skulblaka
@skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Stardew Valley dethrones Valve classic as Steam’s top-rated game 17 hours ago:
I buy things in early access for just such a reason. If it looks like something I’ll like, I’ll buy it early to support development. If it’s great then great. If it falls through then I’m out a bad investment of like, $10.
I’ve got probably a hundred indie games in my library that I’ve supported in exactly such a fashion, from raw pre-alpha to 1.0 release to post-release content update or dlc. They aren’t all winners. But many of them were worth the cost of investment and then some.
- Comment on Stardew Valley dethrones Valve classic as Steam’s top-rated game 1 day ago:
Less AAA trash fires and better access to actual passion projects because they aren’t being drowned in a sea of mediocrity?
This is an absolute win on all sides
- Comment on Lo-Fi Games know you've spent a billion hours with Kenshi, so they're working on making the sequel's discoveries even less predictable 2 days ago:
From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s basically a sandbox. Imagine if F:NV had no main quest but allowed you to create your own faction. You’re just unleashed onto the wasteland to do whatever and let everyone else respond to it.
That is to say, much of the fun comes from building drug running bandit empires.
- Comment on Can you guess, chat? 3 days ago:
- Comment on My son got Nikes so he doesn't get teased. 3 days ago:
Kids do.
Their problems are smaller than us adults’, but they feel those problems with the same intensity we do. Being ostracized from your social group is a big problem even for adults. It’s worse for kids.
And kids, being kids, will bandwagon the hell out of anything. If somebody clowns on your shoes every day, give it a week and half the school will be doing it. Give it a year and you’re “that guy with the shoes”.
Is your brand of shoes important in the long term? No, not at all. Your social status in high school also, largely, doesn’t matter in the long term. But “the long term” is difficult to keep your eye on when you’re looking at 4-8 years of pointless bullying in your future.
All this to say - yeah I think this is pretty dumb, but it’s important to the people who are living it. And something that’s important to a child should also be important to their parents, in my opinion. I was the kid with the ratty shoes and the hand-me-downs. That stuff can really do some permanent damage to a kid’s psyche.
Does this mean that every middle schooler needs to have a fresh set of Jordan’s and a fitted suit every year? No, of course not. But if I can spend an extra $50 once every two years to make my son happy then why wouldn’t I?
- Comment on Welcome to petty lane 5 days ago:
You ever tried to pull over an entire freeway full of cars at once?
- Comment on Yep, I actually own 7,255 games on Steam. I’ve played 23% of my library. I regret nothing. 1 week ago:
[…] because they don’t allow you to run older versions of games.
They do if the dev makes it available, I’m looking at four different versions of Terraria in the beta menu right now that stretch back four major versions. I’m pretty sure a couple games in my library somewhere have their entire update history in there, though I can’t think of one to name off the top of my head right now, that’s not a feature I use very often.
This is not true of all games, but it could be, either directly by game devs without Valve even having to care, or via pressure by Valve by just making older versions available whether the devs want it or not. I think the latter option is probably the better move, but there’s technically nothing stopping the former other than the game devs themselves.
There’s also a valid argument that making downpatching very easy would be a huge boon to piracy. This is a reasonable talking point no matter which side of that fence you sit on. It would also probably benefit modding as well, which I think is a more objective good but some game developers or more likely publishers would probably disagree.
- Comment on Yep, I actually own 7,255 games on Steam. I’ve played 23% of my library. I regret nothing. 1 week ago:
Family share is actually great for this now.
It used to be that if anyone in the group was playing any game it would lock you out of playing anything else on the main account without kicking them off.
But they eased up on it now so you can both play at the same time as long as you aren’t playing the same game at the same time.
So just make a burner account for you or for your kids and family share the library to it and now you don’t even have to go offline unless everyone in the house wants to play BG3 simultaneously.
- Comment on Elden ring night reign single player 1 week ago:
Regular enemies fall over like wet tissue, yeah.
Big boss fights in particular (and some of those in particular, in particular, looking at you Maris and/or Gnoster) often have either a gigantic AoE attack that is very difficult to dodge when you’re the only source of aggro, or else charge across the entire arena after every attack and have you spend half an hour in the fight, 27 minutes of which was spent just chasing the guy across the map. Not impossible, but very annoying.
But 90% of what makes coop easier in my opinion is just having a spare body around that can pull aggro so you can heal. Elden Ring base bosses were designed around being able to be beaten solo so they usually have big wide windows where you can get a breather if you need it. Nightreign bosses have much less of that because they expect you to be running 3 deep. Nerfing their defenses helps with the solo DPS race but it doesn’t really solve the problem that these fights were designed from the ground up for a team who is able to rotate aggro. Nightreign bosses were designed with a sort of raid-boss mentality.
I think if this game were going to be appropriately balanced for single player they would need to go in and edit a lot of the main bosses’ movesets. But that was never part of Nightreign’s design philosophy and trying to shoehorn it in now isn’t doing them any favors in my opinion. This is the equivalent of a World of Warcraft player complaining that they can’t solo all the endgame raid bosses. Sure, you can’t. They weren’t designed to be fought solo. We could try to nerf them down to the point that you can fight them solo, but then it’s no longer a raid boss, you’ve lost the essence of why people wanted to come to this fight in the first place.
Also, are the enemies designed for multiplayer, except in scaling? Everything I’ve seen looks like standard Fromsoft stuff, no weird abilities that just fuck over solo players.
