I've seen many devs cite the refund window as why they don't need to bother maintaining a demo. They're wrong about not needing a proper demo, but people definitely do treat the refund window as a demo phase, not merely a technical test.

Having a lot of fun throwing things around in Maraka. Simple arcade style roguelite, where you do a lot of flinging things at things and slamming things around. May look horde-survivor-ish from the walking in enemy hordes, but you're very active playing, and there are some ranged enemies to watch out for. Bit barebones, but still just fun to play now and then. Easy recommend for that kind of thing.

Also working on the new character unlock for BlazBlue Entropy Effect. It's unfortunately tied to the mainline story progress which I didn't really care for and haven't put much effort into since it was reset after early access ended. So I guess I have to straighten that out to play with the new character. Did get a very strong loadout option where I start with a seemingly pretty killer combination upgrade and one of its two prerequisites. In BBEE, when your run ends, your character gets added to a support pool along with a couple of the build upgrades you used, and when you start a run, you choose one main character and add two supports to get your initial loadout. So, if I setup another character to bring the other prerequisite as their support, I can combine the two to have that all going right from run start on any other character, which is pretty neat. Not the best player-driven metaprogression system I've seen, but player-driven metaprogression still a very unusual and rich idea that adds a lot to a game, even in this limited form. I hope some more games pick up on this kind of thing, so we can see the ideas grow and metaprogression become a more interesting thing. Characters play pretty interestingly and vary nicely, but the enemy side is pretty weak and the surrounding aspects are tedious to clunky, so only a mild recommend here :)

Hoping to see Greyskin in the NextFest this week. If you like a top-down shooter ARPG type thing, check that game out, because it's got a lot of stuff in it, and they indicated before that this Nextfest was part of their release plan, so hopefully we're getting closer to more than a demo.

8/10 for a shell of a game, gutted of significant single player modes from the VF5 series (like VF5's quest, and VF5FS's licenses), plus only porting some of the customization options, even though VF created fighter customization.

VF5 has become less every installment, and it's sad this is all that's left to limp onto PC, still praying that such basic online fighting can be the only thing that actually matters and should earn them a pass on how much of the game they've cut.

However, the reality is that most gamers are now using gear that has some ray-tracing capability.

Sure, plenty, and I'm still going to hard-pass any idiot game that forces raytracing or upscaling. Find something actually useful to do with the power available, instead of something that worthless and computationally wasteful, or don't and run at lower power. That's more valuable than raytracing.

Seems like a strange problem. I'd suggest playing more different games, and focusing on getting your hands in tune with the specific game rather than the type of game or perspective, and being more aggressive about remapping controls to fit how you want to play.

I switch games a lot and don't generally have issues settling into a game just because its controls are off from another game, but if a dev puts something common somewhere weird, I'm absolutely going to move it to one of the places I expect it to be.

It's more that many keep Origin because the EA App is so much more of a problem.

Generally the control im talking about is whether or not I can continue to play the game.

Obviously, and I'm saying that's an extremely small amount of control, for which you give up a lot of other control to have.

"Straightforward" or not, it's well-trod territory, and devs don't do their homework on a doing a good job before putting games out. I don't just mean absurdly basic niceties like rebinding (which is frankly only difficult if your game input is built wrong), but mechanics like deadzones, trigger response handling, aim reticle behavior, and so on. All these are things I frequently need to adjust from outside of games, because we simply can't rely on developers to do quality work, nor to correct things afterward. Building new input schemes is also occasionally useful, eg Curse of the Dead Gods used a dumb weapon switching mechanic on controller, but I was able to build a more reasonable swap-button mechanic on top of it, and share it so anyone else running through Steam can load that config to play that way. It'd be nicer if devs listened and did it themselves, but they couldn't be bothered, even though they already built the kbm input to work the right way.

I've had one Steam game delicensed the past ten years or so, and I got it replaced later. I couldn't easily count the number of games I've changed in one way or another, but I've got a couple thousand hours playing controller in a game with no support whatsoever, so the control I have over my how games play seems a pretty big deal ;) Off-Steam, there was Ubisoft taking The Crew away from owners. How's your physical copy of that running for you? Oh, right, it doesn't run for anyone, at least aside from PC people working on modding in replacement servers.

I'm just saying, there's a lot more to it all than "game runs".

the EA is also missing a lot of content that isn’t ready yet

Sure, but there's also plenty to explore, especially for people who haven't played PoE1 and have to learn how things work from scratch. Given you don't pay extra for EA and premium stuff like stash space you buy goes to both PoE1 and 2, you get quite a bit for your early access ticket.

But probably more important that early access characters and stuff aren't available out of early access, so you are explicitly playing temp characters. Fine if one treats their early/seasonal characters as temp characters anyway, but someone else might not want to play characters with no future after early access.

Yeah, the insistence on trading as a key part of the game (despite the garbage trading system) absolutely murders your loot, which is just a huge drag in a loot game.

Global trading means drop rates and gear quality have to be kept down across the entire playerbase, so stinginess is built in deeply on top of GGG's inherent worship of time-wasting and RNG.

BTW, PoE2 separates skill gems from gear and removes color gem slot restrictions, so that at least frees you of the way PoE1 needed a drop to be good and to get good links and to get the colors you needed on those links. On the other hand, the simplified gem system is missing some life and fun. You don't even level gems by using them anymore. You just burn a higher level gem drop to level a gem you already have.

Get a controller with underside buttons. I also consider stick-clicks an abomination, but it's great now that there are under-buttons we can hard-remap to L3 and R3.

8BitDo Ultimate Bluetooth controller has some awful ergonomics on several things, but the underbuttons are excellent examples.

The slightly more bulbous wings on the 360 controller actually do a lot for ergonomics, but it's very hand-sized based. For me, the 360 is almost perfect in how the wings tuck into my palms. With the controller about 6 or so inches in front of me, my arms are at a natural angle with wrists straight and the controller is securely held without even a finger on it, and I can press any button without even having to brace it. Take even a little of those wings away, and that gets lost, and edges instead of the smooth roundness get annoying. My partner on the other hand, would need a smaller controller to get that same feel or to cross-thumb the dpad as easily as I do. As much as I originally preferred the symmetry of the playstation layout, I have to give the nod to the xbox layout for being able to dpad with the right thumb.

We desperately need controller makers to stop acting like controllers are one size fits all, when that's not even close to true.

Cactus is probably the single best mastery/arcade style twin-stick shooter out there. Don't let the cute looks fool you, while this game is solid to just enjoy, the chaining and level design offer great challenge if you want it, and the way each character changes both the basic play and the way you chain a level show a just fantastic design level.

It usually goes $5 in sales, but it's still crazy we can get games that good for so little.