Quetzalcutlass
@Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
- Comment on Day 464 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing 17 hours ago:
It’s playable solo (and only solo in the current beta branch), but the devs have been nerfing that playstyle for years in the name of multiplayer balance. There are artificial limits on what one player can learn and do, with massive penalties to anything you didn’t start the game with. They include those nerfs in single player because they intend for NPCs to pick up the slack after they’re introduced.
(Note: NPCs have been a promised upcoming feature “after the next set of changes” for over fifteen years at this point.)
Fortunately they include settings to undo the learning speed nerfs, and hopefully will add more to make the upcoming crafting rework less of a pain for solo players. The litany of tweaks available at world creation are one of my favorite things about Project Zomboid, right after all the stellar business name puns.
- Comment on Lemmy shitpost 1 day ago:
Levitating shelves are prohibited, got it.
- Comment on Fight the nazis to rescue your dog in the new free shooter Darkenstein 3D out now 3 days ago:
- Comment on Stationeers - The Storm Update: Solar Storm & New Suit 5 days ago:
That’s not a bad description, though it’s even more hardcore than even Vintage Story. It’s ridiculously complex, to the point you need basic mastery of several different systems just to survive the opening of the game. I’m talking building complete and fully-modeled atmospherics and electrical grids from scratch, with a single block in the wrong spot being potentially run-ending (I’ve plugged my oxygen tanks into an improperly set up system and lost my entire air supply more than once). It’s incredibly rewarding after you do figure it all out, though.
It’s also the one survival game I can think of where a single minor mistake remains crippling even tens of hours into a playthrough. Your only insurance against disaster is whatever redundancy you built into your systems. It truly nails how monumental a task surviving on other planets would be.
- Comment on I love stardew valley. looking for an alternative that is made for controller experience. 1 week ago:
There’s a modern remake called Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town. It’s isometric and cross-platform so I’m hoping the controller support would be decent.
- Comment on I'm not paying $8 for a pack of Skittles 1 week ago:
Concessions are their source of income. Movie companies use their monopoly on film access to demand almost all of the money from ticket sales (something like 90% of the ticket price IIRC), so the theater actually doesn’t make that much off of movies.
Concessions on the other hand, especially stuff that costs pennies to make like soda and popcorn, are pure profit and are basically the only way many theaters can stay in business these days.
- Comment on Keeping the PlayStation 2 Alive: an interview with devs from the PCSX2 emulator (my article!) 1 week ago:
On the other hand, they’re used to working with low-level concepts from their day job!
- Comment on Stardewy warlock schooler Witchbrook delayed to 2026, but its devs have magicked up an interactive map 1 week ago:
I love how vibrant the indie dev scene is nowadays. I completely forgot about this game despite being incredibly excited for it. There have been so many amazing indie games recently that even ones that meet every one of my interests can fall through the cracks.
- Comment on Many developers leave GZDoom due to leader conflicts and fork it into UZDoom 1 week ago:
Any interesting stories? It’s always amusing to read about how little power it takes for someone to become insufferable. Some maintainers can be incredibly petty tyrants.
For instance, half the FAQ for CDDA is about avoiding or navigating around the whims of a few, let’s call them opinionated, team members who gatekeep development of specific systems in the game.
- Comment on If chickens are modern dinosaurs some dinosaurs probably tasted like chicken. 1 week ago:
The global firestorm gave them a nice natural smoky flavor that’s unmatched to this day.
- Comment on I suppose it's better to find this out 35 years later than never at all. 2 weeks ago:
Super Mario World uses a sprite slot system where a limited amount of memory is set aside and reused for on-screen objects. Normally stuff simply won’t spawn if you’re over the object limit, but using glitches to go over this limit leads to all sorts of weird stuff, like being able to spawn a glitched item that ends the level immediately.
Super Mario 64 has a similar object limit with equally broken results when you manage to bypass it.
- Comment on I suppose it's better to find this out 35 years later than never at all. 2 weeks ago:
You can go through walls in World, too! I remember doing it in one of the early cave levels after reading about it online, though aside from some messed up physics it didn’t lead to anything interesting.
