Oblivion paintbrushes will get me up there just fine.

This is becoming less true for FPS every month - the described method of cheating (off-device reading and input simulation) is becoming more accessible as more cheat makers are selling premade devices that do this. Huge problem even for new shooters like rivals - someone was already caught doing it in one of their ingame tournaments. It’s the primary way people cheat in League of Legends, and it would not surprise me to see evidence of it in dota 2(though I haven’t personally, I haven’t been paying attention to it for some years and it isn’t as frequent that a variety streamer or youtuber plays it compared to lol).

As mentioned before, kernel anticheat won’t catch these guys anyway, so it’s largely just a way to alienate your user base. There’s a new problem it does nothing special to solve.

Willful ignorance is the most disappointing feature of humanity

The biggest risk we see (outside the risks that are the same as those from cigarettes but less severe) is circulatory health risks (vessel function). Sure, you have increased risk of respiratory disease, but not nearly as bad as cigarettes. The real benefit is that most vaporizers and eliquids are not carcinogenic (directly cancer causing) the way cigarette smoking is, so you can lose the added chance of getting cancer while titrating nicotine dosage down to nothing over a longer period; one of the main failure points of nicotine gums and patches is that they aren’t effective methods for pack-a-day smokers, the usual suggested regimens have them in withdrawal headaches and brain fog quickly and many smokers quit quitting on week one or two.

We have dozens of ten year studies with HUGE N already. Read them. Check out the REPRIEVE trial data. If you seriously think every single one of the currently available studies and trial results are not “legit science data” you’re insane.

Tombstone is out! Skilling MMO (So think runescape) with a retro-future wild west type theme and pixel gfx that can be played from steam, its own client (available on itch), a browser, or android. Runs on anything, obscenely fast update pace, developers on discord respond to issues dummy fast. I’m currently playing tombstone.

CRPG doesn’t usually refer to MMOs or action rpgs. They’re referring to games that emulate a tabletop RPG but on a computer, which is where the C comes in. Generally they’re modeled after Dungeons and Dragons or similar systems, like Pathfinder.

Nintendo is just as bad as the “other big publishers” and your sentiments aren’t founded in reality. Their gacha practices, frivolous licensure of hardware, and constant patent trolling bring the games industry as a whole down as people like you paint them as a forerunner. I’ll try not to write a whole TED talk but no promises.

Someone mentioned just the Pokemon TCG, but almost every mobile game nintendo has released has had one of the worst dollar spend ratios out of the genre they chose. Fire emblem? Obscenely expensive. Pokemon go? LONG time gating unless you cheat or pay. Dragalia Lost brought in tens of millions annually - 1 in 200 chance from the average loot box for a dude. Don’t get me started on pokemon quest, one of the most “get mom and dad’s credit card” games ever devised. Literal loot boxes were only removed from mario kart tour late 2022.

Nintendo has a couple of exceptional quality teams but those teams would be that quality with or without the Nintendo brand attached to them. There is nothing special about the company or the manner it is run when you compare it to the other major gaming companies, right down to release quality being low for many games because of crunch and share-driven deadlines. Hell, some of their flagship franchises have been victim to it recently (Pokemon titles).

Nintendo puts their seal of approval on peripherals for their systems - have you ever bought a nintendo brand microSD for the switch? Grandma has paid 4x+ the price every year for a nintendo switch branded microSD that might not even come in a file format that works on the switch. All this, of course, to support the console with bar none the worst online connectivity that you must pay for, that cannot be improved by any means. Seriously, the ethernet dongle makes absolutely 0 difference in stability or quality if one player is using it, and it hardly improves things even when all connected players are using it. Insane waste of money.

Anyway Nintendo literally does do that. They are greedy (mobile game cost:return ratios), corner-cutting (trash licensed peripherals), and draconic in the way they patent vague game interactions and prosecute anyone for trying to innovate in “Their space” (see the recent patents locking everyone except nintendo out of the sleep game space). They lock access to their games away from the public, and what they HAVE done is re-release, at full price, decades old games for limited times (Mario collection).

