Remember you can trust Discord with your driver's license for verification, I'm sure they won't accidentally store them in a plain text open API call or anything.

I've just uninstalled and removed Balatro after yet a near, very close 8/8 ante finish. I have been failing and failing, I've only ever seen and gotten to 8/8 ante twice, this being the second time. Every other run has been just insulting me to where no strategy has ever worked, I feel like a lot of it is RNG and pre-determined outcomes based on seeded runs.

And I hate that way of playing. It always feels like I'm getting smacked down by a troll bully who I can never overcome. They'd kick me down every failed run I'd have, then they give me a false sense of security the further I get. "Awwww, getting tired of being owned? Here, let me help you by giving you a few seemingly lucky breaks. SMACK Oh! OWNED YOU AGAIN! FUCK YOU! LOLLOLOL! I BANGED YOUR MOTHER, GIT GUD, NOOB!1"

I just don't understand why these kinds of games are around, even when I have a good idea who it is for.

Today’s game is Halo PvP. I believe last time I talked about this I mentioned some changes I made to the map Zealot. Well, today I got to test them. My friend has a bit of a problem with camping at the top during infection. So to gently… push him away from that I put kill barrier on the camping spots. It’s all in good fun and just messing with each other. The screenshot above is from me testing the barrier during a game.

That does bring me to a point I haven’t talked about yet. I love that you can customize the game that way (at least for 3/Reach). Don’t like a specific map feature or want it slightly different? Go into forge and change things around and bam. Problem solved. Or hell, want to make a whole new map? Forge will let you do that. I think my only complaint is Reach’s forge feels limiting in the materials available.

We also did a game of Duck Hunt, which my friends asked me to go into forge with too and either delete the bombs on the wall or change the respawn time. They felt they were too overpowered as you can wipe the entire team if you detonate them.

This game mode is fun, I believe I’ve mentioned it before. It has an issue of making you wait it out though one the Duck’s win, which isn’t a lot of fun. It’s not really an issue that can be fixed though I feel like. Also, I feel like the shuffle is broken? Like, my friend can get Sniper 4 times in a row one game while another gets no turn.

We ended off with another game of infection to test my changes… and my friend who was known for camping didn’t even try to camp this round. So my prank goes untested for now. It was a good game though. I had to switch to my PS3 controller so it’s taking some getting used too but besides that it was a fun game.

A little while ago I connected with one of the team members of ZOOM-platform. From their own site's 'about me':

ZOOM's mission is to design, create, and publish traditional and interactive entertainment with a multi-generational trans-media appeal. ZOOM's products are distributed digitally via, ZOOM Platform, along with non-exclusive third party content from both major publishers and indies with a catalog spanning the classics to new releases.

You might know them best as 'the' one space to get Duke Nukem games for your PC, or maybe because they're also dedicated to providing each and every title there completely DRM-free. Which, as we all know is rare these days.

Anyway, from chatting to a team member, I was introduced to the CEO, Jordan Freeman, who was kind enough to let me interview him about everything from working with his friend and mentor Bernie Stolar (responsible for the PlayStation and Dreamcast in the U.S.A.) to running a company like ZOOM in a world where DRM-free can be seen as a liability or risk.

We cover all manner of things, and I had such a fun time connecting with Jordan over the span of a week or so putting all of this together.

I have a full interview with some of the ZOOM team coming soon as well, but for now I really hope you all enjoy this one. I feel lucky to have been able to put all of this together, and even luckier that I'm able to share it with you.

Link as always:

https://gardinerbryant.com/the-untold-story-of-classic-games-inside-zoom-with-ceo-jordan-freeman/

YouTube: PRAGMATA - Main trailer

Slay the Spire 2 has topped 177k concurrent players on Steam, and is steadily rising, setting a new record for a roguelike on the platform just weeks after Mewgenics smashed the previous record.

New Xbox & AI CEO announced via Twitter ( not calling it x) the new “hybrid” console that will play Xbox and PC games.

In other words you know just a PC. Thus far it seems the system will use the exact same Xbox desktop experience as the “rog ally”.

