I do like dnd but ive just had some form of burnout lately and i feel like my depression isint helping either.

I want to explore other games and genres besides just dnd 5e. I would like to try solo but im not sure what the most beginner approach/game would be that is free, as i dont want to pay right away. I would also like to explore unique card games similar to tcgs but those dont really come solo.

Im up to hear out your suggestions and questions.

Hi, this is a quick post I make to talk about something I keep seeing online everywhere.

A lot of people say that the price increases will force developers to optimize and to work with what hardware they have to make good games and stop using AI gen and DLSS tech as an excuse for poor optimization.

The big problem is that nobody thinks about those people that don't have the hardware right now.
Those people that were waiting for a discount to buy a PS5 or a PC and now they're left stranded.

Current-gen consoles are getting really hard to find and a lot of people have been left out, stuck on old-gen and old-games.

playing old-games is not a bad thing but you may have missed the fact that even old consoles are getting reaaally pricey thanks to scalpers and speculators of the market.

This is madness people. Fight AI, don't embrace it!

Today's game is some more Alan Wake 2. I finished up Alan's half of the story today. I have to say i'm sad to leave it once again. Don't get me wrong, i love Saga's story. But damn, Alan's story has some high highs and stellar ideas. Meanwhile Saga's story is more so constant.

This time around I sat and watched the entirety of Nightless Night for the first time. It was amazing, it legit had me checking if there were post credit scenes. I love that remedy did this. They absolutely did not have to make a short film for the game. But they did anyways. And not only that but they made a really good one too.

Speaking of the theater before i leave it, One of the shadows spawned in his seat backwards which made me laugh. I had to stop and look at it.

As i was heading out i stopped to grab some collectibles, and you know what i ran into that actually really unsettled me for the first time in a while since first playing this game? This shadow barrier at the edge of the dark place. It makes this humming noise and you can't see what's out there. There could be nothing, or there could be the worst thing ever. It freaks me the fuck out. I love it.

After that things went by pretty fast. I made way to the studio and grabbed the photos before dropping them off, and bam, I'm with Saga. That means soon I'll be playing the DLC which I'm excited to do. I want to get to that tomorrow hopefully.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/55502160

https://www.gamedate.org/

I'm talking more along the lines of, having simulator games where you work in a supermarket and you get to cause as much mayhem as possible. Not in terms of just simply killing, but more like, being a very disgruntled worker in a very annoyingly noisy environment with shitty customers. That game doesn't exist to me and I wish it would.

Instead, we get more simulator games where you're at the service of the people. That's going backwards, if you ask me.

Also, I don't remember asking for armchair psychologists to come here and start dropping unasked thoughts about how to best relieve stress. Check those at the door.

Tao said the company plans to “minimize the impact” of rising memory costs by focusing on “monetizing the installed base” and growing software and network services revenue.

Maybe something lost in translation but that sure sounds like gouging existing customers to me.

I regret literally everything about that title.

It's been almost 30 years, and now the Final Fantasy 7 remake is out for everyone. I always said I'd buy the remake when it came out, but ~$500 was too much (for the game plus the console it required). When it came to PC (via the Epic Games Store), I was a Mac user. Now it's out on Xbox and Switch, and I've played through it on the former.

Of course, I loved the remake from the start, from the expanded opening showing the dystopia and the lack of plant life, the extra scene where Aerith's flower is stepped on before she can pick it back up, and of course the characters having voices. But then, shortly after the intro movie, I started to notice changes I didn't like. I'm fine with you not being able to rename characters. All I really changed was "Aeris" to "Aerith," correcting the translation mistake, but the remake already does this. (I also corrected "Red XIII" to [redacted] (spoiler) so when you get his real name, you get funny dialogue where Cloud asks "Who is [redacted]" and the other character says "[redacted] is [redacted]." It's not important, it's just funny to me, but it bothered me that after you learn his real name, you still call him Red XIII, so I always named him what his real name is from that point forward.)

