Probably not worth it solo for $70/70€ right now. Gameplay is still supposed to be good, and while the story is supposed to be not as cringe as 3, you still get the outdated meme references and “fellow kids” stuff.

If you got some buddies to play coop with, maybe? Chatting on Discord, making fun of the game, usually makes everything a lot better.

Performance can be terrible though, but if you got a top-of-the-line PC you can possibly just brute-force it.

That’s been a thing for a while now. Basically all the big, modern games, that are also on current gen consoles want SSDs (some are just SSD recommended on minimum specs, but required for higher specs). BG3, Cyberpunk, many of the Playstation Studios games, some Xbox studios stuff, etc.

Hardware Unboxed recently did a video, if the drive speed matters (mainly about PCIe SSD speed) and tested with HDDs, SATA SSDs and NVME SDDs. They found that some games will give you a notice if they detect an HDD, but almost all will still run, even if the specs say an SSD is required. Most of the time, the initial load times will be loooooong with an HDD, but otherwise the games still work, although a few had graphical glitches because of slow asset streaming. Once you get to SATA SSDs, it starts to matter a lot less, and with an NVME you just want the biggest drive for your budget (like <10% difference for the initial load times, if at all, between PCIe 3.0 and 5.0).

As we get more and more games that use DirectStorage (or similar technologies), the number of games that truly require SSDs will most likely go up, until then HDDs should still be fine, as long as you’re ok with slow load times and maybe some more texture pop-in.

That’s what I was thinking myself.

Nintendo might have still tried something, even with just the mod chips, just to try and strongarm someone into submission. However, distributing the games just seems incredibly dumb to me, and might be the main reason they were able to get this settlement.

So looks like I forgot about at least one bench.

Dunno which one of those you mean, that can be made permanently free, or if there’s even others I forgot or haven’t found myself.

Worst bossrun so far was probably the judge which was only like 2 screens when you think about it.

I think you can theoretically get the fleas to move in right before the boss room, but I don’t know how many of them you need to find for that to happen. Maybe killing the boss is also a trigger, so in that case this won’t work.

I do feel that the game was created with players like me in mind, someone who did all pantheon, steal soul mode as well as all achievements in hk but is a little bit rusty from the long wait.

I feared they might do something like this, but don’t think they did. I finished Hollow Knight twice, last time was almost six years ago, never did any Pantheon or challenge stuff, same with other Metroidvanias. The game is difficult, but don’t think it’s unreasonable (I’m also in Act 2, maybe the beginning).

like benches that are locked behind a paywall, which you have to pay every time you want to access the bench

I found this in one small area, which was probably done for the flavor, since it makes thematic sense there, but otherwise it’s always been permanent unlocks.

I think the game is difficult, probably a bit more difficult than the first game (which I haven’t played in over 5 years, so I might be wildly off), but I don’t find it unreasonable.

I know a lot of the time it’s my fault that I died, because I’m someone who likes to trade damage with enemies, which just isn’t really possible in this game, but I can’t stop doing it.

As for runbacks, I think there are a few weird ones, that can be terrible, depending on if you found/unlocked the nearest bench, but otherwise I don’t remember anything truly awful.

Started Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, after I finished Circle of the Moon last week. It looks and sounds worse than CotM, but it’s a lot better than that game, because it doesn’t play like ass.

Some other meh stuff is still there, like the game is kinda easy, and exploring the map is an absolute chore for the first half (maybe two thirds), until you finally get the means to open up all the blocked paths and get access to proper teleporters. Still better than double-tap to sprint though.

I haven’t finished the game yet, I might be near the end, but didn’t make it before Hollow Knight: Silksong, which I gotta play first.

I’d say get Hollow Knight first, just because you can probably get it cheaper. After you’re done with that, and you like it, get Silksong. It’s very unlikely if you don’t like one you’ll like the other or vice versa, the games are pretty similar, and they have a couple of things that could be called “polarizing” (like the map).

Unless you want to be part of the “current discussion”, exploring the still new game, maybe you have friends who also play, and you can talk about things you find, then get Silksong.

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.

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.

Looking forward to the next final update.

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.

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.