Gaming

I spent well over a month talking to investors to get the actual data behind what’s happening to the games industry. I was going to say “enjoy!” but it’s, uh, not great.

Big question: Why have alienated young men, especially in America, found their home in the populist political right? Part of the answer is that the populist right takes video games seriously.

Mind the gap: Games have typically been treated as a bit of a joke by wider society. Long-held stereotypes about games being worthless, provoking violence or turning players into addicts has created a gap between the experience of the millions who play games and the perception of the medium in wider society.

The art of persuasion: For most of us who love games, our way of dealing with this problem has been to try to change minds. We’ve talked about games as an economic powerhouse. We’ve argued that games have cultural power. And we’ve sought to support research that’s provided a level-headed perspective on whether games make people aggressive (they don’t) or if they negatively affect mental health (again, a pretty firm nope).

Tunnelling down: But others reacted differently. A small number of ‘always online’ ‘transgressive’ young men, especially in America, have seen the rejection of games in liberal democratic culture as part of a wider betrayal of their personal and political identity.

Worrying development: And according to James Ball, Political Editor at The New European and author of The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World, those disaffected people have successfully been courted by the populist right and authoritarian governments - fuelling their causes with activism and energy that is helping dismantle the liberal order.

I made a website. It’s called One Million Chessboards. It has one million chessboards on it.

Moving a piece moves it for everyone, instantly. There are no turns. You can move between boards.

What

Well last year I made this game called One Million Checkboxes.

It was a pretty fun time! So I thought I’d do something like this again.

I worked really hard on this one. I hope you like it.

How

This was the most technically challenging thing that I’ve worked on in a long time. I’m going to save a full technical writeup until I see how my decisions pan out, since I think there’s a decent chance I’ll need to make a lot of changes.

But I’ll summarize a few things for you.

• Unlike One Million Checkboxes, I designed this for scale
• The game runs on a single server (!)
• The board is stored fully in-memory; it’s a 2D array of 64 million uint64s
• The backend is written in go. This is my first go project.
• I use a single writer thread, tons of reader threads, and coordinate access to the board with a mutex
• The frontend optimistically applies all moves you make immediately. It then builds up a dependency graph of the moves you’ve made, and backs them out if it receives a conflicting update before the server acks your move.

That last part - optimistic move application with what games people sometimes call “rollback” - is about 1,600 lines of code that took me a ~7 days of fulltime work to write. I don’t remember the last time I wrestled with a problem that hard!

For many gamers, this week's release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered has provided a good excuse to revisit a well-remembered RPG classic from years past. For others, it's provided a good excuse to catch up on a well-regarded game that they haven't gotten around to playing in the nearly two decades since its release.

I'm in that second group. While I've played a fair amount of Skyrim (on platforms ranging from the Xbox 360 to VR headsets) and Starfield, I've never taken the time to go back to the earlier Bethesda Game Studios RPGs. As such, my impressions of Oblivion before this Remaster have been guided by old critical reactions and the many memes calling attention to the game's somewhat janky engine.

Playing through the first few hours of Oblivion Remastered this week, without the benefit of nostalgia, I can definitely see why Oblivion made such an impact on RPG fans in 2006. But I also see all the ways that the game can feel a bit dated after nearly two decades of advancements in genre design.

I currently have the 24G2 which is 24 inch and 1080P. It was great but it unfortunately kind of died. White lines, lagging with tougher games and such. So I was researching for a good gaming (and productivity) monitor and found the DELL G2724D. The DELL looked gorgeous compared to the old 24G2. Unfortunately though, insane amount of glow – to the point I just returned it and asked money back.

Now I’m kind of uncertain which monitor to get, I read reviews and all reviews on IPS panels have a lot of complains about the glow. I then researched about OLED, Q-OLED and kind of fell in love. Was ready to purchase one until, I was not. I found out it’s not a good match for productivity usage due to burn-in issue (Excel and Word). So kind of stuck now.

