I love some classic Mario Kart 64, but a family member and his friends kind of ruined that one for me. It’s a game that has relatively little content and is best played in small doses to not get sick of it, but they didn’t do that. They went through a whole phase of playing it every day and gaining expert level skills in it. I was not aware of how deep the meta for MK64 is, because the last time I played against them, they were exploiting glitches in virtually every track and leaving everyone else in the dust.

Was always more of a Diddy Kong Racing fan anyway.

I’ll care about ray tracing if it ever gets efficient enough to run at 60+ fps on an entry-level apu.

If true, guess dude was right, the True Fans found a way to pay that $80 price tag.

I’m still playing the waiting game, will not pay more than $40.

Even if it’s a small amount of people, it still matters. Even if boycotts can’t be made big enough to force a company to change, the change that does occur for the people boycotting changes their own lives. Things don’t happen in a vacuum, there is opportunity cost. Nintendo might still be bullying the rest of their customers, but the boycotters themselves are already free. They’re already using alternatives, supporting those alternatives, and the growth that can happen from that support can potentially mean the world to who is being supported.

I could be playing a Zelda game, but I won’t. And because of that, one way I’ve scratched that itch is by buying indie games with a similar style like Blossom Tales and Anodyne. Indie devs can use all the support they can get, so every customer counts.

It also has me looking into open-source alternatives like the Zquest engine and Solarus engine - both of which seem pretty cool.

And of course as I said earlier it means more of my time, energy, and money go toward Steam, and Valve is doing great work driving increasing popularity and technical capability of Linux, and largely doing it in the right way by substantially supporting open-source software like Proton.

One or few people don’t make much of a difference in the short term, but they are always the first ones necessary to get network effects going. I mean come on, we’re having this discussion on lemmy.

In the last 24 hours I’ve had a great time playing Heroes of Might and Magic 3 on my laptop, feeling pleased about my 800+ games on Steam and the fact that I’m not having my life ruined by Shigeru Miyamoto’s lawyers. This is what people get wrong about boycotts and the defeatist refrain, “no ethical consumption under capitalism.” It ignores that, on the example of Nintendo, I have not purchased any of their systems since the New 2DS XL. No Switch, definitely no Switch 2. And in leveraging that opportunity cost I have instead directed my resources to one of their competitors, which has had immediate benefits for my own personal life.

It’s not about what you want to kill, it’s about what you want to grow. I am helping to support the increased use of Linux by using Linux, paying for products that have Linux, and naturally advertising for Linux as a result of that being a part of my life. I don’t care how successful Nintendo is, because I am already free from their enshittification.

A million customers dropping Nintendo at once would absolutely have a massive impact, are you kidding?

Supporting Nintendo is self harm, I am just trying to suggest to people that they don’t have to participate in that self harm.

Seriously, this is you right now.

It’s really not, and evidently you don’t know jack shit about the discussions, studies, and history in piracy. If you did, you’d know that a primary argument in favor of the free sharing of information is that as we consume media, we effectively become free advertising for that media. So by claiming my stance is a “weirdo interpretation”, you are undermining one of the pillars that supports movements to make info and culture more free.

Piracy is a form of free advertising. And piracy can and often does lead to more sales.

To pirate something does promote it through word of mouth viral marketing.

You’re basically saying boycotts are ineffective. That’s bullshit. Sure I know Nintendo isn’t going away, but now I’m putting my time, effort, and money towards the goods and services from a more deserving company. And Nintendo is gone from my life.

It’s about what you want to grow, not what you want to die.

I guess it must be a hot take, because it gets downvoted a lot every time I say this, but…

I think it’s better to boycott Nintendo outright, rather than pirate their games. Piracy is still promotion, it still benefits them, and anyone going out of their way to facilitate Nintendo piracy is clearly putting themselves at great risk. Even video content creators who are doing nothing illegal are at risk of legal battles they often can’t afford.

Nothing that Nintendo comes out is so uniquely great that it’s worth putting up with their awful business practices, fan abuse, and general enshittification. As far as video game platforms go, Steam provides orders of magnitude more value for the same cost, and they are doing genuinely good work advancing the quality and popularity of Linux.

Makes sense. Speaking of which, I have to break your rule. I think some people have already 'splained that Final Fantasy isn’t as complicated as it seems, you can mostly jump in anywhere. Or to keep it simple, the best start is Final Fantasy X International. For me, Final Fantasy VII will always be my favorite just because it was the first one I played, and especially at a tumultuous time in my life. It was comfort food.

But so was X, and it really can’t be emphasized enough how much of a phenomenon this game was when it first came out. The graphics for it’s time blew people away and even hold up to some extent by today’s standards (especially if you count the remasters). The story is like something you’d expect out of a Pixar film - it will tug at your heartstrings. The gameplay itself is so easy to get into, and even easier to be completely absorbed by. I love the sphere grid. The worldbuilding is rich, and the aesthetic is dreamy. I went back and replayed it somewhat recently, and was shocked because a lot of games and content in general have not aged well; but X definitely aged like wine.

There’s a plot thread involving the main character and his struggles to be himself in spite of years of resentment toward his father’s verbal abuse and toxic masculinity. When I was a kid I kind of felt embarrassed to be playing through those scenes if others were around, but it hits closer to home now that we are at least beginning (at least in some spaces/circles) to push past those cliches and have a little breathing room to let go of outdated masculinity norms ourselves. It’s not a perfect game, but it does seem like it was a bit ahead of its time.

Yeah, easily in my top ten, maybe even top five.

