Dirt 4 is such an all timer
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i barely play driving games besides like booting up outrun 2 as an emergency salve when iām really depressed but every time you post this setup iām like ādamnā¦ this looks sickā¦ā
4 Likes
It really is. Itās grown on me a lot over the years. When it first came out I really didnāt see what purpose it served in a world with DiRT Rally.
Thanks! I get a lot of positive feedback on my setup. I have friends who have five figures invested in their racing gear. Iām running relatively cheap modified stuff aside from the Playseat. The budget for the whole thing is under four figures for sure. My goal isnāt necessarily to be thrifty, but Iāve found a setup that works well for me. And my Fanatec wheel died years ago :\
I think heavier handed folks would probably destroy my setup pretty quickly. Iām pretty good at practicing mechanical empathy.
8 Likes
SMTV review:
oh thank god the apocalypse came right as I was about to do some stupid āfind your friendsā quest with those voices
like, I couldnāt go into the options at any point in the game so I had to restart and turn the voices off and turn the message speed to instant
the music is mesmerizing and I donāt want anything in the way of it either
8 Likes
Not only is the answer to this question ānoā, thereās whole strategies centered around manipulating the merchants you can sell to so they have enough money to actually buy your incredibly expensive magic artifacts at full price
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i never found Scamp or the Mudcrab Merchant by myself in my playthrough hey
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Outer Wilds really is about as good as video games get.
Played a tiny bit of the DLC. Excited for next time.
8 Likes
The Void Rains Upon Her Heart is a shmup for babby players like me who arenāt very good at them. It has sort of a structure a bit like Slay the Spire where you get to choose each encounter (the game is structured like a boss rush) which will have a number of parameters that vary, including
- The enemy type
- Damage/speed/enemy health modifiers
- Rewards for completion
The game seems to be about playing through multiple times, slowly encountering more enemies and powerups (and unlocking codex entries about them, which act as sort of a permanent āscroll of identificationā so that youāll have more information available to you in every subsequent run).
Thereās a cute(ish) story that revolves around a monstergirl who just wants to love the other monsters in the realm she lives in. Itās fluff, but itās about as sensical as any shmup plot seems to be.
7 Likes
the digimon on my 20th anniversary v-pet have reached their final forms: blitzgreymon and mugendramon
i want to talk again about how some digimon look way cooler as tiny 1-bit sprites than in their full colour art. skullgreymon and skullmammomon, for example
5 Likes
Disc Room is pretty cool. I didnāt realize it was going to have like, secrets and such. Thatās neat. Iāll definitely mess with this one more.
Forza Horizon 5 finally got a second patch the other day but it doesnāt fix the Fanatec wheel-related crashes. I tried using Forza EmuWheel to work around this, and it does fix the crashes, but the force feedback is much worse via this method, I think this is one Iām not going to get to play much with the wheel until the new year, honestly
itās an old personās complaint I know but it does seem like the shipping quality of these games has fallen even more precipitously post-game pass
I remember when they had to just have the game entirely working by the time they pressed the discs and āpatchingā involved abusing your own buffer overflow bugs in the MOTD system, or pressing new discs
4 Likes
Wait what??? Tell me more please this sounds incredible
The original post is no longer live because Sony donāt like fun, and was also presented in Flash, but Game Developer still have the summary in this article
Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal was an online title that shipped without the ability to patch either code or data. Which was unfortunate.
The game downloads and displays an End User License Agreement each time itās launched. This is an ascii string stored in a static buffer. This buffer is filled from the server without checking that the size is within the bufferās capacity.
We exploited this fact to cause the EULA download to overflow the static buffer far enough to also overwrite a known global variable. This variable happened to be the function callback handler for a specific network packet. Once this handler was installed, we could send the network packet to cause a jump to the address in the overwritten global. The address was a pointer to some payload code that was stored earlier in the EULA data.
Valuable data existed between the real end of the EULA buffer and the overwritten global, so the first job of the payload code was to restore this trashed data. Once that was done things were back to normal and the actual patching work could be done.
One complication is that the EULA text is copied with strcpy. And strcpy ends when it finds a 0 byte (which is usually the end of the string). Our string contained code which often contains 0 bytes. So we mutated the compiled code such that it contained no zero bytes and had a carefully crafted piece of bootstrap asm to un-mutate it.
By the end, the hack looked like this:
- Send oversized EULA
- Overflow EULA buffer, miscellaneous data, callback handler pointer
- Send packet to trigger handler
- Game jumps to bootstrap code pointed to by handler
- Bootstrap decodes payload data
- Payload downloads and restores stomped miscellaneous data
- Patch executes
Takeaways: Include patching code in your shipped game, and donāt use unbounded strcpy.
25 Likes
I am also playing this!
Really excellent horizontal shmup, reminds me a lot of my favorite games (particularly Gundeadligne, BulletGarden, and Immortal Defense) and has a very detailed, thoughtful, and cohesive collection of systems that encourage you to keep playing without making it feel like a chore. I booted it up and had to peel myself away to make dinner; almost 2 hours flew by.
That said, I really donāt like the narrative direction. The corny love stuff doesnāt do it for me at all, it feels trite and childish. Itās not that the ~idea~ behind it is bad, I just donāt like how twee it is, how simplistic all the emotions itās displaying to you are. Your doubts and self-loathing talk to you in jokerfied font! Itās SO blunt, Iām being bludgeoned by the hammer of allegory.
I also really donāt like that I am a nonsexually-nude alien fairy in every cutscene, I almost immediately turned the censorship on because I do not want to look at awkward nudity every time a story beat hits, it has added nothing to the game so far in my playtime.
When itās not trying to shove its personal development or nude fairies in your face though, the story is nicely paced and has some good moments. I must admit, the tutorial bot overheating when you say āI love youā got old, but then it wrapped back around to being really cute. Go figure.
And, again, the shmup part? Absolutely incredible. A really high bar for future shmups, particularly boss-driven ones, to cross. Great bosses, smart patterns, emphasis on mastery (through full combos and full destroys), and well-paced incentives. It bills itself as a ārogueliteā but itās really just an arcade game with a meta-layer.
6 Likes
thank you, i live for this shit
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Somehow I kinda started mentally filtering out the nudity immediately lol. But it is gratuitous and a weird choice by the creator of the game.
The plot is very 2001 web comic but it, along with the little codex entries you can unlock, have provided the carrot to keep me going.
I am surprised to hear you praise the mechanics so highly! Iām not a sophisticated player/judge of this genre and I figured people who are wouldnāt be impressed. But Iām glad to hear it holds up. From my perspective I appreciate that itās got a health bar instead of one-hit death, and that the game very explicitly tells you which part of your ship canāt get hit. Makes it much more friendly to me.
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someone managed to mod yume 2kki into an online game. it stayed up for all of two weeks before some of the developers asked for it to be taken down. a couple hours before the server shut down, a stranger took me on a guided tour to reach lavender waters. i regret not taking more pictures along the way.
in the last hour, everyone spontaneously lined up in the hub area as a final sendoff
(iām the ācadā in this video if you want to play a terrible version of whereās waldo)
maybe eventually someone will get a private server up and running but it will likely never be the same. i only got to play for a couple nights but i will still miss it a lot.
28 Likes
Iām also playing this. I like the way it looks and feels decidedly homebrew while having a nice amount of depth in its mechanics, reward systems, etc.
I think the character parts could have been scaled back and made a little more subtle, but the game parts make it worth playing regardless.
3 Likes