Then after the first part of the training mission, we get back to Seventh Heaven, and I don't even have the option to give the flower to Marlene. I thought that option was special in the original, but the remake doesn't allow it. We're not giving it to Tifa because at no point does Cloud see Tifa like that — yet. It doesn't make sense. He has the flower because Aerith made him take it. Cloud's basically ace at this point, and he doesn't want to lead his childhood friend on. He just wants to get paid and move on. Aside from discarding the flower, which isn't an option, giving the flower to Marlene makes the most sense. Cloud sees that everyone in Avalanche has hope. Marlene only sees her daddy and his friends (who she also likes) go out and leave her alone every day. So you want to give her some hope. Having Cloud give Tifa the flower by default was the first half of my first issue with the remake.

In the original, Cloud loses some of his edge around the second mission. Meeting Aerith in the church, meeting her mother, the interaction with the Turks, and the whole Don Corneo business changes him a bit, and he lets more of his human side out. Not in the remake, he just stays an asshole through the whole thing, which runs through the Shinra HQ escape. Minor spoiler, but only for those who played the original and understand the context. You escape from Midgar HQ, you do the road scene, and instead of fighting the boss after, you fight the boss still on the bike. Then you fight Sephiroth for some reason and... that's it. It's over. You gotta wait until June for the second part, unless you pay $700+ for a PS5. And no one has the third part yet, even if you pay the steep fee for early access. We're not even sure if the third part will be further delayed on other platforms. So that's another issue — even those who paid the premium to access the second part early don't know when they're getting the third chapter, or even that the third chapter will be the final chapter. It's all up in the air.

What really convinced me the remake was kinda bad wasn't just the extra mission with the new Soldier villain (which is just training you for the bike mission at the end), but it was after Aerith is taken (sorry, minor spoiler) and you talk to her mom and you get her back story. Even with the voice acting... I remember thinking this scene hit so much harder in the original. But, buying Remake on the Xbox came with the original, so after I finished Remake, I fired up the original and started playing. It only takes about an hour or two to get to this scene. To do everything in Remake takes 20-40 hours in Remake, but it only takes about 3 hours in the original, due to all the fluff that was added. (Some of that fluff is good, but most of it literally exists to waste your time.) I got to that scene, and it hurt my heart nearly as much as it did the first go-around in 1997. I think it's the music. The music in Remake simply sucks. The music in the original was hot garbage because it was MIDI. I remember paying $40 to import the CD, then I found a 10MB pirated copy online. All the songs in MIDI except "One-Winged Angel" which was an MP3. I played the songs on the computer and the CD in my CD player. Sounded the same. But anyway, Nobuo Uematsu has since re-released music from Final Fantasy VII, with a full orchestra, and it sounds amazing. You don't get that in the Remake. You get boring, drowned-out songs. You also get this random ass song with vocals by Yosh from Survive Said the Prophet (Japanese rock fans know who that is) but you can never hear the song, even in the trailer. You have to go on a streaming service and look up the song and play it outside the game. It's not just weird. It's bad. The music was such an integral part of the original game, warts and all, but they couldn't get that right. And Aerith's back story just fell flat. It could have been amazing with the newer, non-MIDI, orchestral recordings, but we didn't get that.

If I said I wasn't going to play Rebirth when it comes out in June, I'd be fucking lying. Of course I'll play it. But I'm already to the Temple of the Ancients in the original. The original is ugly and the music is MIDI, but it doesn't completely disrespect your time (there are too many battles, but they can be disabled, but you shouldn't disable all of them), and it's still a great game. And it doesn't shut down on the train tracks leading to the town with Barret's back story like the original PC release did. They either used the fix from the Ultima Edition (a pirate release), or they fixed it on their own. Either way, you can play past that point now. You can probably play the entire game legally now without original hardware. That wasn't an option before — either you were emulating the PS1 version or you were running the Ultima Edition, even if you bought the PC release because no one ever played the PC release past Disc One. It just wasn't possible to proceed due to an unpatched bug. Fortunately, digital releases such as Steam, App Store, Xbox, PlayStation, and others, do allow patches and so the game was fixed. Anyway, of course I'll play Rebirth, and I'll play Reunion as well — what I assume the third one will be called, given the context and the pattern — and I damn sure can't wait to see what the new World Crisis scene looks like (that's not really a spoiler, and neither is this: if you have to go to the bathroom when you're fighting Sephiroth for the last time, pause during the match, because you won't get a chance during the nine minute cut scene that follows. At least it was 9 minutes on the PS1. It'll probably be longer in the remake. And I can't wait to see it. And I can't wait for someone to recut it with better audio.