So judging from the comments, there is your ps2 games recommendations: the entire PlayStation 2 library.

It’s weird to me that game devs don’t experiment with alternative organizational structures more often, kind of like Motion Twin; or how they’re only just beginning to unionize in some places. The “capital” in game development is a little bit computer hardware, but otherwise the vast majority of value in a game design studio is the human beings and their talent and skills.

I cannot think of any other industry where the workers are more essential, and management more superfluous and replaceable.

Part of an overall concerning trend, but as someone who decided to stop buying consoles years ago: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Okay, so more World Economic Forum, less Electronic Frontier Foundation?

Sounds like we need more EFF’s of video games then.

My question is, what is this group as an entity, and why does their opinion matter? Are they an ngo-style advocacy group, or an actual governing body of some kind?

Yeah, the way to make it happen is adding it to my wishlist and waiting for the price to drop to at least $40.

That was somebody else’s point. I just chimed in with my own take. :D

On my laptop I switched from Debian to Fedora and that had a distinct impact on gaming performance, though I think it had more to do with how I had it set up previously. For instance I used full disk encryption for Debian, but skipped that on Fedora, because it does seem to impact games noticeably.

But it also might be because Fedora is more bleeding edge, so the OS itself might actually play a role here.

On my desktop I’ve been running Bazzite and that’s been pretty great so far.

The tariff situation makes it a bad idea to release or even announce new hardware right now. What they should do is finish Steam OS so they can officially release it for all platforms.

I prefer the symmetrical sticks, calling it outdated is just cult of inevitable progress vibes. Also the touchpad is hardly a gimmick when we’re talking about PC as a gaming platform. If anything a touchpad should become standard on all controllers.

My biggest complaints with the dualsense controller is that the shape of it starts to feel uncomfortable after long game sessions, the ds4 was better. Also the dpad sucks.

We all, all of me. I don’t have to care about what others are buying, because Steam and Linux is an amazing gaming experience and they’re the ones missing out. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I am looking forward to playing the Remaster. It sounds like they’ve fixed pretty much everything I didn’t like about the original Oblivion - like the awful level up system. Hopefully they rebalanced the “difficulty” in a good way too. Last time I played Oblivion I remember higher difficulties being boring because it mostly meant even the weakest enemies would take a billion hits to kill.

Skyblivion will be fun to play too.

Having already purchased the Steam early access version, I was ready to be pissed off until I read further in.

Bullet heaven is likely what will stick. If you don’t like that it’s also the name of a game, consider that metroidvania contains the name of two games.

Omfg I can’t believe I forgot about this one. Ecco the Dolphin metroidvania!

Lol, that’d be interesting. Would the whole thing take place in that semi-first-person perspective?

If you’re not aware, Megaman Zero series, and Megaman ZX games are pretty much metroidvanias.

There’s also the fanmade Megaman X Corrupted which is reimagining the Megaman X games as a metroidvania.

Dunno, but if that’s true, then ideally the rights would be bought and used by people who don’t suck, or maybe there could be a spiritual successor.

Commander Keen metroidvania?

Yeah, I didn’t consider that. The game would probably have to design the map in a way that keeps all the characters relatively nearby, or introduce a mechanic for them to converge more seamlessly, like maybe having save rooms that teleport all of them together or something.

Oooh, another one: Demon’s Crest.

Sonic Adventure 1 is my favorite Sonic game. I was thinking more along the lines of a 2d sidescrolling Sonic metroidvania though.

I agree with pretty much all of your points, especially about limited inventories. In isometric arpgs in particular it drives me crazy that half the gameplay is essentially a gambling system of explosions of massive amounts of items - yet they give you virtually no room to carry it? Terrible.

But on Morrowind, I love the game with mods like MULE, but the vanilla level up system makes the stat system self-defeating. The purpose of skill-based progression is to let me play the character I want to play, and do the things I want to do, and trust that my character is going to grow accordingly. But the level up stat multiplier system forces the player to do all sorts of things other than what they want, in order to get the most out of the stat system.

It’s even worse in Oblivion because everything levels with you much more in that game, which means if you don’t do these ridiculous things to min/max, your enemies can actually become too powerful to beat!

Skyrim size was just about right. I just want a deeper stat sytem that promotes more build diversity than stealth archer (but keeping the skill tree system intact - never want to go back to the Morrowind/Oblivion systems), enemies and items that don’t level with me, more monster variety (so sick of draugr), and bring back levitation and modifiable acrobatics!

It wouldn’t be so bad if 3rd party sellers would just be more consistently clear about which models and variants they’re selling.

The thing that annoys me is the way virtually all of these phone models have minor variants that go undocumented in the store pages. I ordered my last phone online, after first searching to make sure it was a model that was supported by the roms I like. The store page advertised it as unlocked, and that it supports GSM. Both of these things are true, and yet it turned out to be a “Verizon” model variant (believe it supports both GSM and whatever Verizon’s networks are called these days, cdsm). It sucks because this small variation casts doubt and may reduce which roms I can install (haven’t gotten around to flashing one yet). And the other annoyance is that even though it does work fine with my carrier, I still get an annoying notification every time I reboot my phone that complains about the SIM not being a Verizon one even though it works just fine.

It’s weird that they would tout “disabling” apps as a gained feature. Like yeah it’s slightly better than bloatware being able to continue running with no recourse, but that ignores that the more original state of computers used to (and still do on x86 systems) do nothing to get in the way of the user being able to delete whatever the hell we want.