True, we’ve seen the exact thing with WoW and Overwatch, after the teams formed Unions. Both games were immediately shut down.

It’s only a matter of time until the Diablo team forms a Union, which will of course also be the death knell for that franchise.

I’ve been grinding that World of Warcraft: Legion Remix. Monk is a lot more fun than Demon Hunter, so I’m glad I made the switch. I’ve done basically everything for now, most of the quests in all the zones, and I’m at the gear cap. For now, there are raids to clear daily, which I’ll do, and clear Mythic+ dungeons over and over for that “infinite” power, which I won’t do. In a few days the second phase will begin, with more quests, a raid and other things, so I’ll keep playing, but wind down afterward (until the next phase).

I finished the Forza Horizon 5: Rally Adventure DLC. It’s alright. The courses are more difficult than the base game, but the map is also so small, but still packed with courses, and you’re constantly driving through the same parts. Since you also need to do each race at least twice (one rally, one normal race) everything just kinda blends together.

Then World of Warcraft: Legion Remix has started. This is the second time they’ve done this mode, and the first time was some of the most fun I’ve had with the game ever. This time doesn’t hit as hard, but it’s still fun. I started out as a Demon Hunter, but found it kinda meh to play. So I’ve switched to my normal main class, a Monk, which is a lot more fun.

Finally started the Forza Horizon 5 DLC. First up, Rally Adventure. The DLC adds a new, small, but densely filled map (at least more densely than the base game). The new races also get a new game mode, a proper Rally mode (as you’d expect from the name). It’s just you alone on the track, trying to make it to the finish as fast as possible, while an NPC reads pacenotes to you.

As someone who doesn’t play normal rally racing games or watches real life ones, it’s fine. The game also asks you if you want to disable the visual racing line, which I did. That makes it a lot harder, since you can’t just immediately tell when you’re supposed to break, but with the rewind or just trying the race over and over again, it’s manageable. I also constantly switch cars, so I don’t get a consistent feel on how a specific car handles.

Then I also started playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I wanted to get to this before all the GOTY-talk at the end of the year. I’m in Act 1, dunno how early, because I’m just running around, exploring everything, ignoring the main quest as much as possible. As you do in RPGs.

The game plays well, it’s pretty responsive, and hitting those parries feels good. The story is intriguing so far, but I haven’t seen a lot of it. Performance has also been fine for me, but I do have a pretty powerful PC.

A few annoying things are, every time you pick up an item on the ground a character has to comment on it, and there are not a lot of different voice lines, so that gets kinda annoying. Then certain parts of the game, like the cutscenes, are filled with pretty ugly post-processing effects. You can disable that stuff for normal gameplay, but then a cutscene plays that has just super heavy depth of field, chromatic aberration, weird artifacts around character outlines (that might be tied to the DOF), it’s weird. These are pretty minor complaints.

Also, in a fight it’s like Super Mario RPG, where you can hit specific keys at the correct time to deal extra damage or for the dodge/parry to avoid any damage. Hitting the offensive buttons is not much of a problem, but the game does some stylish camera angles and shakes a bit, which can make it difficult to time button presses for the defensive moves. There are options to disable these, but the camera shake option doesn’t seem to affect combat, and if you disable the camera movement option the battles look so much duller, with just a terrible, static angle. I think I just have to get used to it. It also doesn’t affect every enemy, some are definitely worse than others.

Still, I’m having fun, just gotta play more of the game.

I just used the Wanderers Crest the whole game, mainly for the normal downward pogo.

For some reason the game forces you into a specific crest a few times throughout, which I just find weird and unnecessary.

I think flying enemies are absolutely terrible to fight, especially early game.

Runbacks are the things everyone has already been talking about. There were two in the whole game that I thought were terrible, so it could have been worse.

However, for boss runbacks especially, because your corpse is in their room, it discourages leaving and coming back later. This can of course lead to just bashing your head against a difficult section and getting frustrated even more. In Hollow Knight your ghost at least spawned in front of the room so you didn’t have to commit to fighting the boss, even if you had to make it back there again.

I guess because of how much of the game is optional and non-linear, the devs couldn’t often really plan on when players will have which ability or upgrade, so some stuff felt kinda underutilized, for long stretches of the game.

Why are so many shard drops above places, where 75% of them will fall into unrecoverable spots? For rosaries, you at least get the magnet, just add the shards to that or something.

Finished my Hollow Knight: Silksong 100% playthrough. Great game with some weird, frustrating and outright bad segments, that make you question what the devs were smoking.

Then I also beat Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance. I was pretty close to the end two weeks ago, before I took a break because of Silksong. Only one small boss and the final boss was left, but hunting for the rest of the secrets still took a while. It’s definitely better than Circle of the Moon, which I played before this, just because it doesn’t play like absolute cheeks. Graphics and Music are a major downgrade though.

Next up is the final Castlevania GBA game, Aria of Sorrow. I’ve played the sequel, Dawn of Sorrow on the NDS years ago, and I remember it being great, so I have high hopes for this one.

Then I started Megabonk. It’s Risk of Rain 2, but as an ASS game (Auto-Shooter Survivor game, like Vampire Survivors). Each run is 1-3 loops of a single map, and there are only two different maps in total. Characters, weapons and leveling are like VS, so your choice is for a starting weapon and each characters innate passive. Then you also earn money during a run to open chests for different items, like in RoR. While I think the game is solid, you have to like the gameplay enough to be fine with just not much variety in the visuals.

