Conceptually it could be fun. Although I feel the (ridiculously expensive) fakeout all night meant we all thought this was Parasite Eve and RE9 is just a letdown after that.

Hopefully she becomes a MC real fast because I apparently have visceral reactions to the trope of “barely functional analyst girl”. At best it is annoying. More commonly it is thinly veiled misogyny and fetish bullshit.

Different games have different rules for how summoning works. If memory serves, Dark 2 was the “worst” because it was fully based on soul memory and you may have even incremented that by wiping without spending? Whereas I think Dark 3 was a mix of highest upgrade level for gear on you combined with Soul Level?

In general? When the game is new or having a community wide resurgence, no. There will always be someone who is SL200 in newbie village. When the game is older and not played regularly, yes. There are various sites (never trust fandom or fextralife) that list recommended level ranges but as long as you aren’t actively grinding more than a level or two extra per region, you are fine.

All that said? Be VERY careful about playing any of the PC Dark Souls games online because they are mostly abandoned by From. I believe the outright RCE was fixed but you can still have your game ruined. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-XFIfmJ2T8 is a great video on the topic.

In fairness, this is a dot ml board so 404 might get banned for completely different reasons.

… Have you tried? Been a minute since I signed up for my free “account” but I want to say the only requirement was that the email is a real one because you’ll be sent an auth link whenever you login. No identification beyond that unless I choose to pay.

So… if you are truly concerned then use a VPN and a free email service every time you want to read this or any other independent media sites that use the same model?

You know what an even bigger barrier is? Not existing.

Independent journalism is good. 404 is REALLY good (it comes out of all the best parts of Vice’s tech reporting). They have a very small barrier that basically exists solely to fight bots as a mixture of reducing traffic load (keeping costs down) and encouraging people to actually consider supporting said independent journalism.

Instead we have chucklefucks immediately wanting to remove that paywall or outright accusing them of abusing SEO and data scraping and all that. And these are the same people who will then get mad when EVERYTHING is AI slop.

And this ties in directly to what right wingers want in terms of making the populace even stupider and more uninformed.

This is literally why these sites have the free paywall. Some get bypased. In this case, I suspect 404 gave archive dot org access because they rely so heavily on that site for researching articles.

But. Regardless: if you think a journalism outlet is so evil and are scamming everyone… Maybe just ignore them because you clearly don’t think they are worth your time.

Also: republican love people like you who do everything possible to attack independent journalism.

Which is also a wall between bots scraping the articles.

Support independent media.

Ha ha. Was just thinking I would use this thread to ask if the Steam Release actually contained 3+4 or that was still coming Soon™. That answers that.

And Deltarune is still planned to be like 8 chapters long, right?

I just want to say that you folk are exactly what I love about indie games. Games with a really cool premise/concept that combine probably overly complicated systems in ways that range from kinda janky to ridiculously janky but lead to genuinely amazing and unique experiences.

And while that might sound like it wasn’t a compliment: Give me something held together with shoestring but interesting over something polished and boring any day of the week.

I still need to set aside some time to learn CK but I am genuinely kind of concerned by how many hours I have put into Star Traders over the years.

It has nothing to do with reddit and has been going on since the days of frigging usenet.

When someone likes something, they find ways to make an exception. The biggest example being The DRM Wars where EVERYONE was suddenly an active duty military person stationed in an airgap in The Middle East and could not connect to any server to authenticate their game (but had no problem spending hours arguing on message boards). Then Valve say you need to use something called “Steam” to play Half-Life 2 and suddenly everyone is ready to say that Steam is different and not actually DRM even though the model wasn’t that different than how Stardock or even frigging Gamespy were doing stuff.

Everyone hated microtransactions and that is TOTALLY the only reason people were angry at the Star Wars game that came out within a month or two of TLJ. Then Genshin Impact came out and suddenly everyone wanted to make it abundantly clear that that was okay because, yes, it is a gacha game but it is totally a fair one where you can do everything without ever spending any money if you just grind endlessly and use multiple accounts to hoard day limited currencies.

But also? People hated DLC way back when it was something you downloaded from a BBS after mailing the developers a physical check. But when it was a game people liked (Star Crusader with mutha fugging Roman Alexander!!!), it was suddenly okay.

Which is to say: Things have been real shit for coming on 40 years of gaming. And yet, by and large, video games keep getting better (not so much the games industry for the people who make games).

Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre 100% do not need a sequel. They are stories about the end of the world and are beautiful in how self contained they are.

I am not the biggest on the roguelike mechanics for such story heavy games but… I would be lying if I said that Hades didn’t repeatedly break me with the way it was used to convey Zagreus’s relationship with the other characters.

I am a bit skeptical on Hades 2. Then I remembered I was skeptical on Hades 1. As far as I am concerned, Supergiant (and Greg Kasavin) can do no wrong.

Russia is more a symptom of cultural greed/theft combined with being ruled by an oligarchy. For example, one thing people don’t realize is that Russia is probably the least likely country to start a global thermonuclear war as they, somehow, have the absolute best checks and balances on that. Based on publicly available information, the Russian model is that putin requires the sign off of at least one high ranking military official to launch nukes. And said military officials are the ones most likely to depose him in a coup.

