Best summary I can give: 3D-movement fighting game, very much based around having three heights of attack, and a few ways you can guard moves based on their height, as well as react to your opponent’s guard.

It’s mostly known for sexualized characters, some of which are visually on the “younger” side, and a very complex, DLC-driven, gacha-based method of unlocking other costumes for its roster. It shares a universe with the Ninja Gaiden games, so a few of those characters like Ryu Hayabusa appear as more than just cameos.

I’ve been at risk for carpal tunnel before, which is why I primarily use a keyboard.

…on a GUI.

Linux is great for a lot of things but so many open-source apps are terrible about giving you a visual interface for something, and then letting you use your keyboard to navigate it. Granted, Windows has steadily enshittified its lead on that front as well.

I’m imagining getting a headshot of Kasumi, upon which she indignantly says “Hey! My breasts are down here.”

I don’t think it’s a full gate train, since it’s a game that defined my early childhood, but Half-Life 2 had more flaws than I’d initially admit.

Some I’d the things you need to pick up on to enjoy the levels are not readily apparent in the moment. The gravity gun obscures your view, leading many people to get objects trapped against bits and bobs. They only introduced the intelligent save system in Episode 2, meaning many players get stuck just before a big fight at 20 hp.

The story, while often environmental, relies very much on Lost-style mysterious elements; not just relating to the G-man but the resistance’s ready acceptance of Gordon’s reappearance. Most crucially, what little further development we’ve gotten on it suggests Valve never really had concrete ideas for a conclusion, or even an answer for people’s burning questions.

I’m going out with a girl who confesses she always looks up to me and always feels at ease around me, even when I’m not saying anything.

Then, once I’ve finished playing that gacha game, I’ll drink a beer and go to bed.

Futro Truck Simulator

For honesty, recent example from me:

I bought about a dozen epub comics. They were formatted with a hardcoded 600x450 width or so, maybe expecting a particular device. Having recently worked with epubs to format my own (word) book, I knew the format, and basically wanted to use Python standard library tools to unzip them, rip out some useless sizing/styling code (from hundreds of XHTML files), and zip them back up.

I hadn’t used Python professionally in a few years, so this was an annoying back and forth to work out the process and remind myself of syntax, especially considering this was something I was just doing for a few of my own books. Instead, taking every important piece of this puzzle/process I’d researched, I instead described the problem to ChatGPT, specifically pointing it to the Python standard libraries I wanted to use. It gave me a one-page program that was mostly complete and I only needed to change in a few areas.

I don’t think I’d ever pay money to AIs for a variety of reasons. I take that assistance as it comes, and could live without it.

Somehow height didn’t work for me. It might be attractiveness; part of me also suspects something about the sum image makes me seem a little bit intimidating to people.

It did come in handy one time when a racist drunk guy was harassing a poor Korean commuter on the subway. It’s hard to quantify the ways being scary/intimidating is good for you, as opposed to the inverse.

Most of my Discord usage is text-based or sharing images, and I tend to have casual presence in many of them at once, due to varying interest groups. As far back as I’ve known, those servers haven’t focused much on that.

The Last of Us Pt 2 Episode 1 (and an announcement for its Remaster in one year)

I might consider the facial verification thing if someone fulfills a security audit that both verifies the photo is never sent, encrypted or not, and it does not stay on the device’s drive.

But yeah, part of me hopes some number of privacy focused companies will just abandon business in these locations and claim “It’s only a matter of time before they reverse course for security failures, we will just wait until then.”

Though Highgiard probably deserves to be a failure, I have noticed these snap judgments too, and don’t often enjoy them.

I even see them the other way. A crowd knows a game for its notoriety, and they worship the amazing payoff at 30 hours. But, in the face of that positivity, no one is making good observations about how 15 of those hours were useless padding and the game’s main mechanics are severely flawed.

That’s not an observation that should retroactively pull down the score of a game that left impacts on people though. Analyzing flaws can help us work out how to improve sequels, or even patch games to help people dive further into them.

Alright, here’s a hot take:

I’m 7 hours into Clair Obscur. It’s intrigued me a little, and I know it has good reviews for excellent story, but nothing I’ve seen has wowed me. Should I give it a negative review?

If you want nostalgia for a remake of a game that came out close to the year 2000, I would instead recommend Trails in the Sky First Chapter. Unlike the dumb time travel ghost shenanigans, it’s actually a remake of an old JRPG. It tunes up battle mechanics, but also respects what worked in the first game.

Some games that came to mind for this thread were:

• Another Crab’s Treasure, a soulslike with some fun imagery, but also a great storyline about the poisons of late-stage capitalism
• Mouthwashing, the famous horror game where the monster is machismo and warped senses of responsibility
• J J Macfeld and the Island of Memories, also a pretty brutal game about a certain kind of social acceptance (I got this one wrong even late-game, which made its message all the better)
• Papers Please, giving you a highlight of the xenophobia developed at the border of nations in conflict
• Celeste, promoting self-acceptance through difficult platforming challenges

I have a novel planned about this. Basically, zombie apocalypse starts. People get infected, the lights go out in major cities and they lose radio contact, and the troupe of heroes, lead by a gritty survivalist, set down harsh rules for their camp to survive as long as they can.

Several months later after some harsh decisions and a few deaths, the radio hums to life again. Turns out, the city’s main antenna was damaged, and there was risk in fixing it. But, with some danger, life has proceeded as normal there; and they’re making steady breakthroughs on a cure for the infection. The government is active, finding who to help, and little of the “Brutal, tough decisions” of the survivor crowd were necessary.

Not much to add, but this was true from the beginning for me. I have “Roguelike” excluded from my Steam searches because around the time Hades got popular it was a source of so much slop where you’d spend most of your hours in the first two levels. Many of those games I hated were highly regarded.

This has been a common sentiment, enough that I’ve thought of making a video about it.

Running a desktop OS, catering to everything people need from their PC, from printing to fringe drivers to VPNs to package management, is a big task. I have long doubted that Valve is personally interested in taking on that task. They write SteamOS for the deck and machine, since their only real responsibility is playing games. People who try to install that OS for other things will see some Flatpak friction - but that’s fine, it wasn’t built for that.

I’d strongly recommend looking at some other distributions with broader group support. My recommendation is CachyOS. Bazzite has worked great for others, but as a general desktop user I sort of bounced off of it - installing some unusual apps ended up getting a lot of friction against its emulation layers. I believe both are based off the same sort of origins as SteamOS, so that may be the safest thing.

It maybe used to be more true, but these days even when someone posts a decent guide on de-bloating Windows, it can A) Miss something critical, leaving spyware telemetry running, or B) Become out of date one month later when a Windows Update manually re-enables all the things you turned off.

I would’ve appreciated it when I was on Windows, but now? I’m kind of just happy not to be constantly fighting my OS on things, even if I do get compatibility annoyances.

I mean by that logic, stop using Steam. It’s (marginally) possible for a company to get big, and not do terrible things. Just keep an eye on them and don’t become fully reliant on them.