So we’re still going with “One of the most iconic story driven single player experiences of all time is now an extraction shooter” I take it?

There’s a lot I could list here, but I’ll focus on a few that I’ve played recently, that don’t seem to be getting as much mention.

Slay The Princess - A literally flawless game. I genuinely mean that. There’s not a single thing about this that I can think of to criticise. The writing is fantastic, the art is beautiful, the voice acting is note perfect and the score is gorgeous and haunting. The concept is insanely inventive, and the execution even more so. I finished my first run in about 3 hours, and then looked at what other people were saying about the game and realised that I had only just scratched the surface. As in, other reviews seemed to be describing an almost entirely different game to the one I played, because literally every choice matters.

OTXO - Roguelike Hotline Miami with bullet time and a bartender who sells bottled superpowers. There’s really not much more to say than that. The soundtrack is like a Trent Reznor fever dream, and the whole thing has the feeling of encountering Quake for the first time. Just a mad demented bloodrush of insane violence coming at you non-stop.

Vampire Survivors - It’s super cheap, it’s super chill, it seems like absolutely nothing and then oops its 3am and you’re telling yourself you can still get in one more run (no, for real, this game actually fucked with my sleep for a while).

Shadows of Doubt - OK, this one is still early access and I don’t actually recommend buying it right now, but absolutely wishlist it for the 1.0 release. It’s rough around the edges at the moment, but GOD FUCKING DAMN WHAT A GAME. The sheer audacity of the idea behind this is unbelievable; a fully procedurally generated “city” (about a 3 x 4 block grid on medium size) where every room of every building can be entered and explored, and contains a business or a resident. Every person in the city (up to around a 1000 at the largest sizes) has a complete life; a job in the city that they go to at scheduled hours, places they like to hang out, relationships, maybe a partner, fingerprints, medication for medical conditions, a blood type, a shoe size, height, weight, age… And they do crimes, which you then get to solve for money. You’re a PI, in a demented alternate history 1979 (“The Bourbon Empire never fell and now Coca Cola is the President of a retro-cyberpunk dystopia”), down on your luck and taking any job to get by. And when I say “solve crimes” I mean it. This is, IMO, the first game ever to get detective work right. There’s no Arkham “Turn on detective vision and walk around until you see all the clues” going on here. You have to actively think about the crime and how to approach it. You can canvass witnesses, dig through government databases, gather prints and match them to a murder weapon, examine the corpse and make inferences about the time of death from which you can pull security footage and look for suspicious characters. You chase down leads, some of which end up as total dead-ends. You have a god damn pin board with string on which to put all your evidence, and then cover it with sticky notes. And it’s all you doing this. The game has a tonne of helpful quality of life elements designed to make the process of gathering and assessing evidence as frictionless as possible, but you’re the brains. It’s on you to actually make the deductions and connections and puzzle out what happened. This game is a work of demented genius and I’m slightly scared of the people who made it.

The tandem option is also viable, and is actually a really great starting place for this sort of thing (I will fully acknowledge that my proposal would be very difficult to get through any current political system). The public sector deliberately competing with the private to bring down prices has been proven to work. A great example of this is Sasktel in Canada, where the provincial government made their own publicly owned telecoms provider, and as a result all the big telcos, that functioned as an oligopoly everywhere else, offering identical plans at identical prices, had to offer plans that were much, much cheaper in Saskatchewan specifically.

Also there’s absolutely room for debate as to whether a single massive rental company would be better, or whether it would be preferable to have lots of small, regional or municipal corps. I prefer the former only because it would give them more flexible buying power in terms of scooping up properties to rent out, but I’m sure there are strong arguments for the other approach.

Yeah, the whole “what about people who want / need to rent because of their current circumstances” problem really is easy to solve.

Create a crown corporation (for those not familiar, a not-for-profit entity owned at arms length by the government) to handle all rentals, with a mandate to offer rents at a (very low) rate established by a formula that accounts for factors of property value (footage, amenities, location), population density and rental demand in a given area.

