Malix

I got back to Marvel Heroes (tldr: "mmo" diablo-clone with marvel characters), as the private server emulator resurrected the game.

The game got killed ~8 years ago, and every passing year since made my craving for the game that much worse. And late 2024 some absolute madlads released a server emulator, and it's seems to work great, though the server I'm currently playing is having occasional lag spikes, which isn't great. I could self-host the server for just for me and/or some friends, but that'd require effort. :D

Anyhoo, got through the story-campaign with my fav marvel character, started looking at the end game ... and suddenly I remembered why I stopped playing the game in the first place. It gets pretty grindy. Oh well, I still have a truck load of characters to play - they all play quite differently, give or take some similar ones (like, the thing, hulk, etc bruisers are fairly samey, gun-tooting-heroes also are somewhat similar, but still all of them have their own twist to it). Each max leveled character gives an account-wide exp boost so leveling gets faster and faster. So... gotta churn them levels, I guess. :)

EDIT: oh right, I also finished Kathy Rain, a pretty neat detective point-and-click adventure. I can't say I had heard of the game before, but as people were frothing about Kathy Rain 2, and the first one was on steep discount, I decided to give it a go... and oh man, worth.

The art, voice acting and gameplay were great. Puzzles were logical for the most part, but there were 2-3 puzzles which did stump me a bit and had to take a peek on a walkthrough - one wasn't even difficult, but I was overthinking it way too hard and somehow confused red and blue repeatedly, but I guess few beers do affect detective skills... In any case I got through the game with a LONG single session, but I just couldn't let it go.

Anyhoo, Kathy Rain was pretty dope, eagerly waiting to pick up the sequel later on.

when your main stat is strength, and you've entirely ignored int/wis

Seriously though, if the cable doesn't want to come out with reasonable force, the solution is PROBABLY NOT to apply more force. What kind of cavemen do you have working there?

Kyrandia 3: Malcolm's Revenge - the "puzzle" that broke me was the cat/dog island and bushwhacking in the jungle.

Basically how it goes is:

• you travel maze like jungle, throw away ticks from your inventory to stay alive and use a machete on bushes.
• each bush can leave 3 things after it: snakes, a bone, or NOTHING! The snakes kill you unless you quickly smack them with the machete.
• After gathering an inventory full of bones, you take them to a dog, give them to the dog one by one. For each bone the dog goes and buries it on the ground. The dog MAY dig up a gem while burying the bone, more often than not it doesn't. You need (IIRC) 8 gems.
• I just save scummed this: reloaded game every time a bone didn't give a gem, and saved if it did. Took me about 10-15 minutes of save/load nonsense to get all gems. Imagine doing it legitly?
• The gems are used few screens over on cat statues. 1 gem per statue. But which gem for which statue? Something about gem color (eg. blue) and matching cat statue (eg. cat statue with fish tail, so blue = water, put it in that statue). Not all of the combinations make sense.
• If you put the gems in to wrong statues -> POOF, gems are gone, afaik you need to do the jungle-grind again! Or just reload the game, hopefully you saved before the attempt.

The game has pretty wild item gathering logic overall, some items you can only get randomly from a trash heap. You basically pick stuff up until you get the item or the heap is exhausted, in which case you walk out of the screen and back in and start picking items.

One particular trash heap requires a walkabout of few screens to get to, and your time on the heap is limited. You need to do the walk several times until you get the mission critical items.

Overall, the game was fairly maddening to play. Did not vibe with it at all.

In Kyrandia 2, there were few puzzles that were quite hard to solve. Eg. one potion recipe requires something called "a windy woof". It's not referring to wind, but windy as in twisting. And there's an item that's "gnarly bark", it's a twisty piece of wood (woof = bark, ha).

Towards the end of Kyrandia 2 there was a puzzle that wanted to build potions to match the colors of a rainbow. Orange got me stumped, until I looked up a walkthrough: need a sandwitch potion. The thing is, earlier in the game when you made the sandwitch potion, it didn't produce a bottle with liquid, the bottle had a sandwhich. But in THIS puzzle, the recipe produced an orange potion... What is consistency?

Kinda cool this kind of "work sims" keep popping up. Though I tend to lose interest in them after few hours, as the gameplay generally turns to routine and becomes fairly boring... that said I don't even know how many hours I've spent driving a truck in Euro Truck 2 so... not all routines are the same, I guess?

Is the game fairly dimly lit or is your store just trying to save on electricity?

corn and petting? the future sounds great!

thanks for the explanation.

so.. corn? Is this a thing or just something edible the cartoonist randomly chose?

But I do like corn though.

Didn't this game have required rt? Does it turn off for steamdeck? Can't really see other ways to make it happen

+1 for keepetclassy. Good stuff there.

Originally found the channel via "Lets drown out" -series Gabe and Yahtzee (Zero punctuation, Second Wind, etc) did aaaaaages ago.

isn't this basically the exact same as the banana clicker, but just with a stone and lower effort?

I've heard the game's name, but otherwise not familiar with it at all. The stutter could be some kind of dynamic shader compilation too, who knows.

depends entirely on the game, how it loads stuff and how big the stuff is.

100 GB openworld game? HDD probably is going to struggle with the asset loading, probably leading to stuttery gameplay or very noticeable pop-in

<10GB game with closed arenas/levels? Probably loads everything at the start of the level, might take slightly longer on HDD, but probably doesn't make any difference after that.

mean while in dummyland: I just now realized I've been not using veil piercer. 🤦

was kinda wondering that I surely had this around 90-something last time... sigh :D