Lipala

For an Example. Playing on my GF's modded server. My starter base

I'm sure most of you are aware this game exists but I wanted to draw attention to it because its far better than I expected. Conan Exiles takes the promise of a game like Ark but with severely reduced jank, much better polish and a level of world building and environmental storytelling/direction that actually makes base building, exploration, and resource gathering worthwhile. If you can get past the latent racism that existed in most 1930s pulp literature (you can tell Howard and Lovecraft chatted) that comes with the Conan universe, the core experience of Conan Exiles is very good. My partner started a private server we've been playing on with some other friends and its just immensely fun even as we're only doing PvE. From a monetization standpoint, while htey have had the seemingly obligatory season pass like most game these days, they announce in advance the names of the DLCs and vaguely what's in htem at the start. Standalone these DLCs are aobut $10 a piece, I think its about $30 for the Season pass which gets yous 4 of them. The year 2 pass just wrapped up. That said the handling of DLC content on a server is nice in that someone who has the DLC can craft a weapon or armor and give it to people without it. The person without will just have to rely on the DLC owner to make repairs and such which lines up with the other systems generally, where you have ot have the tech progression feat for a thing before you can repair it yourself. As far as the contents of DLC, its typically a mix of some new building tiles (styles), some new armors and weapons which are largely cosmetic rather than cleanly "better" than core content. If the DLC introduces a major new thing like the most recent adding mounts and mounted combat. These are added to the base game for everyone as a feature update, but the DLC gets you more breeds of horses you can skin your horse as as well as more styles of saddle and barding. Anyway, if you have it from Humble Bundle last year or just want to give it a shot. I highly recommend Conan Exiles. Its enjoyable in a way a lot of games haven't been for me in quite some time. Just FYI, be ready to die. A lot.

Misskey is a fediverse tied social app with a highly customizable base. The Hondo's instance doesn't have to be linked up to to other instances unless we want it to be and server admins would have full control. https://join.misskey.page/en/ Functionality-wise It provides a micro-blogging and chat as well as larger scale pages for consistently updated content or generators (can take simple coding). Setup is pretty straight forward.

I'm not a huge fan, the touchpad makes them kind of meh for most twin-stick games like FPS and such. I could see them being alright on traditionally mouse-based games but I don't play a huge number of those and I'm faster with my trackball. I feel like the Steam controller was trying so hard to work for every kind of game it made itself the 2nd or often 4th best option for most. capacitance touchpads as primary interfaces for a gamepad wasn't a great choice.

I was kind of hoping the old look would stick. there's a level of Trash Cinema ther that might have made it worth it. The new look is objectively better but in that loses the trash appeal which means I now have like 0 interest in seeing it (granted the initial interest was the same kind of interest you might have in a Godfrey Ho or Neal Breen movie)

I'm not like 20-30 hours into Outer Worlds and I'm absolutely loving the game. Its so good in so many ways and once you leave the first planet it really opens up with things to do all over the system. Very very fun and with a very accurate depiction of Corporate over-reach.

I thought the soundtrack was fine. Though frankly Outer Worlds is the best game I've played in its genre in a VERY VERY long time. Its better than New Vegas was

Yeah, I've been playing a lot of Destiny 2 and Code Vein lately.

Its published by Nintendo, I wouldn't hold your breath on a price drop

Its on my wishlist but I haven't been able to afford it yet sadly

I feel like the slow plodding reification of Star Wars is killing it. Long running sci-fi and fantasy settings both suffer from this problem, Star Wars is just a particularly high-profile version of it. Every new movie or show that's canon is another thing which all future writers and directors are tied down to and if they deviate too far then they either get punished by the Disney, who wants to sell the nostalgia, or the fans, who reject it as "not their Star Wars". I don't blame directors for not wanting to work on Star Wars after one go. Its got to be a stifling environment.

Disney+ is so conflicting for me. The activist in me doesn't want to give more money to Disney. However, the nostalgic brain wants to see the shows and movies it remembers and new stuff based on those universes. I know there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, however, there are degrees of ethical. Ugh, frustration.

Oh Jim Sterling That said yeah, Ubisoft has been slowly becoming like EA and Konami et al, releasing broken games and trying to shoehorn in micro-transactions and DLC

Its a pretty solid allegory for the liberal/fascist bargain and its impact on disenfranchised out groups

I've never known them to be transphobic. There were some meme references on their twitter which were not inherently transphobic but link back to a transphobic rhetoric of belittling people's gender identities, which, frankly, could simply be a cultural disconnect or as simple as, something said jokingly in the spaces of the person who made the tweet not fairing as well on a global platform. The only other "transphobic" thing I've seen had to do with an in game advertisement in a trailer in Cyberpunk 2077 but frankly, in a setting about the absolute commodification and as a result hypersexualization of everyone and everything it doesn't stand out to me as transphobic, rather hypersexualization of someone who happens to be non-binary. I've never understood the point of censoring the more unsettling aspects of art that is in and of itself a satirical critique. It just makes the critique weaker.