chameleon

With the game being out for the better part of a day now, I gotta admit, the much less positive Giant Bomb review is by far the one closest to my experience.

As far as I’m concerned, this game would have been ever so much better if Dark Souls never existed. You can turn off most “souls-like mechanics” via modifiers, but just about anything to make the experience easier turns off all achievements, which is a not-so-silent judgment from the developers for doing it. Boss runbacks are looooong, but if you’re willing to disable achievements, you can have a bonus checkpoint before every boss. So the devs really want you to do runbacks, but I struggle to see what they add to the game. Basically the same complaint as Silksong but I am even more tired of them by now, and the runbacks are worse.

Currency loss and estus flasks plasma vials don’t really add to the game, either.

I ended up wanting an online pseudonymous identity as well as an offline real-life identity, which leads to needing multiple phone numbers when things are tied to said number. That’s extremely annoying to manage, especially with Signal’s current activity and update policies that essentially require you to keep a phone in a drawer, charge it and log into it every so often or risk losing your entire account due to inactivity, as only the mobile device counts for that purpose (this might supposedly be changing).

In that particular scenario, I don’t really care if my least-favorite three-letter-agency or law enforcement can link my identities. It’s a nice bonus if they can’t, but not an absolutely required feature. The main worry is the person on the other end trivially learning it. But the person on the other end might have a different set of worries that makes Signal one of the few available options for them.

That said, Telegram also requires a phone number and has exactly the same issue, so this is a rather weird thread to bring that up.

Funny thing is this particular bill also applies semi-retroactively. The original version was worded

The following shall apply only for server-connected games published for sale on or after January 1, 2027

but in the April 6 revision that ultimately advanced, that was changed to:

The following shall apply only to a digital game available for purchase on or after January 1, 2027

I’m heavily in favor of SKG, but this particular bill isn’t workable on this schedule. It’s not what SKG has been petitioning for.

Even Sonic feels like it deserves so much better. It’s been almost 25 years of shipping 6.5/10 reviewed games, just a little bit too unfinished and just a little bit too janky for anyone to really recommend. Sales figures look OK but they’re boosted hard by being thrown in the bargain bin mere months after release.

This is of course with the exception of racing game spinoffs, which are a protest buy for when Nintendo messes up Mario Kart. And last decade’s Sonic Mania, which they didn’t make.

There aren’t a lot that work well with Space Age, because overhauls are generally incompatible in terms of gameplay/balancing and Space Age itself is essentially an overhaul. Most new mods made for the Space Age era are new planets instead of overhauls, there’s Loup’s Guide to the Galaxy if you want some community-curated advice on what’s decent vs not worth the time (not a mod but it lives on the mod portal anyway).

But if you really want it, there’s a Krastorio 2 fork called Krastorio 2 Spaced Out that integrates Space Age. I think it’s about the best it can be, which is to say, I’m not a big fan of it but other people seem to like it. Nauvis is pretty much just vanilla K2 with new rocket silos while the other planets are slightly janky Space Age.

I’ve tried to find info about the reputability of this “Sakhtafzarmag” that originally shared the rumor and came up with nothing; seems to be a very small publication with a near-stock WordPress template and a YouTube channel averaging ~200 views. Very likely to be bullshit.

I get the impression that “online coop” is a tag it weighs very, very heavily, along with most of the “open world survival craft” subtags. Terraria, Factorio and some other games you can put 1000 hours into while optionally playing with a friend are absolute poison for the algorithm, they share a lot of tags with stuff like Rust and V Rising even though they’re not remotely the same game.

Ace Combat 7 was the trigger last time, and Ace Combat 8 is making history repeat itself. Remains to be seen what the system requirements will be, but I suspect they’ll be higher. I’m just hoping component prices go down a bit before some unspecified date in 2026… don’t have a lot of faith in that.

Not sure, but I can reproduce it on my end. The actual download pages on get.videolan.org have ads, the main site does not.

Can’t wait for a new generation to rediscover the exciting fun of having to survive Kil’Jaeden’s balls and whatever that darkness phase is even supposed to be, despite the boss technically hitting 1 HP in 5 seconds.

The whole “don’t look anything up before playing it” genre of cryptic puzzle-ish games where saying nearly anything about it is a spoiler. There’s not all that many of them, but somehow they’re all games where people go in with no expectations and either love it or bounce off of it really fast. The entire internet can scream at you to play Outer Wilds, but nobody wants to tell you why.

Out of the ones I played, I had the lowest expectations/highest payoff for Void Stranger; on the surface it looks just like a pretty average sokoban with gameboy-styled graphics and a surprisingly good soundtrack. And that’s pretty much what it is, except the sokoban isn’t really why you play it, even though you’re gonna be playing a lot of it.