Compare base game Morgott and Nightreign Morgott and I think you’ll see what I mean here. Boss enemies are much more cracked out with longer combos and shorter downtime than in Elden Ring proper, because the developers expect you to be trading aggro with your teammates to give yourself a heal break.
- Comment on Elden ring night reign single player 1 week ago:
I’ve played quite a lot of Nightreign.
In co-op you have fully infinite lives, your teammates can pick you up at any time and even if they fail to do so you’ll respawn back at a grace. If you fall over in a boss fight you have an unlimited timer to be picked back up and automatically rez at the end of the fight even if they don’t do it.
In solo you’re fighting a boss intended for 3 players and if you die twice the game is over completely.
Co-op, even with randoms, is much much easier by an order of magnitude. I’m usually a solo player in most games and thought this would be awful for me, it isn’t at all. Map pings are plenty of communication for most matches. It is, however, definitely better with friends on a voice call.
- Comment on I'm doing my part 2 weeks ago:
Sure, maybe. But my yard has frogs and fireflies in it and my neighbors’ don’t. That seems pretty empirical to me.
- Comment on The Elder God 2 weeks ago:
I’ve begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It’s there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, and a lovely day. There’s no mystery, no one asks for money, I don’t have to dress up, and there’s no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to ‘God’ are all answered at about the same 50% rate.
- George Carlin
- Comment on Good job 4 weeks ago:
I’ve been using Fences for like 10 years with roll-up containers. Now that I’ve switched to Linux actually having icons on my desktop again is kind of driving me nuts.
Do you know of an alternative?
- Comment on Existential dread 5 weeks ago:
I have bad news about rodeos
- Comment on what is north? 5 weeks ago:
Well sure, and I get that, but the map we’re looking at clearly has a W-E line marked, presumably on the prime meridian. It’s pretty westerly in that regard which seems like a pretty sensible perspective to me on how to navigate at the south pole.
If you handed me this map and told me to go North I would go to Dronning Maug Land.
- Comment on what is north? 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on How to hold onto a subway pole 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on Amazing. 5 weeks ago:
Lost my job around 2017 and it was real difficult to get a new one in the tech sector without a college degree. I lucked in to the one originally through professional connections. No such luck the next time after I got downsized.
So I ended up working at my local auto parts store to make ends meet in the meantime, and figured out that I actually really like fixing cars. It exercises the same sort of problem solving capacity but the problems you solve are usually a little less arcane. Made a few new connections including a guy who worked at an actual garage, got offered a position at that garage if I wanted it, and the rest is history.
I still dabble in programming as a hobby, but I enjoy working with my hands and the feeling of fixing a physical object is more fulfilling to me than fixing software. So here I stay (for now).
- Comment on Amazing. 1 month ago:
I used to be a programmer and now I fix cars professionally, I feel like half of my professional life has been gazing upon some ancient work of dark magic and cussing loudly because I know I’m about to have to go in.
The line between jank and wizardry is sometimes blurry. The best magic has a little bit of jank in it, and the worst jank is sometimes a little bit magical.
- Comment on *play imagine being sung by random white celeb* 1 month ago:
Therein lies your problem. I can show up for a weekend. I can show up for several weekends, in fact. I can’t sit in a protest for two weeks, because I have a job I need to keep in order to eat food and own a home.
As the economy collapses further more and more people will become available for the sort of protest required of them, because they will no longer have job responsibilities. Or food. Possibly including me.
Until that time, I will be making efforts to keep my job.
- Comment on To join Facebook these days, one must record a video selfie 1 month ago:
I would agree with this if Zuck hadn’t been in the news recently talking about how Meta is desperately filling their userbase with bots, on purpose
- Comment on On trees... 1 month ago:
- Comment on Former Dragon Age writer says Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Baldur's Gate 3 prove 'what's possible when a game is given time to cook' 1 month ago:
I was skeptical about it. I saw a lot of it being compared with Final Fantasy and I’ve been largely pretty disappointed with most Final Fantasy offerings since X.
Picked it up recently on the recommendation of another Lemming and, holy shit, this might be the best RPG I’ve ever played. Hands down, it’s that good. God bless the French. This game is making me feel things I haven’t felt since I was a teenager.
- Comment on They're unstoppable 1 month ago:
It started out as a parody and then just turned into one of the better dubs of the show.
The beginning is rough but it comes into its own quickly.
- Comment on Yabba-dabba-doo! 1 month ago:
What front-end are you using? I’m browsing via Summit and everything appears normal here.
- Comment on butt mogged these zoomers today 1 month ago:
Born to Twerk / World Is A Fuck / Slay em all 2024 / I Am Ass Man / 410,757,864,530 Mogged Zoomers
- Comment on Nintendo Anti-Piracy Policy Device Lock Update Warns of Console Bricks for Unauthorized Use 1 month ago:
Hackintoshes have been around since the 80s and this has never happened.
In 2009-2012 Apple did levy a successful lawsuit against Psystar for doing this in a business environment. But they’ve never enforced bricking a consumer Hackintosh and I expect they never will.
- Comment on How can you tell 23 subgenres of equally shitty growls and screams apart, but not see the most Metal basics? 1 month ago:
- Comment on Elden Ring Nightreign’s devs thought it looked funny to revive teammates by attacking them 1 month ago:
Well it sure as hell didn’t work on my Tarnished in Elden Ring proper
- Comment on Bears give zero fucks If they don't have beans. 1 month ago:
