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).

I gotta come back to this game.

I played this for a bit last year, while it was still in Early Access, and the vibes this game has are just fantastic. The look and music were just right for my tastes, it’s awesome. Gameplay wise, I didn’t find it immediately as addicting as Vampire Survivors, but still good, so I wanted to check back again after the 1.0 release, although I haven’t so far.

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.

Looking forward to the next final update.

Here it’s apparently done just through a credit card. Does this meet the standards for the German law, I never really looked this stuff up. Dunno if that’s enough for the verification or if there are maybe some stipulations, especially with regard to the GDPR.

It would be great if Valve did something for German users though, so I finally gift my friends shitty porn games again.

There are similar projects for the old Doom releases, Doom: The Way We Remember It (also for Doom 2, TNT:Evilution and Plutonia), if you’re interested in these kinds of mods.

Don’t really agree with the main premise of this video. The solution to the open-world problems of Cyberpunk or any game really isn’t just to remove the open-world. It’s just a different game at that point.

We’re just not at a point yet, where we can make realistic, detailed, open-world environments in games. There’s gonna be some compromise (currently).

Tried VOID/BREAKER, a roguelite FPS, that released into Early Access last week. The game definitely has potential, but needs more time to cook.

You have a grappling hook, that can function like telekinesis powers and throw certain objects at enemies, or hook to specific points in the small combat arenas, although that isn’t is fun as it should be. It’s just too slow and there’s seemingly always something in the way.

Then you can also find mods for your weapons to change and upgrade it. You’re supposed to find synergies for the mods and essentially “break the game”, but most of the time it’s just to make the numbers go higher. I finished a run twice (first time is with some story elements, after that it just loops), and I think one time I got a few mods that worked well together.

The game also has destructible environments, although that’s also kinda lacking, unless you find a bunch of mods to boost it.

So in the end you’ll be going through the same three environments, that look extremely similar, fighting mostly the same enemies, that also look very similar, shooting with mostly basic guns, while lobbing a grenade or some random object at enemies every couple of seconds.

The building blocks are there, like I said, the game has potential, but it’s just not there yet.

Otherwise with Silksongreleasing in like 10 days, my Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous playthrough will have to wait a bit more. I’m not gonna stop in the middle of a run.

It’s been on PC sine March, full release. You can get it in the current Steam Sale for 30% off.