I have two original Steam controllers and I absolutely hated them. The track pads, whereas a cool innovative technology, weren’t good for 90% of my games. I needed that D-pad, or at least a joystick. I hardly used my controllers, and now I just hold onto them as a piece of Valve history.

Mine came with the physical Steam Link box. I bought two of those boxes, so I could use Steam from a couple different places in my home away from my gaming desk. Instead of the controller, I just plugged in a keyboard and mouse to the Steam Link box. They did away with the hardware though, and now it’s just an app on Smart TVs and app stores. So I can’t use my keyboard and mouse without some extra steps.

Meh, not as good as the original series honestly.

FLCL is a quick, fun six part jaunt I love to revisit.

FLCL is now an 18-episode series. They dropped a season 2 and season 3 in 2018. But personally I don’t feel like they were as good as the original series.

They dropped a season 2 and season 3 only a few months apart in 2018. They’re both 6 episodes long, like the original series.

Project A-ko (the first film) is probably one of my favorite anime films of all time. I saw it for the first time when I was a pre-teen back in the '90s and I’ve re-watched it a ton over the last few decades. Something about a super-powerful girl who can run at mach speeds and wreck machines with her bare hands just appealed to me as a kid. It was very inspiring and I always dreamed of growing up to be as strong as her.

I discovered Ghost in the Shell (the first movie) while I was living in Japan in my late teens and it really resonated with me. I got to watch the TV series, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex as it was releasing in Japan. I’m actually re-watching that whole series now, since they’ve announced a new series coming soon. The new Ghost in the Shell show is animated in the unique style of the original manga, so I’m excited to see if it’ll be faithful to the manga.

I discovered a ton of anime while I was living in Japan in the early 2000s, so I have a bunch of classics I regularly re-watch. Excel Saga is another one. I love how chaotic and over-the-top Excel is. The anime is way different from the manga, but it was made when the manga was only partway complete, so it didn’t really have a direction and chose to be chaotic and disjointed instead. Which really works well.

D•N•A² is another classic I love to re-watch periodically. I dunno why I like that one, but it’s a fun comedy/drama romance story.

Golden Boy was such a ridiculous and perverse show, but it encouraged me to continually seek out knowledge and experience, so I enjoy watching that one over and over again. Too bad the original manga creator is a narcissistic, mysoginistic piece of shit. I enjoy both the show and the manga, but learning about that dude really sours his work. It’s no wonder Golden Boy never got more than a 6-episode OVA; most people can’t stand to work with him.

I was living in Japan when Naruto first released and I followed that show religiously. I remember reading articles about this “hidden gem” in Japan that would never be imported to America because of some issue with the rights being tied up in a handful of studios. I guess they got it worked out though, because by the time I moved back to America, Naruto started showing up everywhere. I never actually finished that whole series (I got about 100 episodes into the original series), but I’ve restarted it a handful of times. I plan to finally finish it soon.

I’m currently on my third re-watch of One Piece. At over 1,000 episodes, it’s a slog every time; I’ve spent months slowly picking away at episodes and I’m going to catch up to the latest stuff soon. I also just re-watched the live action series last night, since I’ve recently learned they’ve started filming for season 2.

Finally, the first anime anything I ever watched was a movie called Puss 'n Boots Travels Around the World, the third in a Toei Animation series of Puss 'n Boots films. I grew up watching it on VHS as a little kid and had no idea it was anime until I sought it out as an adult many years later. I have a lot of love and nostalgia for that film, so I re-watch it a lot.

EDIT: The Toei Animation mascot is actually Puss 'n Boots from these old movies. I dunno why I never pieced that together until I was much older.

I care, because what he says and does can drastically affect our lives in a bad way. It’s important to be aware of what’s happening. Ignoring him just gives him free reign to be an awful person without restriction.

Honestly, it’s why most of our government is allowing someone like Trump to do whatever he wants. Because who’s gonna stop them? Who’s going to enforce the rule of law?

Most people just prefer to avoid political BS, so they complain about the way things are, then go back to their lives a few days later and no justice is actually performed. No accountability.

Most of the time, I feel like the #StopMuskSpam campaigns on social media are just teaching us to ignore him so he can get away with more evil acts.

And the fact that he’s supposedly leaving politics feels like he’s just tired of being in the spotlight and is trying to move back to the shadows so he can continue harming us without criticism.

Don’t ignore him; stay in touch with everything he’s doing so you’re informed and can respond appropriately. And that goes for all political figures in control of our lives.