There’s interviews confirming they have interest in NFT and Metaverse titles going back to 2022, it is a matter of time. TL;DR the corporation is not your friend and you are only considering a tiny fraction of what they do.

The hallmark of roguelikes is procedural generation, permanent death and no overarching progression, like the titular game Rogue. Roguelites (I know, one letter difference who cares) have overarching progression lines that make the game easier as you play it. Extreme difficulty as part of the roguelike formula is expected, since runs where you don’t become very powerful very quickly happen, and the games are often balanced against some of the better possible runs.

Gungeon is punishing, but I regret to inform you you are FAR from too weak to finish floor 2 with the default kit of any character. Bashing your head against a challenge is fine as long as you’re learning something every time you don’t make it through, gungeon is simply a game where getting hit at all is really bad.

All that said, gungeon isn’t the highest quality roguelike or roguelite. That’s probably SLASH’EM (roguelike) or Elona (Roguelike(?)), and Hades (roguelite) or Windblown (roguelite, still in development). I won’t even recommend roguelikes without graphics because the average age in this thread seems mighty low.

You are not thinking of the hippocratic oath (there is no mention whatsoever of gossip about patients). The do no harm clause specifies bodily harm/abuse in a physical context. You have supplied a TV or Movie memory concerning diagnosis, or maybe you think HIPAA is somehow related to the oath. Many modern doctors don’t take the traditional hippocratic oath. If you’d ever read the text, you would know why.

You’ve clearly rattled all this off without taking a single second to look at context. The goldwater rule isn’t an actual law, and it does not in fact have an explicit analogue in the current APA ethics guidelines (though you can argue the same instruction is conveyed throughout a couple of the standards). You have made up rules that doctors live by in your brain. American psychologists do not “have to follow the goldwater rule”. Every time I see you post it’s some “I googled it!” regurgitation with absolutely no understanding of the topic, or insane ramblings about how we should be nice to AI. Your five minutes of searching is not going to help you think critically about anything. This is facebook user behavior.

Truly, a gift that keeps on giving for 200 hours. And it somehow has replay value.

Based recommendation, microman was one of the earliest platformers I played. I still remember insert to shoot being an awkward keybind.

Are you familiar with the term lobbying and how it shares a bedroom wall with bribery? Individual votes usually matter little to none in the grand scheme of things, and there’s next to no evidence that politicians above the local level give a shit about individuals throughout a huge swathe of the US. Governatorial election promises in the southeastern US are almost universally lies about quality of life improvements, from healthcare changes in florida benefitting no one to roadwork that never happens being promised every election cycle in alabama and mississippi. There is a HUGE disconnect between representatives and their constituents in these states, and they’re not the only ones.

Realistically, that money is not being used effectively to sway anyone, especially when little is actually used for propaganda, and weak vectors are chosen. Many campaigns are still running on outmoded methods of contact, like outdated lists of people for cold mailing, text messages that wind up in your spam filter, and shock value ads that only serve to annoy and change VERY few minds about anything.

You have a very optimistic outlook on how any politician views a letter or email from a constituent. Within my whole lifetime, I cannot name ONE politician in the US that has changed course over constituent contact. Not for any single thing. That’s why someone asked if you were eight years old earlier; most people from 25-40 years of age have, at this point, accepted that the current system does not operate in the way that we were taught in school. Instead, we have this broken system where the cries of the masses enter the void, and MAYBE ONE “representative” echoes them to a person or place where change can begin. The ones that do are decried so unbelievably fast it makes your head spin, and the ones that retain office while doing so are treated like crazy extremists by any media that could inform people of their goals, so there’s no hope of popular/uninformed support.

Because they have Douyin.

Because they have Douyin.

You described the garlic-like genre. Which has gotten VERY big. “we’d be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that’s what they were going for.” They are MAKING THEM it’s VAMPIRE SURVIVORS lmao

Most of your complaints about obfuscation make me think you haven’t played Last Epoch and don’t know there is a solution: simply put the information someone would alt+tab or otherwise leave the game to find it IN THE GAME! LE has a robust in-game guide with info on everything from weird status effects down to how elemental resists work against elemental penetration and reduction.

