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Cake day: September 13th, 2023

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  • Astaroth@lemm.eetoGaming@beehaw.orgLOL? lol
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    9 months ago

    Secondly, the purchase UI seems to have been designed to ensure that a new player can never understand it. I’m sure like all things it becomes clear over time but jeez, did a professional team really work on that thing?

    Yes it’s professionally designed, like all microtransaction games the shop is the most important feature and they’re always designed to be confusing by forcing the user to jump through hoops and use multiple currencies to make it less obvious how much money you end up spending on the game if you’re a “whale”.

    They don’t want you to be able to have a direct association between how much money or time anything costs, that’s why these games are so predatory and you should not be playing them, regardless of what you think of the actual game itself.

     

    Well, I will say, for a “free” to play game League isn’t that bad (especially not when compared to mobile games), or at least not last I played (3~4 years ago) but they still use the same methods.

     

    Also as others have mentioned, the game’s reputation in terms of it’s community isn’t exactly stellar. Being very “toxic”.

    But what I think is even worse than the language, which you at least can mute, is that the most popular streamer for the game “Tyler1” constantly rages, shouts, screams, destroys equipment and punches furniture etc.

    Let’s just say if your son starts doing those kinds of things then it’s not (only) because they’re going through a teenage phase it’s probably also because of bad influences from the game and its community.


  • For me I just found it annoying that whenever we wanted to go in different directions one player would end up getting dragged back by the camera border. So many failed jumps…

    But that’s fair, if someone thinks that being able to get in the way of each other and being forced to cooperate better due to it adds to their enjoyment of the game then playing the games without split screen could be preferable.

    I just never considered that possibility.


  • Lego games like Lego Starwars has already been mentioned and I will second those (especially the newer ones that have split screen).

    Divinity Original Sin is also great.

     

    Honestly most games I can think of have already been mentioned and those who have not seem like they might not be that great of an option since it seems your partner isn’t normally into gaming. (RTS in particular might be too hard)

    But I will suggest some anyway just in case

     

    Starcraft 2 has free online multiplayer which includes a COOP vs AI mode.

    There’s also a 2 player campaign adaption of Warcraft 3’s normally single player campaign. Although it might only be available for pre-Reforged.

    Also I didn’t know about it before now, I googled it just in case, but apparently SC2 also has COOP mods for its campaigns.

     

    You mentioned having a Switch so I will recommend Advance Wars Reboot and Wargroove 1 & 2, although there are no COOP campaigns but you can play multiplayer maps.

    Besides Advance Wars Reboot Camp on Switch (or the originals for Gameboy, which you could play with emulator), there’s also an online fan site called Advance Wars By Web where you can play advance wars in the web browser, although there’s no single player.

    Wargroove is also on Steam and besides the campaign and regular game itself there are puzzles.

     

    And speaking of Puzzles, card games tend to have Puzzles. I haven’t actually played Magic, Yu Gi Oh, etc. so I can’t say for sure whether they have any, but there’s puzzles in Faeria. (I would’ve recommended Might and Magic Duel of Champions, it had some great puzzles, but Ubisoft shut that game down many years ago)







  • Google Search is way worse than it used to but still beats DDG by a mile.

    I’ve tried SearX and it was meh, maybe there’s some better instance than the one I tried though.

    Yandex is good for reverse image search and when the American government makes western search engines block certain search results, but not that useful in general. Also for a period Yandex just kept bombarding me with endless captchas and was completely unusuable

    Bing search is just DDG, or well DDG is just Bing.

    Baidu search, tbh haven’t tried it much, but even for chinese I had better search results on google search so yeah



  • How does it compare to PollyMC? It was super easy to use and you can play both offline without an account but also online with a Mojang Account. (Java versions)

    Admittedly I didn’t actually try to play it online since I just looked it up for a nephew.

    I used the Linux AppImage, just download and run it and you’re good (might have to install new java runtime depending on what you have already), but there’s also Windows and Mac versions.

