Video Game Chat Thread - Pre-Alpha Experimental Version

Are videogames for children?

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The British should also be barred at the gates. And anyone fluent in AAVE.

Hispanics get a pass just because it's funny to hear their whole entire house through their mics.
 
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Looks like another AAA title from Team SNEED.

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Scream Aim Fire said:
Bit out of nowhere, but; anyone happens to know what happened with Neopets, that old game? I heard the devs went woke or something a while back; haven't been able to keep up with the franchise in years, anyone got any info?
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Around 2020 I was feeling nostalgic for my time playing the game as a middle schooler so I started to keep track of what happened in 15 years and even recovered my old account, so I can give you a bit of the lore... and it isn't particularly good. I'll give a little history lesson because I find it fascinating. Grab yourself a snack and a glass of orange juice because here we go!

To address the woke thing - yes, in the performative way they absolutely are. Even in 2020 you where banned from mentioning words like 'gay' anywhere on the website but they suddenly shifted course and now have stupid pride stuff in the game. My guess, on top of the game being run by a skeleton crew of Californians, is that the primary playerbase is mainly genderspecial weirdos in their 30s and 40s as no children play the game in modern times yet they strictly held onto policies as if it needed to be child friendly like it's peak in the early 2000s. Heck, there is still weird shit like being unable to mention off-site place like r/Neopets or risk taking a ban to protect these non-existent children. There are other modern day PC stuff like renaming the gypsy camp because 'muh offensive slur' and removing this item for the reason of idiots thinking it's a Trump reference for reasons you can deduce easily that are hilarious in retrospect. Now, this performative wokeness is an easy way of earning goodwill with it's cat-lady userbase because...

Neopets is an absolute zombie site. It should come as no surprise that Neopets peaked long ago in a time when technology was far less advanced and it's novelty is long past. As a result the money coming into the site has dropped off a cliff. what was once supported by sponsors chomping at the bit to advertise there keeping the site free has given way to many different ways to monetize it's small userbase. I played Neopets on-and-off from like 2001-2004 and at that time there was only products like plushes, clothing and trading cards being sold at Limited Too and the integrated advertisements on site, but now there are many loot boxes and even site membership. The site changed hands several times, and it currently rests with NetDragon a company notorious for over-monetizing and Neopets is on the borderline of profitability being worthwhile. Now, with all these factors in place it has led to an environment where there is almost no new content ever and the player-base is very angry at the management as the lack of maintenance causes the site to slowly crumble.

In the old days the site saw a constant influx of new flash games, new pets, and extensive story lines with large scale user interactivity. In the current iteration of Neopets the last pet release was in 2014, and the last big plot was all the way back in 2018 and it was apparently the first new one in like 5 years then. The games also stopped coming a decade ago, but at least there was a huge backlog... until in 2020 flash was discontinued and suddenly hundreds of flash games became unplayable. On top of this, pretty much half the site's activities slowly became defunct and broken even before then. Now, the site actually does see really frequent items releases... in the form of dress-up items from micro-transaction lootboxes which is 95% of what the team puts out. The skeleton crew staff and corporate management are constantly criticized for doing nothing but money milking in any way possible while doing little to fix new problems as they arise. Out of the hundreds of flash games, about 10 have been converted to run without flash... but it didn't stop them from making several cash-grab mobile games with abundant micro-transactions. Heck, they had a match-3 mobile game shut down only to within a year make a NEW match-3 mobile game that released just a couple months back. On top of this they angered the playerbase by putting out Neopets NFTs last year. A huge hack occurred on the site as well last year which led to criticism expanding past the bounds of just it's playerbase to the wider internet it was so bad.

The state of the game is just really interesting seeing how this early web 2.0 giant has fallen to where it is a dying leech surviving by sucking the blood of spinsters and trannies who support it despite getting nearly nothing in return from it's empty husk. It is in a Schrodinger super-state where it is both going to die within the year and somehow exist forever. Realistically the site is so simple that it could easily be improved with content from just a few creative people but that is unlikely to happen even if the cost increase would be minimal. It's one of the more interesting online graveyards as it is kept on life-support enough to explore it.
 
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Thanks for the input, @Professor G. Raff. I used to do a ton of stuff on Neopets myself way back in the day - the game was a huge part of my childhood, and I actually have some of the older games and stuff still - and seeing what's happened to the site is simultaneously fascinating and somewhat depressing. Seriously, the game was massive back then, and seeing it drop so hard is a hell of a thing; fairly certain it was thanks to groups like JumpStart buying the site out that pretty much spelled doom for it.

