games

It's a shooter-moba. I have access and can invite. If anyone wants access, I will need to friend you on steam.

You can post friendcode in comment or PM it, I don't mind. I will add people then send invite, they're not instant they get sent in waves.

I have very mixed opinions on it.

Edit: I need your friend code. NOT SteamID. Easy mistake to make.

Editedit: If I missed you, poke me. Sometimes notifications are weird here.

Editeditedit: Looks like some of these have started to go through!

This has surprisingly garnered lots of support amongst gamers

Every day I keep getting surprised and my bar keeps getting lowered deeper into the ground

bullying, harassing, or even "criticizing" them is an entirely pointless endeavor that does nothing but make you feel superior to another person. having a "minimum standard" for random matchmaking is OK i guess, but not having that standard met is the developer's fault for not having proper matchmaking, not the random shitty player just trying to play the game.

and it's a game. it fundamentally does not matter if someone is so bad you can't get your +0.2 second record or whatever. it does not matter if you can't win the difficulty you chose. everyone starts somewhere, and in games where different difficulties tend to be almost like entirely different games, this is even more true. if you want a game where you have an 100% chance of everyone involved being at the correct skill level you want, than don't play with explicitly random players. no one cares if you want to feel special because you can win more at some fictional game than other people. I respect skill, but if you think that's a reason to bully people than you should leave every game scene ever to save people from your presence

if a player stumbles into something but doesn't understand it it's the developer's fault 90% of the time. if a player doesn't want to "git gud" it's the developer's fault 90% of the time. every single genuine criticism made about a game's difficulty is inherently valid. every game should have an easy mode. players should default to helping new players rather than dismissing them. learning a game by playing it is always more intuitive than using google or reading blog posts.

I remember when they became standard way to select weapons, abilities and so on in the Xbox 360/PS3 generation and how modern and next-gen they felt. When you wanted to change equipment in older PS1 or PS2 games, typically you had to pause the game to dig around in an inventory to pick a new weapon, then exit back to the game and oh boy does it feel clunky when returning to those older games.

I assume the change was motivated partly by the dpad finally being completely supplanted by the left analog stick for movement so designers could come up with new uses for it

PC games had of course used the number keys as hotkeys since day 1 so the change was mostly a console thing

Game was shined to a sheen it has no flaws. Graphical masterpiece of the generation even puts mgs to shame. Banger soundtrack to boot

I won't ask twice.

It hits a teenage nostalgia no game does. Its so passionately bad only some dedicated sonic fans could have made this

I don't even play guilty gear

The thumbnail shows the common form of smothered mate with the king in the corner. The Wikipedia page has other forms - like in openings. A grandmaster getting a smothered mate (even in a speed chess game) is uncommon because what the attacker is up to tends to be obvious. The thumbnail form done by not one but two knights must be exceeding rare. I'd never seen it before.

Magnus had a big advantage and after 25...Nxd3 white mentally collapsed. He spent ~30 seconds thinking which is a vast expanse of time in speed chess, he made a bad move, he made another bad move, and then Magnus had mate in 3.

https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/live/116721637783?tab=analysis&move=49

Smothered mate

In chess, a smothered mate is a checkmate delivered by a knight in which the mated king is unable to move because it is completely surrounded (or smothered) by its own pieces, which a knight can jump over.

The mate is usually seen in a corner of the board, since only three pieces are needed to surround the king there, less than anywhere else.

Lost planet 2 really falls off hard in the last 2 episodes but it was worth it for this scene

Good ol' buttcraft

I don't really mean in terms of mods, but like go off if you wanna. I'm a lifelong Minecraft enjoyer, played it basically from Alpha right up to release, and dropped off around 1.2ish. I've played it in bursts again over the years, but the more weird stuff they add the more weirded out I feel. I just wanna build houses with sloping rooves, sheesh... It does kind of make me wanna just give up and play Legacy Console on Wii U or something weird.

[Minecraft boomer alert I guess]

I don't totally hate what they've done with the game itself but it's clear that the launcher is a lost cause. Plus how does Java chug this badly on a Ryzen 2600? I have to choose between a performance mod that makes the game run, or pad support, because one of them uses Fabric and the other uses the other thing. Remember when Minecraft mods was just dumping .jar files into the game's directory?

I mean to ask, what is the way cool kids play Minecraft nowadays? Are there cool alternative launchers or modpaks or a specific version or whatever I can play that's cooler than Microsoft Occupied Minecraft and are more fun?

Hearthstone is my old standby game. This is an interesting twist on previous mechanics and I'll be glad to see buddies go.

Long story short, Ross Scott, who you may know as the Freeman's Mind guy, has been annoyed by games as a service and the industry practice of requiring online connections to company run servers to run their games. The primary reason is that once the game becomes unsupported, access to that game altogether usually goes with it. He's a hardcore game preservationist, and has been keeping a running count of games that have completely died with absolutely no way to ever play them again, so he decided to vanguard an international campaign to see if this issue can be settled for good.

His latest (and most promising) endeavor has been an European Citizens' Initiative called "Stop Destroying Videogames". Once it reaches a million signatures, the European Parliament will discuss the matter and move forward with whether or not this is a valid consumer protection violation, and if so, write into law a way to stop the practice.

There's been some recent drama with some youtuber called Pirate Software who seems to take issue with the initiative seemingly from a bad faith argument perspective. Fortunately this brought some attention to the initiative, but it is a classic tale of reactionaries coming out of the woodwork the second political traction against corporate interests starts taking place.

Bonus points if it's actually more helpful than GameFAQs. Capeesh?