chameleon @ chameleon @fedia.io

i'm lizard

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2 yr. ago

My favorite demo this time around has been Sting & Swing. Bee golf is a cursed concept somehow turned into an Animal Well esque game.

To add to that, even the original paper written with 1999-2007 era SDRAM/DDR/DDR2 is not optimistic about the scenario of a machine that was already powered down at regular operating temperatures:

with the fastest exhibiting complete data loss in approximately 2.5 seconds and the slowest taking an average of 35 seconds

And that only got worse with more advanced RAM, not to mention that they lost almost all of the data far quicker than that with only a couple % of bits surviving that long. For all practical intents and purposes, cold boot against an already-powered-down machine is a myth, the cooling has to be applied while it's on.

One example: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=oracle-bin&id=eceeb808ef933a66285ea68cefd72c1b5f4374c9 . It seems the AUR team forcepushed the malicious commits out of the repo branches, likely to prevent being accidentally reused by git-bisect in the future, but the URLs still seem to work until they run garbage collection. The author/committer information on each affected commit impersonated a previous maintainer of that particular repository and isn't real.

The whole thing essentially just boils down to adding a cd /tmp; npm install [random crap] post-install hook to every abandoned repository they easily got access to, which itself had a post-install hook to set up malware things. npm has nulled the affected packages, though it took them somewhere around 24 hours to do so. atomic-lockfile was one of them.

Dev post on the forum:

Just be aware that choosing works only in places where there is ambiguity due to belt being perpendicular. Those cases were the cause of problems for blueprint flip reliability.

So there's limits to it.

A different FAQ item mentions Winward NL Limited is in the Cayman Islands, which is a really nice place if you would want to hide such links. But yeah, could also be a bunch of individuals just looking for some extra yachts (bonus irony if they buy them from Gaben's yacht company).

Being a fan of the SNES/GBA Mario Kart games as well as a fan of games with playable lizards, I'm actually kinda excited for it... but even then, Playtonic utterly confuses me. They're making a very specific game that will be enjoyed by dozens of people, and in the process of doing so they kinda ignored the fanbase's long-standing demand for a Diddy Kong Racing spiritual successor. Doesn't seem like a wise decision to me.

I didn't play the demo, so I was a bit surprised to find it has less in common with Link's Awakening and Castlevania than you might think

To me, the demo felt like it was setting up something resembling more of a Zelda game, even though the demo itself wasn't very Zelda due to its length. Which kinda made it worse to me, I thought I would get Legend of Mouse: Oracle of Slightly Souls and unexpectedly got Mouse Souls for the Gameboy Color.

That is a game I could ultimately find enjoyment in, but at 5-ish hours into the game, I was incredibly frustrated by the difference in expectations vs what I just played. The Zelda influence does show up a bit more later in the game as dungeon/world design improves a bit, but it remains thinner than I would've preferred. The "Souls mechanics" can mostly be turned off via the modifiers menu, but that doesn't really turn the game into what I would've preferred either.

For the right person, this is going to be a GotY candidate. I'm glad I did play it through to the end, but it's too soulsy for me to truly appreciate it. I will say that the soundtrack very well might be my soundtrack of the year though; easily Jake Kaufman's finest work (and the OST is pay-what-you-want on Bandcamp!).

The default is that Valve does moderation, and if you don't opt-out of it, they consider those kinds of topics to be completely on-topic and valid, removing the reports. All of the relevant Steamworks pages aimed at publishers (eg Steam Community) are publicly available and are really enough to blame Valve for the whole state of things.

Even if a publisher opts-out of Valve moderation, they don't have the tools to deal with sockpuppets or organized attacks, and being banned from one game forum just means those same accounts move elsewhere. Valve could absolutely deal with it by doing community-wide bans, but they don't.

There's strong indications that there is going to be some minor but technically base-breaking rebalancing. Getting rid of "space casinos" (quality asteroid upcycling) and platform thruster stacking was mentioned as being ready over a year ago, but they didn't want to break existing bases at that time. This is their last good moment for it.

Some ROM hacks.

Pokemon Emerald Rogue has been mentioned, but I can't overstate just how polished it is for being a ROM hack. I think it would get really positive reviews if released as an official product as-is. It even manages to gradually introduce a lot of complicated Pokemon mechanics in ways the main series games never did. Only change I would make for a mass-market release is lowering default difficulty to Easy.

