games

Excuse the goofy helmet until I can find something that looks better. Progress, progress, progress, level 22 now and ready to start the lowbie questlines.

https://eq.magelo.com/profile/4253939

https://twitter.com/StarDreamiie/status/1782031694201016474

This thread was horrifying. Some good responses in there but holy shit.

Its very pretty but these games suck. Boring narrative, watered down by needless open world shit, uninspired crafting, platforming that is straight up not good, and why the FUCK is everything so hard to see? Its gorgeous, but its sensory overload. There are so many effects and splashes of color they forgot to make the game fuckin readable.

The PC version of Space Marine fundamentally fucked up the gameplay -- the execution system works differently (and worse) from the original console release, and nobody has ever talked about it somehow.

Alternatively, it's possible the game always sucked and I had the only good version of it due to a unique bug on my 360 disc. Like, that shit ain't the same way it was on my 360 version. I checked. It's different.

Space Marine requires the player to use special "execution" moves on enemies to regain health, like DOOM 2016, but years before that. A key detail is that you are not invulnerable while you do the kill animations. This brings us to the key difference that makes the game dookie on PC:

On the 360 version, or at least the particular disc I have, you cannot outright die during the animation. You can still take damage, and you can still take so much damage that it ends up being a bad choice, so there's still a worthy risk-reward consideration, but you can't outright fucking die during the animation.

It was still totally possible to die literally seconds after the animation finished, such as if you regain less health than you lost during the animation, but the animation had to at least finish.

This created exciting battles where you'd be basically riding a wave of execution moves to keep yourself alive while under constant assault. Like, you're barely keeping your head above water, chaining from one "safe" point to another -- just gotta stun somebody and reach them before you outright die and you're secure for another few seconds. It felt really cool actually.

On the PC version, you can and likely will die frequently during the kill animations, making it shit. It's just annoying shit now, and feels super cheap and unfair, especially since the kill animations have different lengths, and you can't choose. Best is when you die right before it's about to finish and give you the health you wanted in the first place.

This doesn't even start to become too noticeable until the second half of the game where the Chaos dickheads start showing up, and the little renegade guardsmen absolutely light your shit up with their rifles even on normal -- they're scarier than the chaos marines or the demons.

And the protagonist has to drop some fucking Dove chocolate-ass "live-laugh-love (The Emperor)" line every time he dies, making it take just a little bit longer than it needs to to get back into the game.

With this change (or bug, or lack of a bug, whatever causes this) the second half of the game (which used to be my favorite part) goes from being a solid action beat-em-up affair to a 3rd-rate 3rd person shooter with no cover mechanic against enemies that start Gears-of-War-ing your ass.

If this is how the game was always supposed to be, good god what a turd. If they changed the game, good god what dumb-asses. Did I seriously get the only good version of the game years ago, due to a unique bug on the 360 disc? I have no clue, it's so fucking weird.

373 items for $8 is fuckin wild, honestly this seems like a great way to completely torpedo your ability to effectively select games by being buried in an avalanche of creations.

I did play A Short Hike which was fun (got it free on EGS) but have not heard of any of the other ones. Maybe these are like, real actual indie indie games and if I play them people on mastodon will think I am cool.

The popular and trending games tend to feel generic and samey to me, I want a way to search for weird and obscure potential gems.

I've been playing Outbreak, the semi-forgotten online PS2 co-op Resident Evil spinoff with friends recently and I've had a great time, but it'd be fun to play the games with others as well, especially now that I have some idea of what I'm supposed to be doing.

They're free, have low requirements (pretty much any semi-decent computer made in the last decade should run PCSX2 just fine) and you won't need to worry about exposing your Steam/Xbox/PSN/Nintendo username as you'd just be using a free Outbreak fan server account + an ingame alias and the game allows you to set up 3 different aliases per account.

There'd be no need for voice chat either if you want to have the classic PS2 Outbreak experience and rely on the ingame ad-lib system

You'd need

• PCSX2 (Windows, Linux, Mac), XBSX2, (On Xboxes with dev mode unlocked) a PS2 or a fat PS3
• Patched Japanese roms of Outbreak File 1 and 2 (easy to find)
• Memory card files with the required online settings files ( also easy to find)
• An obsrv account

Here is a tutorial video that goes over the setup process (for Windows). The memory cards mentioned above are linked in the description. Instead of patching the Japanese roms into English yourself, you can find them pre-patched on 💿Romance

By ground level, I mean games where the scope is of people on the ground (either an individual PC or party) rather than playing as an abstract nation or political party like in a grand strategy game. So nothing Paradox- or Kremlingames-related (though, Victoria 3 including little things like pop info is a nice touch).

At first, Fallout 4 seemed to fit the bill with its settlement system but it's still very much within the bounds of capitalism and private property no matter how much I like to think the Minutemen are actually communalists or whatever.