- Comment on I suppose it's better to find this out 35 years later than never at all. 2 weeks ago:
If you want to know more about why this is possible in excruciating technical detail, check out the channel Retro Game Mechanics Explained.
I think this particular bug is covered in this video about level end glitches.
- Comment on I suppose it's better to find this out 35 years later than never at all. 2 weeks ago:
This and many other stupidly precise tricks, like pixel-perfect jumps against the sides of walls or a plethora of bugs involving Yoshi and his tongue.
The most common use of this particular bug is what’s shown in the image, carrying a shell and a key at the same time. You need to throw the shell against a wall while falling and land on it to extend your jump past what’s normally possible, while also carrying the key across the gap. It’s everywhere in Kaizo runs.
- Comment on Can someone fact check this 2 weeks ago:
NASA are so dumb for sending their satellites all the way into space. Why don’t they simply float them above the trees as the majestic owl teaches us?
- Comment on Emperor of overpromising Peter Molyneux says he's done with games after Masters of Albion, which is also his 'redemption title' 2 weeks ago:
*Metal Gear Solid 5 flashbacks*
- Comment on Obsidian Temporarily Removes Games From Sale Due to Unity Exploit 2 weeks ago:
This feels unnecessary. From what I’ve heard, the exploit in question requires a local file and only operates at the privilege level of the game itself, so you’re unlikely to encounter it unless you’re adding files to your game install.
So you’re vulnerable if you install malicious mods, in other words. Which, consisting Unity mods are done via DLL injection, is already the case even without this exploit.
- Comment on I just finished the Casemate mod for HALO: CE 2 weeks ago:
How hard was it to maintain your sanity while working on this? Whenever InfernoPlus goes into detail on working with Halo’s content creation tools, it sounds like the most painful jury-rigged mess imaginable.
- Comment on Snake Pass, unique and charming platformer 3 weeks ago:
if you know similar unique concepts, I would love to learn about them!
There’s an entire subgenre of indie games based around controlling weird things like this. Sadly most of them aren’t very fun (it turns out inventing entirely new control schemes is hard, who would have guessed?), but there have been a few I’ve enjoyed.
The most famous of the past few years is Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, where you play a man in a pot trying to climb a mountain. Its whole schtick is being as frustrating and unfair as possible, so it’s definitely not for everyone.
My personal favorite would be Yoku’s Island Express, which is a cute Metroidvania-lite using pinball of all things. It’s way better than it sounds, though it’s kind of easy if you have any prior experience with pinball games.
There’s also I Am Bread, which is more typical of these types of games in that it’s just being weird for the sake of being weird. In it you’re a sentient piece of bread who has to flop around a messy house, trying to complete the steps to turn yourself into delicious toast without getting inedibly dirty in the process.
And of course the granddaddy of them all, the Katamari Damacy series. I haven’t played any since the original on consoles so can’t speak as to whether the modern ones are any good.
- Comment on Amid EA's unpopular $55 billion buyout, Baldur's Gate 3 director takes time "to remind people that making games faster and cheaper while charging more has never worked before" 3 weeks ago:
For a prime example of this, look no further than EA’s former CEO John Riccitiello, who keeps getting executive positions despite being objectively bad at his job.
He was hired as EA’s COO (and later CEO) despite having zero experience in the video game industry (his prior work was at places like Pepsi and Clorox). EA under Riccitiello tried to squeeze every cent possible out of customers through aggressive microtransactions, pushed to make every game always-online to prevent piracy (a decision that lead to the disastrous SimCity reboot, and the Sims 4 only escaped the same fate due to SimCity’s dire reception [though it’s theorized its vastly simplified gameplay compared to earlier Sims titles is a remnant of this time]), was a major proponent of the worst sorts of anti-consumer DRM such as SecuROM, and treated employees like trash leading to an exodus of talent. EA was voted the worst company in America twice during his tenure, and people online celebrated when the stock price plummeted and he was finally pushed out.
