“I’m almost afraid to ask, but what is the blue square for?”

What I liked a lot from Mel was that it really focused on exploring the existing mechanics deeply rather than introducing new mechanics.

I got some ReBoot vibes watching this

Big tbh. The SDL guy even works for Valve and puts this in.

This would very much be Jet Lag: The Game material!

Look, I may have spent the past several weeks playing Path of Exile non-stop. But I’m back on SOMA now. Back to slowly walking on the ocean floor and being interrupted by monsters while I read lore notes.

It’s also time to start up TF2 again, since a new community MvM event has started on potato.tf.

Holy hell

All 80 or so games in Aisleriot Solitaire

1800 hours and counting on Path of Exile. With how major game updates are scheduled, either I’m sitting it out for months or it’s all I play, depending on if the expansion interests me. This pattern has been going on since I joined the open beta in 2013.

The large variety of builds, extremely vast endgame, and very high power ceiling means that there’s always more stuff to play and more improvements you can make.

Hell’s Cube (It works.)

It’s pretty comforting how straightforward it is. You just go blasting. After the main story, replaying levels in arcade mode is also good fun.

I genuinely believe this is a post that would be appreciated in this community. I don’t see what’s meme-ish about the video other than that it’s entertaining in addition to being generally interesting, even to those outside the RCT niche. I’ve licked boot before and reported posts here for rule 4 violations, but this seems in line with other non-“gaming news” videos here:

• [Ahoy] What genre is DOOM?
• “I made a website to revive dead multiplayer games (GameDate)” by batty
• Portal, but the portal surfaces are inverted (I shared this one)
• and various occasional videos about speedrunning achievements

My personal motivations to post to !games@lemmy.world are to share things that are interesting with at least some level of intellectual stimulation, to contribute my original effort in magazine-like content from time to time (as Atticus, PerfectDark, and CobySev also do), and to share news that gaming news sites don’t cover. From my own perspective, I think I’ve demonstrated appropriate discretion in posting things here; I don’t bring in every headline and video I see pop up that has something to do with games. This channel has plenty of videos about RCT but I chose to share this one because it’s not so deep that it would belong in a game-specific community and not so shallow that it’s gaming lifestyle/humour content, but it is in a range where the topic is reasonably appreciable by a general core gaming audience.

r/games is so uptight that it’s pretty much a gaming news RSS feed with a comment section and the “gaming” communities are upvote farms with only marginal connections to games themselves. I like here because I like the mix of high-profile news, low-profile news, and original discussion. If you don’t think videos like this belong here, I’m okay with that, but rule 4 will probably need a revision to better match what you want here to be. I thought this post was adequately within the spirit of that rule, as were those other videos I cited.

Anyway, let’s discuss this video.

Marcel Vos makes a lot of deep, technical videos about RollerCoaster Tycoon. This is actually a follow-up to his previous video where he goes into how he updated the longest ride ever to be even longer. That video was pretty deep and it’s also a mind-numbing 41 minutes long. Compared to his usual fare, this demonstration of very short rides is much more accessible! And short!

In my opinion, what makes this not meme-ish is that he doesn’t add humorous music or other embellishments to his demos, and he shares (AFAIK) his own knowledge and work in figuring out how to make very short rides, including some creative and contrived ways to reduce the length of a ride. It’s not a mere clip compilation or just reading from a wiki or subreddit, so there is an informative, intellectual element. I find it really fascinating to see people optimize the hell out of a game purely out of curiosity and appreciation of it, especially when the game is long past its trendy phase.

Fun fact: if the learning curve is steep, then it’s rising up a lot in a small amount of time. In order words, a steep learning curve means a lot of learning happens quickly!

Fedora’s key selling point is being up to date and extremely boring. It’s mainly just off-the-shelf software, with minimal niche custom software. Flathub and Steam are available from the setup process. It’s the most Linux Linux that Linuxes today.

Edit: the bonus is that Red Hat being a sponsor means that the biggest improvements to the Linux desktop come to Fedora first. That’s what happened with PipeWire.

Portal 2’s level editor

I think the video I linked in the post would demonstrate the benefits better than me writing here. I agree that the look of Portal 2 has long-lasting appeal, but P2CE introduces improved lighting and graphics rendering inspired by Source 2 while still being Source 1. Otherwise, the improvements are mainly technical, like removing signature “Source spaghetti” engine limitations.

The real killer feature is that it reorganizes Portal 2 under the hood to be very mod- and custom campaign-friendly, so it will be the Portal enthusiast’s dream platform.

Here’s a video from the P2CE channel that shows the lighting changes in a bit more detail.

You’ll miss out on the plot of 1 that sets up for 2, but for gameplay, you would be fine. But if 1 crashes, you better hope 2 works well.

For Steam games (and non-Steam games launched through Steam), you can use Steam’s controller settings to expand the dead zones. Not the most universal solution, though.

Path of Exile runs credits at the end of act 3, but the whole campaign goes to act 10. And soon after that, you receive the quest line that leads to the game’s famously vast endgame. The endgame is what Path of Exile fans play for.

Computer, write me a smarmy Reddit-style comment mocking this guy for thinking anyone will be impressed by their ability to ask a computer to do work for them