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1445
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Immersion is tricky, because it is an incredibly subjective thing. At the end of the day, what immersion means (I think) is that the "veil" separating you from the game is incredibly thin and transparent. Think of it as wearing glasses: if a game is un-immersive the lenses are dirty and scratched. You can still see whatever is in front of you, but you're constantly aware of the fact that you're wearing glasses. An immersive game is like wearing perfectly pristine glasses: you forget you're wearing glasses at all and can just take in what's in front of you.

    An immersive game to me is something that successfully manages to both suspend disbelief and sustain the illusion of a living world, letting you mostly forget that it's a pre-programmed game you're interacting with. I always found something like the STALKER games great for this, with their dynamic A-life AI scheduling really selling the whole living world feeling.

  • Yes, but if you try to recommend people to use Mbin you have to explain why they have to call shitposts in meme communities "articles" in "magazines".

  • This is the way.

  • From a day of using it I think it's a better experience overall. The player seems a lot smoother, especially transitioning between PiP and fullscreen and back.

  • I like Boost but it still doesn't have swipe gesture actions, right? I can't live without those anymore.

  • I've had less time than I'd hoped, but I have started to play The Last Express. So far it's a really beautiful, fascinating experience - although somewhat daunting.

    Unlike a traditional point-and-click adventure, The Last Express plays out in real time: the train you're on is constantly moving and the other passengers are too, doing things around the train and having conversations. This is not just an old fashioned classic adventure game or solving puzzles, but actually puts a major emphasis on time and timing. You find a dead body in a compartment? You gotta deal with it somehow, and when and how you do so seem to actually matter, creating some either fully or partly branching narratives (haven't finished it yet). There is no quick save, but there is a "rewind" function if you've messed something up irrevocably, although there are also apparently also multiple endings depending on how you do things. For a game this old, the game world actually feels much more alive and vibrant than many newer titles. I think the nature of the limited scope of a confined space of a train, combined with the smart use of basically overlayed 2D rotoscoped film clips, allowed them to create this truly immersive experience where it really feels like you're actively participating in a movie playing out in real time, not interacting with static NPCs in a video game.

    Finally, I need to pour heaps of praise over the art direction and graphics. Using rotoscoping over live action footage and fully voice acting everything makes this game hold up visually in such a remarkable way for a 1997 release. It's also good phenomenal voice acting - especially for the time - with some really good voice directing. I was incredibly impressed when eavesdropping on a conversation between two women early on, one french and the other English. They would both switch languages occasionally in a natural way, and both use the appropriate accent when speaking their non-native language.

    Absolutely recommend this game to anyone who appreciates games as an art form.

  • Agreed. I know you can technically browse tiktok on PC in a browser, but realistically that is not really how people interact with it.

    As long as Loops doesn't have a phone app, it is not a TikTok replacement.

  • I went from Sync to Summit and it is by far the app that feels best to me, even though it's not a 1-to-1 copy of Sync.

  • Just moved over to PipePipe-X today and really liking it. Player is much smoother, especially transitioning from PiP to full screen and back.

  • PipePipe is still working for me. Theres now also PipePipe-X, apparently

  • Agreed.

  • I was thinking of some kind of tobacco company parallel here.

  • I actually think this post has a lot of solid points, many of which I have argued myself in the past. One thing was funny though. He says:

    Today's Reddit is a phone product. The “just use the web UI” crowd is not representative of mainstream behavior.

    and then several users in the comments were turned off by the Web UI of Lemmy.

  • They've done it forever, it's been part of their initial concept for ages. Lots of the actual old games on there (as the name Good Old Games is derived from) are pre-patched to work on modern machines without setup, often also including community patches if there are any.

  • Got a chuckle out of me.

  • Yes, hence why I said I understand why it needs to remain opt-in. It still doesn't change the fact that it's a burdensome and inconvenient quirk.

    Not that I have a better solution to propose either, mind. Feels like one of those things that just is what it is, an unfortunate downside of the federated design.

  • I always tend to push back on people saying "oh, the Fediverse is so complicated", but small quirks like this make me go "well okay they have a small point".

    I understand why lemmy-federate.com probably has to remain an opt-in service, but man would it be so much smoother if it was just automatic.

  • The format of exclamation point in front like !community_name@instance.tld is the standardized instance-agnostic link format around here! It will let anyone open the community in their own home instance.