Gaming

"It’s time to sue Sony," game preservation advocates Stop Killing Games have declared, as the group throws its weight behind a Dutch lawsuit targeting the PlayStation Store’s alleged monopoly and "Sony Tax" on digital games.

While the case originated back in 2024, as part of an effort by Dutch consumer group Stichting Massaschade & Consument, the core complaint – that Sony wields monopoly power by only making digital PlayStation games available through its own store – has been compounded by the recent reveal that Sony plans to ditch physical games entirely in 2028, effectively cutting out its only source of competition. Allegedly. For Stop Killing Games, it’s also the latest in a string of non-preservation-specific causes the organisation have amplified, possibly indicating a widened advocacy mandate after failing its key goal of securing new European Commission legislation to keep discontinued games playable offline.

I'm looking to get into driving games and would like to buy a wheel. Budget is not that much of a constraint, but it doesn't need to be expensive for no reason.

Things that are important to me are:

• Should be fixable to a desk without drilling through the desk, but still hold on tight even when force is applied.
• Should be sturdy and have the feel of a real steering wheel of your average consumer car or racing car.
• Should have buttons such that I can hold it with both hands and still use the hands for throttling and breaking, i.e. at least two thumb-reachable buttons. (I am not aiming at getting pedals right away)

Do you have any recommendations? Do you use a wheel yourself that you can recommend, even if it does not fit my points above?

Any input would be appreciated!

Sharing because Kayin's talk about achievements made me think about why do I even accept them in games at all so I disabled them in Steam (the only way to do this is by disabling the whole overlay =_=) and found that I don't miss them at all.

What's you opinion on RetroAchievements, and achievements in general?

I’ve been writing about accessibility and the disabled perspective for nearly 7 years. I’ve had the absolute privilege and immense responsibility of breaking some of the biggest stories in the gaming industry, holding powerful organizations accountable, and even helping disabled players process uncomfortable truths about a community that doesn’t always have their best interests at heart. For almost 7 years, I’ve been pushing myself to be a better journalist, not for myself, but for disabled individuals that deserve to have a voice in the gaming space. But for the past six months, I’ve realized that things need to change.

When I began writing for Can I Play That in September 2019, I sought to produce high quality journalism exploring the relationship between disabled players and the gaming industry. I wanted readers to understand that accessibility and disability reporting is not only essential, but capable of sitting alongside the same daily beats that regularly fill the pages of standard gaming publications. This sentiment still rings true. The work that I and other disabled reporters do can be both timely and evergreen. And it’s still true that publications struggle to understand this fact. I’m not here to convince you that the work disabled reporters do matters. I’m here to tell you that unless this style of reporting is consistently supported, the industry risks losing coverage of a beat that will only grow in necessity as time goes on.

I am personally of the opinion that because Jared Kushner (Trump's son-in-law) is involved we will see a MAGAfication of EA sports titles. It is one of the few mediums Project 2025 hasn't been able to crack and to reach a younger audience this will be their mechanism.

This is a rant!

For the first time in a long long time I went and bought physical games (I don't game too much and haven't for over 12months). I wanted to play FPSs, I am in the mood. So I buy a couple CoD games (for better or worse). Holy fk. The worst. Now... I know there's gonna be a download and an update... But this... Black Ops 3 or whatever 36gb update after the install?! For features I'm not going to use but have to have?! Fuck off. So I skip that with fingers crossed. I pop in MW3. 5hrs worth of install & update time. Okay, Rest Mode. Got it. Finally sit down to try and play and I have to make an Activision ACC?!! Fine, so do that. Now I'm fucking confused because ALL of the COD games are on screen, why? (I feel old) AND FINALLY there's MW3 and I have to FUCKING DOWNLOAD THE FUCKING GAME?!?! 60 ODD GBs?! ANOTHER 6HRS DOWNLOAD.

FUCK. THESE. GAMES.

TLDR; I feel old and PS CoD games are complicated to install for literally just the campaign. Are all games like this now? Is this modern console gaming? I hate it.

Edit: I finally finished downloading MW3 and it didn't even come with the campaign. I have to DL that separately, apparently. Another 30GB and 3.5hrs. Rest Mode again. Taking the absolute piss.

The answer is "yes." The methods are ...

