly outstrip my income. Combine with having to spend hundreds of thousands of credits in travel fees to get anywhere and I’m very quickly even more broke than I started.

Just for kicks the other day I set up an Instant Action for testing purposes and I brought two Atlases, a Highlander and an Archer to some random backwater mid-difficulty mission and still barely limped out of there alive, with the Highlander and one of the Atlases downed. That’s just shameful.

Fuck that, when I bought Chrono Trigger for the SNES, I owned that game. I still own that game. Nintendo has not broken into my home to rescind my license to a physical cartridge that I purchased.

They also have the highest incidence of fire based death of any car of all time, including the Ford Pinto, which was best known for catching fire.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/on-the-road/fiery-death-trap-most-dangerous-car-killing-its-passengers/news-story/ab364eb2e1ad2b569e367664f08aa705

Hey I was that weirdo that down voted this, and I assure you it was by accident and I changed it now. I actually never got the chance to play Apocalypse and hot damn, I had no idea it was a whole sequel, I thought it was an expanded release in the same vein as a bunch of the Persona games have (P3->FES, P4->Golden, P5->Royal).

So, amending my statement, play SMTIV and then play Apoc.

Also, excuse me, I have some shopping I need to do.

but it would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.

So we can pretty much bank on it definitely happening, got it.

Leave Pokémon behind, play some Shin Megami Tensei, thank me later.

There’s a pipeline of former Pokémon fans thinking “Huh, these games have kind of gone to crap, I wish I had this same monster-collector style game but with a real plot and interesting characters” and then SMTIV falls from the sky like manna from heaven unto them.

I don’t think IV is actually the best SMT game, I think that honor goes to Nocturne - which is available on the Switch - but SMTIV is a good showing of the series that is available for 3DS. If you have the option, pick up SMTIV-Apocalypse, it’s an expanded “GOTY-style” re-release of IV, but the base game is also fine.

Um, there is more than one type of anticompetitive practice? Amazon uses predatory pricing to drive companies out of business, Microsoft uses tying to sell Teams, Google uses self-preferencing for their own services in search results, Facebook acquired Instagram rather than compete with them, etc.

None of which are related to Steam nor has Steam done anything resembling any of these examples to my knowledge.

One of Valve’s favorite anticompetitive cudgels is requiring “most favored nation” clauses in their contracts, prohibiting devs from selling for less on other storefronts (which Amazon also has used).

Valve prohibits people from selling steam keys for less on other storefronts which I think is perfectly reasonable. You can list your game on Steam for $20 and distribute it on Itch for $5 or even free and Steam has zero problem with this, so long as you aren’t distributing steam keys via that storefront. This is to try and prevent a developer from leveraging Steam for advertisement purposes but making all their actual sales off-platform.

Can you describe where Steam has done anything even approaching that, ever?

EA and Activision stores didn’t fail because Steam bought them out and bullied them out of the market, they failed because they were trash products. Steam doesn’t buy “default placement” in anything. They just have a good product that people want to use over alternatives.

Point out a situation in which Steam has acted anti-competitive and I might agree that you have a point, but I can’t think of any situations to call out here.

You can sell your game for different prices on different platforms, you just can’t sell steam keys that way. If you purchase a game on Itch and it gives you a steam key, that’s still a steam purchase and is subject to this restriction. If you purchase a game on Itch and it hands you an installer then you can buy that game at whatever price they want to sell it at.

Failing to make a product that doesn’t suck shit does not make a monopoly for your competitor.

In fact, Steam is de facto not a monopoly because of the very existence of GOG. EA and Activision tried to break in to this arena but failed to provide a product that actually switched people off of steam, because they failed to provide a comparable experience to steam. GOG did, and they’re doing fine.

Huh, that could be exactly it, actually. Experimental is usually my default Proton fork that I try first. Makes sense that it would catch frequent updates and then invalidate the cache. I’ll try this again with GE-Proton and report back later if I remember to.

Any idea why this happens constantly without driver updates?

I ended up turning off shader-preprocessing because some games would sit and cook shaders for 10 minutes every time I boot them up, update or no.

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Whoa, back up there. Nobody was talking about CSAM until you brought it up.

Repacks are sourced from the scene, and the scene cracks video games. The fact that you get free video games out of it is a side effect.

Could you explain what you mean by this? Are the cracks just done for fun / for clout? I do admit I have wondered what keeps people so reliably cracking new games. Seems like a thankless job.

Huh. Did that come with an update? I remember trying to play HZD when I first got my steam deck and it consistently hit about 14fps during combat at the lowest settings. Completely unplayable. I just uninstalled it and didn’t try again, but maybe I should now.

The oligarchs use VPNs to make their corporations function. They won’t be made illegal. Blanket banning all VPNs in America leads to an instant grinding halt of all commerce.

Totally understandable because I feel exactly the same way about Morrowind. Rock on brother.