Hi, I’m Cleo! (they/them) I talk mostly about games and politics. My DMs are always open to chat! :)

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  • 78 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: October 25th, 2023

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  • I can’t say I share those feelings. While I think the 2D sections are just okay, they’re very short. I also think as far as pacing and traveling between fights, they did about all they could without distracting from the point of the game in my eyes.

    Like yes you can make better platforming or exploration, but that’s not what the overall level is there for. It’s there for scale, setting, NPC conversations, etc. Add too much and you distract from the next fight, add too little and you might as well have a boss rush type game. Fine balance here and this is honestly the best I’ve ever seen a game like this pull off filler time.

    That’s a whole conversation about filler in games but I think it’s harder than people realize to get this right.







  • I didn’t say they weren’t banning people, I said they aren’t really playing the cat and mouse game. VAC is a known system and it doesn’t actually affect cheating in any meaningful way since the game is free, steam accounts are easy to create, and time between VAC waves is extremely long.

    Go play a few matches of CS2 on competitive without buying the premier and tell me that they’re doing anything at all that is effective. It’s gotten so bad that playing on non-premier games I will get a cheater in the lobby about 75% of the time. And premier isn’t immune but it’s about 20% of the time.

    Most of what needs to be done is that their servers need to clean up and stop sending so much data to the client and also the servers need anti-cheat. There’s been some suggestions of this by people getting banned for moving their mouse to fast repeatedly, but that’s about all they’ve done of note.

    If you think that the company who has almost entirely abandoned TF2 and left it to rot to cheaters is doing much with CS, I think that’d be a bad assumption.







  • Really good points here but also I just want to add that Skyrim is very unlike any other game I’ve ever played. Whereas Fallout is shooting, which I’ve played a million times in other games. When I look at the other factors, Fallout has them in spades. Great enemy designs, good locations, great story depth, and the world and themes are phenomenal.

    But at the end of the day you’re right, your interaction with the world is mostly just guns. That’s why people find such enjoyment with melee runs in Fallout I think. Guns just aren’t as engaging but also they kind of encourage you keep your distance from the enemies. Whereas in Skyrim, unless you’re playing with a bow, you’re directly interacting with the enemies up close and personal.

    My advice is basically just to go play fallout and try it with a melee build and maybe ditch the companions. Or maybe find mods that try to add things to the playstyles.


  • Read a book that goes over the development of Stardew written by Jason Schreier and covered Eric a good bit.

    The dude was was worth multi millions shortly after Stardew had launched and it hadn’t even occurred to him to buy a new car. Jason hung out with him and watched him climb over the seat to get into the drivers seat of his car because the door was broken. Then at some point Jason asked him how it felt to be a famous developer and Eric basically just said he didn’t care about the fame and actually didn’t want it. He just wanted people to enjoy what he made.

    Saying Stardew Valley is a passion for Eric is an understatement. By the time he finished the game, he basically hated working on it. And ever since its launch, he’s worked on it for no reason other than to make a better game.

    Eric Barone is a shining light in an industry of constant shame.


  • I think the high jump could’ve been handled by either holding the jump button down to control the height like most platformers do or by having a system to time the jump in a multi-jump sequence to gain height like Mario 64 used. I also don’t see why a double jump wouldn’t suffice as an unlock in its place.

    This is a key example of what I mean by the nostalgia is holding them back. The moves are mostly copies of BK and it didn’t need to be that way.



  • I honestly thought I was the only one that has those problems. I think the thing that gets me is when you install a program, the installer closes, you don’t know where in gods name it just installed to, so you type the name of the program and windows is like “sorry never heard of it”, so you go to the programs list and it’s right there.

    What you mentioned is particularly frustrating because I too will type full program names and it often switches on the very last letter. It’s even more frustrating that the user can’t manipulate the search by typing a few letters, realizing those letters are shared by two programs, and then typing a few more letters to lead it to your program without moving to the mouse. Instead it acts like you’ve added no info and recommends the same thing.

    Also if you go to uninstall a program by right clicking it in start or search and instead of uninstalling it presents you with a list of programs which you then have to go find the program again in and then hit uninstall again. Been that way for 8 years now.


  • The issue isn’t material choice. It’s that plastic can’t be replaced by most materials because of the current function of our containers.

    Let me pitch it like this: go to the grocery store. It’s all plastic. The meat? Plastic container. Milk is in plastic. Water in plastic. They’ll even put your potatoes in a pre-packaged plastic sack.

    So the issue is that plastic has made its entire niche and therefore is irreplaceable in that niche. Whereas if we would swap over to reusable milk containers and dispensers or refillable chip bags, we’d be miles ahead even if those were all made of plastic still.

    The problem isn’t containers, it’s the existence of disposable packing being the only option.


  • Oh absolutely, I was going to reference the Gameboy Advance that I grew up on as a part of this phase. Unfortunately, I don’t think those handhelds even got their time in the light that they could’ve had. It seems like they’ve had a long legacy but the DS and GameBoy came and went in but two generations of consoles.

    I mean imagine what we could do with a gameboy today. Or imagine how we could easily transform a modern phone into a DS form factor. We’re talking now about running a modern resident evil game in the palm of your hand. Insane power really.

    All this is largely due to the mobile play stores having no competition or curation. Our mobile games absolutely suck now. There are gems, sure, but otherwise I hate phone gaming despite my phone being my most used device.

    I think you’re absolutely correct though, the DS is the best handheld. Slim, powerful enough, very interactive, and a great game library. I highly recommend buying one and modding it, you won’t regret it.


  • I loved the PS2 era of gaming a lot. This may be a controversial take, but the PS2 era did not last long enough.

    Everything about the aesthetics of the games that the PS2 produced were excellent. In my opinion, this is the point when low fidelity and high quality assets overlapped just enough to make games more comprehensible to their players. That enabled a lot of innovation that the PS3/360 era handled entirely differently. Forget an era, the PS2 is the last part of an entire age of gaming that delineates what I’m referring to.

    The PS2 was a huge turning point in what games were and could be in 3D. Prior to this, many games were abstract and the characters were a lump of polygons. With the PS2, this began to change. So we began to get games that our minds had to do a lot of interpreting but could see reality through. Nowadays, I’d argue that your mind does less interpreting and so the resulting picture has glaring inaccuracies.

    It also helped that ps2 was primarily played on CRTs or at least plasma which helped the picture look better in plenty of scenes than a PS3. Not to mention the color palette of games after the PS2 turned to muck.


  • Because those systems already exist for the console players. All they’re doing is switching it over to steam but they likely had a translation layer there before to do all the things you’re saying but through PSN instead. Why? Because that system already exists for consoles.

    So their options here are that they can take the netcode for consoles and modify it to utilize SteamIDs and fetch data from Steam or they can just turn your Steam ID into a console ID and treat all of the inputs to their systems exactly like they would on the PS5 while fetching them from Steam.

    I’m not saying it’s a good idea, I’m saying you’d think that just trying to match the console and the way it handles players would be simpler. Especially when you’re trying to make cross play work. Clearly it wasn’t so they temporarily ditched it. Maybe Sony does just want your data but if that’s true, why would the telemetry gathering be such a big deal? And they also could just use your SteamID for that data gathering. So clearly PSN used to be more integrated than people here are suggesting