A fellow Xbox gamepass User IT seems.

Nope, I’m just someone who waits for sales and has a bit of an indie streak.

This was after my First playthrough. Now, with George putting out his video, im back in. My god, its marvellous.

I see we follow similar creators! I only just picked Pentiment up last week – Jacob Geller’s recent 2023 video is what originally put Pentiment on my radar and then George’s video gave me that final push into playing it for myself. I’m extremely glad for having done so because Pentiment has quickly become quite special to me. I already look forward to making subsequent playthroughs despite still working on the first.

Hifi Rush was great, but felt too formulaic for me, so i abandoned it after the first or second Boss. Too much running arpund, No real banger music between Bosses.

I can see where you’re coming from. From a macro perspective, the game’s essentially just a series of battle arenas stitched together by corridors and platforming challenges… nothing incredible there. What makes Hi-Fi Rush special for me is the novel fusion of rythm mechanics and spectacle fighter mechanics – they complement each other extremely well. (Forgive me for explaining at you like this. I just can’t help myself when it comes to talking about this game)

Normally, I can’t stand DMC-likes because of the requisite rote memorization. HFR flips this dynamic on its head by making the memorization incidental – it happens naturally as you practice playing the combo on-rythm. Perhaps even more importantly; just as mastery of a combo string comes within reach, the underlying musical qualities all suddenly spring into focus and turn the sequence into a musical phrase. It clicks together in a very intrinsically satisfying way IMO. Naturally, this all compounds in on itself and gets double-fun once you start improvising your own “melodies” during real combat. You like Jazz? Because it’s like Jazz if Jazz killed people.

Now, obviously this isn’t going to hit the same way for everyone (nor should it!)… but if you’ve not yet buckled down in training mode and truly mastered a string or two for yourself, then I would very emphatically encourage you to give the game a second try. I actually had to do the exact same thing myself before I really “got” the game and my mindset shifted. Hi-Fi Rush truly is the Dark Souls of 3rd-Person Action videogames

When it comes to Deep Rock/co-op I think my issues are more associated with the underlying gameloop design. I find it hard to perform well when the “tension” ramps up and these games are kind of tailor-made to create high-tension situations. When a round ends I’m left feeling tired/deflated rather than joyful. I had the same issue with Left 4 Dead, but oddly not so for Payday 2.

In any case, I’m right there with you when it comes to TF2 community servers. I sorely wish that more games emphasized these sorts of digital “3rd places”. I have TF2 servers where I can go anytime and just… belong for as long as I please. Games should have more permanent places like that, where play and community come before any imposed win/lose dichotomy. People would be happier.

Yup, that about sums it up: fun, but shallow. Nevertheless I think it’s worthy of a recommendation because it has a great honeymoon period before falling off.

I had a really solid year, all things considered:

• ⭐ Hi-Fi Rush – Love it, hands down. This game’s like if Jet Set Radio, Scott Pilgrim, and DMC got into a fist fight and then that fist fight had a baby with Jack Black
• ⭐ Pentiment – I’m still playing through this one but I can already tell it’s a new favorite. Major Return of the Obra Dinn vibes
• ⭕ Against the Storm – This game innovates on the citybuilder genre so hard and I can’t get enough of it. If you love a challenge and hate the late-game, this is THE ONE
• ⭕ Psychonauts 2 – Fun and bursting with creativity… but I had to set it down after a certain point because I stopped enjoying the gameplay loop. Can’t put my finger on why…
• ⭕ Peglin – Yes, Peglin. The Peggle Roguelite. I like it and you would too if you gave it a chance. It’s not a forever roguelite, but I guarantee you’ll have a blast with it for 5-10 hours
• ❌ Deep Rock Galactic – I bounced off of this one. The game has so much charm… but I just couldn’t click with it. I think co-op games just may not be for me

Honorable Mention: TF2 – Definitely not a “new” game to me, I own TF2, I bought it with money! Even so… this year marked my return after a looong hiatus. Coming back was a total revelation – I thought I’d grown to hate FPS games – as it turns out, what I’d actually grown to hate was the modern antisocial MMR grindset. Game developers: I beseech thee… abandon matchmaking and return to 2007. Return the slab or suffer my curse

Um excuse me time actually already ended in 1991

Wow

Hmm… I think we’re dogging on the author a bit much here. Don’t get me wrong, they’re clearly swimming in philosophical water that’s a bit too deep for themselves, but sometimes you’ve gotta be clumsy in order to explore topics at the edge of theory.

