Wait, that’s online?

I want to appreciate the additions, but…this is also not a good way of doing it.

The difficulty is often the point in Soulslikes, but quite often it feels like these games are hard in 17 different ways, and a player may only have trouble with 1 of them.

Maybe that’s navigation, and finding the next path forward. Maybe that’s working out how to put together a functioning build, and realizing what each weapon does. Maybe it’s that the parry window is just a few frames too tight because they’re playing with an input delay.

That’s why the games I’ve liked have varied accessibility options to let you change just one thing, like getting your souls back on dying, slowing down the game, slightly decreasing damage values - or increasing them on both sides.

Back 4 Blood was the game that served as the idea for this post.

I recently felt like picking up some cheap copies of it to play with a few friends, and decided to launch it once ahead of time just to test it out and see how it ran. I picked “Online” mode out of habit, feeling it would likely search for a bit before handing me 3 bots to play singleplayer. Instead, I actually got a decent group of people together several days in a row.

In B4B’s case, while the developers visibly “abandoned” the game in news headlines, the form it exists in is very playable and generally bug-free, even if its ultra-highest-difficulty “endgame” allegedly lacks some refinement. It got a lot of outlash for not matching the playstyle of Left 4 Dead; having players use a deep system of roguelike-style upgrades. Since the enemies escalate in difficulty, those upgrades are often necessary and can connect with team strategy. It’s now on PS+, and since it’s crossplay, Steam players will get a lot of queue buddies. It’s also playable with just 2 people since the other 2 characters will just be bots.

From how it sounds, especially with the actor’s permission, this seems like my preferred way of using AI-generated voices.

I’d really want to make sure any legal language around actor AI permissions is built to avoid coaxing though - like including it as an “industry standard” clause for infinite use when recording a single audition. Ideally, the voice would always “belong to” the actor it came from, and would only be licensed on specific uses, like “This NPC within this game mode, available for 8 weeks in summer of 2025”. No idea if that’s what they did here.

Well, same way Stormtroopers wear helmets. You can’t really individualize them or people start to appreciate them and root for them, like they do every villain.

“Wrong direction” sums up my anger towards everything FromSoft.

Two Soulslike games I really enjoyed though, are Tunic, and Another Crab’s Treasure. Both are generally pretty rewarding of exploration, but also tightly guide you at the beginning. I honestly just don’t feel like FromSoft is very fair when it comes to early exploration. One path utterly destroys you and has no reward at the end.

My first PlayStation was a PS3, and thankfully, around then they were still releasing a number of ported “trilogies”.

Even though mine was not a backwards compatible model, I was also able to play digital versions of the Fatal Frame series, which is sadly now pretty much inaccessible.

I never played Jax, but I saw an analysis of its vector-based facial animation, where there were few enough vertices for animators to directly tweak; and it does feel like a nostalgic way to make cartoony, expressive faces.

If you have a Netflix subscription, the app lets you install many games that aren’t looking for microtransactions within.

Most of the Ace Attorney games are on smartphones.

I’ve also been having a lot of fun with Zenless Zone Zero. F2P, combat is based around swapping between a team of three, and making use of parry / dodge frame effects.

It’s a 4 hour drive man, obviously they’d pick up and install a 4K dashcam on the way.

It was only recently I saw that Blue Prince did not make a PS4 release, which surprised me - quite a lot of games even in the past year have still put that out when there’s nothing in them that’s highly demanding. Usually, it just means it hovers around 25-30fps.

It did sound like the initial comments were taken from Discord, not an interview, which to me paints it in a different light.

I’m sure I’ve claimed to be the Queen of England on there once.

My current solution is checking Switch games out of the library.

What most people get irked about is loss of ownership, which can be a separate topic with careful management. For instance, if you buy an ItchIO game, there’s no DRM and you can copy it anywhere - I imagine many would be fine with digital downloads if everywhere used that system, but on the corporate side they’d likely be grumbling about piracy.

Did this happen because of Google API pricing changes?

What I absolutely love is the specific, mysterious revelation of “How is he doing this, this shouldn’t be possible”.

Spec Ops: The Line touches this a little bit - with some actions and messages leaning toward incredulity that 3 soldiers have been destroying an entire battalion.
The movie Willie’s Wonderland also aims for this. The lite mystery is how the animatronics became possessed, but the big mystery is who/what the hell the Janitor that wandered into town is.
On a similar note, you get a bit of that feel in Half-Life 2 from Dr. Breen’s angry message to the Nova Prospekt soldiers for them missing you at Black Mesa East; “This is not some agent provocateur or highly-trained assassin!! Gordon Freeman is a theoretical physicist!”

I highly doubt a social network would ever lack incentive for increased engagement (via shock value and toxicity or otherwise) in a non-capitalist society.

They may gain popularity, societal influence, or whatever else instead of money. They’re still motivated to deepen that connection.

I think this is the problem gooner games have run into.

Like the Neptunia games. They are not great games at all by any measure. But the only people that would publically post reviews of them are likely going to review them positively.

I get a lot of good information from bad reviews, just by having a bit of introspection.

“This game is too easy!!”
Oh, that’s okay, I was looking for something easier.

“Two body types!!”
Oh, wow, so the only people that hate it are bigots.

“If you die once to the first boss, then it kneecaps your stats and you get no healing items for half the game.”
Wait, what…? But everyone else loves the game. Is this true?
“lol it’s fine, only scrubs die to the first boss, if you do just restart the 3-hour intro.”
Are these reviewers paid!? No thanks.

I was a mega-fan of both Ori 1 and 2. I’ve got a mug based on the first game, but when I first saw the trailer for this game, nothing about it interested me. Kind of like the Xbox 360 era of “brown and gray cover shooters” I’ve never understood the appeal for grim, depressing medieval worlds. I like having some vibrancy and inventiveness, as well as some motivation behind the violence used to achieve some end.

One of the only Soulslike games I’ve finished is Another Crab’s Treasure. The story/setting in that game ends up being pretty depressing, but it at least maintains a lot of humor and colorful design.

What’s more, I looked through the negative reviews, and a lot of them touch on incomplete or over-punishing systems, rather than seeming motivated by external factors.

I wouldn’t see it SO negatively. If they were paying people for reviews, then yes, that’s corruption; but every YouTuber uses phrases like “Drop a like” and it’s considered normal. When you worked hard on something, I think it’s common to ask for a positive review. People are sentient enough to choose whether to do so.