Similarly, North Korea has a very strong military (relative to the rest of the country). As do many “African Warlords”. The key is to have leverage on said military leaders so that they need to be ready to sacrifice EVERYTHING to lead a coup.

That said, I also think the US is speedrunning the Russian model. Moreso because all of trump’s cronies are some of the dumbest and most incompetent mother fuckers on the planet.

Also, I would strongly encourage refraining from “China is lazy” rhetoric. Most of that is sinophobic bullshit that came out of the US factory/car industry when we refused to modernize/innovate and now have those pesky labor laws preventing true competition. Yeah, China Don’t Care ™ and a lot of knockoffs are literally after hour runs from the exact same production lines (often using the exact same materials…). But a lot of it is also that drop shipping and (now closed?) import exceptions meant it was trivially easy to get Chinese white label products to The West for dirt cheap.

And just look at the EV space for Chinese innovation. Like… they are probably at the forefront of that.

The topic that often comes up is how ridiculously fake so many of the Chinese military weapons are. And… yeah. Lots of proof of concepts and prototypes that get paraded around and never used again. But that is kind of true of all militaries and is a function of a runaway military industrial complex. It is just that we tend to see the US perspective where “Cool ass littoral battleship technology. Please stop saying you are the clit commander” and then we never hear about it again. But you can look at online discourse about the new XM7 rifle for a good laugh about massive overspending to solve a problem that arguably doesn’t even exist (even though much of the soldier complaints are the same as with the FAL back in the day and boil down to “it takes a lot more training and practice to fire a heavy round accurately”).

Nah, there is a LOT of reason to criticize China (see: sweat shops and genocide). But “China is lazy” is just sinophobic bullshit.

Okay, but on a timeline measured in years instead of quarters, it’s really fucking stupid to punish the factory that churns out engineers for your war machines, right?

1. You assume that republicans CARE about anything but the immediate moment. The past… over 50 years have been characterized by republicans fucking everything up, Democrats spending years trying to salvage things, and then republicans taking credit for that before fucking it up even worse.
2. You ALSO assume that trump and his handlers want a powerful US military or economy.

MIT didn’t “go maga”. They are intrinsically tied to government contracts.

Basically all STEM research at the university level is funded by a mixture of corporate and government interests. Even NSF grants (remember when those were a thing…) tend to focus on areas that anyone with a keen eye can see having military applications. One of my favorites was the massive push for graph analytics 10 or 15 years back and people not realizing that was a roundabout way of saying “analyze social media”.

MIT in particular is VERY dependent on this because they need to be “elite”. Smaller state universities can shuffle money around and focus on other funding sources, to a degree. MIT can’t because their staff inherently have good networks and would jump ship the moment their perks start going away.

Contrast that with Harvard where they still get lots of “donations” from rich and powerful lawyers (and politicians) and where the publicity for “fighting the government” can heavily offset all the international students getting put in a concentration camp before their checks clear.

Not even just AI. Fandom’s entire wiki empire is largely built around manually stealing the work of guides writers and reproducing it verbatim. It is why you’ll find so many fake roads and the like.

I am incredibly skeptical of this being viable monetarily. But the idea of people actively choosing to support a site that has known good guides and emphasizing the “tip jar” mindset? I have seen worse business models. And if they really focus on what the community/they want to make guides for rather than just chasing the latest big releases, that actually reduces the odds of other companies scraping them.

For example, the right crowd would straight up kill for a breakdown of what is actually needed to unlock whatever in Kynseed in the post release version (rather than EA). Fandom actually have a kynseed wiki but it is abandoned and the other guide sites don’t give a shit about a moderately successful Stardew that “came out” in early 2024 (?). So even though stealing that would be trivial… odds are nobody would care enough to do so.

I kind of hate that website layout with a passion but cool. And already gave them a higher priority in my kagi results.

I always preferred Polygon more for their editorial content and thought pieces but I do recall the guides generally being pretty good when I looked at one.

Rami Ismail is Dutch but obviously cares about this topic. And when he seems to feel a particularly high level of self loathing, he talks about it online

https://kotaku.com/war-games-muslim-arab-call-of-duty-palestine-1851055848 is a great article that includes quotes from him and discusses the topic at large.

Interesting. I assume it is related to the ongoing nvidia driver hell? Except ERN would likely want the latest patch for whatever features nVidia added to better support them and… yeah.

Unless there are major changes from the Deck version, I would STRONGLY advise not running SteamOS on any machine with sensitive data. You want a real login screen and, preferably, FDE for any laptop.

If you like the Desktop Mode? That is just KDE Plasma. Basically every major distro has a build that uses it (and you can install it yourself otherwise). And Steam mode is literally just Steam Big Picture (with some minor tweaks).

For a laptop? I am an old so I use Fedora. But I think everyone loves atomic distros these days so consider Bazzite.

That’s gonna be the next major Gamer lack of media literacy:

“I didn’t know I had the option to just shoot at the russians who were being racist toward me, uninstall the game, and masturbate for weeks at a time. This game is trash and full of plot holes”