All I can think about is how this bot is immediately a non-starter because this is the kind of attitude I can expect from the author when asking for support or collaboration. It’s not just in this post, either.

Even if the parent comment here was hostile–it’s borderline, at worst–I can’t possibly understand the mentality of being argumentative in a post trying to encourage the use of a service.

I forgot I had this on my list. I’m neck-deep in Metaphor ReFantazio right now, but I’ve got to try this soon (along with at least half a dozen Next Fest demos). Emperor Rise of the Middle Kingdom is one of my favorite games.

I also can’t see complaining about free content. This isn’t an Ark situation.

A welcome change, though I imagine the more savvy grifters have seen the writing on the wall for a while now with virtual credit cards becoming more popular. I put a freeze date on every single purchase I make that has a recurring subscription.

Did the same, although damn is this release ever tempting me. I was done with the first Hades pretty quick, but I could see this one easily sucking me in for 100+ hours. Felt to me like they improved damn near everything, and the vibe is divine. Amelia Tyler is a treasure.

I smell copypasta.

Forever ago, out of morbid curiosity. I do vaguely remember it being quite bizarre.

Sure. There’s just degrees of it. Your average Steam community discussion board is far, far worse than the community you’re in right now.

RPGs come immediately to mind. Your partner in Disco Elysium is more competent than the main character for reasons that will be immediately obvious. Bethesda’s RPGs are also open world, and while you’ll start out alone in them, you get permanent companions pretty quick (especially if you know where to look). They also get more chatty in the world and more character development in the later games. Fallout 4 more so than Skyrim more so than Fallout 3, for example. Starfield makes you swap them out if you do the main story, which I don’t know if you’ll like or not.

For a dedicated shooter, I think Titanfall 2 has the most protective companion I’ve seen in the genre. Get this one on sale, since it has its robust multiplayer priced in, but it has an excellent–if a bit short–single-player campaign.

Probably the same reason it’s happening all over the corporate web: fewer eyeballs moderating content. I was never enough of a regular on Steam communities to be sure, unlike GameFAQs (which I can tell you has always been that way).

Dropping a random tip here that might help a couple people that are running Metaphor on PC with an RTX card: turn on DLDSR and FXAA from your Nvidia Control Panel, and set 100% rendering scale in-game. The game doesn’t have anti-aliasing for whatever reason and the shimmer is real bad compared to Atlus’s earlier games. The best you can do in-game is crank up the scale, and I think some pretty beefy hardware is still required for good framerate with that.

Some stuff is probably going to be bad no matter what you do (like Strohl’s vest), but this way I can reduce a lot of the aliasing and still get a rock-solid 60 FPS on my modest 3060Ti. There are likely better third-party solutions being developed by the community right now, maybe even some good presets in Reshade.

Meanwhile I’m over here thinking about how I greatly prefer to put my saves in my own cloud storage (too many games these days not giving me as many slots as I’d like), the community forums are some of the most toxic places on the Internet right now, it’s a coin flip whether Steam’s going to give me a problem with my DualShock4, I hate how the Workshop is a walled garden, and I’m so much happier with my streaming now that I’ve dropped Steam Link and moved to Moonlight.

I guess the guides and Big Picture Mode can be nice?

Steam’s still the #2 best option for me on PC storefronts; the battle.net launcher has some aggressive advertising, as an example of hellscape we’re avoiding here. But Steam continues to not offer me much added value. I go there only because some of my games aren’t available on GOG.

I will say I appreciate what Valve is doing with the Steam Deck, and I’m really hoping it continues to grow an ecosystem that directly competes with Nintendo. They are actively burning up banked goodwill right now, and that segment of the market is getting unhealthy without someone keeping them in check.

Loved these movies as a kid. Still one of the worst games I’ve ever played.

It should also be noted that playing on authentic hardware is an inherently destructive action. Parts wear out–especially on hardware with disc drives or fans–discs get scratched, cartridge contacts corrode, etc. On top of all this, goods get destroyed or lost in transit all the time even in the collector market. All of this is driving prices up.

If one wants to have an authentic experience, they still can, but they had better be prepared to pay a premium for it. People are already compromising on displays since CRTs are rare and/or cumbersome, and there are other compromise options like MiSTers and repro carts that aren’t just emulating on your home PC.

As a general rule of thumb, if it has dialogue, it’s going to be pretty good, and surprisingly so a lot of the time. The Witcher 3 is still unmatched for quality and quantity of side quests.

This wasn’t a particularly good open world game even for its time, so I’d say ignoring the map markers completely is often smart.

I blame Metroid Dread for that one. Such a bizarre design choice for Phantom Liberty, especially being very late in the game. At least Dread flipped that around.

Unfortunately, FromSoft wasn’t on Tenchu until later in the series when it…wasn’t so great. Still, that Sekiro started as a Tenchu concept is why I picked up the game in the first place. And like Tenchu, effective stealth is there, it’s just especially challenging.

Now, Zelda: Skyward Sword is one I can’t defend (and one of the reasons I’m surprised OP is getting crushed for this post).

The term is more specific than that, referring to runaway capitalism being the cause. Otherwise you’d just use something simpler like “worsening.”

The original context comes from a 2022 blog post.

Can’t help but feel like this is a step back for Brace Yourself on their music games. Loved the first NecroDancer and Cadence of Hyrule. Tried the demo, but this one just wasn’t for me. Maybe I need a gimmick for these kinds of games–for Dance Dance Revolution it was the dance pad, Rez had the vibrator and the visuals, Frequency and Amplitude exposed me to new music genres, etc.

Elite Beat Agents and Theatrhythm both did well in the games that were just press-the-right-button, so I know there’s an audience for this. I’m just not in it, I guess.

I don’t know how well it’s aged for a new player, but I found it very notable at the time for being dark, if not outright macabre, at times. We had very little of that in the 16-bit era.

Drawing from real-world locales and cultures was interesting, too. Ys is another series that does that to good effect.