I'm having an absolute blast with this game. You are establishing communication with an alien probe, and after some hours of gameplay it still is completely plausible.

I don't mean "in a PSX style", this is actually a game for PlayStation 1. It's short (only two worlds implemented) but very charming.

Unfortunately, the developer doesn't seem to have plans for the full release for this fangame.

The machine before me looks like Frankenstein's homebrew version of Guess Who. Its main panel is composed of three rows of portraits. Some show men in 1930s suits, others women in flapper dresses, still more are simply blue people-shaped silhouettes. Below each portrait is a simple on/off switch. To the left of the portraits is a slide selector alongside a list of locations. Above that is a radio dial and filament lights indicating a current setting. At the bottom of the machine is a readout displaying a cryptic code '01-QU-1-11'. And, to the right, most enticing of all, is a big red lever.

It may not be much to look at, but calibrated correctly, this machine lets me hear the dead. It's a good thing, too, because there are plenty of corpses at Galley House.

I will try to avoid any spoilers and only use screenshots from the games opening half hour. Though, as with other deduction games such as Her Story and TR-49, The Incident At Galley House is a game best played blind. If you like those games, I can recommend this, though I have some reservations you may want to read after playing through the game for yourself.

The Incident At Galley House opens with you arriving at a boarded up manor. An aged newspaper in your bag reveals that on a March evening in 1936, multiple people staying in the home turned up dead. While some showed an obvious cause of death – a gunshot here, a heavy fall there – for most of the victims it remains a mystery.

I found the first hour of The Incident At Galley House enthralling. As I deciphered the workings of the machine and began to discover new characters and locations within the house, I found thread after thread to be followed through the events of the evening. Each correctly deduced code gave me a thrill. My notepad filled with scribbled clues to follow up, as there were so many they threatened to be forgotten. I hopped about the timeline trying to grasp the contours of the night, unsure if I had found all of the characters. But then that flurry petered out and the action shifted to become more methodical and, at times, tedious.

Once you have worked out the dimensions of the mystery by locating all the rooms and meeting all the characters, you are now focused on tracing their movements across the evening to make sure there is no point in their night you've missed. There thrils shifted for me to feel more like box-ticking than mystery solving. It doesn't help that while some of those scenes open up new lines of inquiry, several are simply a character stood on their own, talking to themselves or lying in bed.

We're looking for someone to find a way of giving current PlayStation 5 users real ownership over their own hardware.

The bounty can be won by any eligible person who makes a hardware, software, or combined modification or method to any model of PlayStation 5, that meets the following criteria:

It must demonstrably allow for the modification or bypassing of the PS5 hypervisor to the extent that an alternate OS can be booted. The alternate OS is not required to be stable.

It must either be a one-off implementation, or an implementation that takes no more than 10 minutes to execute if it needs to be repeated.

It must work on firmware version 13.42 or newer.

The alternate OS must be able to access the PS5's primary computation, memory, and graphics hardware.

The PlayStation 5 must continue to be capable of being booted into its original operating system, with the capability to play PS5 games.

If the proposed solution involves a hardware modification, it must:

Not require hardware (aside from an external disc drive) that has cost equivalent to any substantial portion of the PlayStation 5's cost

Be able to be carried out by someone with only basic soldering skills and equipment

Just got the urge to play a bit of payday 2, what do I see? Diesel 3.0 open_beta. Yeah, maybe there'll be a good game to play again this summer.

Roguelikes are infamous for their ruthlessness: instant deaths that could only be prevented with spoilers, early game hell gating most of the game for those who aren't able to learn all the intricacies of the system, many ways to permanently cripple your character in one wrong move, unbalanced classes / builds with no clear indication on what's a good choice for a beginner...

Some games like DCSS and Brogue see this as a fundamental flaw of the genre. Others lean into it instead, turning pain and (perceived) unfairness into a new masterpiece. That's Infra Arcana.

Let me predict your first run in IA:

• You open a door and meet face-to-face with a pack of wolves. They kill you easily.
• As you explore a wall collapses and a group of zombies appear. You either try to kill them and die or you try to run away and reach a dead-end. And if you somehow manage to get rid of all the zombies you end up being infected crippling your character for the rest of the run. Yeah.
• You meet a cultist with a shotgun. You make one step forward to them and they one-shot you.
• You confront a blind zealot and they maul you to death.
• You open a sarcophagus and a ghost saps your spirit in a few turns.
• You drink an unidentified potion and die.
• You try to cast a spell that removes all your spirit in one casting.

