stealth_cookies
@stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
- Comment on TRIBES: The Most Influential FPS You (Probably) Never Played [video essay 52:59] 2 weeks ago:
VGCG
I mostly came into the series at Tribes:Ascend during the beta, but had played a bit of Tribes:Vengeance with friends in the past. This video is a great summary of the mishandling of an amazing series that nothing else comes close to. There are few things more satisfying in gaming as flying at high speed across a map and hitting that blue plate special.
I was excited to see Tribes 3 until I saw it was old Hi-Rez employees running the show. I played a few of the early playtests and decided to hold off on purchasing anything until the game got into a more polished state. I don’t know if others doing the same was a contributing factor to development stopping, but by the time I started thinking about checking it out again, they had announced the cancellation of development.
- Comment on 1080p viewing experience 2 weeks ago:
The one I’ve noticed is that for videos with the 1080p “Enhanced Bitrate” option, the free 1080p video looks like a blurry mess compared to normal 1080p content.
- Comment on What are your favorite 1000+ hour games? 4 weeks ago:
Yes it is a subscription to access the servers. But you also get a ton of access to other content forever (all the past campaigns and TOTD tracks released) so the value is still pretty damn good. Considering I’ve got 2000 hours in the game since release and it has in total cost me about the same as a normal game I’m not going to complain about it being a subscription.
- Comment on What are your favorite 1000+ hour games? 4 weeks ago:
Trackmania 2020. Great example of a game that is simple in concept but super deep in skills that you can both play super casually at your own pace or super competitively. Plus there is a great community and endless content to play.
- Comment on Zen Browser: A New Privacy-Focused Browser(Firefox) 1 month ago:
I like Floorp better for a Firefox variant, feels more developed and stable than zen.
- Comment on Vivaldi polishes its browser, adds a dashboard • The Register 1 month ago:
No matter how I set it up it gives me suggestions to specific pages I don’t want instead of the base domain.
- Comment on Vivaldi polishes its browser, adds a dashboard • The Register 1 month ago:
Some months ago they completely fucked up their address bar suggestions to the point where I have tried again to move to another browser. I’d prefer them to fix that before updating their UI.
- Comment on Hi-Rez Studios announces February 17th shutdown for Realm Royale and Divine Knockout 2 months ago:
Hi-Rez and shutting down games, name me a more iconic pairing.
- Comment on Paralyzed Man Unable to Walk After Maker of His Powered Exoskeleton Tells Him It's Now Obsolete 2 months ago:
Shit like this is why we need strong regulations for anything that is a medical device that is depended on by people. I dot. Give a shit if it isn’t profitable anymore, these companies need to support their customers that may be significantly impacted if their devices don’t work.
- Comment on What are your favorite racing games? 2 months ago:
Yeah they added “action keys” that can trigger different percentage presses (20-40-60-80-100%) as a “fix” because the bobsleigh blocks they added in the new game were not keyboard friendly and they wanted to even the playing field. They eventually changed the physics to get rid of that specific need (but not completely) but they are still useful in some situations.
Download the newest game! It has a free access tier which gets you access to the first 10 tracks of the quarterly campaign and to the ranked mode. It is a bit limited but enough to see if you might get back into it. There is a decent community on reddit for the game.
- Comment on AI tool cuts unexpected deaths in hospital by 26%, Canadian study finds 2 months ago:
AI has tons of potential but the final decision should come from a person that evaluates the output for correctness. This is a great example of that.
- Comment on What are your favorite racing games? 2 months ago:
There are advantages and disadvantages to all the control schemes depending on the types of tracks you play, the surface you play, and the car/environment you play.
Most good players play with controller because there are many situations you run into where you want the precision of steering a specific amount around a corner, or you are playing a track where you want to either speed drift (SD) at a specific angle (e.g. fullspeed or higher speed dirt/grass/plastic) or want to keep your steering under a certain angle to no slide (e.g. low speed dirt/grass/plastic).
There are techniques such as neosliding where it is much easier to do them in keyboard as it requires multiple taps in quick succession. It is also easier to play keyboard when you need to make turns where timing of a full steer is important (e.g. ice).
Considering cars other than the stadium car you start getting into situations where one control scheme is far superior than others. The snow and rally environments require smooth steering so wheel is superior there, but controllers are a good middle ground. Desert is faster with tapping movements over smooth steering so keyboard is a bit better there. I recall canyon is a bit better with keyboard as well.
This all applies equally regardless of whether you are playing older or newer games.
- Comment on What are your favorite racing games? 2 months ago:
Seconding Trackmania, though I’d recommend playing the latest one released in 2020 rather than Nations Forever. A year’s access to everything is $20 and you get tons of content to play.
For a game that is at its core can be played at the highest levels with just 4 buttons it is incredibly complex with an insane skill ceiling. I’m pretty good and the difference between me and the top players is absolutely insane. The game is a bit beginner unfriendly, mostly because you are going to suck against good players because there are tons of mechanics that the developer tells you nothing about and unless you watch a video you aren’t likely to understand why players are leaving you in the dust.
This is the game where you get people who can hit a jump at just the right angle so they thread the needle through a series of holes barely larger than the car while travelling at speeds well above 300mph (welcome to TrackMania, I don’t think there’s a speed cap). They also do it using keyboards. Seriously. High-level TrackMania players use keyboards, not gamepads or, god forbid, racing wheels.