While we all saw it coming and there isn’t much surprise. This to me says Xbox is dead as a platform.

It’s going to be expensive, it’s going to have Windows. It’s going to have co-pilot it’s going to have the same pop ups.

At least we get an Ally ROG desktop at most a Surface Gaming Desktop. Either honestly is a terrible idea. There will be most affordable options not tied to windows there will be mode powerful options at the same price. Even if you like the idea of going all in PC gaming this won’t be your best option.

If you want to stay a console gamer you’re going to have to switch teams …

RIP Xbox.

So a few weeks back my friend klops: the lead dev of PortMaster, introduced me to a developer called bmdhacks (who was once, long ago, a dev on a couple PS2 games!). bmdhacks had a crazy plan (well by the time I got to chat to him, that plan was very close to complete!) of bringing Dead Cells to the inexpensive R36S retro handheld. Which maybe you'll know, if you're a retro handheld fan, is a device that was never designed to run games of that scale.

What started as a impossible request in the PortMaster world (they had it rated as “Low” in feasibility) turned into a stupidly difficult technical project involving a custom ARM JIT compiler for HashLink, an LLVM-based ahead-of-time compilation backend, and an entirely new decompiler pipeline capable of reconstructing structured code from bytecode.

And did I understand everything he told me when telling me what he did, how he did it, and what was next? No. Not at all.

My article I got to write on it (from all bmdhacks told me) covers the whole process, so if you're into the technical side of porting games? Then you're in for a treat!

Here's my link:

https://gardinerbryant.com/the-anatomy-of-an-impossible-port/

Little edit: bmdhacks is in the comments below, if anyone has any specific question to ask, or comment to share! Yay!

hey I'm a solo gamedev and I recently launched the demo for Folk Emerging.

if you're into turn-based strategy games like Civilization and enjoy in-depth characters, cultures, and ecosystems, then this might be for you!

curious to hear what folks around here think

Hi friends. Seeing as how the last Steam NextFest just wrapped up, I'm curious about the demos you may have played and what your thoughts were.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/60250839

Hey everyone 👋. I just wanted to share a little personal project that grew a bit more than I initially planned.

The original idea was simply to build a game so I could play Parchis (Ludo) with my family, as it’s a classic in our household. I ended up building the whole thing entirely through "vibecoding" (AI-assisted coding) because I wanted to see how far I could push current AI tools.

The result is a full web multiplayer game (React/Vite frontend + Node/Express/Socket.io backend with SQLite to store game data).

If anyone is curious or wants to spin it up on their local network to play with friends/family: 🔗 Repo: https://codeberg.org/baner/parchis (it has a docker-compose.yml ready to go in seconds).

⚠️ A big warning about security: As I mentioned, I completely built this relying on AI, and it was initially meant as a home project. I am not a cybersecurity expert by any means. While I have briefly exposed it to the internet a couple of times to play with remote relatives, my absolute recommendation is to host it ONLY on your local network (LAN) or behind a VPN (like Tailscale/Wireguard). The nature of AI-generated code means it's probably full of vulnerabilities that I haven't caught. Play at your own risk if you decide to open ports to the wild web! 😅

This is also my first project using a monorepo structure and publishing a Docker image for others to deploy. If you take a look and see something horrible (or something that works surprisingly well haha), all feedback is super welcome. I hope someone finds it fun for a local game night!

Today’s game is some more Metal Gear Solid Delta. I made it to the boss fight with Pain, and man. Fuck this guy. I liked the boss fight but those bullet bees were a pain in the ass. I ended up using some napalm grenades saved from fighting ocelot to clear away his bees and then mow him down with the AK.

As much shit as I’m giving it though, I kind of like it. Like. I’m given tools to fight this boss, but there wasn’t a specific way to go about it I feel like. Yeah. I could wait for his bees to vanish. Or I could light him on fire and power through him. It was kind of cool.

Ocelot’s fight was kind of where I got an idea for just how the game is though. Like. The game was serious but also kind of wasn’t afraid to dork around. Like the long cutscenes of him reloading or Ocelot fighting off wasps by spinning his revolvers like fans. It reminds me of how people talk about the Yakuza franchise. It’s serious sometimes but other times it’s just goofing off.