Then you make it so that only this crown corp is allowed to charge residential tenants rent. Anyone else who wants to make money off of their second properties and the like will have to sell them to the crown corp. Anyone like in the OP who wants to rent for some months of the year will enter an arrangement with the crown corp where the corp rents the property on their behalf at the rates established by the formula.

+1 for Insurgency. It’s more “mid shelf” than “indie”, but either way it’s an absolutely superb military shooter, and one that actually does a really good job of avoiding the usual MURICA bullshit that is so endemic to the genre. Combat is portrayed as genuinely scary. The voice actors all do an amazing job of displaying fear and panic in their line reads. Even the Russian voice is very obviously masking his fear behind a veneer of machismo, which is a refreshering change from the usual image of the macho badass soldier that these games present.

I also really appreciate that female characters are present, but only on the security forces, because the insurgents are clearly intended to be ISIL, and they’re not gonna whitewash how shitty those guys are to women. OTOH, the insurgents are still portrayed as (shitty) human beings who look out for each other, and react in very genuine ways to the scary situation they’re in. No one ever yells “Allah akbar” or whatever.

Out of curiosity, what is the actual limit for an acceptable quantity of genocide? Like, I’m trying to understand if there’s a hard number of murdered civilians that Isreal has to reach before we can make comparisons to the holocaust, or if it’s more just a vibes thing?

They can argue all they want. I really don’t care.

The legal definitions of genocide are only difficult to meet because they were written by countries with their own histories of genocide. That’s why it’s so hard to prove.

That’s not a standard we need to hold ourselves to.

Why?

It seems to me that it really strains credulity to suggest that the US has no further ability to reign in Natanyahu, especially if Isreal needs protection that badly. They basically depend on the US for their existence, but they also have the US over a barrel? How does that square up?

The US needs to stop funding genocide.

Use the word. It’s important. It’s what it is. This is a modern holocaust happening before our eyes, and we are complicit in it.

Streets of Rogue is amazing, especially with friends. Absolutely bonkers game.

Genuinely one of the greatest games ever made.

Embracer, actually, and while I do suspect that the blame for a lot of these problems lies with them (especially the lack of servers, which was almost certainly down to Embracer cheaping out), it’s hard to blame this particular failure on anyone but Aspyr. While Embracer almost certainly created the conditions by not giving them enough time and resources to deliver good work, it’s still on Aspyr that they used someone’s work without permission. There’s no real justification for that, even if you’re in a bind.

Sear the name Embracer into your mind. This is what’s going to happen with any studio owned by them. This is what ruthlessly taking a blowtorch to all of your studios headcounts gets you.

Generally speaking, game devs never like putting out a bad product. It’s a creative industry, and one that people go into because they love games (otherwise they’d be working in fintech where the pay is much better). I guarantee it was Embracer who made the call to launch this product in its current broken state, and probably also Embracer who put so little money aside for server infrastructure.

According to other sources the remake is still in the works, but needs at least another year of work.

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/embracer-suggests-star-wars-kotor-remake-isnt-coming-out-for-over-a-year/

Minor/pedantic addendum: For all uses of “blockchain” in this thread, I assume we can all agree that we’re talking about “public ledger blockchain” specifically.

Private blockchains absolutely have their uses, such as being the technology that powers Git. But those uses are still strictly limited to situations where an append only ledger is actually useful, and those are very few indeed.

But yes, in regards to public ledger blockchain, there are absolutely no valid use cases.

There aren’t. a16z are a crypto company. They’re almost certainly tying the funding to CCP putting the word blockchain in there in the hopes of tricking people into thinking there’s still some life in this dead horse they’re flogging.

As best I can guess, it looks like they’re just throwing the word blockchain in there so that a16z will hand them $40m in funding.

Yeah, every time I see this meme, every person who’s ever owned chickens immediately chimes in with some version of “Believe me, they know.” Because the little buggers really do.

Absolutely. He had the courage to question his own assumptions when they were challenged by new evidence. Everyone could stand to learn from him.