I really like Gravity Bone, Atom Zombie Smasher and Thirty Flights of Loving.

I believe Jazzpunk is not made by Blendo Games. Cool experience if you are into these sort of games.

There likely are (I quit Twitter over a year ago), just because it does unique coverage on many topics.

Agreed. Just at this point I think it’s fair to say that this policy is definitely not in effect.

It’s a comically bad experience.

I get it that it’s probably easier to setup a Discord server, than to run your own forum, but you can always get a managed solution or use reddit (I would prefer if Lemmy was used, but I am also realistic).

I really hope indie gamedevs start moving off Discord. Sometimes it’s the only source for finding help or reporting bugs.

I was wondering if this is the case due to the “first store label”, but I wasn’t abel to find a link to the Steam store page for the full game.

I guess I didn’t look well enough. :(

Tried out the demo in late 2024. I really like the concept. It didn’t feel like all those "[retail store type] simulator] UE5 asset flips that are all over Steam. It has it’s own visual style and IMO has more refined core gameplay mechanics. Sure, some of the gamplay is similar (and can be very addicting), but you can see that thought was put into the gameplay mechanics.

If the 1st person store simulator concept seems intriguing, but you are looking for something beyond a quick UE5 asset flip, I would recommend to check this out.

I am surprised that it was released for free. I briefly interacted with the dev in late 2024 and I was under the impression that there would be a commercial release in 1H 2025.

Fascinating business model.

rental sales of CDs

CDs? What would you rent CDs for? The only thing I can think of is music and win 9x games.

I believe it’s a Star Trek instance and a smaller instance that’s called lemmy.one or something like that.

Good to see another instance defederate from ML. Now if only more of the non-tankie communities moved off ML (it’s slowly happening).

What’s are you on about? There is no centralised censorship. Every instance can make their own decision around whether they want to federate with ML.

The weird discount application and the sales taxes.

The sales tax always drove me nuts (and in total I loved in North America for a decade), I could never get it over it.

Where I live we just get an item list (with true cost per item) and a subtotal.

That’s a fucking wild bill if you are not from the US. One would almost think you are being scammed (I am talking about the deceptive structure of the bill, not the values).

I have yet to try the demo, but I believe with Entitled, it’s actually not the story. You have the standard “save the world/princess” narrative (their page describes this in an ironic way) which you can complete, but you also have a management/tycoon x lifesim hybrid:

The world of Entitled is a quirky mix of fantasy and real life. Modern economic themes blend with a medieval fantasy setting. One moment you’re delivering swords for the blacksmith, hoping someday you will own a sword of your own and become a proper hero. Shortly after, you pay taxes and attend lectures on supply and demand on the job market. All that to figure out what to actually do with your mediocre life.

I tried the demo (this was over a year ago, so much could have changed). Seemed solid, but a little bit average. The world was compelling and I was curious to learn more. Some unique mechanics were included.

In principle I agree with you, but it’s also a “chicken and egg” type problem. Many people aren’t going to switch to Lemmy if there isn’t a modicum of coverage for more specialized topics.

I think getting to somewhere beyond 100K MAU will have a transformative effective on activity in some more specialized communities.

I think the bigger deal is Lemmy/Threadiverse getting 100K MAU and seeing steady growth beyond that. We are currently at around ~50-55K MAU.

Subs are a deceptive metric, MAUs are far more important.

Those castle and pond shots are beautiful.

First few hours of both FO1 and FO2 are pretty rough. Lots of almost comical kiting and a bunch of tiring save scumming seem mandatory.

Combat in the mid to late game is fun though. You have hard encounters, but you also have the opportunity to be prepared.

Thanks for the write up.

I mostly agree. The combat is indeed terrible with both real-time and turn based. Turn based just feels off and pure real time is not viable. I play with real-time with pause.

I had the misfortune of playing as a technologist on my first playthrough in the early 2000s. It was really rough. Over time you can figure out strategies/approaches to make it easier, but I would argue many of them almost break the game.

I agree you need a measure of tolerance for retro gameplay/jankyness and honestly combat was subpar even for its time (Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).