His post-EA career was also a disaster. After leaving EA (with a golden parachute, naturally), he was hired as the CEO of Unity Technologies - the company behind the Unity game engine - due to his “industry expertise”. Over the next few years he ran the company into the ground with awful monetization strategies (he’s the one behind the “runtime fee” fiasco, where Unity wanted to charge game developers by how many times their games were installed), wasted billions of dollars acquiring middleware vendors (mainly ad and analytics companies), and set engine development priorities that chased mobile game fads over what the actual users of their product wanted. He “resigned” when the stock price dropped by over 60% in a year due to his mistakes, and the engine’s reputation hasn’t come close to recovering from the damage his leadership caused.
I can’t wait to see what company he ruins next.
- Comment on Xbox consoles are now getting a fullscreen Xbox Game Pass Ultimate ad at boot, just a day after a 50% price hike was announced 3 weeks ago:
Keepass2Android shows a pop-up each October asking for donations. Perfectly fine, but the dismiss button is labeled “I don’t like the app that much”. Even free software isn’t spared that sort of thing.
- Comment on THEY'RE EVOLVING 3 weeks ago:
Especially since they started with drones unlocked!
- Comment on Life imitates art 3 weeks ago:
fictional Templar-run evil Assassin’s Creed gaming company Abstergo Entertainment
Did trying to parse this give anyone else a headache?
- Comment on Do you recognize this guy playing video games? 3 weeks ago:
Which one? Both.
- Comment on Being a noob in heist games 3 weeks ago:
As an aside, if you want to try a fun heist game without needing to worry about letting down any teammates, I highly recommend checking out Heat Signature.
It’s single-player and is a 2D, top-down heist game where you sneak aboard space ships to complete objectives like assassinating a crew member, stealing something valuable, hijacking the entire ship, etc.
It looks simple, but things get crazy fast. One minute you’re sneaking behind guards and knocking them out with a wrench, the next you’re teleporting into a locked cabin, shooting out the glass so the explosive decompression blows you and your target into space, then teleporting back to your original location (because you used a recall teleporter that does so automatically after a few seconds) while they slowly asphyxiate, before hacking the nearby turrets to shoot down any investigating guards while you sprint back to your shuttle and escape.
- Comment on Jimmy Kimmel is The Most Boring, Cringe and Unfunny Comedian Ever; People Should Boycott Disney for Getting His Show Back. 3 weeks ago:
It might fit into shitposts, but the response each post gets shows the community isn’t a huge fan of these. The other places you post them suggest that you’re actually just crossposting to communities that allow anything to be posted.
But again, crossposts aren’t marked in every client (and some don’t even show the crosspost text, just the title!), so a lot of readers won’t know not to take these posts seriously and fights will break out in the comments. Though judging by the comments on the original posts, people can’t detect bait even when the community is literally named ragebait.
(Also, do the random emphasized letters mean anything? I’m too lazy to do the work of checking for hidden messages myself.)
- Comment on Jimmy Kimmel is The Most Boring, Cringe and Unfunny Comedian Ever; People Should Boycott Disney for Getting His Show Back. 3 weeks ago:
There has to be a better way of promoting your ragebait community than crossposting to an unrelated one. Some clients don’t even show that a post is a crosspost.
- Comment on Amazon is making it impossible to remove the DRM from Kindle Books 4 weeks ago:
Just wait until you can only stream books, not download them, with random words replaced with synonyms using an algorithm that lets them track down who the originator of any scanned copies is.
That might sound ridiculous, but streaming-only to prevent perfect copies and hiding purchaser identifiers in the data are both DRM techniques that have been explored in other media already. There’s no limit to how anti-consumer publishers can get when they think there’s slightly more money to be had.
- Comment on hyperbaric oxygen chamber 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Palfarm Trailer - Palworld Spin-Off Game 4 weeks ago:
Nintendo to the Patent Office: “We invented farming games with the introduction of berries in Pokémon. Please ignore all other prior art that wasn’t ours.”
