Adding to this one. Incredible game.

Bugsnax. Substantially better game than I anticipated.

God, Mouthwashing was a masterpiece.

I also really, really enjoyed Arctic Eggs, but it’s so absurd that I can barely recommend it to people.

I appreciate Critical Reflex in ways I hadn’t quite put together until reading this article.

I’m famously a World hater, so yes, absolutely. Until Icebourne released, I was extremely disappointed with World, even for a pre-G Rank release.

Though, all of the titles since Generations have had the problem of being released with a portion of the planned content missing. I was more forgiving of it before, though I am having a hard time pinpointing why.

Compared to World and Rise? It’s just not very good. It’s by far the fewest hours I’ve put into a Monster Hunter game since… Well, literally ever.

I still have the CD in a box somewhere. It was loaned to me by a friend and I never gave it back. Hilariously, I still see that friend, so that might make for a fun conversation.

I do want to state that the flight model has NOTHING on Elite. But otherwise, it is in a lot of ways a game which I wish Elite was a lot closer to.

Friends and I downloaded it, prompted by this post. There’s a little bit of awkwardness and animation jank, but man, does the game get the core concept right.

Space is not flat, the ship feels like a near arcane contraption, rail guns should feel like they’ll punch a hole in a small planet, and grappling hooks always feel good. These guys know what I’m looking for. The only thing I could genuinely ask for is a more true to physics flight model, but ultimately, I’ll be too busy taking down fighters using a rocket launcher while gravity-booted to the nose of my ship to care too much.

0% homelessness in China btw.

Which is like the US declaring homelessness a federal crime, imprisoning everyone who lives on the streets, and calling homelessness a solved problem.

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I hate that you get downvoted for pointing out the reality of the situation.

Relative to the price of everything else, $80 for a AAA videogame is actually reasonable. The problem is that rent has gone up drastically, food has gone up drastically, and our wages have stagnated. Getting pissed off at Gearbox for charging $80 for Borderlands 4, and then paying $15 for a burger and fries without an equal reaction just doesn’t seem sensible to me.

Everything is awful, and videogame devs aren’t the ones stealing all our buying power.

I agree. The war in Ukraine can only truly be resolved by removing it’s root causes. Remove Putin, and the war ends.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called Canada a “socialist regime”

God, I fucking wish.

I’d hardly call $50 games “budget titles.” Is paying $30 for a meal at a steakhouse a budget meal just because that high-class $50 a plate reservation-only place exists?

I agree that price doesn’t equal quality, but I don’t feel so good about trying to normalize AAA $50 games as “budget titles.” And the link to the article is broken, so I am not sure what the greater context and points of the article are.

Okay, this is a cute way to push Linux and all, but Windows 10 reaching end of service really doesn’t mean we have to give up using it. We could easily have years before the end of support causes compatibility issues for the average home user.

That’s an interesting take. I found them to be very different people. Two different flavours of cliche’d anime protagonist, sure, but very different people none the less.

My partner and I make a point to occasionally play through a couch co-op game as well. Here are some of the things we enjoyed.

Phogs - Currently playing this. It’s a cute, dog-themed puzzle game thing, where you play as two heads of a single long dog-thing. We’re enjoying it, but we’re not particularly deep in, and I do wonder if it’ll get Ibb and Obb samey, but it’s worth checking out imo.

Cassette Beasts - Couch co-op, Pokemon inspired, adventure RPG with great storytelling, fantastic music and a retro aesthetic. The world is very Zelda-like in exploration and puzzle solving, while combat is Pokemon double battles. Highly recommended, just be aware that one player gets to be the player-made protagonist, while the other is one of an interchangeable series of partner characters.

Sea of Stars - The co-op update did a lot of good for this game. A Chrono Trigger inspired, faux-SNES era, indie RPG. There’s a lot of unvoiced dialogue, which I could see as being a barrier to enjoyment as a multiplayer game, but the game is paced quite well, so I don’t think it’s a huge problem. Also, players do take turns inputting commands, but everyone is responsible for the timed hits/blocks, and you each control a character of equal agency in the overworld, so it avoids the largest co-op turn based RPG folly of having one player and one half-watching “follower.” There are a ton of accessibility options/features (difficulty is VERY malleable), and as an added bonus, there’s a free story DLC coming on the 20th.

Children of Morta - This is perhaps the most “hardcore” of my list, but the girlfriend, despite explicitly not enjoying “hard” games, really really enjoyed this one. An action-RPG with some very light roguelike elements, Children of Morta has you play as a family of hunter-gatherer-warrior types in a fantasy world, working together to stop a malevolent power from corrupting the physical world. Each family member has a different playstyle, their own skill tree, and a lot of personality. The game is very story driven, with a few moments being taken between each run for the fantastic narration to drip feed the narrative, slowly teaching you more about the world, the characters, and their family dynamic.

These are the ones that came to the top of my mind, either because they were particularly good or, in the case of Phogs, is ongoing. If I see anything else worth mentioning when I look at my Steam list next, I’ll add.

I believe we (as in, people) all have a responsibility to hold each other accountable. But we can also only do so much, and inserting yourself into a toxic community founded for the sole goal of normalizing that toxicity in some misguided attempt to reform such people is beyond what any one person can be expected to engage with.

I explicitly stay away from such groups. I call it out in person, and politely check my friends when they say something that they might not realize is harmful, exactly the same way I expect them to check me, but that’s just it. That kind of discourse isn’t welcome in these groups because they were created with one explicit purpose: to justify and normalize the absolute shittiest behavioursof the most sexiest of male culture.

She’s right, it isn’t a small amount of men. But it’s a supermajority in certain circles, and a tiny, neglible minority in others. She, unfortunately, exposed herself to the worst of men enmasse. We should instead go to those latter circles, and avoid/ostracize those former circles, until they realize if their only goal is sex, they’ll have to figure out how to be a decent person first. And men, choose to be better.

Feel free to degrade me.

Are you okay?