ampersandrew

@ampersandrew@kbin.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I hate the term "Boomer Shooter"⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think they're called that because they postdate the "looter shooter" that combined Diablo-esque "action RPGs" with FPS games, like Borderlands and Destiny. "Looter" without the "shooter" is a much better name for Diablo's genre anyway, since we have far too many RPGs that are also action games and have nothing in common with Diablo.

  I'm still waiting for the resurgence of the style of shooter that came just after those that inspired this wave of boomer shooter; the likes of Half-Life, Halo, 007, TimeSplitters, and so on. I don't know what subgenre will be assigned to those games when they start to come back around, but that style is also old at this point, so hopefully it doesn't also get assigned the label of "boomer shooter", because then it'll be harder for both audiences to find what they're looking for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God of War (PC) is now available on GOG⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks a bunch. If I get the answers I'm looking for, maybe GOG will be my go-to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God of War (PC) is now available on GOG⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Neat. I was aware of Heroic before, but I haven't heard of this. This does change the equation for me, because now there's a data point that GOG can use to see where my money's going and how they can get more of it. What can you tell me about their refund policy? Are the results on ProtonDB just as reliable for GOG versions as they are for Steam versions of games? Does Heroic pre-compile Vulkan shaders the way that Proton on Steam enforces it? Whatever answers you don't have, I can do some of my own homework, but I'm intrigued now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God of War (PC) is now available on GOG⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you have a source on Heroic getting a cut? I can't find it in their FAQ.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God of War (PC) is now available on GOG⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Setup is annoying, and feedback on whether or not it's working is a bit rough. I've lost data by misconfiguring it before. You have to run a background daemon on a device where battery life matters, so I tend to shut it off when I'm done. Syncing saves with SyncThing requires knowing where those save files are, whereas being built into the launcher client means they already know where those saves are, and that step is already done.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God of War (PC) is now available on GOG⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I want auto updates for my games so close to "always" that you can only tell it's not 100% if you squint a bit. I use Syncthing in other contexts, like syncing emulator saves to and from desktop and Steam Deck, and it's not quite as easy as Steam cloud saves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God of War (PC) is now available on GOG⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, that's the selling point, but I also value automatic updates and cloud saves most of the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God of War (PC) is now available on GOG⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, but I want things like auto updates and cloud saves as officially supported features rather than something they can revoke from Heroic at any time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God of War (PC) is now available on GOG⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They don't even need to invest in its development. They just need to integrate it as a launch option.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God of War (PC) is now available on GOG⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Please give us Galaxy on Linux, GOG, so I can shop with you over Steam.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Final Fantasy XVI PC Version In 'Final Stages Of Optimization,' Expect A Demo Before Release⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The question for me is how much less I'm willing to pay for a game that made me wait past GOTY/spoiler season to play it, because I'm not paying $70 for it anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Multiversus, WB's Smash Clone, Is Coming Back This Spring⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They're called platform fighters. And I doubt this thing has an offline mode, so no thanks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Multiversus, WB's Smash Clone, Is Coming Back This Spring⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It felt more like a retroactive beta, like taking back a move in chess saying your hand was still on the piece when they realized it wasn't working out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of March 10th⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I'm back into Final Fantasy VII, which I've never finished before. I've been playing this game off and on over the past several years, and boy is that a rough way to play it. It's very difficult to remember what I was supposed to be doing next, because that game often gives you one line of dialogue about where to go and then has no in-game reminder of it. As a result, I've got a walkthrough handy to reference whenever I'm lost. I just got to the bottom of the mountain after the snowboarding sequence, and those parts of the game where you're trying to navigate the pre-rendered backgrounds are where you can feel its age the most.

  I'm replaying Horizon: Zero Dawn on PC ahead of the Forbidden West release as a refresher on the story, though I'm not going to play the sequel on day 1. They made me wait several years for it already. They can keep waiting for my money until it gets a sale down to about $40, maybe this summer. I still really enjoy the combat in that game, especially on higher difficulties, but this is a game that still feels like I'd enjoy it more if I could select missions from a menu rather than going through the open world trappings. It may have made these games cheaper to develop at the same time. Oh well.

  I finished The Outer Worlds and its DLC. I highly recommend it. I feel like this game gets overlooked often enough. Did you wish Starfield was better? Play The Outer Worlds. Did you want another Fallout: New Vegas? Play The Outer Worlds.

  Now that I've finished The Outer Worlds, another Obsidian game, I'm back to playing some Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. I only progressed one quest a little bit this past week, but I want to keep pushing forward and finish this game before Avowed comes out.

  Other than the above, still more Skullgirls grind. My pushblock guard cancel skills have atrophied, and I need to run some drills. Also, Peacock zoning, even when I know the answers, is tough to deal with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Physical or Digital?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the last console game I bought was Metroid Dread, but I leaned physical for those as well, because their digital storefronts are a single point of failure. I've witnessed first hand a friend of mine getting frustrated with a now-sunset Xbox 360 store, a problem I could see coming a mile away even when I was in high school when the console launched. On PC, if Steam disappeared tomorrow, I could pirate my entire library. If GOG gives me a week of lead time on their store going away, I could legitimately back up those games.