Today’s game is Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I’ve been checking in on this one daily. Did I maybe sort of promise to stick to New Leaf regularly? Maybe. Did I break that promise to myself? Definitely. Am I going to stick with this one? Probably not.

Anyways, I’ve been having a lot of fun with this. Shocker. I know. But I’ve grown especially fond of catching fish to display in my house. I have this squid in named Sammy. I fear Sammy’s enclosure is too small for him, but I don’t have anywhere else to put him other than sell him. And I refuse to do that.

I got both the shops constructed which is great. I ended up getting them both placed, before finally deciding to just Time Travel, as I decided I’d have more fun that way.

After that I went clothes shopping. I find it funny how sassy the player character looks. They look good and they damn well know it.

After dressing myself up I went and looked at the aquarium. Honestly that’s my favorite part of this game. Just the aquarium. Bugs, Art, Fossils? Nope. They can all screw off (nicely), I want to look at the fish dammit. I like how the lighting of the water looks and just like staring. The music that plays there is nice too. Really calming.

I ended up just propping my Switch up and watched them while I did some homework. It was chill. I actually ended up ripping the entire OST and adding it to my Jellyfin to stream.

That’s kind of all I got up too. I wanted to update on what I did last time, try and build up a habit and all that. I’m gonna try and binge Alan Wake II tomorrow, I wanted to marathon it to see how far I get.

After last week's Star Wars: Galactic Racer gameplay trailer reveal, IGN sat down with the game's makers for an in-depth chat revealing its new systems and story mode, and a proper discussion on why this marks the triumphant return of track-based racing, after so many open world games.

Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20260214075750/https://www.polygon.com/video-game-romances-need-to-grow-up/

Today’s game is some more Halo. I’ve actually been challenging myself to not do Halo for these just because of how much I do it (plus I’ve been busy adoring Alan Wake which helps). I made an exception today partly because I just wanted to relax with friends.

We did a forge game today that was Rainbow Road from Mario Kart Wii. I think our general consensus was that while this one had merit, the Halo physics just made it not fun to play. It was too faithful of a recreation to work with the physics.

We also did a game mode titled “Get out of my House” where we had to fight zombies off out of the “house”. It was fun, it definitely felt like it favored the defenders though which was a major issue.

Of course, while we did have fun with Get out of my House, we decided to wash it down with something we knew was a good time. Hence that brought us to Zealot infection. I don’t need to say much about this one. The map is basically perfect. The only issue is the roof top area is very easy for people to camp on, and I think I have an idea to counteract that in forge.

I ended up losing by 4 points. it was a pretty close match all around, so even if I didn’t nab second place I think everyone else would have been dangerously close.

That brings us to our final match. Just some slayer on Oni Sword Base. It’s like the White Bread option. It’s reliable, fun, and is just good however you do it. I got payback for the last match and won by 5 points.

That’s about all we got up too, there was a Halo 3 match we did too but that went by so quickly there’s not much to talk about. Tomorrow I think I’ll play some more Alan Wake 2. I have something I want to try out so I’m eager to get back to it.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/strategy_games/p/1093266/i-designed-a-board-game-creative-commons-open-source

Hey I've been working on this abstract strategy board game on and off for more than 10 years. I've picked up the project again trying to get a digital version up and running in the browser that is playable.

It's still under development, but you can check out the repository here: https://github.com/GreenAnts/Amalgam_Webgame/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-file. (There are links on the main page for rules, and etc)

Rulebook: https://github.com/GreenAnts/Amalgam_Webgame/tree/main/assets/Rulebook

Video tutorial: https://youtu.be/LZD5h4siXVM

Play against a (dumb) bot/AI: https://greenants.github.io/Amalgam_Webgame/ (this is the under development game, and a has a lot of placeholder text - but once you enter the bot game, it should actually work.

The game is a bit niche, and I'm assuming probably won't fit the bill for most people in this instance, but I'm hoping someone might be interested and help us grow this project. The game is open source and creative commons licensed, so I'm hoping the game will become community created.

Anyways, if you check it out, I'd greatly appreciate it!