Hopefully with 100% fewer zombies than a game that it looks like.

Computer Worlds is a showcase for indie computer games whose distinctiveness would make it hard for them to reach their audience. In the words of Gil Lawson, the brain behind the showcase:

There's something happening that I want to tell you about.
For the last few years, game studios across the world have been getting downsized and demolished. Massive, expensive AAA games are being met with disinterest and dispassion on release, and the culture around games has been choked by algorithm driven feeds and collapsing forum for public conversation. The mood has been a little grim.
In spite of that, though, there is a growing movement of developers often often working alone around very small teams, making beautiful, fun, strange, distinctive games that find large, enthusiastic audiences on release.
In a moment where both independent developers and massive teams are trying to hedge their bets and play it safe, these developers are swinging for the fences and finding that's what people want to play.
Those people and those games don't always have the easiest time finding one another though. The games press has been gutted, there's almost no infrastructure left for curation and criticism, and even publishers don't know how to publicize a game today.
If you want play a game in a specific genre, there's probably a steam tag for that, but if you're looking to play a game that is specifically distinctive and unique and unlike anything else, it can be hard to know where to start.
I don't think it should be that hard. So I reached out to a number of other developers working in this vein, and we did something about it ourselves. I'm very excited to show it to you. It's called Computer Worlds.

Please, take a peek for yourself! There is a treasure trove of cool games in here, including something that will probably become your personal GOTY for the coming year.

COMPUTER WORLDS - A New Showcase Celebrating Strange & Distinctive Games

They were going to get £55 from me but now they're getting nothing!

A user asked on the official Lutris GitHub two weeks ago "is lutris slop now" and noted an increasing amount of "LLM generated commits". To which the Lutris creator replied:

It's only slop if you don't know what you're doing and/or are using low quality tools. But I have over 30 years of programming experience and use the best tool currently available. It was tremendously helpful in helping me catch up with everything I wasn't able to do last year because of health issues / depression.

There are massive issues with AI tech, but those are caused by our current capitalist culture, not the tools themselves. In many ways, it couldn't have been implemented in a worse way but it was AI that bought all the RAM, it was OpenAI. It was not AI that stole copyrighted content, it was Facebook. It wasn't AI that laid off thousands of employees, it's deluded executives who don't understand that this tool is an augmentation, not a replacement for humans.

I'm not a big fan of having to pay a monthly sub to Anthropic, I don't like depending on cloud services. But a few months ago (and I was pretty much at my lowest back then, barely able to do anything), I realized that this stuff was starting to do a competent job and was very valuable. And at least I'm not paying Google, Facebook, OpenAI or some company that cooperates with the US army.

Anyway, I was suspecting that this "issue" might come up so I've removed the Claude co-authorship from the commits a few days ago. So good luck figuring out what's generated and what is not. Whether or not I use Claude is not going to change society, this requires changes at a deeper level, and we all know that nothing is going to improve with the current US administration.

Today’s game is Minecraft Legacy Console Edition. You might be thinking “You mean Xbox 360/PS3/Wii U/etc.?” But nope. Someone has made a port of it to PC. I will admit I only scanned the source code, and while it looked clean it’s not an endorsement of this being clean. Either morally or malware wise.

Besides that though it’s nice. The game includes multiple mashup packs. I tested it by playing the Halo one which was fun. I just flew around looking at what I recognized.

The game does have a major bug though, and this might just be because of Proton, but it crashes randomly (and very cleanly). The app just decides “nope. We’re done” and closes like that.

Multiplayer works too. It’s only local though so you need a way to share it over the internet like hamachi or Tailscale. Once that works thought you’re set. Me and my friends were playing a world and built this little cabin.

We ended up getting off though after we kept crashing at a specific point. It just seems we couldn’t escape this night like some weird Groundhog Day (or night).

I’m hoping the developers are able to clean this up as it’s mostly functional but has a few major flaws such as the crashing. I saw people online saying their saves don’t work either but besides that worked really well. It even has a Render Distance slider unlike the original.

Official statement from Valve.

We shared with the NYAG that these types of boxes in our games are widely used, not just in video games but in the tangible world as well, where generations have grown up opening baseball card packs and blind boxes and bags, and then trading and selling the items they receive.

You're right! We should stop that too!

The cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot

Today’s game is some more Metal Gear Solid 3. Today is gonna be quick because I basically had to backtrack after getting forward a bit because of some save issues. But despite that I realized this game has a lot of cool ass secrets that actually affect the game.

Like I went off the beaten path and found a sniper rifle. Completely out of the way. No message pointing me there. Just a completely random sniper hidden.

I also wanted to bring up the stealth. It’s really grown on me. Having to use the camo and slink around feels really good. I do feel like I lack any good ranged stealth weapons (suppressor broke fast) but it does make it satisfying to to a CQC Takedown. Just crouch up behind them and take them down.

Anyways, after discovering that secret today I had to share it. I love when games have secrets like that and this is no exception

cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/c/retrogaming/p/568201/we-ve-freed-cookie-s-bustle-from-copyright-hell-video-game-history-foundation

This is such a specific game that most people won't know what the article is about, but here's the TLDR: > > There's a 1999 Japanese game called Cookie's Bustle that gathered a cult following in the last couple of years. It's an incredibly bizarre point and click where you play as a teddy bear in some surreal world where a war is taking place. > > What makes it really interesting is that someone (who claims to own the game) has been desperately trying to erase it from history. Any videos about the game, any let's plays or gameplay videos, any screenshots, any fan art etc. have been getting rigorously copyright struck and removed from the internet. Nobody knows why. > > The video game history foundation finally freed the game from copyright hell and blocked that guy from issuing any more copyright strikes. This is pretty cool for video game preservation and people interested in the game. > > P.S. The article is absolutely worth a read as it goes in-depth into what it took to disprove the copyright troll's claims and fight back against fake DMCA claims.