I was thinking about the ASUS ROG Strix XG27ACS or LG UltraGear 27GR83. But I have bad experience with the ASUS before (bought it and would not turn on, might be just bad luck?) and I read different opinions on the UltraGear one. I’m still on the fence for an OLED/Q-OLED but don’t want to purchase another monitor after 1-2 years of gaming and office work. Got told about Mini-LED but they seem not really available in my country.

Any recommendation, tips and such would be really appreciated!

Note: There are many communities about gaming, so was not sure in whcih to post. This one seemed to fit the most since the others were mostly posts with news articles regard gaming and technology.

The maker of cryptic block-seeding puzzler Starseed Pilgrim has announced a new game in which you are invited to do the unspeakable and "kill gameplay". The End Of Gameplay will be an exploratory 2D platformer according to the tags on its Steam page but anyone who has played the work of creator Droqen might predict those labels to prove looser than a toddler's shoelace. Enjoyers of obscure and poetic wanderings in minimalist spaces will probably be happy with the trailer below.

The creator describes it as "like Starseed Pilgrim, but only all the parts that nobody told me they cared about". This is a strong pitch but in what direction I cannot tell. Starseed Pilgrim was a mysterious blockbuilding platformer released back in the hellsands of 2013, in which you had to plant various seeds and discover their effects to go... somewhere? I never quite got it, to be honest. But that's okay, I'm not alone.

We at RPS regularly and viciously kill the word "gameplay" every time it appears, like a relentless weed in our garden of text (I am strongly restraining myself right now). But that's just a word, the visible tuft of a greater problem. The concept of gameplay remains stubborn, its roots spreading deep under the soil of the games industry like a vast and undefinable mycorrhizal network. It is this which Droqen seeks to destroy. This mission is a dangerous folly. I am interested to see how it goes.

Co-founder Jason Citron is stepping down, but will remain with the company as a member of the board of directors.

Ah, well thank heck for that. I thought I'd spent my weekend hunched over a screen in a goblinesque sweat-trance. No! Says Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 voice actor Andy Serkis: I was simply partaking in some vital culture; a veritable Wildean sophisticate. Film industry folks thought games were "not an art form in any stretch," Serkis told Game Watcher, "and gradually it's taken over the film industry, which could not exist without it." Take that, Roger Ebert's dead wrong dead horse of a dead body.

“I wouldn’t have called myself a gamer at all,” said the Lord Of The Rings actor, who also worked on Enslaved: Odyssey to the West with Alex Garland. "But I was always very interested in next generation storytelling. Around 2004, when we made Heavenly Sword, I started our performance capture studio with a view to create immersive stories outside of traditional 2D experiences, like cinema or television.”

"There used to be a terrible snobbery from the film industry with [videogames] being the lesser cousin,” Serkis said. “That they didn’t really tell stories, it was just about the gameplay, hack ‘n’ slash, and killing people". But games have "come of age" since then, he says. "There are actors coming out of drama schools who want to be in videogames and see it as another part of the palate of what it is to be a performer.”

Happy Sunday! Whatcha y'all been playing?

I've done nothing but blue prince. It keeps going deeper. And deeper, and deeper..... I can't stop playing. Someone help

In this video I am doing some changes to my own game. These changes are something like adding sword combat, adding particles and visual buffs, repairing inventory and crafting table. This video also contains discussion about my oncoming challenge video where I do a coding challenge. Please give feedback about your experience a s a viewer! Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y71h5Vmly-8&t=6s

So, started playing freedom unite recently and I have a massive skill issue. Any advice you can give? Is my first monster hunter game. Especially in quests where you have to kill a big monster I just get bodied. Tried out lance, longsword and dual swords.

Steam revenue estimated 2024: $10.8B

Google Play Store gaming revenue 2024: ~$31B

Why doesn't Valve want a part of that? I mean they already have an Android app. Several, actually. I realize there's some amount of investment but surely the payoff is worth it, and they have the necessary funds and skills? I mean if F-Droid can do it with nothing but volunteers and grants...?

Certainly plenty of games won't lend themselves well to the mobile experience but also plenty of them do.

From a personal perspective: I don't really care a whole lot for mobile games but I do like Balatro and want to play it on my phone, but if I want to do that I have to buy another license, which I can't even do because I don't run Google Play Services.