Even if you are well familiar with the genre you will find plenty of (deadly) surprises as you try to keep a character alive for more than a few floors.

Here's an example from my recent run:

I started as a rogue (focused on stealth) and opened a door in a room I spawned in. Immediately a wolf pack went inside started attacking me. I make a step back and a cultist with a shotgun appears!

I saved myself by tossing a Molotov cocktail but even then I already was one hit away from death. One of the wolves wasn't affected by the cocktail (the only way to include it in the "explosion" was by exposing myself to it too) so I had to fight it with my weak starting dagger. If I got a little bit more unlucky, that one wolf would have finished me off.

As you can see, the early game difficulty is somewhat offset by the amount of tools you start with. Every character (except ghouls) start with a melee weapon, a gun with some ammo, some explosives and throwing weapons. War veteran (the local fighter) starts with the best equipment overall while occultist (the local magic user) has the worst equipment. Since magic is very dangerous in IA and every occultist starts with only 2 spells, veteran is actually the most versatile character at the beginning unlike so many RPGs I know of.

Now, you might have a question: why would you want to play such a brutal and unforgiving game? Regardless of whether the game is actually unfair or just feels like that to a novice, it will still invoke the same feeling of a cheap death. Well, I cannot make you enjoy experience that just aren't for you but hear me out!

The game provides a formidable challenge but it's never impossible. From the very beginning you have the tools to confront the horrors of the cult: even the weakest starting gun deals a lot of damage, explosives can get rid of hoards of undead and starving canines, stealth is a powerful tool that's not punished at all (enemies grant no experience), spellcasting while dangerous is open to all who amass some spirit points, throwing weapons are a cheap and quiet way to damage enemies from afar, statues and braziers can be kicked on your foes to get rid of them wasting no resources.

Infra Arcana is a game that's very satisfying to conquer. And, no matter how harsh it looks at the beginning, it wants you to succeed.

The Game Narrative Reader is a collection of links built to resemble an anthology textbook. It's a survey of key topics in video game narrative design, composed from essays and articles published elsewhere by their respective authors. It's meant as a resource for students, educators, and practitioners.

Narrative design, as a discipline, has had a complicated and fraught history. It has been invented many times, independently, in different parts of the world and under different conditions. Those distinct traditions have not always talked to each other.

Criticism, theory, and craft discussion about interactive narrative have happened over decades across many venues, and often people engaging in one area have been totally unaware of work done elsewhere. The Reader is intended as a starting point for those new to the discipline, and as an anchoring canon for those with more experience.

The ordering of articles here is purposefully idiosyncratic; they're arranged in an arbitrary order meant so that ideas loosely flow into one another. In some cases, texts are arranged so that material with greater complexity appears later; in others—such as in the latter chapter on process—the order of entries is analogous to their place in an actual process.

This "zeroth edition" is meant as a trial balloon as much as anything; it is very much incomplete and tentative, published with the explicit goal of drawing criticism of the choices made in curating it. This initial compilation is, self-consciously, very heavy on things written by people I personally know, including some writing done specifically to fill gaps in the collection itself. It naturally reflects a bias towards my own web of influences and contacts. But it's my hope that by putting it out there at this stage, I can induce others to yell at me about things I should be aware of.

It also includes only links to relatively short articles that can be read on the web. Future editions are meant to include a selection of additional materials, such as an index of useful videos—a lot of useful knowledge has been transmitted through talks rather than in writing.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/72341319

121 countries are unable to make PSN accounts, which means that they are unable to use the PlayStation Store. In a digital-exclusive future—which looks likely for the PS6 after Sony announced plans to cease production of game discs in 2028—that means everyone in those countries will be locked out from purchasing titles on the platform.

(DCSS = Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup)

It started as a goofy suicide performed by Edmund the dumbass who turned my ice beast into a fucking dragon.

And then suddenly the dragon is against ME and Blorkula appears out of nowhere with a wand of charming. Imagine a more epic appearance.

On an unrelated note, now I have two wands.