chameleon

@chameleon@fedia.io

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨similar to the word of mouth post, what game did you not expect much from but loved it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Great games you would recommend from before 1990?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Mother/"EarthBound Beginnings" definitively has the late 80s/early 90s RPG smell with its grindiness and rocky difficulty curve, but is still pretty damn good if that's not a dealbreaker. The official translation came out in 2014, but is reasonably accurate.

  Gradius and especially Gradius 2 are classic shmups for a reason, but the much bigger hitboxes take some real adjusting if you're used to modern bullet hell ones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The PS2 Ace Combat games (4/5/Zero) are still best-in-genre as far as I'm concerned, and have held up exceedingly well in general. Aerial dogfighting with good controls, good mission design and interesting story.

  Sky Odyssey is a more "relaxed" little flight game that I also like, still got game-like controls but no combat, just missions where you fly through hard situations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a week dominated by Silksong and Borderlands, co-op roguelike Shape of Dreams still managed to launch on Steam as an instant top-seller⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I've also been playing this, even though it's well out of what I normally play. I'd describe it as being closer to an ARPG than a MOBA, and for both better and for worse, it feels like a roguelike version of mid-seasonal gameplay in ARPGs. Couple of buttons on relatively short cooldowns backed up by buildcrafting meant to make those buttons utterly broken with lots of good opportunities available. There's okay variance between runs. Buildcrafting is super flexible in general, you can move all of your ability upgrades around to other abilities at any time with no cost, you can even give almost everything to friends in co-op.

  Not all is good. The game was review-bombed at launch due to the metaprogression and cooldown changes from the demo, and honestly, that was probably correct. The balancing work and the per-character XP requirements ruined some of the fun that the demo had. The worst was hotfixed within a day, even adding a compensation system for demo players, and progress is like 3X faster now, but it still feels like it's too slow and not fluid enough. I sorta settled on having a "main" in a genre that's more fun if you swap between characters to keep things fresh. The devs will probably find a solution sooner than later.

  There's some other problems like the performance absolutely tanking in lategame regardless of what you're playing on (my trusty RX 580 performs about as well as my friend's RTX 4080, and that's a pretty universal complaint), there's some multiplayer bugs like a boss attack that only the host can survive, some questionable balancing here and there, one of the 8 characters feels unfinished (Shell), but overall it's been pretty good, fills a pretty unique role and the problems don't really detract from what I'm getting out of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DDR4 costs soar as manufacturers pull the plug — panic buying and stockpiling impact DDR4 spot pricing as supply dwindles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I've seen the claim around but I'm highly skeptical of it. DDR5 is far too slow for anything where memory bandwidth really matters, any newly produced chip that's gonna be used for AI is on HBM3 or HBM3e, or possibly GDDR6/GDDR7 if it's a GPU pulled from the consumer segment. HBM5 is still a very, very early research project and is certainly not being produced yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bandcamp Clubs [new Bandcamp feature]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The idea is interesting, but $13/month for one 'mystery' album from an artist you (most likely) don't know feels rather up there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam: Updates to User Review Scores Based on Language⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Even with the current thumbs up/down people get it wrong. Give it a thumbs up but write a scathing review.

  I've done that and it's a result of not having more options than good/bad. Always the same cause: I really wanted to write a 3* review for a game that has a lot to praise but its core is fundamentally flawed, but Steam doesn't let me give a 3*, so I try to correct for the review score bracket I think the game should be in.