Thank you! 🥳

Like I mentioned, this game was released for April Fools Day 2023, so of course the trailer had to troll everyone. 🤣

I was excited for this game, even had it wishlisted on Steam for a while now. But its rating on Steam is mostly negative right now.

Most of the reviews are saying this is an incomplete mess, with bad audio levels, cringey voice acting, incoherent/confusing plot, and awful graphics regardless of what setting you use.

I still have high hopes for this game, as it’s in early access right now. But I’m not gonna buy it for a while. I’ll give the developers some time to fix it up.

I have this in my Steam library, but I haven’t played it yet. Guess I need to install it and see what its all about.

Aaand… this is my cue to go to bed. It’s 6:30 AM here and I haven’t slept a wink yet. I’ve been up all night being super productive, as is my M.O. as a retired night owl.

Far Cry 6 was a huge letdown, I hated it.

I felt the same way. It was even more disappointing because Epic Games got their claws into it, so it released as an exclusive title. I had to wait a year before I could play it on Steam, and it didn’t even live up to the hype!

I recently re-installed Far Cry 6 and a friend and I have been replaying it in co-op mode. It’s actually a lot more fun than I remember. I don’t know if it received a bunch of patches/updates since I last tried it, or if I was just super-critical after Far Cry 5. But it’s not a horrible game. At least not yet; we’re only a couple hours into it so far.

Video games and collecting Sonic the Hedgehog comics are my two expensive hobbies; I don’t spend money on much else besides essentials (food, shelter), so I can afford to splurge a bit on these hobbies. I am not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but the US military took really good care of me for 20 years and continues to provide for me in retirement, so I’m able to live a pretty relaxed life now.

If you somehow dont have Metro 2033 yet, you can still add it to your library for free today.

I saw that it was free for 48 hours! I already have the whole Metro franchise, but I’ve informed my gaming friends about the deal this morning. Thanks for spreading the news!

One caveat to my Steam library is that I always try to wait for deals before I buy; I rarely buy anything at full price. I don’t want to think about how much money I might’ve spent if I bought everything at full price! 😱

I really like video games. And I’m retired young(ish), so I have all the time in the world to game now.

Plus, I have a (relatively new) blog dedicated to introducing games to people, which encourages me to play through a variety of games in my library. It’s basically just archiving my “Random Screenshots of my Games” posts in !games@lemmy.world.

And according to the SteamDB, I’ve played 26% of my games. The last time I checked, it was at 38%, but that was maybe 2,000 games ago. I need to keep working through my library!

Oh damn. I’ve spent $30,359.76 on Steam in the 17 years I’ve had an account. And I just passed 4,000 games in my Steam library within the last month. That checks out.

It’s not that bad. They have three difficulty settings: Normal, Black Mesa, and Hard. I played on Normal and I haven’t really struggled anywhere. I think I’ve only died once in my whole gameplay, and it was when I was fighting off waves of Marines flooding a single large space that I couldn’t leave. I’m assuming “Black Mesa” is their suggested difficulty level.

Thanks for your support! My posts originally started as just a random screenshot or two of the latest game I was playing. But I always hated how people just talked about specific video games like everyone on the thread was intimately familiar with them. Especially if it was a game that sounded interesting to me. I wanted to know more about it!

So I decided to use my screenshots as a way to introduce newcomers to each game; give them a little intro to the plot and gameplay so they’d be interested in trying it out for themselves. Or to remind previous players of a great game they hadn’t played in a while.

By the time I started writing long-form blog entries on video games, I already had a bit of a series going and I didn’t want to suddenly change the title of my numbered posts. So they are “random” screenshots of my games, but they’re also a spoiler-free in-depth exploration of each game.

One day, I plan to go back and re-do some of my earlier posts so I can actually have in-depth discussion on those games too.

I’ve also been archiving my posts on a personal blog, in case any of them get taken down or blocked here for any reason. If anyone’s interested in checking out my history of posts, it’s a bit easier to review the archive at that link.

They put a ton of effort into remaking Xen so that it blends better into the gameplay and story. I think I read somewhere that Half-Life took about an hour to slog through Xen, but Black Mesa, despite having around 4 hours of Xen gameplay, was actually really enjoyable.

Here’s a bonus screenshot for you. I really like this image, just because it’s sort of an ominous “quiet before the storm” shot. Seeing both scientists watch you with silent anticipation as you’re about to cause a world-altering event in that next room.

I learned “perkele” from Scandinavia and the World. Although from various context on that site, I always thought it was the equivalent of saying “fuck.”