cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/c/hytale/p/450908/hytale-is-out-now-in-early-access

Note: Not my screenshot

It's been over 7 years since the game was announced, and after being cancelled by Riot and bought back by the original devs, against all odds it is FINALLY playable!

The game was supposed to come out in an hour but it seems the devs released it early. I'll wait and see some early gameplay but it looks like I might buy it on launch day. Feels surreal that the wait is finally over.

Today's game is some more Animal Crossing New Leaf. I've made it past the 3 day mark for abandonment! New record for me. What's with the hat choice? I started buying whatever hat was in the first hat slot in the store. The sombrero just so happened to be today's. Yesterday's was a newsboy cap (and so far that one has been my favorite).

There wasn't much going on in town today. Mainly just some daily stuff. I made a stop by the museum and looked though. The Aquarium is my favorite section of the museum in every game. New Horizons has my favorite, but i like the aesthetic of New Leaf. Combined with the music it's got this vibe too it i love.

Someone is moving in next to the Able Sisters. I have no idea who they are because i don't recall ever actually getting this far, so i'm excited to find out who it is. I have a few hunches but i'm excited regardless. I like unlocking new things.

I've also expanded my house and invested in two pieces of furniture. There's my Bed and then my Cactus. The Cactus is my emotional Support Cactus. Bad day? Pet the Cactus. Need a distraction? Pet the Cactus. Feelin' lonely? You guessed it, pet the Cactus.

I've also been neglecting to visit Tortimer. I'm not sure why, but now that Isabelle brought it up i've taken it personally and won't do it for even longer. I will not be bullied onto the old mayor's island. I don't care how many people tell me to go.

But yeah, that's just a quick recap of everything as of recent. One last thing though, There's also a new bridge i built. I noticed there was a lack of really any major paths over the river on the Eastern side of town, so i built a bridge too help people get across easier as my first official act of mayor. I got to open it today.

AI in video games is a caustic enough subject that Valve requires developer disclosure if a title utilizes the generative technology. This way, people who have qualms about AI or its impact can opt out of purchasing anything that uses the genAI. One developer, however, is saving everyone from the moral quandary in the first place by just deleting their game altogether.

Hardest is a free-to-play roguelike on Steam that was released in the summer of 2025 with the tagline, "stop time, summon tsunamis, shoot with bubble guns, feed cards to mimic, collect rare negative cards!" Except for a user who says the game helped him bond with his son, Hardest mostly got a negative reception. "I assume the whole thing is AI slop," one reviewer wrote.

You'd think flopping like this would be the end of the story, but half a year later, Rakuel, the developer, has undergone a revelation. On Jan. 10, the indie creator posted an update to Hardest announcing that he would pull the game from the platform by the end of the month.

Plus, Nex Playground heads to Europe and Phasmaphobia devs launch publishing arm

Fortnite now allows creator-made games to sell in-game items — and immediately, the platform's most popular experience Steal the Brainrot has added $45 premium item bundles and a chance-based roulette wheel.

and here we go..

Today's game is some more Halo 3. Me and my friend went through with our plans to play Halo 3 today. We almost went through the entire game in one sitting like usual. The only thing that stopped us was a crash at the very end of The Covenant. We still had a damn good run though.

There was The Storm, where me and my friend took the Razor Back up the lift and ramped it up too the Scarab. It looked dorky at first but then it looked badass. The game kept trying to buck me off the scaffolding though while driving so something tells me its not supposed to be up there.

During the level we ended up also getting distracted by a bag of chips on the ground and we got into this discussion me and my best friend had about Arbiter getting his head stuck in the bag trying to eat it like how a cat might get it's head stuck in a bag. He ended up drawing this wonderful rendition of Arbiter with a bag stuck on his head after, which i have asked permission to share. Whether his stature is one of elation at the chips or terror at the bag stuck on his head i'm not sure.

During the very first level one of our Marines got stuck too. I'm not sure how, but he was looking at the ground like there was something interesting down there. I like to imagine he saw a cool bug or something.

During the level The Ark, my friend controlling the Arbiter got this weird visual glitch where High Charity flashed on screen. I have to assume it was a bug, but i like to imagine it's Arbiter was thinking of home. I tried to capture it in Theater but the game won't let me go in first person in Theater mode for Arbiter for some reason. I'm not sure why.

After all that though, as i mentioned above, i had to stop on the level The Covenant due too the crash. It's crazy to think with Halo 3 i've reached the point i can play through it in one day. Just after this it'll be Halo 4 again and i've have completed the Master Chief Saga, which will be great. Maybe after me and my friend can pick up LASO CE again.

I played the shit out of this game for a year or so before it just completely died. I came across a post about it earlier today that reminded me how great it was. I miss it a lot. Relatively slow moving, strategic, 3D space arena teamed CTF, I made some great friends playing that game.

Es wird wieder gewürfelt. Die #minicon geht in ihre vierzigste Ausgabe. Das sind also jetzt schon über 20 Jahre, die wir das machen - meine Güte, aber zum Würfeln ist mensch ja nie zu alt ;)

https://minicon.games/

#tabletop #penandpaper #dungeonsanddragons #dasschwarzeauge #rollenspiel #seriousdicerolling #spiele #gaming #games

@games
@gaming
@spiele_analog

Today's game is Halo 3. I was bored and doing a little "Spring Cleaning" of my Steam Library, narrowing everything down to what's on hold and what i'm playing. Right now Max Payne and Halo are in the Currently Playing, while my on hold looks like this:

I had the overwhelming urge though to play the last mission of Halo 3. I'm not exactly sure why today of all days, but i found the Warthog Run Score being stuck in my head while packing today.

