Deconceptualist

Happy birthday! I actually just started playing Journey for the first time yesterday, less than an hour I’d say (on Steam). The visuals and fluidity of controls are nice, nothing spectacular by today’s standards but I’m sure they were great back in the PS3 era. The beginning felt a little slow trudging through the sand until I understood how the scarf upgrades work. But then when I encountered another player it really started to click and go more smoothly. I like how the game encourages cooperation by pinging and refilling each other’s scarf energy, though I feel like progress might go slow again if I get stuck going solo next session. The puzzles are very simple but I was feeling sick so having a ‘cozy’ game was actually pretty nice.

BuzzKill is great for wrangling your notifications. Match a word or phrase and group them, snooze them, set special vibration patterns, whatever.

Do you mean… not pandering to the majority who wish you wouldn’t copulate with canines?

My dad helped me install the original Wolfenstein 3D on DOS when I was a kid. And he’s 100% a boomer (b.1947). So for that reason it always feels accurate to me.

I was permanently banned from the Reddit sub without recourse for posting this

Looks at username

You’re sure it wasn’t for… other reasons?

Yep this seems even more blurry and pixelated than the last 3 times I saw it haha

I imagine people resharing memes (long before OP here) take a photo of their monitor with a potato phone and then reupload that after resizing it with some shitty Motorola app or whatever first. Do that 3-4x and soon it’s a mess.

Looks pretty good, glad to see another true Linux system. No weight listed though, and no backside buttons, so we’ll see how it turns out.

They sure as hell do. Show your sources or GTFO.

• The vaccine trains your immune system to generate antibodies that target the virus
• When you get infected, those antibodies attack right away to keep the virus population low
• With low viral load you literally have fewer viruses to spread to other people

If you’re not vaccinated (or not boosted for the correct variant) then the virus population blooms much more quickly and you get a higher viral load, meaning your coughs and sneezes are quite literally more contagious.

You should still get the boosters because those will both A) help keep you from becoming ill at all, and B) not transmit it to others if you do.

Most other people aren’t in great shape. Wouldn’t you feel bad if you passed it to someone’s cute kid or lovely grandma and they got severely ill as a result?

I believe that resolves the same as

ain’t!(!untrue)

As I recall there’s not much left of that temple to dispute.

EA, Activision, Ubisoft… their BS is on another level entirely and I generally don’t play their games because if it.

For NMS / Hello Games it’s more that I really want to like the game but find it immensely frustrating that after years and years of updates, they still haven’t fixed some of the most basic elements.

Like when your character sprints, the tiniest bump in terrain cancels the sprinting. This even happens in the Nexus where it looks like flat ground. Why?

Again for the alien languages… there’s no dictionary in this universe? I’m supposed to believe interstellar travel is commonplace, but they don’t have an app to translate the 3 ubiquitous languages? I have a device in my hand right now that can do that.

Space combat still isn’t balanced. If you alternate between the phase beam with the shield absorb upgrade and any other weapon, you can basically wear down any threat and win.

What has actually been improved about the core game of NMS? People keep telling me that in vague terms without saying what specifically was improved. I know the inventory system is better (but still kind of a mess IMO), but what else? Don’t say multiplayer because they promised that at the beginning.

Yeah I like the “go anywhere” feel and was happy when I found a dinosaur planet too. But it still all feels 2 inches deep in so many ways.

I’ve come back to it a bunch of times because people keep insisting it’s good or “no you just need to try X” or “but the latest update added so much”. Steam says over 300 hours now but a decent portion of that was standing around trade hubs waiting for ships I wanted in S or A class, or literally just walking away from my PC while refiners ran.

I’m not usually the type of player to use cheats/exploits but I actually had more fun when I started using a duplication glitch. No more limited inventory, money, or resources, I could just pick one ship and one multitool and max them out with all the storage and weapons and whatnot. I don’t enjoy grinding so this was a relief. But it still didn’t make up for all the bad underlying mechanics.

Playing the game felt like satire. Basic questions I would expect other devs of sci-fi games to ask themselves seemingly either went unanswered or got super lazy answers.

e.g. “Should we let players customize their spaceships?” to which HG apparently thinks their system of solely generating ships from a random permutation of parts is plenty. Or “Do you think different planets and galaxies would have different hostile flora?”, to which they decided “nah, the same 3 are fine everywhere”. “Should planets have biomes of any kind, at least ice caps maybe?”… “nah, players don’t care if planets are basically uniform.”

I really wanted to like NMS. The core concept is 100% up my alley, it looks pretty good, and it’s a neat sandbox. I suppose it’s not bad if you’re the kind of player who is happy mindlessly gathering resources so you can craft an ornate base. Hell, I played quite a bit because I was determined to collect one of every type of spaceship.

But I really do think the gameplay is objectively bad by almost any possible measure. The on-foot traversal is terrible, waiting around for refiners sucks (though at least they had the sense to give a backpack refiner), trying to get the actual spaceship you want is awful, flying towards the galactic center is a chore, and I could go on. I guess the gunplay is serviceable, but the enemies aren’t the least bit interesting aside from maybe the largest walker bots.

What are you talking about? The player literally learns nothing about the alien languages. All you do is walk up to a NPC, button mash through absolutely inconsequential filler text, and pick the option that says “teach me a word”. Then a popup says “You now know the Korvax word for ‘THE’”, except it doesn’t even tell you which alien word was translated or explain any grammar or context or conjugation or anything. Your character just does a magical substitution from that point forward.

Or you can do the same thing by walking up to the black pillars if you’d rather trudge around a planet surface for macguffins.

How in any way is that a good system? There’s zero skill or challenge or reward or even real gameplay here. A word search puzzle would have 100x more depth.

Unless they’ve fired the absolute moron(s) who designed the crafting and alien language system in NMS, I say stay far away.

I mean, combining dihydrogen and oxygen yields… NaCl? And you learn alien words literally one at a time? Oh but they have procedural generation! Except every single space station looks identical.

IMO This is a developer who does not respect their players. And somehow they’ve convinced a lot of people that periodically adding more shallow grindy fetch quests means the core gameplay isn’t garbage.

We are the McBorg. Did somebody say assimilate?

Some others:

• Cloudbuilt, currently $6.99, lowest $2.99
• Dead Cells, currently $ 14.99, lowest $11.99
• Tropico 5 Complete, currently $23.81, lowest $9.99
• XCOM 2 Collection, currently $11.88, lowest $6.99

Meh. I’m seeing a lot of prices that aren’t even that close to historical lows. e.g. Mass Effect Legendary was $10 somewhere recently but now it’s $12 on Steam (though I’m not giving EA any money for it until they fix the stupid launcher for good on Steam Deck).

Prototype is like $4 though, might snag that if I don’t already own a copy elsewhere.