It’s just displaying review summaries from VaporLens next to the reviews on the store page. There’s no AI boogeymen in the plugin itself, and you can easily disable the feature.

Tooling around and checking some Guild Wars 2 boxes as usual, but the new arcade twin-stick Sektori has been eating dedicated playtime all through holidays. A couple of my Steam friends went for some scoring in the side modes, but I got some solid runs in they will have to work pretty hard to pass again. I’m still trash against the games heinous bosses, though. Those things were designed to grind mistakes out of you, and I only occasionally get by even the first tier boss versions without some mistake. I definitely get tired of playing boss rush, but until I’m more consistently passing those without eating hits, campaign mode just isn’t going anywhere, and I’d really like to be over that hump. Good thing the other side modes are all pretty great and focus on the core play rather than the fancy but tiresome bosses. Too bad side modes got short-changed on achievements, because the dev annoyingly limited the Steam achievements based on consoles, so there are a bunch of pseudo-achievements that are only displayed in-game.

Sure, I knew which game you meant. It was just an oddly dismissive and mildly inaccurate way to refer to a legit top-tier game.

I play a lot of twin-sticks, so Robotron was a real curve to throw in. From my perspective, those are pretty different ;P

Shooting shapes in Sektori, a stunningly good arcade twin-stick, bashing dragon toes and playing bells in Guild Wars 2, a fun ARPG-MMO where we recently added a few more dress-up dolls to our roster just because we play a lot and like a few more ways to play, and third, mowing down hallways full of bugs in Combat Complex, a top-down shooter ARPG that’s weak on the ARPG aspects but the shooter side manages to feel like a great arcade twin-stick, plus some neat enemy-enemy friendly-fire mechanics.

Much more the first two than the third, as CC is good but it’s in early access and they recently changed and botched the progression, so playing right now at my level/floor is basically worthless, and I just have to hope they eventually do something to fix it.

Sektori, though, is seriously good.

geometry wars meets robotron type deal.

That makes no sense. Both of those are just arcade twin-stick shooters, and Sektori is no more Robotron than Geometry Wars was. Also, while Sektori very obviously draws a lot on Geometry Wars, it’s an amazingly good arcade twin-stick that improves so much on what GW did, and really deserves recognition. It’s niche, but it’s genuinely a top game in that niche, and I mean best in ten years top game.

It’s weird just how long input device bigotry persists in the PC space, despite being basically ridiculous.

Mouse is great for positional input, and keyboard has a lot of keys, but let’s be honest, the keyboard isn’t even great for typing, let alone gaming. That ‘m’ has been hard-carrying kbm for a very long time, whereas controllers are very much purpose-designed, and have finally been getting some nice advances with gyros (pretty fun to use with flick-stick) and extra buttons, plus one of mine has a cool automatic trigger resistance option that really adds to driving games even without the game knowing about it at all.

And that’s not even getting into that some players just find controller a more fun way to game than kbm. Sure, I’m never playing an action game on keyboard because it would murder my already pained hands, but honestly, that’s not why I play on controller. I like (preferably unassisted) controller gaming. Yeah, it’s not optimal in some games, but “optimal” does not equate to fun, especially if you’re not deep in competitive shooter territory, which includes a lot of players PC or otherwise.

If you like arcade twin-stick shoot-em-ups, Sektori is one of the best the genre has seen. Hard though: if one doesn’t know the genre, play Waves and Assault Android Cactus first.

• Silhouette Mirage on PS1
• Pandemonium (1) on PS1
• Tobal 2 on PS1 (if translated)
• Skygunner on PS2
• Splashdown on PS2
• Viewtiful Joe on PS2

Game pass is in essence a subscription model to demo games.

I’m not pro Game Pass either, but this is misrepresentative. Game Pass isn’t for demoing, it’s for the large number of people who just don’t return to games after playing them. They don’t care about owning their games, and they may not even care that much about choosing their games, so Game Pass gives them things to do and plenty of hot new things to jump into while everyone is talking about them, all without ever having to pony up for anything specific unless it’s the rare case of something they want to play more/again after it leaves Game Pass.

It’s like the old console market where one would buy a game, then trade it in for credit on the next game. You feed money in to have things to play, and then some more if you actually want to keep something and have to make up for its trade in on the next game. Especially since things are probably getting discounted by the time they leave Game Pass, so the sub+price-to-keep may still end up being comparable/better than the original buy price.

It’s just a different way of experiencing gaming, and Microsoft is obviously still trying to figure out exactly how much they can milk that market for that convenience. Quite a few smaller games can probably make more from Game Pass than they would from sales alone, because fewer people would buy the game than consider it added value on their Game Pass sub, and multiplayer games can jump-start their communities without going free.

They don’t want to hurt some dev’s numbers, but they don’t like the game either.

Or they just can’t handle giving the thumbs down. A lot of people like that nowadays. Only likes are allowed.

Top-down/twin-stick games where the aim (especially on controller) uses camera handling features, like smoothing the input or a cross-shaped deadzone.

Screenshake enabled by default, or not even an option to disable.

Have you looked at Zero-K? They have some TA history.

It’s kind of funny, looks like my main sale purchases are going to be Netherworld Covenenat, which is still on it launch discount, and Bloodrush Undying Wish, which is inexplicably launching in the middle of the seasonal sale. There’s also BlazBlue Entropy Effect’s new character DLC, also on launch sale, so none of that is really seasonal sale stuff.

I’ll pick a couple shmups to pick up, probably Divine Orders and Assault Shell 2, but those are both stingy sales. Only particular sale-sale items I’m looking at are Void Expanse finally putting their DLC back on sale after 2 1/2 years of nothing, and 30XX’s character DLC finally getting its first sale, but those are minor even if holdouts.

Was actually rather hoping to pick up Relic Hunters Legend, after they finally put a demo up so I could see the game had more meat to it than it looked like, but annoyingly, they seem to have put the demo up right in the middle of the Feb NextFest, put the game on sale for only a few days, and then nothing since for anyone who saw the demo later, despite pushing release (from early access) back to Q3. Indie devs man, it’s like they are just flailing around doing random things.

I guess I’ll pick up Idun Frontline Survival (tower defense game where you move the towers around, not a horde survivor) instead, but was hoping to get some partner co-op going with Relic Hunters. I guess we’ll try to get that from Synthetik 2 instead, since they finally got their next update out after like two years stalled early access.

Ouch, Stardeus is not going to be happy to see that news.

The app requires an existing login to use, right? I tried the app since the website’s email/password registration screen just returns “An unexpected error occurred” every time I try it, but didn’t see a new registration option for the app, just the login option.

How do we prevent this from happening to other instances?

We don’t, and we can’t. What we need is to stop acting like Actors/People/Groups are single points homed on a single instance. They should be a ring of mirrored instance entities, so the “source” Actor and content are still there when one instance drops out of the ring. Everything is already getting copied around, we’re just missing out on the biggest value of that: RAID for identities.

Ie, if I make my accounts on three sites, those should all be me, and it doesn’t matter to the fediverse which one I use at any given moment. Same for communities.

That’s real federation, not this ramshackle heap of points of failure where we just hope we don’t individually get bit too often by shutdowns, even though shutdowns are completely inevitable.