Epic got in on this already. Where's Valve?

Edit: my reflections on this conversation:

Valve could distribute their own app like Epic but they'd also probably have to remove it from the Play Store because now a cross-platform game would give them an Android version, thus breaking Google's ToS. So would doing such a thing outweigh lost sales from the Google version, and would it impact customer satisfaction? I wonder how many people are actually purchasing PC games in the Steam Android app...?

The legend goes that in the 12th century, King Canute plonked his throne down on the seashore and commanded the tide to go out, thereby empirically demonstrating to all the toadies at court that he was not, in fact, God Almighty. You don’t need to order the ocean to piss off in Endless Legend 2: it’s already in headlong retreat. But not from you.

At intervals throughout Amplitude’s new 4X strategy game (the studio’s first reveal since they bought their independence back from Sega) mysterious “tidefall” events cause the surrounding waters to plummet and reveal a new expanse of hexagonal terrain, rich with questable dungeons and other eldritch sights. A world map that began as an Earthsea-style archipelago gradually becomes a set of proper continents, with more opportunities to meet and out-gambit other factions, and more secrets to discover. It’s an evolution of the first Endless Legend’s seasonal dynamics, and “the beginning of an answer” to what Amplitude co-founder Romain de Waubert de Genlis describes as a classic 4X challenge: keeping players interested beyond the early game, once every last scrap of territory has been disclosed.

Whatcha all playing?

I've been diving deep into Blue Prince.

Really awesome roguelite puzzle game. Highly recommend checking it out!!!

Marathon looks like an Ai agent would create. Art style, gameplay and story wise.

This is the next game from the Destiny creator Bungie. A multiplayer extraction shooter. It has nothing to do with the original Marathon game its based on, an old single player game. Those who could hands on the game describe it as a Destiny like controls and animation, but as an extraction shooter mode.

As for me, I would probably even check the game out, if it was free to play (its full price game, like Concord) and if it would be playable on Linux. Bungie is anti Linux, so not for me anyway.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/61066503

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/61066449

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/61065843

This little handheld console has been so great. My PC and Steam Deck must be so disappointed with me.

Retro consoles set up video

I had been following r/SBCgaming for a while and never felt the need to play very old console games. But now it seems that these consoles have really come a long way in what they can play. I saw reviews for the Retroid Pocket 5 and thought it looked amazing. Then I saw the prices of the Retroid Pocket 4 pro and it was a no brainer.

I bought the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro on eBay for £120 (probably could have gotten it cheaper, but I rushed to buy this). The fact that such a tiny and pocketable handheld can run Nintendo Switch games (less demanding ones) really blows my mind. I carry this with me everywhere. It fits in pretty snug trouser pockets and is only slightly bigger than my phone (although my phone is an S23 Ultra with a chunky case). I’ve had it for over 2 weeks and I’m still in the honeymoon phase and using this instead of my gaming PC or Steam Deck. I’m discovering consoles I never owned (3DS and Wii games). The fact that it plays Android games as well is such a great bonus (mainly Balatro with save game sync online) is such a great bonus. It has WiFi 6, hall effect analog sticks (much better than the Switch!), an IPS display, headphone port, analog triggers, bluetooth 5.2 and a decent battery. This this has no business being this good.

For anyone else interested:

· If you’re looking for an affordable, pocketable console with good performance then the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro is amazing and I would recommend it. Buy this on eBay as people are unloading these to upgrade to the new console.

· If you want better performance then the Retroid Pocket 5 has a better SOC and much better screen, but is twice the price and much less pocketable. Order on AliExpress when there’s a sale/coupons.

· Buying a console like this is a bit like adopting Linux.... You’ve got to be willing to tinker and troubleshoot. It took me hours to set it up (use this guide) and I still haven’t sorted out Vita emulation.

This is a device I didn’t know much about and really didn’t expect to enjoy this much. If you haven’t come across these little consoles, definitely take a look! If you want to test the waters and see if this is for you, then starting with emulation on your phone will is a good way to start.

Review video

Retro Pocket 5 review video

Video comparison