A large portion of the issue is the ever eternal Minecraft Problem imo, it seems like you (and many people in general) have trouble setting your own goals when it comes to why you’re making the character more powerful. ARPG have different approaches to this: diablo 3 hasn’t got much stuff to “distract” you from pushing greater rift levels, while Path of Exile gives you a 12 boss checklist in different dimensions and you need to finish a LOAD of content, then fight 4 of them to fight the bigger bosses after them (and content beyond even that). Without knowing which bosses or how to find them, some players get lost.

TL;DR the genre is evolving as people ask these kinds of questions and you’re slightly behind the forefront of questioning here. Not a knock, just worth mentioning that what you’re looking for (an ARPG with sparkling information clarity) already exists, and the thing you’re thinking might exist in the future (streamlined ARPG with less mechanical intensity) also already exists.

E:D doesn’t really have them, but valheim and other information heavy games tend to have writeable signs. Since early modded minecraft, I have utilized these signs to communicate with my future self; writing down what I’m doing at the time and what my major goals are before logging off for the night is just part of my gaming routine now. Takes me a few seconds of reading to trigger the flow of action again. When games don’t have signs, I use a notepad .txt file to track what I was up to, or failing that I’ll save a note in my phone.

I would never have finished factorio or satisfactory without text files and signage. I would never have finished most large minecraft modpacks without signage. Organization skills rock.

They literally tried to patent the loading screen and mechanically locking a player object to a moving object ingame just after the release of TotK. Nintendo is the absolute king of frivolous gaming patents. Here’s hoping it’s their downfall. For an example of how seriously vague some of the patents they’ve been granted are, check out some of their current ones after pokemon sleep’s initial success (basically trying to keep everyone without 9 digit money out of the sleep app game space).

https://patents.justia.com/assignee/the-pokemon-company

PT stands on its own in the horror video game genre IMO. Too many games fail to convey one of the elements of horror well, typically overusing shock and disgust as it’s hard to achieve psychological terror when your art medium has the potential for funny things to happen (like physics objects in amnesia deciding to fling themselves all over the room when you let go because they bounced wrong). Really interrupts the flow of the scared juice. The other half of horror games give you enough tools to completely defuse the horror after an initial few encounters (death stranding) or straight up don’t try to scare you situationally, just acting as combat action games with horror themes (later resident evils).

PT remakes for PC are in a good place finally, “P.T. emulation” being a bit closer than unreal PT to the source material as a project. How konami could possibly drop a project with star power like kojima+del toro is beyond me, especially considering reception to the demo was GREAT and it was slated to release while streamers playing horror games was still in vogue. Unbelievable fumbled bag lying there

It’s so hard to describe contact. It’s like a more exploratory Rune Factory with no farming sim element and swappable jobs like the final fantasy MMOs. I feel like the audience for the game wasn’t targeted well, as it fell in that era where “core gamers” stopped being a popular target audience (we hardly use the term at all these days).

Early in the lifetime of the DS, before the 3ds had even been mentioned, a ton of JRPGs released for the platform seemingly in a bid to become the next earthbound or chrono trigger. Most of them were very mediocre, but to this day Contact (published by atlus) and The World Ends With You (square enix) stand out as stellar titles to me. They represent opposite ends of the jrpg spectrum; contact is a grinding game with a very floaty story, whereas TWEWY has an intricate story and a penalty-free swappable easy difficulty setting to help new players cope with the (initially) awkward combat system. Both of them are stand-out in their own ways, with memorable settings and characters supporting the mechanical depth they offer.

Both of them are games that take advantage of the DS’s unique features, not the microphone but the touchscreen. While Contact is pretty easy on the gimmicks, only requiring you to occasionally peel a sticker or something simple like that, TWEWY’s combat flow has you use buttons to control the top screen while simultaneously doing multiple touch screen gestures, making the game difficult to master on the actual DS and unbelievably hard on an emulator.

TWEWY has since had a remaster and a sequel, but contact is seldom mentioned anywhere when I see the DS talked about. Worth a look!