Eric Tatara

GOG has been fairly anti-censorship, when they remove games from sale it's usually a publisher decision and not a censorship thing

I do wish they were better curators in terms of allowing games on their platform, but at least it's nice they're not bending to this particular pressure

they probably could have done better for a bundle of games facing censorship; Abaddon: Princess of the Decay, which I got from GOG, was one that was shadow banned on itchio and was never allowed on Steam to begin with

and has (behind a toggle, admittedly) Boys' Love and... other stuff

Freedom to buy games Some games vanish. Not because they broke the law but because someone decided they should

I was wondering what GOG's response would be to the nonsense itchio and Steam have been dealing with re: censorship and payment processors

a free game bundle is fun to see

www.gog.com/en/game/free...

They're all good examples of games that are about a particular thing, and then created a mechanic where managing a relevant kind of endurance is critical to your success.

White Knuckle and Peak both engage with first person perspective climbing in almost completely opposite ways, and both are great

I like fear being the "health"; if it gets too high, characters enter a buffed berserk mode until it either subsides or they pass out from fear, losing a heart.

Fainting too many times causes despair, which partly means they might leave the party, and then if their bar fills again, they die.

Abaddon: Princess of the Decay is an erotic survival horror RPG inspired by Lovecraft and Sweet Home. Each character has a fear bar, a number of hearts, and potentially a status effect, and monsters increase fear when they attack or trigger a phobia. Injury and poison are status effects.

Peak is a co-op survival climbing game where you have a universal stamina bar that represents both stamina and health. Hunger, injuries, encumbrance, poison, and cold/heat all take fractions of your stamina bar, limiting your ability to climb while a freezing fog slowly chases you up the Peak

White Knuckle is a speed climbing survival horror game that involves managing stamina between two hands; each hand turns red as it's used to hold on to climbable objects.

Monsters and certain obstacles can kill you, but they don't seem to cause lasting harm if you manage to escape them in time

it's been interesting to play White Knuckle, Peak, and Abaddon: Princess of the Decay back to back, because they're all flavors of survival games without traditional hit point systems

if nothing else, it's nice to have an excuse to revisit System Shock 2

someone shared with me an article about dndgpt, and I was glad the author's conclusion was that they wouldn't do it again and that the experience felt sterile

like, yeah, I don't want an adventure tailor-made to my character, with every roll being a success because the AI doesn't understand failure

I've been trying to build the habit to legitimately learn art -- I think I may have caught covid again a couple weeks ago, as it's thrown off my energy and made it difficult to do more than daily chore stuff lately

but AI ain't gonna be the shortcut to do it, in any case

I saw I had that phone update that included AI to turn "simple drawings into (whatever)"

and I hated it, but it's even more insidious if it was being advertised as being for kids, and not just creatively bankrupt adults

seeing bad board game news every couple of days, thanks to the tariffs, is like the opposite of a cherry on top

It was something I appreciated when reading Metamorphosis Alpha 1e, and something I enjoy about OSR-adjacent stuff where cool stuff doesn't come from leveling up, but from adventuring and acquiring it.

Gotta quest for it.

playing Monster Hunter: World made me appreciate again games with "external" power scaling; stuff like System Shock, Thief, and Subnautica where your character's growth is tied to what equipment they have access to.

this was following a stint with Balatro and Path of Achra, and man, if both aren't completely different flavors of turn-based number-go-up

I prefer Path of Achra, but only by a slight margin, Balatro is incredibly well designed

aside from surviving, I was trying to find a new hyperfixation after the massive Persona binge, and after a brief binge of Zero Escape (999 / Virtue's Last Reward)

I've settled on Monster Hunter: World and Grim Dawn, with a side of prepping for Shadow of the Erdtree

good deep, hearty action RPGs

Happy late new year to you too Raul, and thank you, I appreciate it!

The work you've been doing on your game projects has been really inspiring. I'm still working on core principle stuff.

I'm also starting to learn to draw, but that's neither here nor there. I grabbed SuchArt on Steam, been screwing around with that kind of thing.

I'd like to grow as a person and gain some new skills and/or hobbies this year, that would be ideal.

reflecting on how I missed a Twitter-esque RPG dogpile yesterday because I was playing Cosmic Encounter with people, and I guess I should try and do that more now

ah, happy new year, lol. Hopefully it exceeds expectations...

Musing on Atlus's Kazuhisa Wada describing Persona as "deadly poison wrapped in a sweet coating", and I kinda dig that -- mainstream stylish coat of paint, impactful striking content underneath

I feel like artpunk stuff is kinda like that -- old school stuff wrapped in popping art, it's fun

RE1 AND DINO CRISIS HAVE BEEN FREED FROM PS+ PRISON!!! YOU CAN BUY THEM ON THEIR OWN WITHOUT A SUBSCRIPTION!!! YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THEM FOR FREE IF YOU ALREADY BOUGHT THEM ON PS3!!! GO GO GO SHOW CAPCOM WHAT WE WANT PROVE TO THEM WE'RE NOT JUST TALK! LET'S PROVE RE2 AND 3 DESERVE TO LIVE AGAIN TOO!

ahh yeah, the only other game I can think of with that specific a trick is Fallout 4, since they apparently had Stephen Russell record a long list of names for Codsworth to call the player

totally makes sense that voice acting makes this challenging, though

come to think of it, I feel like the only game that really did this is Fable? that I can remember

seems like most games go the opposite route; named your character? wrong, you are henceforth J.C. Denton / Joker / The Courier etc.

oh, I guess "no politics" is the difference this time in this debate

it's hard for games to not be political when you're defining villains and targets of violence

I find it really interesting how political games can be, especially sometimes in ways you don't expect or realize

I don't check Bluesky very often these days, but I see I accidentally happened to check during the monthly "OSR = Nazis" debate

excited for whichever new term springs up to try and replace it again; I'm partial to "crawlers"

my current rankings:

P4 Golden > P3 Reload > P5 Royal > P5 Strikers > P4 Dancing > P4 Arena > P3 Dancing / P5 Dancing

we've only played the one version of Persona 3, but I'm curious to try Portable and FES, given how much I like Golden

I think the biggest indicator that we've gone too deep into Persona now, is having seen every story cutscene in Persona 4: Dancing All Night (after P5R, P4G, and P3R)

still a bit shocked how much I like modern Persona, but it's given us a lot to talk and think about lately

My partner and I have been working our way through Persona. We played through all of Persona 5 Royal, and then went backward to Persona 4 Golden.

I really liked P5R's music and UI style, but I can't believe I missed P4G, which hits a lot more of my buttons than I expected it to.