  Digital is more convenient. I have shelves of old games and consoles that I'm working on culling rather than expanding, especially as someone who tends to move to a new apartment every couple of years. Physical often tends to be a false sense of security in the modern age of day 1 patches and other kinds of server dependency. DRM-free is actually what you want, unless you really, really enjoy the tangible aspect of the game. Outside of nostalgia, I don't think it matters to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good games that have a bad reputation due to unreasonable expectations?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup. But if Microsoft is smart, they'll be examining exactly the reasons why Starfield is what it is and how to improve the next BGS game. That will start with throwing their engine away, because any way you slice it, there's just no saving that thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good games that have a bad reputation due to unreasonable expectations?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, if you feel that that's what set that game up for failure, let me tell you about another RPG going through the exact same cycle: the next Mass Effect. That game isn't getting full attention until after Dragon Age. Its first teaser was 3 years ago, and it's still got at least 3 more years to go, assuming Dragon Age comes out this year.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good games that have a bad reputation due to unreasonable expectations?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How do you get 13 years? It's been 11 years since the pre-rendered teaser trailer, and it was less than that between announcement and release. They also were open about not being full force on development for the game until Witcher 3 finished, and the announcement trailer served as a recruitment tool, something that most studios don't do anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I'm not sure where you're getting that there's a lack of evidence of charity fraud.

  The Moon video quite derisively mocks his and OrdinaryGamers' definition of charity fraud, as coming from the equivalent of "legal Tinder" for matching lawyers and clients, with the distinction being that one is interested in being easy to understand while the other is a definition that determines whether or not someone violated the law. They demonstrably typed in "definition of charity fraud" and went with the top result regardless of its reliability. The Moon video then goes on to point out several ways that the charity could be operating that would make the actions of Open Hand not just legal but ordinary. Jobst has circumstantial evidence for lots of things, and Jirard could be guilty of some of it. Given the scrutiny he's about to be under, we'll know for sure inside of a couple of years. The problem with what Jobst did is that we ought to be sure now, and we're not. If we're going to destroy someone's reputation (and the jobs of the people that he employs in the process) for doing something nefarious, we should know for sure that he actually did it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The first video showed the money hadn't moved. Correct, we can observe that from his research. The second video alleged more money was missing, alleged embezzlement and fraud, because he guessed that some money from a golf tournament wasn't accounted for. The problem here is that he has no hard numbers for how much money, no source to say that something malicious happened and was hidden, etc. Please recognize the difference here.

  The video was phrased with reasonable doubt, while often juxtaposed against a tweet from someone to show why a reasonable person would think so.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  if they're true

  Look, I get your a fan of his, but this "if" is the problem, like I've been saying. The video I linked you, which you aren't interested in watching, only outlines why he may legally want to shut up about Jirard. The video author comes to this conclusion tediously because the law is tedious, but at least he's got some sense of humor. I personally just never want to watch another video of Jobst's because I think he did a poor job of reaching a burden of proof that an actual reporter would need before coming forward with a story. Even not being a journalist myself, I came to the same conclusion as that link the other user sent you. Good on you if you enjoy Jobst's videos, but I hope he holds himself to higher standards in the future.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But these two attempts at defending what Jirard did are genuinely ridiculous.

  Taking issue with how Jobst constructed his videos to attack Jirard is not the same as defending Jirard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Counter-sue? Karl is suing Jirard? When did this happen?

  You're right, miswording on my part. I got lost in the legal threats back and forth. I'll correct it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I'll start you off by saying that his "textbook definition of charity fraud" is not from a textbook, and you'll find that and many other answers in the video I linked you. It's long, but it's chapter coded with timestamps, and while I didn't skip it, the author gives you a sizable chunk on tax law that you can skip if it's too dry.

  Literally nothing in the story I linked had anything to do with anything not in the public record. I was asking about those specific claims to get a sense of what exact statements of Karl's you're talking about. Your answer doesn't give me a ton of confidence that you're being precise in your allegations about Karl.

  As far as I can tell, the only thing he actually proved was that approximately $600k sat in a bank account that most people probably believed was being moved along more judiciously than that. Even that has a reasonable explanation from a legal perspective, and even that answer may not be good enough for the people who donated to Open Hand. As someone who just wanted to know the truth, whatever it was, there was no smoking gun in the next two Jobst videos I watched, and that's the problem. Legally, the video I linked gets into far more about what they shouldn't have said and why Jirard's video was definitely heavily advised and/or drafted by actual lawyers (which even us non-experts suspected, even if we didn't know why) who may have set up Jobst to fall for a trap allowing Jirard to legitimately counter-sue.

