i’m lizard
The PS2 Ace Combat games (4/5/Zero) are still best-in-genre as far as I’m concerned, and have held up exceedingly well in general. Aerial dogfighting with good controls, good mission design and interesting story.
Sky Odyssey is a more “relaxed” little flight game that I also like, still got game-like controls but no combat, just missions where you fly through hard situations.
I’ve also been playing this, even though it’s well out of what I normally play. I’d describe it as being closer to an ARPG than a MOBA, and for both better and for worse, it feels like a roguelike version of mid-seasonal gameplay in ARPGs. Couple of buttons on relatively short cooldowns backed up by buildcrafting meant to make those buttons utterly broken with lots of good opportunities available. There’s okay variance between runs. Buildcrafting is super flexible in general, you can move all of your ability upgrades around to other abilities at any time with no cost, you can even give almost everything to friends in co-op.
Not all is good. The game was review-bombed at launch due to the metaprogression and cooldown changes from the demo, and honestly, that was probably correct. The balancing work and the per-character XP requirements ruined some of the fun that the demo had. The worst was hotfixed within a day, even adding a compensation system for demo players, and progress is like 3X faster now, but it still feels like it’s too slow and not fluid enough. I sorta settled on having a “main” in a genre that’s more fun if you swap between characters to keep things fresh. The devs will probably find a solution sooner than later.
There’s some other problems like the performance absolutely tanking in lategame regardless of what you’re playing on (my trusty RX 580 performs about as well as my friend’s RTX 4080, and that’s a pretty universal complaint), there’s some multiplayer bugs like a boss attack that only the host can survive, some questionable balancing here and there, one of the 8 characters feels unfinished (Shell), but overall it’s been pretty good, fills a pretty unique role and the problems don’t really detract from what I’m getting out of it.
For the benefit of people that can’t watch this horrible video:
This is really about them being able to change the already extremely vague terms of service and you having no recourse other than voiding your purchase if you don’t like it. There is some focus on a gun thing early on, but it’s just an example where they flip-flopped multiple times over the years based on vague wording in the ToS that was changed after the fact. Commercial modded server owners were the main ones that had to make changes because of that rule, often taking guns away from players that had them, but it’s generally enforced very inconsistently.
But the main thing they’re focusing on in the lawsuit is the mass deletion of legitimately bought Minecraft copies when they stopped Mojang account migration in 2023 (everyone that didn’t migrate then no longer owns Minecraft according to Microsoft; no refunds). That, too, was effectively a one-sided ToS change. And to make matters worse, the old ToS had an explicit clause that you could keep playing the game in singleplayer even without agreeing to any new ToS.
This lawsuit is being done in Sweden. I don’t know if this kind of ToS/contract validity has actually been tested there before.
I think this is the first time I ever watched a video at 0.5 speed. “this was done due to retention purposes for the video to maximize spread potential”. Yeeeaaaah. No. Checked reddit, it’s downvoted to the negatives over form. Checked a different place that would be all over this, entire topic is discussing the form and there’s not one mention of what it’s about because nobody got that far. The exact kind of person that might take time out of their day to join a class action is not going to watch this garbage. I think it’s good to have this tested, but I straight up don’t trust this guy. Supposedly maximizing views while getting zero information through to anyone is not going to help the cause.
I get the impression that “online coop” is a tag it weighs very, very heavily, along with most of the “open world survival craft” subtags. Terraria, Factorio and some other games you can put 1000 hours into while optionally playing with a friend are absolute poison for the algorithm, they share a lot of tags with stuff like Rust and V Rising even though they’re not remotely the same game.