Reverie (Super Mario World) is one of the best Myst-ish puzzle games I've played. Doesn't really require you to be good at platforming, savestates or rewind can help in the worst case without cheapening out on its strengths. One of those games where you end up with a fantastically messy set of notes.

Link to the Past randomizer somehow creates a lot of unique twists before it starts to run out of curveballs to throw your way, especially if you keep cranking up the gimmicks over time. I think a basic beginner run is quite doable and likely interesting for anyone that's 100%'d base LTTP once in the past year. As long as you don't touch the glitches setting, you'll probably complete every run eventually.

With the game being out for the better part of a day now, I gotta admit, the much less positive Giant Bomb review is by far the one closest to my experience.

As far as I'm concerned, this game would have been ever so much better if Dark Souls never existed. You can turn off most "souls-like mechanics" via modifiers, but just about anything to make the experience easier turns off all achievements, which is a not-so-silent judgment from the developers for doing it. Boss runbacks are looooong, but if you're willing to disable achievements, you can have a bonus checkpoint before every boss. So the devs really want you to do runbacks, but I struggle to see what they add to the game. Basically the same complaint as Silksong but I am even more tired of them by now, and the runbacks are worse.

Currency loss and estus flasks plasma vials don't really add to the game, either.

Funny thing is this particular bill also applies semi-retroactively. The original version was worded

The following shall apply only for server-connected games published for sale on or after January 1, 2027

but in the April 6 revision that ultimately advanced, that was changed to:

The following shall apply only to a digital game available for purchase on or after January 1, 2027

I'm heavily in favor of SKG, but this particular bill isn't workable on this schedule. It's not what SKG has been petitioning for.

There aren't a lot that work well with Space Age, because overhauls are generally incompatible in terms of gameplay/balancing and Space Age itself is essentially an overhaul. Most new mods made for the Space Age era are new planets instead of overhauls, there's Loup's Guide to the Galaxy if you want some community-curated advice on what's decent vs not worth the time (not a mod but it lives on the mod portal anyway).

But if you really want it, there's a Krastorio 2 fork called Krastorio 2 Spaced Out that integrates Space Age. I think it's about the best it can be, which is to say, I'm not a big fan of it but other people seem to like it. Nauvis is pretty much just vanilla K2 with new rocket silos while the other planets are slightly janky Space Age.

I've tried to find info about the reputability of this "Sakhtafzarmag" that originally shared the rumor and came up with nothing; seems to be a very small publication with a near-stock WordPress template and a YouTube channel averaging ~200 views. Very likely to be bullshit.

I get the impression that "online coop" is a tag it weighs very, very heavily, along with most of the "open world survival craft" subtags. Terraria, Factorio and some other games you can put 1000 hours into while optionally playing with a friend are absolute poison for the algorithm, they share a lot of tags with stuff like Rust and V Rising even though they're not remotely the same game.

Ace Combat 7 was the trigger last time, and Ace Combat 8 is making history repeat itself. Remains to be seen what the system requirements will be, but I suspect they'll be higher. I'm just hoping component prices go down a bit before some unspecified date in 2026... don't have a lot of faith in that.

Not sure, but I can reproduce it on my end. The actual download pages on get.videolan.org have ads, the main site does not.

Can't wait for a new generation to rediscover the exciting fun of having to survive Kil'Jaeden's balls and whatever that darkness phase is even supposed to be, despite the boss technically hitting 1 HP in 5 seconds.

The whole "don't look anything up before playing it" genre of cryptic puzzle-ish games where saying nearly anything about it is a spoiler. There's not all that many of them, but somehow they're all games where people go in with no expectations and either love it or bounce off of it really fast. The entire internet can scream at you to play Outer Wilds, but nobody wants to tell you why.

Out of the ones I played, I had the lowest expectations/highest payoff for Void Stranger; on the surface it looks just like a pretty average sokoban with gameboy-styled graphics and a surprisingly good soundtrack. And that's pretty much what it is, except the sokoban isn't really why you play it, even though you're gonna be playing a lot of it.

Steam changed it so that popularity metrics are mostly ignored during the first couple days of Next Fest. This started with the October 2024 run, and it's a big part of why you no longer have the good demos popping up quickly at the start. To my knowledge, they never published details on it, but there was a short blurb in the developer Q&A. Things should get better starting sometime tomorrow (tends to be day 3 or day 4).

The idea is that it gives games that don't have pre-existing marketing a way better chance of success, instead of the really massive snowball effect that used to exist where devs lost out for the entire thing if they weren't popular within the first couple of hours, but it has made it a hell of a job to look for new games.