The entire climb up too the Control Room feels really different on Single Player. In Co-Op me and my friends are all cracking Jokes. But in Single Player it feels like you're immersed (at least to me). It's honestly impressive Halo can immerse you in like that so deeply. It's something i noticed while playing Reach on Legendary Solo. It honestly makes me want to try and play the whole franchise on Legendary solo (instead of just Halo Reach and Halo 4 like the achievements ask for)

The SMG in Masterchief's hands also looks super tiny. I know he's larger than the average soldier but it looks kind of silly when you see it.

I of course, made sure to give Sgt. Johnson a kiss on the forehead before leaving. Such an iconic character deserves it. Sleep well my Sweet Prince.

Soon after that though the heroics kicked back in and me and Arbiter sprinted to the Warthog run. I honestly struggled a little on this section, as i suck at leading my shots with the Plasma rifle. With the plasma pistol i can use the charge blast, but with the rifle i'm basically left to fend for myself in the Aim department.

I was able to make it to the Warthog run though after that and did it all in one try. The run, as usual, was iconic. This is honestly one of my favorite final levels in the Master Chief Halo games. Halo CE's is a close second but i just cannot find it in me to enjoy the Warthog physics in that game. Halo 3's at least are bearable, though i don't like how i skid to a complete halt whenever i do a jump.

i got this clip of my last few seconds of the run, which i really like how it turned out. Me and my friend were talking about playing Halo 3 again tomorrow, so i might play the rest of the thing (I know, i'm a bit of an addict. How many times has Halo featured on here?). Anyways, it was nice to get that out of my system, even if it did take a whole 30 minutes from me.

Today's game is Phasmophobia. After moving PCs it took me a while to get it set up again on my PC. Apparently i needed the SteamDeck=1 command to get Voice Chat to work on Non-Steam Deck devices. After that though it worked perfectly.

We have a new friend that's joined our group, but the problem with games like these is that they're only ever 4 player. So our solution?

I messed with pipewire and merged my Mic and Discord's Output into one Audio Source, then fed that into Phasmophobia. Then i streamed Phasmophobia too my friend on Discord.

The result was all my friends could hear him through me and he could hear them through my stream. It was like having a second voice in my body.

Is it convoluted? Yeah. Is my flow chart a mess? Probably. But it was a lot of fun to setup, though it definitely needs more work. I wonder if i could make some sort of Widget to toggle it on and off per a game to make it cleaner.

Nerd stuff aside, we only played a few matches. All our games kept taking quite a while because we'd die and then the Ghost just... wouldn't show up. Nothing at all. We spent a total of maybe 2 hours playing in total.

By the last match we needed to lower our sanity, so i just took to watching my friends through the window like a creep. The player model kind of looks like Todd Howard, so just picture him watching you through your living room window at night and you get the idea.

After that wore off to bring my sanity down lower i started tossing stuff on my dead friend. Just random stuff like kitchen supplies. I thought i was probably going to die because everyone was left in the truck. But one of my other friends went back in for a photo, and the moment he did the ghost started a hunt. I was already safe back in the truck by then and we lost him.

That ended up being our last game for the night and we went back. We were going to do one more but one of our players started having Wi-Fi issues, thanks AT&T.

I like how this article does not talk about the anti consumer practices engaged in by Nintendo, that might push some customers away from their consoles. /s Nintendo can disable your Switch 2 for piracy in the U.S., but not in Europe, as confirmed by its EULA. There is already a switch in my household, but the price along with the ability to remotely brick the device, is what made our household pass on the switch 2. We bought a second steam deck instead.

Manor Lords and Terra Invicta publishers Hooded Horse are imposing a strict ban on generative AI assets in their games, with company co-founder Tim Bender describing it as an “ethics issue” and “a very frustrating thing to have to worry about”.

“I fucking hate gen AI art and it has made my life more difficult in many ways… suddenly it infests shit in a way it shouldn’t,” Bender told Kotaku in a recent interview. “It is now written into our contracts if we’re publishing the game, ‘no fucking AI assets.'” I assume that's not a verbatim quote, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

The publishers also take a dim view of using generative AI for “placeholder” work, or indeed any ‘non-final’ aspect of game development. “We’ve gotten to the point where we also talk to developers and we recommend they don’t use any gen AI anywhere in the process because some of them might otherwise think, ‘Okay, well, maybe what I’ll do is for this place, I’ll put it as a placeholder,’ right?” Bender went on.

Talk about Source spaghetti!

The Quake community regularly performs map jams. While I haven't tracked the efforts of the previous ones, this jam results in a large, nonsequential set of maps on offer, combined with a full conversion that creates new enemy variants, and remixes Quake's known weapons into new forms (dual nailguns, a rebar cannon, a multi-missile launcher, and a gemstone that functions like Doom 3's soul cube).

When you load in, you're brought to a museum-like "gallery" with portals into each of the maps created for the jam, denoting their author and difficulty level; sorted into "main offerings", "new faces", and other sections.

The simplest way to set the mod up is as a mod for Quake (though ironically, you'll be replacing both the main paks, AND the engine)