Castle Magus

I think this is complete bullshit.

And this is coming from someone who has ranted more than once about seeing hentai/porn games showing up on the Steam storefront and in my discovery queues and the like. Even if I don't care for or want to see that shit myself, I think Steam should be allowed to sell (or not sell) whatever it damn well pleases. If credit card companies are the ones trying to dictate to Steam what they can and cannot sell, though, then Steam should (or, at least, could) probably tell them to take a long walk off a short pier and create their own payment processing service. You know, if Valve really wanted to do that. They could very well do that, but they probably won't, though. It's much easier to just kowtow to the Moral Guardians™ and whiny pissbabies, I guess.

Well, that and if a bunch of people were suddenly faced with the horrid inconvenience of not being able to mindlessly plug their credit card number into Steam and use that to buy games, they just wouldn't buy games on Steam anymore, whether said people were buying hentai/porn games or not. And that is way more important to Steam than selling a few extra rape/incest/bestiality/whatever games.

In any case, this isn't the first time that the credit card oligopoly has imposed their whims onto others. It's never not bullshit.

Look at the first posts in these two threads, and then look at their last posts. It's bullshit, and Valve (along with the entire rest of the Internet) needs to stop doing this bullshit.

But then, I've already made my opinion about "necroposting" known, and obviously it's never going to change because the Internet has become increasingly enshittified.

I just finished this game a bit ago. Steam says it took me 15.7 hours (over the course of maybe a week or so, real time, off and on) to complete it, i.e. see all the endings[1] and get all achievements (which all seem to come from just playing the game naturally and making the different choices to see all the endings, which is possible in a single playthrough, because I did it). It is a free game, and it's another one of those free games that has no business being a free game, in my opinion, kind of like Heroine's Quest, the original version of Doki Doki Literature Club, or some of the other free games I've mentioned in my "game recommendations" tag that I don't necessarily feel like hunting up now. And I've already paid the $10 USD to buy the "Shareware Donation" DLC, which does nothing but put a sticker on the title screen. I did it because I feel like the game was worth that much. I've also added the other games by the creators of this game to my Steam wishlist (though I have to say that I'm not currently willing to spend the $50+ USD required to buy them).

So... without spoiling much that isn't already spoiled on the store page of the game itself... The Shadow Over Cyberspace is basically a game that combines the Y2K scare (remember that shit?) with Lovecraftian cosmic horror. You start as a character (default name, which I went with instead of the usual "Kane Magus" I ordinarily use, is Randolph Carter) who almost immediately gets fucked up by cosmic horror shit. His (or her/their, if you change the default) goal is to find a way to undo this. To that end, he starts researching stuff and, soon, begins to make contact with The Old Ones.

And even taking all of that into account, things are not what they seem at first. Even for a story kind of based on Lovecraft stuff, it's a mind fuck, with several reveals and mild twists along the way.

(Note: If you don't care about all the spoiler stuff clumsily hidden behind cuts below, just click the headline and open the post directly, and all of that will simply go away. Or... if you do care about spoilers and somehow found this post via other means than your reader page or my main page or whatever, then... sorry? Dreamwidth doesn't have a dedicated spoiler tag, as far as I know, and I didn't feel like kludging up a pseudo-spoiler thing, aside from using the cut tag.)

The only mildly spoiler-ish thing I will say about the story is this. ( Putting it behind a cut as a sort of makeshift spoiler tag )

(EDIT) Oh, and forgot to mention, while this game is set in 1999, it was released on January 10, 2025, and the game absolutely makes veiled references to current events and social issues from the past 25 years. Let's just say... the game's "politics" (as expressed by most of the characters in the game) pretty much align with my own, and leave it at that. If anyone reading this happens to be a RWNJ, I'd strongly advise you to avoid this game, as it will probably give you a case of buttrage. (And I'd also strongly advise you to go eat shit, but that's neither here nor there.) Just saying. ¬_¬ And ( spoiler ) (/EDIT)

