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Heh, looks like somebody had a similar idea first. That, or one of you guys work faster than John Henry on a halfway-lethal dose of amphetamine.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/582890/Estranged_Act_II/
Act I is just simply always-free, in case you're wondering.
Sorta marathoned the game starting on Friday evening. I didn't play continuously and actually did a variety of other things on Saturday, but I just left the game running at various points, so I ended up finishing at around 3 AM Sunday morning.
Steam says I played the game for 23 hours, but it's actually more like maybe 8-14 hours at most.
https://github.com/id-Software
That's Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, Wolfenstein 3D, etc. in official source code form.
That's pretty cool.
Also, first thing I did was searching for "fuck" in Quake III Arena and turns out there's a lot more instance of swearing in source code than I expected.
Can't remember why I didn't.
I would suggest Operation Abyss except I'm not sure what it's for other than PC.
It does have a sequel called Operation Babel though.
However, you make a very good point. I should maybe give my handhelds a bit of a workout after it's been so long.
Should've done that ages ago so I can protect the planet when I don't have anything else to do. At first I was bothered because of course the game wasn't made to use a touch screen, but apparently I got used to it because at one point I spent two hours on it without even realizing.
So I started a game on the highest difficulty, destroyed some UFOs, downed and raided one and it was going well until my base was attacked (I don't remember it ever happening that early) and boy did that go badly, I was prepared and even remembered to set up my base's layout for easier defense but there's only so much my ten or so untrained ungeared agents can do against crazy accurate, exploding, mind-controlling aliens.
Now I'm doing it again but in the easiest difficulty, which shouldn't matter beyond the first few missions anyways due to the bug that sets each saved game's difficulty on the easiest mode. DOS games amirite?
I'm pretty sure I've posted about X-COM: Apocalypse, an X-COM: UFO Defense mod (with similar disastrous results) and UFO: Alien Invasion here before, but for some reason the only related posts I can find are about XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
So this is happening.
Astro Boy, Princess Solange and a bunch of retro characters teaming up in a puzzle fighter? The Switch is looking better and better.
(Amusingly, I previously picked up this game on GOG.)
@lrdgck you may get more of a kick out of this than the rest of us since you know how to read
pope runesrunes that cannot into spacesausage runes.Also I just found out about r/Freegamesstuff and it seems there's lots I hadn't heard of.
TL;DR Telltale Games closed so their games won't be sold anymore.
Happening on both GOG and Steam.
Games affected:
The wolf among us
Marvel's guardians of the galaxy
Hector's badge of carnage
Batman a telltale game series
Batman the enemy within_ the telltale series
Sam and Max: Save the world
Sam and Max: Beyond time and space
Puzzle Agent
Puzzle Agent 2
Tales from the borderlands
Strong bads cool game for attractive people
games already removed (as per https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/7/1653297026032540295/ ): Game of Thrones, Tales from the Borderlands (still on GOG at the moment)
*grumbles about stupid IP laws keeping people from purchasing the games*
what
You'd think the first thing a closing company would do would be to sell off it's IP to recover some of the funds they owe or whatever.
Also, this feels like the latest in a long line of "Going all-digital is great because... oh..."
(Personally, I will lose all my English CDJ books at the end of May, though could only read them via an online reader anyways. I could have migrated my account elsewhere, but I don't think that should be necessary. That's... quite a chunk of money just gone).
You just can't buy it if you don't already have it.
I think they probably tried to sell their assets but found no buyers for whatever reason? Or at least no deal. I dunno the details though.
So lately Sony has instilled a new policy on their video games. It's been a subtle shift, but the gist of it is that they will no longer allow ecchi-games like Senran Kagura and Omega Labyrinth to be published on their platforms. People call this censorship, but this is ignoring that Sony is a publisher with a worldwide image and not like, anybody's government.
At first, this policy only seemed to apply to localizing games outside of Japan, but the latest salvo has been completely rebranding the latest Omega Labyrinth game, Omega Labyrinth Life, as just Labyrinth Life. They of course could have kept the original name, but that would probably have meant keeping the "omega symbol portrayed as a character's chest area". In accordance with that first change, they will be removing a lot of the objectionable content from the title, which will receive it's original-flavour fanservice release on the Nintendo Switch of all places.
On one hand, as people who play Japanese video games, we've been heavily desensitized to sexualizing
people* girls under 18 (or really, even those over 18) in ways that are, in all honestly, extremely demeaning. Garden-variety objectification has nothing on a lot of these games.As such, it's probably best that at the very least, we leave this sort of behavior in the past. Sony wants to make it's platform reflective of values that accept everybody as they are, and I doubt having cool female characters in an action-focused video game (yay!) and then having a mechanic where their chest-size grows as they level up (what?) and also a chest-appraisal system (come awn) is something people in their heart of hearts want to see in a video game. If somebody really, really needs this sort of thing, they can look elsewhere.
Now that I've spoken about sexualization and changes in video game culture, let's get to Catherine.
In the localization of the latest Catherine game, the Atlus games removed a (genuinely, pointlessly offensive) instance of deadnaming (in which a trans character is referred to by their pre-transition name) and a few more pointedly offensive moments. Most revolve around other characters in the name deadnaming the trans character in question, and one is basically the main character questioning said character's femininity as a joke.
"Of course he does, the main character of this game is a jerk!" the reasoning goes. However, being transphobic is nowhere near as cute/relatable as somebody just being an idiot. I'd argue, personally, that this is one of those lines where the game staff's bias slipped out, rather than coming at it from a perspective where this character acts rude because that's who he is.
What bias, you ask? I mean, Japan isn't exactly making strides in accepting trans people, so of course Japanese game developers don't care about the implications of such a statement. However, I'd like to think the people at Atlus US think differently, and have personal moral objections to such a statement making it into a translation they approved of in such a context.
So, yeah, things are changing for mainstream video games, and that's great actually.
*I would say people but really, I could probably count the number of times a man was objectified in a mainstream video game with one hand.
I don't disagree, but... this is perhaps a good time to mention that I don't like discussions where this argument gets thrown around, because they're also the ones with the "but X is socially important and should be accountable so as to not [host objectionable content/disallow free flow of content], as with monopolies" and which side holds which argument depends entirely on whether the company in question did or didn't block/remove some morally dubious content.
Well, I can't really argue with that because it's totally true. I guess all I can say is that... platforms are complex entities that we shouldn't entrust our lines of morality to, even where their actions seem to reflect it.