Let’s dial things up a notch and bring Undertale (the Dark Souls of – nevermind) into the discussion. What does it have to say about branching pathways, tonal consistency, and savescum? It says: I was made for you, please enjoy me.

The game adapts to the audience – you, that is. You are weird and hard to please, so the game needs to be flexible without feeling compromised. If you want to leave hidden depths unexplored, the game abides. If you want to vivisect every last detail, the game changes to fit your desire.

It’s alchemy, of course; both magical and unobtainable, so the author isn’t strictly wrong to accuse Baldur’s Gate of falling short. It’s true: sometimes a gap in the curtains opens up and the illusion is spoilt. With that being said, I think what’s missing is the logical conclusion to the criticism: universality – despite being unobtainable – is still worth striving for. To be universal is to distill humanity itself, as great and terrible and impossible as that may be (and here you thought I was joking with that Dark Souls jab!).

You’re about 20 years late for that particular shitshow, but here’s a fun video retrospective on the war on Pokemon if that’s your thing.

We can do better.

I’m guessing “wrong-sider” would be a step in the wrong direction?

Ah, nevermind sorry about the trouble. He’s a cofounder of the company whose logo you’re using as an avatar (“Ronimo”, i.e.: “Robot Ninja Monkey”).

This is a long-shot question, feel free to disregard… but I have to ask: is that you, Joost?

Time to call a doctor 😳

I was floored when I opened the beta and found that almost all existing features survived the transition. In a single month! You’re a monster that makes the rest of us developers look bad 😉

I know that there’s an active ongoing discussion about monetization models and I’m certain that there’s room for improvement… but at the end of the day you can’t make everyone happy. I just wanted you to know that, as a long-time fan, I sincerely appreciate what’s been accomplished here. Cheers! Don’t forget to take some well-deserved you time once things quiet down a little.

Though, for the record, this is one of the few situations where humanity would have been better off if Google had simply paid their web engineers to go out into the world and kick animals all day long instead.

Skill issue

Nice catch. I messed up the formatting on that link by putting an extra pair of parenthesis in there – fixed now.

For anyone interested, here’s the Lemmy markdown configuration. As you can see, Lemmy’s website UI supports the full commonmark spec (tutorial / official spec), plus a bunch of extensions. I don’t think anyone’s fully documented these yet, so I’ll try doing so below. Apologies in advance to mobile users, this is probably gonna get ugly (see included image links for how it should look):

• URL autolinking (plaintext URLs automatically turn into links)
• Lemmy autolinking:
  • NOTE: No link will be inserted if the viewer is browsing an instance where the resource is not yet known/blocked
  • Communities: !fediverse@lemmy.ml→!fediverse@lemmy.ml (link ref: /c/fediverse@lemmy.ml)
    • Kbin-style is also supported: /m/fediverse@lemmy.ml→/m/fediverse@lemmy.ml
  • Users: /u/chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org→ /u/chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org (link ref: /u/chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org)
• Typography substitutions:
  • (c)→©
  • (tm)→™
  • (r)→®
  • +-→±
  • ...→…
  • ---→—
  • --→–
  • ???? (>= 4x)→???
  • !!!! (>= 4x)→!!!
• Github-flavor Markdown extensions:
  • Tables
  • Strikethrough: ~~example~~→example (image)
• Subscript/Superscript:
  • Sub: example~sub~→example_sub (image)
  • Super: example^super^→example^super (image)
• Footnotes:
  • Inline part: example[^notename]→example^[1] (image)
  • Bottom part: [^notename]: Note text→(see bottom of post) (image)
    • Important: the bottom part must be at the very end of the post, otherwise both halves of the footnote will break!
• Ruby Text: {example base text|example ruby text}→example base textexample ruby text (image)
  • “Ruby” is an html-ism for special pronunciation aids which frequently appear within young person’s media where the language includes non-phonetic characters (e.g.: Chinese characters)
  • Japanese Furigana example: {凄|すご}い！→凄すごい！(image)
• Spoilers:

  ::: spoiler visible part example
  hidden part example
  :::
  

  • See below ⤵️ (collapsed image) (expanded image)
    visible part example

    hidden part example

• Image/Video embedding: ![accessibility alt-text example](https://i.imgur.com/9nVMRqa.jpeg) => (image)

You can improve the reliability if you provide it test cases. You can now be the PM you wish you had for the robot that will eventually replace you.

Look at me! I am the product owner now!

You’re clearly not yet a Sr. Developer. Everyone knows that you start getting apocalyptic software visions the day after promotion.

Source: It was revealed to me in a dream