Analog and gravity-based ones exist and only make you look slightly more like a tool than Smart Glasses

Spire 1 had the beta art unlockable as a per-card toggle for beating the Act 4 boss. Spire 2 doesn’t have Act 4 yet.

If you like these narrative driven games especially Disco, you owe it to yourself to check out Esoteric Ebb and Many Nights a Whisper

If you browse on itch.io by popularity and go down the list until you find one you’ve never heard of (or never played, if you want easier standards) that’s where the “newgrounds culture” is nowadays. Plenty of stuff that works in browser for free.

Download them once from the website, store them on a resilient NAS, never worry about your shit getting patched or losing it again.

Steam’s DRM will still lock you out if you’re logged out (not in “offline mode” that can only be entered by logging in online and then toggling it). Some games on Steam are truly drm-free and navigating to the executable will start the game without even running Steam at all. It would be nice if Steam exposed which games are truly DRM-free.

Note that native Steam shortcuts will never work without being logged into Steam (in normal or offline mode), because they’re steam:\\ protocol links. To play DRM-free Steam games steamless you need to navigate to the actual file or make an OS shortcut to the executable.

It makes sense because GOG was never going to drive year over year growth for the publicly traded CDPR. Operating as a private company, it doesn’t need to provide shareholder value and can be sustainable by simply “being profitable” forever, like Steam. Publicly traded CDPR holding GOG was a ticking time bomb but for once it seems to have been defused.

GOG isn’t “attacking” steam for market share though? It has a legitimate niche in the market: being a storefront that bans all DRM and also doesn’t require a launcher/account to buy and install games. GOG’s main competitor is piracy (because DRM free means trivial to pirate), so its main features to compete with that are ease of use, trustworthy installers, and consistent + easy access to game patches that pirates don’t often keep up with.

You don’t legally own any software you purchase (bar true FOSS), even if that software is stored on a disc or cartridge. It’s a meaningless distinction to make.

The best thing about GOG is the ability to never use a client or launcher at all. The ability to just download the installers from the website and store them locally means that your GOG games will outlast the following: GOG as a company enshittifies, GOG as a company dies, your account gets banned from GOG, you lose access to your GOG account, your favorite game gets a game-ruining update from its developer, some song license expires and devs are forced to patch or pull the game…

“I have an oculus account”

Same thing. Facebook = meta = oculus. The ability to even have something called an oculus account is purely grandfathered in, lucky you for getting one in the good ol days and only giving facebook money once to use your headset as a pc display, but nobody else can do that ever again. It’s a “meta account” now.

“We don’t require a facebook account, we require a meta account”

“We don’t eat dairy, we eat cheese”

Can you install software directly to the device without a Facebook account? Can you update the device firmware without a Facebook account? If you buy a new one right now, can you play games on it without a Facebook account? Can it serve as a display for your PC without a Facebook account? Can you modify or alter the games and software installed on the system with third-party tools? If you get account/IP banned from Facebook for not providing/verifying your real identity when making the account, does your headset become a paperweight?

That’s what the “meta ecosystem” means. If you can’t operate the device without signing into a Meta account in good standing, the ecosystem is locked down. A corporation can break your toy whenever they want to. The Quest’s price to specs ratio is fantastic specifically because Facebook knows they basically have to undercut their competitors to that level to sell people Facebook accounts and make those people use their own software store, even if one or two Enlightened Individuals can manage to only make a Facebook account and use their store to download the PC connect stuff.

I personally consider the Quest at $500 to be an $800 headset that pays me $300 to make a Facebook account and that deal isn’t good enough for me.

Yes, but that’s Facebook. What i said was “either deal with Facebook or pay $900+”. Neither option is worth it to me for the novelty that VR provides. A Quest 3 at $500 or $300 with a completely open source operating system would already be on my shelf, but it’s Facebookware.

