Imagine if Time Eater in Spire wasn't a cool fight that requires you to think about which cards to play and whether their impact is worth the cost

And instead, he just disabled all 0-cost cards and all card draw effects. That's what Pareidolia in Balatro feels like, it's useless filler

I think my winrates on Gold stake went through the roof when I realized the reliable way to win is just spamming High Card builds and ignore the poker game as much as you can.

Gets boring fast, but doing anything else gets you countered by unfun bosses or one bad draw. High Card is immune to both.

Ignore all the people telling you to wait for Valve's "new headset". "Valve's new headset" has been "coming soon" or "two more weeks away" for literally 3 years straight. Not kidding.

Now try again with pouring rain, like we've been having the past few months

Cold is fine, the rain is the issue.

The amount of Matrix mods for Max Payne 1 that all had the same kung fu mod bundled with it was insane, truly that era was a golden age of modding.

People have been yelling at Mint for 8 years to add a reliable mouse acceleration toggle in the GUI. To this day I can confirm they haven't added it yet. You still have to paste arcane rituals into the ruins of an old config file to fix it.

A distro that has mouse accel is not "setup", it's broken

Anyway what I'm trying to say is, I guess the playstation and xbox still have no games

I checked the list of exclusives for both platforms and man is it underwhelming. The lists for both look OK until you realize that "exclusive" just means "not on the other console (but it probably is on PC)".

Both Xbox and Playstation are just shitty PC's nowadays anyway. But it never gets old to witness slapfights over which locked-down and underpowered device beats the other, based on some subjective criteria. It feels like two old men arguing over old CRT tube televisions

On the upside, this place allows you to block certain tags and words in posts at least. My Discover feed would be absolutely unusable if I wasn't able to auto filter anything remotely related to US Politics.

Since titles like Lisa the Painful were on there, I figured I should mention OFF. It's been a very heavy inspiration for games like Undertale and it's fully free. It's getting a Steam and Switch re-release soon, but in the meantime the "old" version has been fan translated and you can just grab it.

Out of curiosity, can you name some of these games? Genuinely struggling to think of examples right now.

Basically, the name of the game is now "how do we get players to stay in our game as much as possible, and how do we extract money from whales?". They will happily make games less fun to get you playing more.

And then all they need to do is make the battle pass free and they farm goodwill for free.

Also, PAYDAY 2 is the game that really invented the modern form of player engagement with their "community group rewards". But MMO's already had them beat, they were basically the way for a company to make a game that people would keep playing and spending in. Now it's gacha.

Game dev companies have perfected the art of maximizing "player engagement" instead of "fun".

And then you get Battle Passes, dailies/weeklies, gacha mechanics, etc. Even if the battle pass is free, it accomplishes the goal.

I don't cry often at a videogame but for me it's Void Stranger and Mother 3