Ultimately, the game is a Ren'Py visual novel, and it plays pretty much as you would expect, if you've played one of those before, with some added UI effects for clicking on things like doors, computers, refrigerators, TVs, the moon, etc. Everything that is clickable is regularly highlighted, so there's no pixel hunting. And the in-game conversations are just straight up visual novel gameplay. You get little notifications that tell you if a given option was liked or disliked or an act of defiance (the latter of which is not necessarily a bad thing, as it can still lead to a "liked" response). Some of the dialogue choices (indicated by sPoOkY tExT) will indicate that you are falling to either "Chaos" or "Order" and losing "Humanity" as a result. While I did pick a couple of these at the start, which got my "Chaos" rating up to 10% (90% Humanity), I mostly avoided them after that, and because I apparently did good self-care (i.e. regularly clicking on the fridge and bathroom and pile of magazines and doing a lot of the "game hacking" mini-game, which is literally just Minesweeper), I had 0% Chaos/0% Order/100% Humanity by the end. Supposedly, swerving one way or the other or trying to keep them all in balance could change how the game progresses, maybe, I don't know, but I was still able to get the ( spoiler ) achievement (probably thanks to a fair bit of save-scumming to redo any actively "disliked" or any not actively "liked" choices), even without any of that. And even with 100% Humanity, you can still ( spoiler )

So yeah, I definitely recommend this one, especially if you like Lovecraft-ish cosmic horror stuff. All you'll spend is the time to play it, unless you do like I did and buy the "donation" DLC thing.

[1] - Well, no, I guess technically I haven't seen all the endings, because I went with the ( spoiler ), though I did go back and also see the ( spoiler ). I haven't seen ( spoiler ) yet. The ( spoiler ) gives you at least a hint of what those would have been, anyway.

No real comment on this one. The tags below are pretty much the gist of the topics this clip was about.

(Also, this is yet another "the 'diablo iii' and 'asinine anti-singleplayer trend' tags are serving as the de facto 'blizzard sucks' and 'asinine anti-offline trend' tags, respectively" post.)

Full headline because shit sucks: "Former Blizzard boss says 'the only thing bigger' than Sony buying FromSoftware would be if it bought Valve or Nintendo"

As decades of precedent has shown us, it would be utter dogshit for those companies and for fans of games made by those companies if Sony (or any other big company) bought any one of them. As for me, personally, I don't give that much of a shit about FromSoftware or even Nintendo anymore, but Sony/Microsoft/anyone else better keep their fetid fingers away from Valve. And that's not because I'm all that huge a fan of Valve's games (I mean, sure, Half-Life 2 was good two decades ago or whatever), but because I don't want them fucking up Steam (at least not any worse than Valve itself has already fucked it up, anyway).

One thing I care about the least, though, is a "former Blizzard boss" saying pretty much anything at all, at this point.

Full headline: "Another reminder that your digital library isn't forever: Oxenfree will be completely removed from Itch.io next month"

"The Netflix-owned studio has already delisted the game from the site."

By that, it means the game will be removed for everyone, including people who paid cash money for it already, not just that it won't be available for future purchase by anyone else (which is the "usual" meaning for "delisted"). Sure, you can download the game before it's removed entirely, but if you fail to do that for any reason, you are apparently shit outta luck.

More Glorious Digital Future™ bullshit, in other words. I wonder if itch.io will refund everyone who bought the game for the full purchase price. No mention of the word "refund" in the article at all, but that doesn't mean it won't become a thing in the near future, if enough fucked over customers raise a big enough shitstorm over it.

I would say remind me to never buy anything from itch.io, but it's not like I've ever done that in the past. I'm certainly not going to start doing that in the future, after this.

Also sounds like Night School Studio is just yet another developer that sold out to a yet another big company (Netflix, in this case) that inexorably turned said developer and said developer's IP into a steaming shitpile, because of course they did.

As for Oxenfree itself, while I do "own" it on Steam, the last time I tried to play it, I had dealbreaker problems with it.

Full headline, because it didn't all fit up there: "Valve stops laughing, starts ranking your Steam reviews with a new 'helpfulness' filter that makes memes, jokes, and beautiful ascii art less visible"

Thank fucking Cthulhu. It's about goddamn time. Better (five to ten years too) late than never, I guess.

Yeah, I have had a fair bit to say about shitty, asinine, worse-than-worthless Steam reviews over the years.

