bvanevery

Can you do things that will get the other team killed, even if indirectly? Like get a particularly mean dinosaur to wander into their area.

Since when does Steam provide game installers “bare” that don’t need Steam whatsoever to do an installation? I thought they infected all games they sell with Steam, in essence being a DRM platform. I just checked on this issue, read some article somewhere, and they indicated this is true for the vast majority of titles sold on Steam.

GOG, on the other hand, provides both a GOG Galaxy and a standalone .exe installer for the games they sell. You can back up that standalone .exe installer and use it anywhere. If you want to sneakerware it over to an old machine, you can. Once GOG has handed you that .exe installer, they’re not involved anymore. They are not a DRM platform. In fact that’s one of their main selling points that they pitch: no DRM.

I’ve bought a few games from GOG. I have never bought anything from Steam.

Absolutely agree. One of many reasons I’ve never bought anything on Steam, is Steam infects games with their Steam software. You don’t get the game “plain”. You get the game totally dependent on what Steam does with it. Like not running on an old machine anymore.

GOG gives me a backup of the game installer that has no GOG at all in it. I can save that backup to a DVD as an archive. Yes I do own the game, independent of GOG. I can get it to work, anywhere that it can be made to work. That might be easier or harder depending on where I try, but I can do it. I can do it 20 to 40 years from now if I remember to copy my DVDs, keep them alive, don’t get them burned in a house fire, don’t lose them, etc.

I believe in piracy for “demo” purposes. If the studio “forgot” to provide an official demo, you as a consumer should take matters into your own hands and provide the ‘demo’. Delete it when you’ve played a ‘demo’s worth’, which did have a fairly industry standard meaning back in the day.

When I became willing to play this 1 older game that shall remain nameless, and pay for it, I went looking for a Game Of The Year edition to pay for or some such. For some reason, this particular game never released a comprehensive GOTY. They expected you to download a quite silly amount of expensive DLC for trivial features. Slightly more powerful items in a RPG, basically. Those items even had the effect of ruining the game balance, so I’m not convinced it was even a good idea to have the DLC. Yet they expected you to pay for it sight unseen.

This was all driven by some kind of big corporate trick or scumbagging. I think it was an EA published title. Because they were clearly being greedy with an older title, I said to hell with them. It is one of the only games I’ve played in its entirety, that I didn’t pay for, that wasn’t abandonware. If you’re gonna be like that and your price on goods is not reasonable, I don’t feel I have to cooperate with you.

Now that I know what’s going on with DLC games, and also the low level of quality that’s going to result when a publisher engages in such practices, I’m not likely to seek a ‘demo’ of such a game at all. I will probably retain my demo only, not pirating purity in that regard. But to the extent I’ve ever been impure, that once, it was directly driven by the DLC. I was like waaaat, srs, gtfo.

In real life some of these spaces I never did laundry in, and nobody was doing laundry, because the beer and music were far more important. Especially when the laundromat was in another part of town, so I’d never actually haul my laundry to it.
It was this weird business that various people would try to run. A friend of mine started up this laundromat that was also a whisky bar. He took us after hours to check it out. I had already had a bunch of Belgian beer and I got so sick on the whiskey, sickest I’ve ever been on alcohol in my life. Still can’t consider a smoke flavored whiskey to this day.

No I don’t. I find most people’s videos incredibly boring, even if they’re supposed to be on an interesting subject. Making videos is so common that lots and lots of people are terrible videographers. They just let things drag on, they waste people’s time. So making a video of a subject that is also boring, looking over the shoulder or listening to someone play a game, is even worse.

I’ll watch my Mom play a video game in real life for like 30 seconds. That teaches me something about what she’s doing, and that’s all it’s worth. I’m an indie game designer and developer. I see it; I get it; that’s all I need.

Games are interactive and are meant to be played. I can’t relate to people only watching games, at all. I know people do it. I cannot relate to it in any way. It is alien to me.

One thing I’ve realized about people’s YouTube play sessions, is they get their audience more from the audio they’re doing, than from the video. Because people listen to these videos, while they’re eating dinner or doing laundry and so forth. Their eyes and hands are on something else.

In the early 2000s I went through a whole period of mythological city building with the game Zeus. And there were real laundromats in Seattle integrating alcohol, board games, video games, and even music performances in them. I still see laundromats in other cities today with an arcade cabinet in them, and more than once I’ve thought, “Why can’t this be an arcade game that doesn’t suck?” They haven’t gotten any money out of me. So I can relate to the idea of building out a more swank laundromat, 90s / 2000s style. But by that same token, mythological city building is better than laundromat building, and more period.

I actually haven’t perused the builder game space in quite awhile. There was a long period where my extreme jadedness was justified. Minecraft Alpha for instance was terrible as a game. But it was a bunch of kids’ first game, that was a big part of it, that they had no preexisting concept of what should go into a proper builder game. Another was insider cult rituals of finding secret stuff to do in the game, how things worked. Went hand in hand with outsourcing “why you bother to play the game” to social media.

I spent 5 calendar years modding Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri to make my SMACX AI Growth mod. I solved many things, but one totally rubbish thing caused me more rage quits over the years than all other sources combined. Probe teams can take over cities for trivial amounts of credits, compared to the value of the city and the military units in it. The original game formula is completely overpowered and broken. My mod is .txt modding only, as anyone who bought the game could originally do. I was able to mitigate the problem but not solve it. It’s now down to goddamn irritating instead of absolutely infuriating. The only way to fix the mechanic short of making a totally new game from scratch, is binary modding the original game. People do that, and I have the technical skills to do it, but I studiously avoided any invitations to engage in binary modding. It took me 5 calendar years as it was to perfect my .txt mod to the degree it could be perfected. I’m done providing free stuff for the internet that way. Next gaming effort gets me a paycheck (I hope someday).