     

    p.s. I’m not really into Minecraft and don’t know what’s up, but apparently there’s some drama or something and PollyMC (with 2 'L’s) is not to be confused with PolyMC (one ‘L’).


  • I legitimately didn’t know it removed features and until reading the other reply and watching the linked videos I wasn’t aware of a lot of the changes or even the existence of features like rejoining matches. If I ever got disconnected from a match I just played something else even back in the day. I don’t remember ever having an option to rejoin a match, unless that’s specifically a ladder games thing. I don’t recall getting disconnected from many games though, but I know it did happen. Definitely not enough for me to have been upset about it.

    Warcraft 3 itself never had rejoin as in you could not close WC3 start it up again login and rejoin, but if you were having connection issues it would pause the game and wait a minute or so to give you a chance to reconnect before dropping you.

    Some private WC3 servers did a have better reconnection features added, like ENTConnect, but obviously those were obviously just for games hosted by their own bots (although you could still join these games from official battle.net lobby search until Blizzard nuked host botting a year or so before Reforged came out)

     

    But if you get Desynced there’s no waiting for reconnection, you’re just dropped.

    Because being Desynced means the game state on your client doesn’t match with the rest of the players, so to fix that the game would have to be rewinded until before the desync happened and no such feature existed in WC3.

    And the patches leading up to reforged and Reforged itself added a ton of desync issues.

     

    I’m assuming that’s what you’re referring to by missing network features because it still has multiplayer and I’m pretty sure it still has the chat lobbies although I never really used those back then and I don’t use them now either.

    LAN doesn’t exist. Ranked Ladder & profiles didn’t exist until 2022, and it still sucks and everyone uses W3Champions instead anyway, and the auto hosted in game tournaments don’t exist.

     

    As far as me saying the custom games were improved I’d say you’re the dishonest one if you’re saying that’s not the case. They definitely improved custom games and while I don’t know all the changes, an easy one to point out would be the saved ranking system that exists for line tower wars now. That definitely didn’t exist back in the day.

    Regarding custom games, the custom games are not made by Blizzard, they’re made by players. However in the patches leading up to Reforged Blizzard did add a lot of new functions that modders/map makers could use which were great additions, thus allowing for new cool stuff in custom games.

    One super obvious and huge change was that in version 1.30 24 player support was added, instead of the usual 12.

    But that doesn’t change that Blizzard then also made changes in Reforged that broke basically every existing custom map and they had to be updated to fix.

     

    There were some desync issues and saving games in single player was broken but for custom games version 1.31.1 (the last patch before Reforged) was the best patch, you had all the new functionality added to the map editor but a lot less bugs and problems from Reforged.

    Also there still haven’t even added the ability to play custom campaigns to Reforged lol. The few single player campaigns you can play in Reforged are thanks to people independent of Blizzard coming up with a work around and they’re technically just a series of custom games you play (although that is what campaigns are so).


  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

    Ignoring unauthorized copying

    … Bill Gates said “And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

    The practice allowed Microsoft to gain some dominance over the Chinese market and only then taking measures against unauthorized copies. In 2008, by means of the Windows update mechanism, a verification program called “Windows Genuine Advantage” (WGA) was downloaded and installed. When WGA detects that the copy of Windows is not genuine, it periodically turns the user’s screen black. This behavior angered users and generated complaints in China with a lawyer stating that “Microsoft uses its monopoly to bundle its updates with the validation programs and forces its users to verify the genuineness of their software”.

     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

    … the documents identified open-source software, and in particular the Linux operating system, as a major threat to Microsoft’s domination of the software industry, and suggested tactics Microsoft could use to disrupt the progress of open-source software.



  • Since you mention Baldur’s Gate 3 you could try Divinity Original Sin and DOS2, DOS has 2 player coop by default and with mods you can play 4 player, DOS2 has 4 player coop out of the box.

    Although depending on how old your kids are it might be difficult to play.

     

    Someone else already mentioned the lego games and I can’t 100% recommend those as well. Lego Star Wars complete saga, lego star wars clone wars, lego indiana jones are the ones I’ve played and can recommend all of them.

    Although there’s only 2 player coop.