VR also isn’t worth “tradeoffs” like installing a proprietary streaming tool to kludge the Facebook thing into pretending to be a “standard VR” display. What Valve’s offering is something I can completely trust to:

A: not require any hoops to jump through to use with VR-capable software on my computer

B: work with any of that VR-capable PC software instead of requiring one locked down storefront (and the storefront it’ll be most compatible with is Steam)

C: work with any Android APK software on device, for the lower intensity VR toys like Beat Saber

D: be compatible with a variety of controllers and peripherals

E: not be connected to Facebook in any way

F: maintain an open source OS so that a community can fully maintain the software even if the original manufacturer abandons support for the device

For those promises, I’d buy in at up to ~$700. No other headset on the market currently fulfills this list for less than $1000.

The main (and big) reason to not touch Quest is Facebook. It’s Facebook hardware running Facebook software and everything you do is tied to a Facebook account. VR is a novelty, I don’t think it’s a novelty worth using Facebook or buying a $900+ piece of hardware for (and most non Quests have their own restrictions).

Plus as far as I know, Quest doesn’t work very well as a PCVR headset. So instead of my $2000 gaming PC, I’d be playing these ultra high resolution high refresh rate games on what’s functionally a phone. Frame is designed as PCVR-first.

I will say, Cyberpunk runs a lot better on the Deck than Clair Obscur does. Clair Obscur isn’t worth running on Deck IMO - frames drop below 30, hair and shadows are a horrible mess, and in the game’s first big cutscene that wasn’t an FMV it was so stuttery that it was making the music crackle. Completely ruins the game.

My steam deck is 95% docked gameplay. I love the ui, ux, cross saves, steam features, ability to play non steam games, and ease of use with the pile of controllers I’ve accreted over the years.

The same experience but it can run Expedition 33 at 1080p without looking like a framey disaster? Sign me up unless it’s ridiculously expensive. I’ve got no interest at all in buying one of the big 3’s DRM boxes, and building a PC for the living room is very expensive unless I’m willing to have it be a bigass tower. The cube is for meeeeeeee.

From what I can see, this doesn’t need privilege escalation. Just for the user to grant it screen reader privileges, which many users aren’t conditioned to see as the giant flashing red alarm bell it is.

Malware is like fishing. Bait a million hooks and throw them out there, something’s gonna bite and get hooked even if 999,999 lines never even get tugged.

I have yet to see a well made Unreal Engine 5 game

Do you not consider Expedition 33 a well-made game?

I have less issue with smaller devs doing it

The comment I replied to says “we should push smaller devs to try engines like Godot now for that as Unity and UE got too big for their boots.”

Indie games on shoestring budgets are also the games that can least afford to pay employees to learn the “better” tool set on the job. Hiring devs that are experienced in Unreal or Unity means your onboarding is just about teaching them your studio’s stuff, and the demands of your game. Budget is a zero sum game - if something like Expedition 33 (UE5) did it “right” instead of doing it “easy”, they might not have been able to afford or produce the phenomenal mocap/VA/soundtrack/environments in the game.

Godot continues to mature, and some relatively big names in the indie space are publicly dumping Unity for it (like Mega Crit with Slay the Spire 2). But “pushing” smaller devs to ignore the onboarding problem isn’t the way. It’s the smaller devs that benefit most from engines with “good enough” defaults - bigger studios can afford to pay someone to “do the lighting”.

Picking an engine (including the option of rolling your own shit) has to be a decision made very early in the game development cycle, like “before you hire anybody” early, and it’s a really hard one to change your mind on later. For a lot of studios, the right decision isn’t the “best, most capable, free-est” one. Hell, for Balatro the dev chose LOVE, which is usually used for VNs, because he didn’t need all the other features he’d get out of something like Unity or Godot.

I mean, this article was spawned by The Alters, which had a bad machine translation segment (a thing since long before we called it AI) and… Some lorem ipsum in a background texture.

It’s already in every game in the background. Do you think paid graphic designers are instructed not to use the AI features built into Photoshop/Illustrator?