  These two and a half videos from Jobst (I got fed up with his "this response is the worst thing ever" video) are the first I've ever watched from him, because it came up in my recommendations, and his reputation around Billy Mitchell and Wata preceded him. What I saw led me to believe that perhaps he just needs to be the guy who exposes people's scummy secrets, but maybe this one actually ended before it got truly juicy, because life isn't always as dramatic as what gets written for television, and then he just had to fill time in extra videos. Either way, I was not a fan of what I saw and decided to never watch a certain YouTuber again based on his videos; it just wasn't Jirard...oh, and ordinary gamers was probably worse than Jobst.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Click the link in my comment. There is room for almost all of what he said to be true, but he didn't prove it, and that's a big problem, because there's also room all of it or nearly all of it to be false. It's why an actual reporter would get someone on the record to confirm a fact, consult with an expert, and be sure that the things they think are damning are actually damning. Meanwhile, he and OrdinaryGamers may have made some legal faux pas in the process of putting up videos that are sensationalist for clicks. Again, this doesn't mean that their allegations are false. But it's so, so important to actually prove it, because if they're wrong, lies travel faster than the truth, and if they ever make a retraction (I doubt it), fewer people will actually hear it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  He can stop making videos on The Completionist unless you really want to see someone cosplaying as a journalist list things he suspects the guy did but can't prove (beyond the first video). There's a reason that an actual journalist would want to get actual numbers behind the golf tournament, for instance, or consult with someone to see if maybe it's totally ordinary for signatures to be missing from documents because they were e-filed, or perhaps make sure that their legal definitions came from something other than just the first hit that they found with a quick Google, but maybe that timeline doesn't work for the World of Tanks promo slot he sold for his video. If the "bait" that he fell for in Jirard's response was as damning as implied, it might be in his best interest to stop making videos about The Completionist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What games do you think are unfairly snubbed when talking about the best games of all time?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Definitions will vary from person to person, and plenty of games in each camp will represent some but not all of their defining characteristics, but you'll see some common themes. Historically, I've also preferred western RPGs by a wide margin, so that might color some of my definitions below. Also, both of these branches in RPGs had the same starting reference of D&D, and then a multi-decade game of whisper down the lane led to them diverging more and more.

  Western RPGs:

  • character creation, choosing from classes that you'll often see represented by other NPCs
  • allocating attribute points, both at character creation and as you level up, that govern other things about your character
  • generally flatter power progression (you might do hundreds more damage at the end of the game than you do at the beginning, but not hundreds of thousands more damage)
  • in attempts to recreate the tabletop experience, will often times allow for outside-the-box solutions to problems besides combat as well as choices that affect the world state

  JRPGs:

  • usually a finite cast of characters that level up more or less only in one way, but you might have a secondary system for them to customize with equipment beyond weapons and armor
  • combat usually doesn't involve positioning on something like a tactical map but rather a line of combatants on each side of the screen
  • magic and abilities are more often limited by a magic points resource instead of a rest system
  • dialogue with NPCs tends to be more limited in choices, telling a more linear narrative

  I'll be honest, trying to differentiate these two with a list of bullet points was harder than I thought it would be to articulate. I'm almost more inclined to just say "I know it when I see it", haha. But for some points of reference, I'd say Baldur's Gate 3, Pillars of Eternity, and The Witcher 3 are western RPGs; Final Fantasy VII, Persona 5, and Pokemon are JRPGs; Sea of Stars is a JRPG that isn't made by a Japanese developer; and while also an action game, Dark Souls is closer to being a western RPG than a JRPG.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What games do you think are unfairly snubbed when talking about the best games of all time?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It's an RPG made in the west, but I've always heard that it was notable for being a JRPG.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What games do you think are unfairly snubbed when talking about the best games of all time?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If I'm rattling down a list of my favorite games ever, they're heavily concentrated in the last decade, with a couple of stragglers from the decade before that. I don't think that's recency bias; I think developers have just, in general, gotten better at honing in on what people like, especially in the age of rapid patching. There's plenty of negative that comes along with this too, but for every game like Diablo IV that patches out builds because they were too much fun and impacted their live service retention rate, there are plenty of games coming out of early access after learning what worked and didn't work with their players, much more rapidly than the old days of iterating on yearly sequels.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What games do you think are unfairly snubbed when talking about the best games of all time?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I loved the first level of System Shock, now that it's been modernized. Then I got to the second level, and resources were no longer scarce, and it didn't appear to be shaking up the formula from level to level, so now it feels like Doom with an inventory system rather than the games that took inspiration from System Shock.

  Half-Life is still pretty great, but as far as organically teaching the player, it's far behind even its own sequel. There are a lot of cheap deaths that you just have to save scum your way through. My go-to example is that when Half-Life 1 introduces a sniper enemy, you see a hole in the wall that could look like a sniper's nest if I told you that they existed in the game and if you squint at it a little bit, so you just get shot in the back. In Half-Life 2, you emerge from Ravenholm, and a combine sniper with a laser sight is clearly trained on some escaping zombies, so that you know that snipers in sniper's nests are now a thing you'll have to contend with, and you get to observe it safely once before dealing with them in the game. That kind of thing. 90s PC games seemed to be worse at this than their successors and console games at the time.