Steam changed it so that popularity metrics are mostly ignored during the first couple days of Next Fest. This started with the October 2024 run, and it’s a big part of why you no longer have the good demos popping up quickly at the start. To my knowledge, they never published details on it, but there was a short blurb in the developer Q&A. Things should get better starting sometime tomorrow (tends to be day 3 or day 4).

The idea is that it gives games that don’t have pre-existing marketing a way better chance of success, instead of the really massive snowball effect that used to exist where devs lost out for the entire thing if they weren’t popular within the first couple of hours, but it has made it a hell of a job to look for new games.

Mother/“EarthBound Beginnings” definitively has the late 80s/early 90s RPG smell with its grindiness and rocky difficulty curve, but is still pretty damn good if that’s not a dealbreaker. The official translation came out in 2014, but is reasonably accurate.

Gradius and especially Gradius 2 are classic shmups for a reason, but the much bigger hitboxes take some real adjusting if you’re used to modern bullet hell ones.

For anything public, it’s anything varying from trivial to hard/annoying depending on your client settings, but never quite impossible. Even in the best-case scenario where you have DHT turned off and all the trackers in the torrent are using HTTPS, man-in-the-middle attacks are fairly doable for anything popular.

The PS2 Ace Combat games (4/5/Zero) are still best-in-genre as far as I’m concerned, and have held up exceedingly well in general. Aerial dogfighting with good controls, good mission design and interesting story.

Sky Odyssey is a more “relaxed” little flight game that I also like, still got game-like controls but no combat, just missions where you fly through hard situations.

I’ve also been playing this, even though it’s well out of what I normally play. I’d describe it as being closer to an ARPG than a MOBA, and for both better and for worse, it feels like a roguelike version of mid-seasonal gameplay in ARPGs. Couple of buttons on relatively short cooldowns backed up by buildcrafting meant to make those buttons utterly broken with lots of good opportunities available. There’s okay variance between runs. Buildcrafting is super flexible in general, you can move all of your ability upgrades around to other abilities at any time with no cost, you can even give almost everything to friends in co-op.

Not all is good. The game was review-bombed at launch due to the metaprogression and cooldown changes from the demo, and honestly, that was probably correct. The balancing work and the per-character XP requirements ruined some of the fun that the demo had. The worst was hotfixed within a day, even adding a compensation system for demo players, and progress is like 3X faster now, but it still feels like it’s too slow and not fluid enough. I sorta settled on having a “main” in a genre that’s more fun if you swap between characters to keep things fresh. The devs will probably find a solution sooner than later.

There’s some other problems like the performance absolutely tanking in lategame regardless of what you’re playing on (my trusty RX 580 performs about as well as my friend’s RTX 4080, and that’s a pretty universal complaint), there’s some multiplayer bugs like a boss attack that only the host can survive, some questionable balancing here and there, one of the 8 characters feels unfinished (Shell), but overall it’s been pretty good, fills a pretty unique role and the problems don’t really detract from what I’m getting out of it.

I’ve seen the claim around but I’m highly skeptical of it. DDR5 is far too slow for anything where memory bandwidth really matters, any newly produced chip that’s gonna be used for AI is on HBM3 or HBM3e, or possibly GDDR6/GDDR7 if it’s a GPU pulled from the consumer segment. HBM5 is still a very, very early research project and is certainly not being produced yet.

The idea is interesting, but $13/month for one ‘mystery’ album from an artist you (most likely) don’t know feels rather up there.

root= isn’t correct for booting a live image like this. You need to use some specific parameters to guide the initramfs to where it can find the /boot/x86_64/airootfs.sfs file, and in general, something like that will be the case for most distros but there are lots of unique mechanisms. Looking at the grub.cfg, /loader/entries or similar files will usually get you some things you can put into your favorite search engine to hopefully find some documentation. For Arch it’s part of mkinitcpio-archiso: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/mkinitcpio/mkinitcpio-archiso/-/blob/master/docs/README.bootparams?ref_type=heads

I don’t have a setup to test it but if If I’m not mistaken something like this should work:

options  "archisosearchuuid=2025-08-01-13-39-26-00"

These containers are/were for self-hosting. VMWare previously owned Bitnami, it was their attempt to make it easier to self-host rather than paying a cloud provider, which should directly benefit them because VMWare got its money from businesses that self-host + self-host people growing up learning free homelab ESXi and wanting to apply that at work. It helps a lot if there’s well-maintained solutions for deploying popular stuff.

Then Broadcom bought VMWare for a ridiculous price and is doing none of that.