You need to hold the PS button and select (I’ll never stop calling it that) until the LED starts flashing, then it’ll be in pairing mode.

You can buy phone mounts for PlayStation controllers. It’d definitely be cheaper than a whole new controller.

It looks like the game that changed its dailies was Star Rail, not Genshin Impact. Which makes sense: I remember seeing the change in-game but I haven’t played Genshin since around the time of that event in Enk… whatever the underground area is called.

I’m trying to find good articles about it but internet search is abysmal these days, especially for news outside the anglosphere. I did find a forum thread about the Star Rail change as well as a Reddit comment translating and explaining the proposed law though.

The TL;DR of it all seems to be that some time around December 2023, new restrictions were proposed affecting gacha games to curb addicting behavior. The news caused stock prices for affected Chinese companies to plummet, and the person who proposed the law was quickly removed from his position and the proposal dropped.

the same small group of lemmings was transported to the location, jostled on turntables, and repeatedly shoved off a cliff to imply mass suicide

That Wikipedia quote implies it wasn’t deadly, but checking the end line citations, their reference calls it a “mass animal killing made to look like natural suicide” and makes no mention of using the same group multiple times.

Thanks for the detailed write-up! I’ll have to pick it up at some point; even if it doesn’t hit the same highs as JA2, there hasn’t really been much else that comes close and a more modern coat of polish would be welcome.

What did you think of the new aiming system? I’ve heard mixed things, but it sounded good to me (or at least way better than a flat percentage).

ReVanced (a patched version of the official app) is straight up better than Premium because it can get rid of all the crap corporate insists on shoving into customers’ faces. My YouTube app has a subscriptions tab (that only shows videos, not shorts or random “informative” carousels) and my profile tab with all my playlists, and nothing else.

It’s glorious in its simplicity. Why would I ever pay Google for a worse product?

I’ve heard good things about 3, but haven’t bought it myself. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts if you ever get back into it!

There was also COVID screwing up sales projections for the last few years. People were stuck at home for months and ended up buying a ton of digital media such as games to stay sane. Executives are stupid and were somehow shocked when numbers dropped after quarantine ended and people went back to their regular lives. Since then, a bunch of projects or even entire studios have been axed due to “underperforming” because they couldn’t compete sales-wise with a period where the entire world was a captive audience.

Okay then, the labyrinthine structure spontaneously generates tiny minotaurs, which then consume the disease-causing miasma.

Jagged Alliance 2 (especially with the 1.13 mod) is the most ludicrously detailed tactical RPG you’ll ever find. It can be a nightmare to actually play until you spend many, many hours learning all its systems, but nothing else comes close immersion-wise. You can customize every mercenary’s loadout down to individual weapon attachments, capturing different parts of the map gives bonuses that actually make sense (like being able to ship in weapons once you’ve taken the airport), you can train militias to hold onto captured sectors for you, and you can even use the in-game internet to send flowers to the main villain.

Steam is banned in Vietnam because it couldn’t/wouldn’t comply with their restrictive content laws.

The battle pass removed its daily check-in IIRC.

China started drafting legislation cracking down on engagement bait daily tasks a few years ago and some games (like Genshin and other Hoyoverse titles) dropped daily check-in bonuses and made more things reset weekly in response. I think China later backtracked (IIRC the politician pushing the laws fell out of favor?), but not feeling forced to log in every day made those games so much less stressful.

I haven’t played anything in the genre in years, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that crap crept back in again.

What other game lets you fight the demonic personification of Fox News and Bill O’Reilly?

I know a lot of people hyped up Outer Worlds as a spiritual successor to New Vegas and were disappointed when it didn’t reach the same heights of writing. Obsidian not being given any time to make New Vegas and then missing their contracted bonus payout by a single Metacritic point was brought up a lot before release, and gamers trumpeted this new game as what Obsidian could have made without Bethesda mismanagement. Then it came out and had the temerity to be average, leaving fans acting like they’d somehow been betrayed by Obsidian.

It wasn’t Obsidian’s or the game’s fault that people decided it had to be a 10/10 masterpiece, it just got caught up in a stupid fanbase war against Bethesda and its reputation suffered when it couldn’t meet people’s sky-high expectations.

Portal 2 has the best introduction to jumping controls of any tutorial in existence.

Same here. Though considering how the last attempt at a Dungeon Keeper revival turned out, it might be a good thing it’s not…

At least we have War For The Overworld.

Except those imports were used by a huge section of code you temporarily commented out, and now you’ll need to manually select a dozen imports to get it working again when you come back to it.

(Sure you could have just commented out the unused imports, but the linter auto-sorted them and you’re feeling too lazy to copy-paste a dozen scattered lines)

I could never get into Stellaris, or most other Paradox games for that matter. I have a thing where I want the complete experience on my first playthrough, and Paradox’s DLC practices are like anti-catnip for me. I can’t enjoy the base game because I keep thinking of what all I’m missing out on, but the game with all DLCs is overwhelming for a newbie.

Side note, I got excited seeing this post’s thumbnail because I thought you were playing Starsector. Great game if you haven’t picked it up yet, one of those indie games that does a half-dozen genres and does them well.

Could you remind me what features people were upset about? I stayed away from most of the drama since CDPR has a long history of releasing a free major upgrade a year or two after release that fixes everything people complained about.

I remember the dev diaries being pretty open about dropping features during development, like the RC drone turning from a staple of your kit into something shown off once in a mission and immediately forgotten.

I’d really rather gamers focused their energy into showing support for the developer groups making cool projects, than specifically deriding any works made under publishers they dislike.

The thing about EA is they have a long history of acquiring the developer groups you’re talking about, then mismanaging them into the ground before dissolving them entirely. I know just as many if not more only exist because of EA and their funding, but it’s hard not to feel bitter when many of my favorite studios no longer exist due to their incompetence and greed.