Couch competitive multiplayer? Because it’s not a fighting game, and I’d say it has more in common with Speedrunners than it does Smash Bros. And Samurai Gunn is a good one of those.

This studio in particular has a hell of a history of making some all-time greats, so it sucks to see it squandered.

I’ll probably pick up Kena: Bridge of Spirits, and depending on launch discounts and reviews, I might pick up Screamer as well, if the sale is still running by the 26th. There’s no point in picking up anything else if I don’t think I’ll get around to it by the next Steam sale.

I don’t. And I don’t know if they put their videos elsewhere.

Skullgirls. You won’t find a deeper fighting game.

Uh, didn’t know Earthsea, Game of Thrones, Wheel of Time were Tolkien clones.

That’s on you.

This entire medium is built on iteration. Basically every fantasy thing you ever played was basically a palette swap of Tolkien or someone who copied Tolkien before them. Original D&D had “hobbits” until they were changed into halflings. Palworld is also parody, which thrives on the similarity as it calls pals bastards for breaking out of their capture, or arms them with modern weaponry. Not only that, but “survival game with a riff on Pokemon” is creating something original.

As a Giant Bomb fan, it’s somewhat renewed interest in forums over there from the operators and users. Discord was always a bad forum anyway, but it was great for immediately being able to have a conversation with people to find answers to problems.

What brought the game to court compared to the other monster collectors is that this one made a shit-ton of money, and the other ones didn’t, so Nintendo and The Pokemon Company were, for the first time, threatened.

If memory serves, the plagiarism allegations were doctored. Nintendo tried to find whatever they could sue them for, and it wasn’t plagiarizing monster designs; it was for things like “riding a captured creature” and “catching creatures by throwing a ball at them”. Some aspect of Japanese law allowed for them to make new patents after Palworld came out and then sue them for it retroactively.

Yes, Fluxer’s self hosting documentation 404s, and Stoat seems to still rely on a central server, which isn’t self hosted enough for my needs. It’s cool that both of them are looking good in the near future, but I want something I can start using in the next few months.

Teamspeak lived long enough to see an exodus from Discord, but that doesn’t mean Discord is dying.

Did you run into the same problems I did with self-hosting? And if not, how did you avoid them?

You can find full playthroughs of most games with no commentary on the YouTube channel MKIceAndFire.

Yup. The only game to really stress test it was Borderlands 4, but…that’s because the performance in that game sucks across the board. Even then, they put out a performance patch that helped a ton, and I can still run it on high settings with some frame gen, or a few settings turned down to medium without it.

RX6800 XT. It did cost me an arm and a leg when I bought it, due to the shortage at the time, but it’s lasted a long, long time.

I’ve been rocking the same graphics card since 2021, and it still plays every new game on high settings. There are very few games that can even afford the production budget that would push a card like that or even a PS5 to its limits anyway. My most-played game is a 2D game from 2012 that can run on a cheap laptop, and the market at large is most focused on games that are so low spec that they can run on phones too.

Steam reviews are one data point in your pocket. And I’ve found they average out to be pretty useful.

The engine is Godot, which he chose specifically because it was open enough that he could rip out the existing rendering code and replace it.

I do think parents have plenty of responsibility here. I don’t think that absolves Valve. We put regulations on who can legally gamble because we know it’s addicting, and I think it’s a problem how little Valve have done to prevent it from being done by those who aren’t legally supposed to. I’m not advocating for government intrusion to collect more PII, nor am I convinced necessarily that that’s what NY state is asking for, but it’s certainly what Valve would like you to believe they’re fighting against. I would love to see things legally categorized as gambling that currently are not, and the space that Valve is operating in may be less of a gray area than their competitors operate in due to the resale market.