Like you said, it wouldn't be all that difficult to really fix the game back up; update some of the old art and games, bring in some plotlines/finally go back and finish up some of the older plots that never got resolved, and maybe stop catering to wokeshit dumbasses as that's pretty well been proven without a doubt to be a fast-track ticket to bankruptcy. With the game's current state though, I'm honestly stuck somewhere in the middle; part of me hopes the main game will finally get put out of its misery, but another part thinks that there might just be something worth salvaging. Seriously, the pet thing might have lost its novelty, but I still think that the devs might be able to salvage something if they were even a little competent.

At the very least, there's all of the older games and such still around...
 
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If I get a Sniper Elite game, which one should I get? The choices are Afrika, France, and Italy. Italy's Mafia stuff sounds interesting, but I play Isonzo and will get Mafia 4, so the setting may feel really tired. Afrika looks a lot like Italy. I'm leaning towards France.
 
CaptainAutism69 said:
So I bought (and finished) Ixion. It's a good cross between Startopia (the original), and Frost Punk. Excellent game that will frustrate people until you learn how to complete the 'puzzle' that is the resource management stuff. you start out feeling vunerable as hell, then as you get used to it an advance, survival is easy and you can just smash your way to the end.
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Finished it today, too. If you're into this type of game, wait until the next patch (end of February most likely). It's hard as balls and the presentation is amazing. Especially at the beginning (Chapter 1-3) you shouldn't even try to overwork your crew or ignore any crew requests. The death spirals are even more brutal in comparison to Frostpunk from my experience. You'll most likely have to restart a run, but after that you know what you're up against. Had a lot of fun with it and you should at least expect 40+ hours before finishing the campaign.
 
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The new Harry Potter game broke 1 million concurrent twitch streams a short while ago, people on twitter reckon it's probably a record (Elden Ring only did around 950k).

I don't give two shits about the game but i'm glad to see how little power trannies have in some aspects of the real world and i'm delighted JKR will make a fortune off of it despite having the utter nerve to say women are women.
 
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For years I refused to try Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines because I thought it would be like some cringey Twilight shit. I gifted it to two of my nephews during the Steam winter sale and they started playing it talking about how good it is. I have been playing it off and on for a few days and it's a little cringey at times but not often. It is a really good game though. It's like a better looking Deus Ex with a vampire themed mod. It reminds me a lot of Deus Ex actually. It can be clunky at times like Deus Ex. I know it's using a beta version of the Source engine that was used for Half Life 2. It does look good for a game that was released in 2004. Being a PC exclusive definitely helped with that. Of course, it looks like a game from 2004. But so far, the story is the best part. Especially with what happened with the two sisters that run that Asylum club. I can see why it's called the Asylum now because that was some dark and crazy shit.
 
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So what is going on with Star Citizen? I saw that they finally added in a multi-crew ship that wasn't just manning turrets while flying around. Is the game actually sorta, kind of getting there or is still a burning black hole of money?
 
Back me up! said:
So what is going on with Star Citizen? I saw that they finally added in a multi-crew ship that wasn't just manning turrets while flying around. Is the game actually sorta, kind of getting there or is still a burning black hole of money?
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Still a scam last I heard which was a few years ago.
 
Played Mario Kart 8 for a while and ended up having a good time. A very polished game, lots of nostalgic tracks, and something the wife and I could play together for a change while we take a break from MMOs. Gonna be moving on to Fire Emblem Engage now, but February is a busy month for games that I plan to play with the new Theatrhythm and Octopath games both coming out before long. Good times.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
If I get a Sniper Elite game, which one should I get? The choices are Afrika, France, and Italy. Italy's Mafia stuff sounds interesting, but I play Isonzo and will get Mafia 4, so the setting may feel really tired. Afrika looks a lot like Italy. I'm leaning towards France.
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3, then 4 and 5. otherwise it will feel off going back, since they do get technical upgrades and evolve over time. depending how much time you wanna spend you could even go with 1+2, then play nazi zombie army for the lulz.

or if you're just in the mood for some pulp sniping get dead war for 10/10 camp.

in further news, this has started: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/nextfest

already tried grim guardians and fabledom, and the first fucking thing people ask in a fucking settlers clone is MUH DIVERSITY, because that's what's important in a fucking management sim. at least most of the posts telling them to fuck off give me hope...
 
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