I remember planting so, so many rings in a single place with debug mode enabled in Sonic 2 just so I could play through each stage as Super Sonic without effort- aside from the super slippery controls.

This was the only thing I could think of with that title.

To add to this: taking territory is the easy part.

The hard part is holding it, because you don’t just have to worry about staffing the front line, but maintaining security in the occupied regions long enough for non-state actors to cease hostilities and accept the invading force as the new legitimate authority- which may never fully occur- all the while dealing with resistance fighters.

This means orders of magnitude more personnel, funding, and equipment for an unknowable length of time across a much larger area than just the line of incursion.

It’s taken them two years to fail to take the land, and now have an incursion into their own soil to contend with. so I’m skeptical they’d manage to keep it permanently.

I’ve been playing this game off and on for years, and it’s always a delight.

That perfect investigation bonus can get pretty big, and that needs a full photo album of 3-Star photos. Disturbed salt is an easy way to get close to that, so your friend is sleeping on some great cheese.

For C&C fans, Tempest Rising is C&C in all but name. The most recent playtest felt like a hybrid of Tiberian Sun and Tiberium Wars. It’s not out yet, but I’m very excited about it.

The Wiiimote and Nunchuk combo needs a little tweaking (maybe make the wiimote more like a nunchuk for ergonomics, give it an analog stick for coarse camera movement) but it was the most comfortable controller ever since I could place my hands in different positions relative to one another.

I enjoy them; they’re a small, mundane, humanising element in a sea of (often bad) news or game trailer links in my feed.

Though I also appreciate the parody.

Nice. Also, I like the storyline you’ve got going with the respawns.

I hope it turns out well; I’ve wanted to experience 2e as a player since before the playtest, and this would be the closest I expect to come for a long time.

Tbf, they sold the Steam Controller for a while, and eventually dropped the price to $5 just to clean out the rest of their stock- and that was the end of a product line instead of the older, cheaper version of a current product.

Alternatively, they may have realized that some people who want the Steam Deck but cannot afford it justify the OLED model as their first handheld PC would most likely go to a competitors’ product instead, or write off handheld PCs as unattainable due to cost.

For my part, I was on the fence about the LCD model when it came out because I didn’t think I’d have enough use case scenarios to justify the initial cost, and only after someone I know upgraded to the OLED and gifted me their old LCD model did I actually find out what I was missing out on. Now that I’ve had one for the better part of a year, I can say that the LCD model works for my needs.

If I had any complaints, it’s that the touchpad is too low in its position and too square for me to comfortably use for FPS games, and the select & start buttons are placed in such a way that I have to reach my thumb over their respective analog sticks just to reach, which feels awkward sometimes; I feel that the touchpad and analog stick positions should’ve been swapped- though iirc the OLED has the same form factor, so it’s not an issue exclusive to the LCD model. I’m also coming from the perspective of a Steam Controller fan, too, which to me is nearly perfect as a controller. (I only wish the left pad was just a dedicated d-pad, better analog emulation when using keyboard inputs, and as many back paddles as the Steam Deck.)

That claim is such a pet peeve of mine. That’s not even how our eyes work, and it’s demonstrably untrue.

It can even be proven false by rapidly moving the mouse cursor across the screen very quickly and the lack of motion blur.

This bug has been around for a while. It’s apparently reliably repeatable if you know how to manipulate it, but I haven’t looked into it too much myself. For context, I’ve been playing Phas on and off since 2020.

They’re effectively visual novels with light gameplay mechanics for navigation or making some narrative path choices. At least, that’s how I felt about Until Dawn.

I want to see his diagrams, or at least photos of the infrastructure.

I can’t imagine the heat buildup in that room after an hour if the infrastructure is all powered on at once.

Hell yeah! These were really fun for me to play as a kid, and I did like the Raptor ending in particular, but I always wanted a bit more, given how much effort it took to get to the end. Especially the Grant campaign.

As a kid, though, I just wish the map would change and display the next level on the map once you finished the third stage. Even if you couldn’t pick your route anymore, it was always frustrating not really getting to see my progress after that point.

I played it a bit a decade or so ago. I never really got the hang of the main, game-defining mechanic; one of the main methods of movement in the world was to jump from a high point and build momentum while gliding to get higher, but that was also the main way to deal damage, iirc. It was very strange.

As for the crassness, the original Worms game had a self-destruct attack that was about as direct, iirc.

Not to add to the whataboutism, but don’t forget how the US firebombed Tokyo.

I’ve been enjoying Signalis. It’s a survival horror game with a top down 2.5d perspective and a late ps1-early ps2 graphics style. It’s very reminiscent of the older Resident Evil games where ammo is scarce(more or less is available based on difficulty), inventory space is limited(adjustable limits are available in settings), and there are specific rooms with a storage container where you can store items and save your game (there is no autosave or checkpoint system; you have to manually save your game), but it very much feels like it’s own thing.

I picked it up on a whim when looking for games with female protagonists to play on a new-to-me hand-me-down Steam Deck, and it happens to run perfectly on it.

What’s frustrating for me is when the PC side cripples mixed-input entirely even though I just want mouse-look, gyro aim, and analog movement from my controller without any aim assist. (Looking at you, Destiny 2 and Halo.)

This sounds like it would mean charging Valve money for the privilege of using Valve’s own infrastructure every time a player installed a Unity game after a major PC upgrade/reinstall or after uninstalling that MMO they dumped every other game in their library try out.

Steam could probably bake a ban on software that uses installation trackers into their developer/publisher ToS, or ban the collection or transmission of Steam user data related to installations, or something similar.