They don't start talking about the thing in the video title until almost 19 minutes into this, but once they do start talking about it, that's pretty much the entire rest of this 1:15:47 video. And I agree with pretty much all of it.

The gist:

• Stocks, the stock market, shareholders and all that shit suck scabrous scrotum, full stop.
• Square-Enix, and companies on the same path as Square-Enix, spend way too much fucking money on making their games, because the line must go up, always and forever. Except... the line can't and won't go up, always and forever.
• Square-Enix, and companies on the same path, must now compete not just with each other but also with live service games or GaaS/"gas games"/whatever the fuck we're calling them now, such as Fortnite and all that other dogshit.
• AAA and AAAA (and however many more A's you want to use) game development is innately unsustainable and will die, sooner or later. The modern video game industry (or at least that part of the industry) will crash eventually.
• Companies like Larian and Nintendo and Valve who don't have to answer to stockholder bullshit will weather the storm of the modern video game industry crash just fine. As will, apparently, the companies that make all the dogshit "gas games" now (and I don't necessarily disagree with that, either, but I sorely wish to hell it wasn't true).
• Some stuff specifically about Square-Enix and how they should stop taking profits away from the "good games" like (ostensibly) Final Fantasy XIV (you know, a MMO game about which I personally do not give the first, single shit at all) to waste on developing dead-on-arrival shit like Foamstars or Babylon's Fall or fucking Nosgoth or whatever. (What the actual shitting fuck even is Foamstars? Makes sense that I never heard of it before now, because it sounds like complete garbage, just like all the other "gas games.")

You know, back when I started actively wishing for the video game industry to crash, something like a decade ago or whenever, I never really thought of that as anything more than pie in the sky at the time. Now, though, as the years have gone by, it's seeming more and more like the inevitable, inexorable reality of the situation. And I can only say, "Good. The modern video game industry has been terrible for decades now, and it fully deserves to finally reap the whirlwind."

Full headline, because I didn't even try to fit this one up there: "Bummer: Tesla's 'gaming computer' that it built a car around for some reason will be 'no longer capable of playing Steam games'"

"'They probably realised it's a car.'"

Also, this, from a few years ago. What. (Fortunately, as stated in the article linked at the top, at least some of the idiots at Tesla apparently have at least a modicum of sense, as that was later disabled while driving.)

It really sucks that Tesla is probably the "most well known" name in electric cars *ahem* """""vehicles"""""[1] now. It also really sucks that the Tesla name is being dragged through the shit by these ludicrous dumbfucks.

[1] - After all, the cybertruck is still a thing that, unfortunately, exists.

Both from PC Gamer.

The first, from 23 hours ago: "Sony doubles down, removing Helldivers 2 from sale in 177 countries and territories that can't access PSN while Arrowhead CEO says 'I don't have the final say'"

The second, from 11 hours ago: "Sony backs down on demand that Helldivers 2 players log into a PSN account"

Sure, the second one is good and all, but unless they also back down on the first one, then the second one doesn't mean all that much.

Also... I'm certain gamers will learn the wrong lesson from this, that being "review-bombing actually does work and will make a company change things we don't like." In this particular case, with Helldivers 2, it was a good outcome, because the thing Sony did there was legitimately terrible. However, with that said, you just know that if, say, Stellar Blade was also on Steam, it would be getting review-bombed all to hell as well[1], and for the absolute dumbest reasons. No two review-bombing situations are created equal.

[1] - That said, Stellar Blade is currently sitting at 4.81 out of 5 on the Playstation Store, so maybe not? Either that or it just shows that all the dumbfucks rampaging about a slightly changed costume are a tiny minority and all the other coomers/gooners/WTAF are totally fine with the game as is. But it also shows that the game didn't get review-bombed by "woke SJWs because too sexy," like all the dumbfucks predicted would happen, either. Of course, Helldivers 2 also has a 4.45 out of 5 rating on the PS Store, so who the fuck knows. But then, why would HD2 players on PS give the slightest shit about what's going on over there with the PC version, at least enough to review bomb it on PS? Or maybe giving a star score on the PS Store simply works differently than how Steam reviews work, making it more difficult to change a rating for review-bombing purposes after the fact on there. *shrug*