Boy Boy

Neon White, Cyberhook, and Crumble are all excellent, though you might be looking for a more traditional platformer.

Blue Fire is decent and definitely worth checking out while it’s $4 right now.

Regarding social media feeds, I have mixed opinions, because you’re right about the echo chamber, but I also am only still on any mainstream platform for the memes, and I only want it to show me memes, which it wouldn’t do if not for personalized recommendations.

As for games, I don’t want my recommendations to be dominated by whatever has the biggest marketing budget and can take over my feed. I mostly play indie games, and I think if my store page wasn’t personalized, I wouldn’t see nearly as many small games as I do.

Would you be willing to share why you don’t like the “corpo spying”? I personally never understood - an online service has to know your requests in order to serve the results to you, and keeping revords of those requests is the only way to have personalized recommendations, which I would rather have than be served ads for games (or music or whatever) I’ll never even consider.

I haven’t played Dark Souls specifically, but in Hollow Knight (+Silksong), Elden Ring, Lies of P, and Sekiro, I usually felt like if I really hit a wall, I could just explore another path for a while until I hit a wall there, then repeat until I ended up coming back to the first path, whereupon my stronger abilities gave me the forgiveness I needed to beat the first boss within a few tries.

Sometimes I did hit a wall of a boss with nowhere else to go, and I did have to git gud, but I’ve found that those tend to be more interesting and fun to learn than side bosses are. But I usually enjoy that process. If you don’t, I do feel there’s no reason to not get a “give me a gun” option like in Another Crab’s Treasure (or mod one in yourself). I never understood people policing the fun of single player games.

^a notable exception to my enjoyment of learning bosses would be that bitchass wizard frog in Silksong from Bilewater he deserved the cheese I used^

VeggieTales is giving them too much credit - there’s good moral lessons in there! (And the creator said all the botanically-fruit male veggies are canonically trans??)

ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air for saying Kirk’s killer was right-wing and that they’re trying to use Kirk’s death for political points.

Full story Machinima style series are rare, but if you just want heavy editing and a somewhat coherent plot as opposed to nearly unedited gameplay, Alpharad and LarsBurrito might work. Alpharad heavily edits his videos and usually writes a script to go over the gameplay that does a good job pulling a story out of the footage. LarsBurrito does a similar style, but also often does themed playthroughs where he writes the script to flavor the playthrough to fit whatever character he’s roleplaying as.

If you want actual story but are ok with significantly less editing, Mianite is a series I rewatch every once in a while in a similar way you describe. The scripted story doesn’t really start picking up until a significant way through season 1, but there is still enough conflict between the different players to make it more than just a Let’s Play.

Indeed. The sources I’ve read seem to lay blame with games not usually patenting mechanics (which apparently is all patent officers look at for prior art, not other games), meaning it needs active challenging to be thrown out.

PocketPair is based in Japan, which is where the previous, more directly problematic patents have been filed mid-litigation. While there is clearly prior art for the US patent, it isn’t quite as comically broad as the Japan ones, and since Japan doesn’t seem to care about prior art, those remain the most concerning to me.

In the US, yes. In Japan, it would appear such a concept does not exist.

Yeah but not raw milk straight from the udder (unless you enjoy salmonella), letting it dribble down your chin and get in your beard (unless that’s what does it for you I guess, you do you)

My main gripe with TLJ is that the editing is a total mess. Multiple scenes lose continuity between shots. The most egregious example is the milk scene, which in addition to being gross and unnecessary, was clearly jammed in between two shots meant to be continuous. Rey and Luke start walking down a skinny peninsula, no space cow in sight, then hard cut to space cow and Luke milking it, then hard cut back to the end of the peninsula and Luke setting down his stuff.

I found one for NieR: Automata at a used bookstore that has maps, a ton of concept art, and a short story.

Race condition

Ahem, don’t you mean AAAA

There are thousands upon thousands of indie games with neither of those mechanics…

Any two party system is the mathematically-inevitable result of first-past-the-post voting, nothing more or less.

I’m not saying it isn’t insanely hard (actually I mentioned that fact twice), I’m just trying to point out that Steam gives developers more tools for visibility than any storefront that exists, with most storefronts giving no tools whatsoever. Any game with no marketing budget selling enough to support a multiple-person development team, when they have to compete directly with AAA games, is impressive for both the developer and the platform.

If you want to advocate for improvements and change, you can’t just ignore the positive things that already exist.

~Also you clearly didn’t read the page about the update visibility rounds, because those have nothing to do with popularity and are completely randomized regarding who among the recently-updated games gets a spot on the front page. In fact, your game gets rotated off that spot once you’ve gotten 1 million impressions.~

1. Blatantly untrue, as update visibility rounds are one of several marketing tools Steam gives you that can put your game on the front page for free, regardless of popularity.

2. Kitfox Games has published a guide (one among many you can find on the internet) on how to successfully market a game with no advertising budget. While their existing audience definitely helped, and as they mention, it takes a significant amount of time and effort, they do not spend actual money on sponsorships or advertising. This would not be a viable strategy on any other storefront, save maybe Epic, though Epic still gives fewer tools than Steam.

Steam has been coasting on the fact that everyone shoots themselves in the foot, sure, but you should look into the unparalleled level of “free” (30% cut) marketing support Steam gives to developers. On no other platform could developers end up with the visibility they achieve on Steam with nothing more than very strategic timing and good social media presence. It’s still insanely hard, but the fact that it’s even possible to compete with zero marketing budget against AAA companies speaks volumes.