Also got to level 2 on my wizard on takp server. To be honest I'm having more fun playing live everquest and feel like I'm making more progress. I hit 200 platinum and bought some gear for the monk too. Old EQ is is slow like real fucking slow. Plus you need to group versus live where I can do everything solo with a barbarian mercenary.

https://eq.magelo.com/profile/4253939

373 items for $8 - all proceeds from the Palestinian Relief indie bundle will be donated to the PCRF (Palestine Children's Relief Fund)

If this gets 100,000 signatures, it will be discussed in parliament. We have half a year, so this is doable! Sorry for indulging in so much electoralism lately, but this really does feel achievable.

Go to https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ for information about the campaign. Be sure to follow all the steps the website gives you if you can, especially if you live outside the US, and sign up to the mailing list if you want to be notified of any future actions that open up to you.

CW: Discussion of chattel slavery, implied SA aspects.

(This is more of a random, sleepy rant and not any sort of proofread analysis or deep-dive into the game. Spoilers in my rant are kept vague, save for this one short quest. Here is a link to the quest on the UESP wiki, with very heavy spoilers.)

Morrowind is incredible and I could talk for days about it. Probably many on Hexbear could. If I had more time, I'd write an entire essay on the way it uses religion, culture, and materialism to make a narrative that is way more interesting than just about every other Western Role-Playing game. However, every time I replay it, there's always a quest that very much creeps me out and ruins my enjoyment for a bit.

See, Morrowind's game world, the district of Vvardenfell, allows slavery.

In my opinion, it's very much treated appropriately by the game: as a cultural discussion, and a narrative twist on the objective of the imperialist Empire, which outlaws slavery as a means of keeping order in the diverse continent of Tamriel. For the most part, being pro-slavery is treated as backwards, disgusting, and is mostly used by the rich landowning class for exploitation. In fact, the game's villain intentionally uses class conflict to gather supporters among the enslaved and lower-classes in order to fight the ruling Temple religion.

Now, I would obviously prefer that the game went way more with it and let me exterminate slavers to the last with gleeful cheers from the proletariat. But at the very least, the game only ever rewards you for freeing slaves.

...Except in one key instance.

During the main plot, you are tasked with gathering the support of the local Ashlander tribes. The tribes have a unique and interesting culture, and the player is forced to learn their customs in order to progress. The leader of one of these tribes, the Zainab, tasks you with finding him a bride from the local mage faction (the stuck-up rich wizards). However, the way you go about accomplishing this mission is my single most hated section in the game.

So, your character is given the plan of... purchasing a slave to fool the tribal chief.

You have no other options of completing the quest. The player is forced to pay money to a greedy slave-trader, whose dialogue is smugly gleeful about "enjoying your purchases" and "putting the slaves to work". (Not even gonna get into the abhorrent SA implications behind plenty of the lines, which were clearly intentional).

So once you pay, you are instructed to dress the living person that you now own as property in a nice, pretty outfit for delivery to the tribal leader. The lines here just get worse and worse:

"Yes, sera. Falura Llervu... pleased to make your acquaintance. See? Savile Imayn [the Slave-trader] has taught me well." -Ewwww.

"I am a little anxious about marrying an Ashlander, even an Ashlander chief, but anything is better than being a slave" -implying that purchasing this woman to sell her to a random man from a foreign culture is somehow a favor to her.

"I'm sure she said you had some presents for me." -I hate the way the game dresses up giving her clothes so that she may be a better "bride" as "presents for her".

And then: "Oh, sera! These clothes! They are divine! Such a perfume! Only the very rich can afford this! I shall do everything I can to please you and my new master... that is, my gracious lord and husband-to-be. Come! I am so excited, I cannot wait!"

Yeah, so there are ten trillion ways of describing how disgusted this quest and the dialogue involved makes me. There is no legitimate way of skipping this quest (there are ways of skipping this entire part of the game, but they are alternate routes and are more of an obscure Easter-egg). Like, the quest itself sucks complete ass gameplay-wise. It's not fun. This tribe is framed as the "trickster tribe" that you must "outsmart", but this plan is just dull and uninteresting on top of the actual problems with it. You are given no freedom and no options.

Like, the game has an abolitionist faction! You can pretty easily play out your wildest John Brown fantasies and free the enslaved people of Vvardenfell in just about every other spot. Slaver factions can be freely ignored or destroyed, there's no requirement to join them. All except this one quest. Which is a Main Quest!!!

In the end, it's very hard for me to reconcile being "the savior of the land" and all that fantasy prophecy nonsense while being forced to engage in literal chattel slavery. There's no Main Quest that forces you to free slaves, so why is there one to purchase them and sell them into some kind of sexual servitude? Fuck whoever wrote this quest and fuck Bethesda for not scrapping it. Death to Gamers, death to the idea of "role-playing" this shit, and death to all the white Maryland programmer suburbanites that created it.

TLDR:

Edit: Before I forget, it's worth mentioning that there's other instances of creepy shit, misogyny, harassment, and all that in the game. It's a game made by white male nerds in 2000, after all. But this is the most blatant example I can think of. I also found this mod that removes all this stuff, thankfully. I will certainly be downloading it next time.

It's the Legendary Commie Bear!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA