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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • It is hard to see how the slot machine in LBALL can be gambling when you are guaranteed to profit on every spin (unless you’ve intentionally designed a machine where you can win nothing, but that seems like your fault). Gambling involves risking a stake, but in almost every configuration of the machine that you’ll encounter during normal play there is no risk, you are guaranteed to make more than it costs to spin. The challenge is to make enough to stay ahead of the landlord.


  • The Sims 3. I had to figure out how to disable OneDrive backup for my Documents folder, because Sims 3 insists on keeping your saves there, and somehow everything breaks if OneDrive tries to sync them. Previously I had given in and let OneDrive sync everything because Win11 nags you if you try to avoid it.

    I also have to fiddle with processor affinity to get the game to launch, for some reason.

    It still crashes a lot.




  • I think I’m part of the Terraria crowd (I play through it basically every time there’s a big content update, at least) and I think the patience argument has a lot of merit even with games like Terraria. If you were only going to play through Terraria once, waiting longer would mean you got to play through more content. For people with limited time to game, I think it makes a lot of sense to focus on games that have had more time to build up features so that they get a more complete experience.




  • Initial reviews seem remarkably positive given what we saw in the first gameplay reveal a few months ago. My impression at the time was that about half the voice actors sounded like they hadn’t been given enough context about the scenario and some of the cutscenes had questionable direction, which were bad signs for a curated ten minute slice. I still think it’s ultimately not for me—I don’t really want action combat in my Dragon Age—but I’m glad people are enjoying it.







  • ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoGames@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 months ago

    The Build Mode features in 4 are pretty good if you’re into virtual dollhouse building, and there’s a ton of custom content for it (as long as you’re on PC).

    Live Mode is not very good, but it’s functional enough to play dolls in the houses you built if you’re willing to do all the story writing to make up for sims not having very interesting personalities/desires/autonomy.


  • I had a Tamagotchi, but it was the original Digimon toys that I was really obsessed with. I got my friend into it too so that I had someone to battle with. We were even raising them in class. We had all sorts of hypotheses about what made them stronger, which were probably based on no real evidence. I had a bulking-cutting strategy where I force fed my 'mon to increase its weight and then trained it until it reached the minimum weight for its rank.

    I picked up an anniversary digivice a few years ago, I should replace the battery and raise some more digimon.


  • It is part of the main gameplay loop. In order to keep your car in a state where it protects you and is reasonably driveable, you must gather materials to craft repair items and replacement parts, in order to maintain the car’s panels, doors, and bumpers (which together function as armor), its wheels (which are necessary to get anywhere), and the various add-on systems you can craft for it. Tools gradually break with use, so you’ll also craft replacement tools, which are mostly for scavenging materials or interacting with stuff in the Zone.

    By collecting a certain resource you gradually unlock upgraded parts and tools for crafting, which is the main way player power progresses during the game.





  • Open-ended, “sandbox” style MMOs are a lot trickier to get right than “theme park” style ones like Star Wars: The Old Republic. Games like SW:TOR require a lot of content to be developed, but you can at least be pretty sure that if you develop fun quests then players who like questing will have fun.

    For a “sandbox” style MMO, you have to design systems that lead to interesting player interactions… and then hope players actually interact. This is complicated by the market share for sandbox games being smaller overall, meaning you can’t guarantee there will actually be a sizable player population. Also sandbox-style players are sharply divided on basically every topic from “how much PvP should there be” to “how much grinding should there be” so you quickly find yourself either targeting increasingly narrow slices of players or trying to appeal to multiple playstyles at once, which is even harder.

    I think this is why sandbox games have mostly moved towards smaller worlds and self-hosted servers, like ARK and Rust, where they can thrive with small player counts and individual play groups can tweak the experience to better suit their needs.