I have had one major complaint while playing. And it’s minute. It was this cave. My brightness was calibrated right but it was so fucking dark in here I had to raise it manually. I found a torch though that made it a little more forgiving so there’s at least that.

What more appropriate to end today with than talking about the save dialog. I like how it ends with a conversation about movies usually. It’s fun in a way that the game really gets self aware. I like it. I remember one of them was about Godzilla. My favorite one so far though has been this James Bond one.

Hello, I'm announcing this new update for my new 2D musou roguelite with sci-fi queer story-rich indie game named Starfish ROOM: DEFEND THE ROOMS

-Z-depth of characters -New spiders art -Remove aliens/monsters border collision of Player -Count Eternal Loop to Boki fight -Fix Kibo hurt collisions and infinity kick attack

https://kittycreampuff.itch.io/starfishroom

These are the changes I made to my game, I hope you like this

The full article that was hinted at in interviews last week.

There are likely a few reasons behind this shift. One is that several recent PlayStation games have not sold well on PC.

Interesting...

But the strategy has been muddled and confused many players. Most PC releases arrived months or years after the games came to PlayStation. The cadence was never consistent, and the announcements appeared to be haphazard. The company also upset PC players by asking them to create PlayStation Network accounts to access many of the games.

I love Horizon: Zero Dawn. I have not played Horizon: Forbidden West. By the time it came to PC, Sony started making PSN logins necessary to even authenticate the game in the first place, which is basically just the worst kind of DRM. They've reverted this policy, but now I don't trust them. They put out a handful of games on GOG where I don't have to trust them, and I'll probably still pick a few of those up one day, but Forbidden West isn't there. Seems to me that they have no idea how badly they screwed up this rollout themselves. Oh, Uncharted 4 didn't do too well on PC? Where are the PC versions of Uncharted 1-3? Where can I play the original God of War trilogy? I'm not buying a PlayStation no matter how many exclusives you lock up there, so I'll just continue to not play your handful of exclusives.

Anyway, that's my two cents.

Ubisoft has just released the first piece of concept art for Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced, finally confirming its long-awaited remake that has been rumored for years.

Today’s game is Pokemon Emerald. This might be the last entry for this game depending on how the rest of the Pokédex goes. I finished the Gyms at E4 today, and then went and hunted down all the Box Legendaries. It was all pretty easy except Groudon. For some reason the asshole just didn’t want to get in. After about 30 minutes though of just reloading my save I finally caught him and named him Greg. So now we have Juan the Kyogre and Greg the Groudon.

For my team I used, only about half of them were relevant to the victory. The other 3 were under leveled and just kind of served as fodder meat to use revives. The 3 relevant ones are Blaziken, Gardevoir, and Vaporeon. All at Level 80 and who all steamrolled the champion and E4.

Speaking of Gardevoir, I found my first ever one from my very first playthrough of Pokemon Emerald. It turns out when I emulated it I saved the save to Drop Box. I thought it was lost but dug it up and there it was! I backed that thing up ASAP and have it stored until I can get the Pokemon off it and moved over to Home and/or my own local bank.

So far the last few bits of my game have been filling out the Dex. For the starters I think I’ll just use a save editor to add them to my party as eggs, as no one I know plays Emerald and I don’t feel like figuring out online and multiplayer.

I’m a bit sad to be finishing this game again. It’s what I call my “Cold Water” game for Pokemon. It’s got solid fundamentals while still being good and not bland. It’s always my go to for friends wanting to get into the franchise with how accessible to get ahold of it is. My one complaint is sometimes I get lost. And even then it’s kind of like its own adventure

Screenshot is taken directly from the headset. The game is streamed to the headset wirelessly via Virtual Desktop app with the new foveated streaming feature (you can see the cutoff on the periphery where stuff starts to be more blurry / compressed). In the headset scenes like this (Low lighting with soft shadows) looks extremely atmospheric and really incredible because of the micro oled display and thanks to the new foveated streaming / encoding i finally can safely say compression artefact in wireless PCVR is a thing of the past.