The max speed is 999 km/h, which is only acheivable with speed drifting, but speed in excess of 800km/h are not uncommon to hit in certain kinds of tracks. Your statement about controls also isn’t correct, most of the top players play with controller, but there are some that are keyboard players, there is even a couple insane ones that play wheel (most notably Granady).
- Comment on How to decide what kind of controller one should purchase? 3 months ago:
If you want wireless, one thing to be concerned about is the latency of the gamepad. gamepadla.com tests many controllers for their latency.
Personally, I’ve just gone with xbox with their PC dongle. I only like controllers with the sticks in the xbox/nintendo configuration and the latency is great with their dongle. I also like that it uses standard batteries so I just keep some rechargables at hand for when it runs out. On the downsides, there is no low battery indication on the controller, so occasionally it just dies in the middle of use.
- Comment on How to decide what kind of controller one should purchase? 3 months ago:
I’ve heard nothing but problems about the reliability of these. One streamer for my main game is sponsored by them through their org and occasionally rages about how many they have broken just playing.
- Comment on What games popularized certain mechanics? 3 months ago:
That was Oblivion believe it or not. Ahh, the good ol’ days where everyone got up in arms over even cosmetic DLC.
- Comment on Chrome will block one of its biggest ad blockers 4 months ago:
I wish I could for work. But stupid corporate policy demands otherwise, Google workspace is so shit.
- Comment on The Humble Games Situation Gets Messier With Claims Of Lies And Damage Control 4 months ago:
Humble Bundle was cool when it was an occasional event focused on charity. Once it became something that was going pretty much all the time it quickly lost any interest I had.
- Comment on Musk is lightyears away from a self-driving car 5 months ago:
Could be in the galaxy, but it would be safe to assume out of the solar system.
- Comment on Man makes money buying his own pizza on DoorDash app 5 months ago:
Masayoshi Son’s business acumen is only matched by Elon Musk.
- Comment on Why does Asia scan to pay when the rest of the world taps? • The Register 5 months ago:
The article more or less covers it. Asian countries without a credit card culture mostly transitioned to QR because it was easy with minimal equipment changes required. Those with widespread credit cards accept tap and QR (e.g. Taiwan widely accepts QR payments, Google pay, Apple pay, credit cards, and transit cards).
Since the western world has been on credit cards for decades that is the solution that is accepted there with QR payments being almost exclusively in businesses that have a customer base from Asian countries. Even then the US is odd compared to other countries since they never really adopted chip and pin.
- Comment on Today, it has been 6 years since The Elder Scrolls 6 teaser 6 months ago:
Oblivion had quality of life improvements that made it a better game IMO. Yes Morrowind was bigger and deeper, but it was also a frustrating game that didn’t age very well.
- Comment on Today, it has been 6 years since The Elder Scrolls 6 teaser 6 months ago:
It really does feel like Starfield completely killed any excitement for Bethesda games, everything since Oblivion has been a step in the wrong direction IMO.
- Comment on Token2 is an open-source Swiss FIDO2 security key that brings innovative features at a cheaper price 6 months ago:
They actually have the dual USB-A and USB-C key product that is inexplicably missing from the main security key vendors! While I’m not going to replace my perfectly good keys, I was so pissed off when I bought mine and the obvious product was missing from Yubico’s offerings.
- Comment on Trackmania 20th Anniversary: Desert Update Trailer 7 months ago:
Sorry I should have said 2003, it came out in November of that year and this is supposed to be a yearlong celebration of Trackmania. The earliest game most people have experience with was TMNF/TMUF which came out in 2008 and United does include all the old cars so maybe that is your reference date?
- Comment on Trackmania 20th Anniversary: Desert Update Trailer 7 months ago:
The original Trackmania game came out in 2004 and contained 3 environments with different cars: Snow, Rally, and Desert.
The latest Trackmania game came out in 2020 and as a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the original game they have been adding the old cars from the original game into the latest game.
- Comment on Reddit gets ready for IPO, setting a top valuation of $6.4 billion 9 months ago:
That means that over and above whatever debts they have, they think the market values the data their users have given them is worth that much. That said, if Google is only paying then $60M/year for access to that data, they are going to need a lot of customers like that to reach $6.4B valuation.
- Comment on Physical or Digital? 9 months ago:
On PC I’ll buy digital because worst case if it comes unavailable I’ll torrent a copy.
For consoles I am staunchly in the physical camp because it is more likely I’ll be able to play those games in 10 years when the maker has shut down their store.
- Comment on Steam keeps on winning 11 months ago:
Hopefully they have some sort of transition plan for who will take over when Gabe retires. As long as they hand the reigns over to someone with similar ideas and not some business type they could be fine given they are privately owned.
- Comment on Creators of Slay the Spire will migrate their next game to a new engine if Unity doesn't completely revert their changes 1 year ago:
Sort of but not exactly, the recent shift is because money has gotten expensive and now investors are wanting to take a profit rather than tossing money around hoping to get lucky. So now these business types are scrambling to do anything that makes the business profitable when their entire business plan was unsustainable without the constant influx of money keeping them afloat under the guise of “growth”.