Started Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, after I finished Circle of the Moon last week. It looks and sounds worse than CotM, but it’s a lot better than that game, because it doesn’t play like ass.

Some other meh stuff is still there, like the game is kinda easy, and exploring the map is an absolute chore for the first half (maybe two thirds), until you finally get the means to open up all the blocked paths and get access to proper teleporters. Still better than double-tap to sprint though.

I haven’t finished the game yet, I might be near the end, but didn’t make it before Hollow Knight: Silksong, which I gotta play first.

I’d say get Hollow Knight first, just because you can probably get it cheaper. After you’re done with that, and you like it, get Silksong. It’s very unlikely if you don’t like one you’ll like the other or vice versa, the games are pretty similar, and they have a couple of things that could be called “polarizing” (like the map).

Unless you want to be part of the “current discussion”, exploring the still new game, maybe you have friends who also play, and you can talk about things you find, then get Silksong.

The Steam Store has gone down every time they do a major sale for over a decade or something. They don’t care about these temporary problems, because they are just that, temporary. Increasing the server capacity for like an hour or something is just not worth it (most likely).

Also, it’s not like the rest of the Steam network is affected when this happens. You can still play your games or download stuff at full speed.

You still had the rubberized grips on a lot of mice back in the day, that would just get sticky over time or get rubbed off. Not really much better.

In addition to that, for popular, “name brand” mice, there are often also tons of replacement parts available from China. You can basically re-build the complete mouse from parts.

Otherwise, as you’ve said, switches, wheel, the battery and maybe the cable, should always be replaceable (as long as you can solder).

Not very, I think, but it’s been years since I’ve put custom firmware on mine.

Check out https://3ds.hacks.guide/ (link hopefully allowed here) and read through it. Also check out the /r/3dspiracy wiki.

And? My comment wasn’t about Blizzard. Them being greedy doesn’t mean other people can’t (supposedly) be greedy as well. As you can read, I was just talking about one specific part of the parent comment.

I could see it being alright back in the day, and it has some neat stuff, like the graphics and music, and the magic system is ok (lots of repeating stuff though, just in a different color). It just didn’t hold up, I think.

I haven’t played most Castlevania games myself, I mainly know the DS games, and played two of them like 10 years ago, Portrait of Ruin and Dawn of Sorrow. I remember them being pretty good. The third DS game, Order of Ecclesia didn’t work for me back then, because of anti-piracy stuff. Any of those three games should be fine on the 3DS (Dawn of Sorrow is a sequel to the GBA game Aria of Sorrow, but I don’t think it really matters plot wise)

This is actually why I got the Advance Collection and the more recent Dominus Collection, because I wanted to go back and check out a few of the games I missed and re-play the DS games, to see how well they held up.

If you hacked your 3DS, you can of course also try games for other systems, like the GBA games (mostly for the aforementioned Aria of Sorrow) or maybe even Symphony of the Night, which supposedly runs fine with some tinkering.

If you’re not into the whole Metroidvania stuff and want more classic, linear side scrollers, then the old NES/SNES games are also available somehow (but maybe not anymore, unless you’re doing homebrew stuff). The standout here is probably Super Castlevania IV, but tbh I never really played these myself.

Waiting for Silksong, like many, so I’ve finally played through Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. I bought the Castlevania Advance Collection years ago, but it didn’t work on my desktop PC for some reason. I played the game for a few hours on my Steam Deck years ago, but never felt like finishing it. Since I got nothing else going on right now, I might as well go through these games, since I managed to make them work.

The “port” itself is nothing special. You get a pretty basic emulator, that just plays the old games as they were. Save states and a rewind are as good as it’s gonna get, the rest is kinda half-baked.

As for the game, it’s kinda mediocre to bad. Controls don’t feel great, everything’s pretty stiff, and you’re stuck with sprint being on double-tapping a direction, which never stops being a complete pain, so getting around just isn’t that fun. It also feels like the devs wanted to pad out the relatively short runtime as much as possible, by placing the save rooms and teleporters in the most inconvenient places, so if you die, you’ll have to go through the same sections over and over again. Save states or the rewind help here of course, depending on how much you wanna use those features. At least the game looks decent enough and the music is pretty good.

BTW, in case anyone cares, the reason I could never play this game on my desktop was because of my keyboard layout. If you use a custom one and maybe even something that doesn’t match your Windows language/region/dunno, you get an instant VC++ error on launch. Once I changed it to default US QWERTY it works normally. Only found this out recently, through a comment on the Steam forums.

Maybe I manage to finish the next game in the collection, Harmony of Dissonance, over the next couple of days, probably not, but then I’ll just come back to it.

This was just to give some possible context about part of the first comment, that said this is made by a team that don’t just want your money.

To the devs behind this private server (or maybe just the leadership), this is a business, probably pretty profitable. They’ve been running ads, seemingly made to look like you’re going to play legit WoW. They’ve done this stuff before, (allegedly) exploiting others, stealing donation money, RMT, to make a quick buck themselves, before jumping to the next one.

Dunno about that last part. According to some comments I’ve read, the head of this project has been doing some shady shit for years.

Running their own mount shop in-game, taking other people’s work without permission, selling gold, whatever.

From the article:

While it was never a mere recreation, it expanded significantly over time. Nowadays, Turtle WoW differs from World of Warcraft with features like additional playable races, leveling zones, quests, endgame content, and transmogrification.

I think around the time Blizzard did their Season of Discovery for Classic WoW, I heard a lot of people talk about Turtle WoW and how they want something more like that (Classic+) and not just the old game anymore.