General Game Discussion thread for April 2026

[Zed Clampet]

UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

I need better reading skills. I got this game called the Bus, which was supposed to include a 1 to 1 recreation of Berlin. I thought that was really cool. So I immediately set off in free play hoping to pick up passengers and never take them where they wanted to go. I'm staying on the same road, and I'm not seeing any bus stops, so I decide to turn at the next light and try my luck on a different street. I turn right and immediately slam into an invisible wall. "I must be on the edge of town," I think, so I slam into the cars behind me because there's no other way to turn around, and head back down the original road, but I still don't see any bus stops, so I think, "Maybe it's because I'm on the edge of town," so this time I turn left...and immediately slam into an invisible wall. "Wow, Berlin is much smaller than I thought." So I go back to the store page and it says, "1 to 1 recreation of Berlin BUS LINES". Oh.

 

[Johnway]

Path of exile - i decided to knuckle down and complete the last 12 maps i needed. So we dinged 28 challenges and i'm cashing out. theres no point playing any more as it's unlikely i'll reach 36 and as mentioned before i have idea for head cosmetic.

So after getting it, mixed feelings. Its alright, but meh i think after the amount of effort and time i spent playing it i think its time to avoid the next league. Considering the connection issues, i think its not worth playing the next league.

What next? well, i'll play an RTS game and finish some indies games before going back to an action game proper. As promised i'll play Homeworld remastered and see how thats like. Although i do have a taste for total annihilation which i never played (played supreme commander series and found it meh tbh).

 

[Frindis]

Dark Souls 3 boss fight, only first phase, I got scared, mind melted, somehow I managed to avoid a heart attack and hit something...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRCDU0nxYMQ

 

[Johnway]

So i fired up Homeworld remastered edition and i'm intrigued and very intimidated by the complexities of the game. its the 360 environments, understanding the controls, the formulations/complex tactics and lack of a pause option. The SP campaign seems to be quite interesting and fingers crossed it eases me into it. i might need to read up on some guides and videos to understand the mechanics etc.

 

[Zloth]

Yeah, the melee thing is in the main game, too, though I still don't understand why it affects all angles of attack when just one is blocked. <shrug>

It does also say that the game automatically picks the type of melee attack for you but you can pick it manually as well. Maybe the game sometimes picks a kick automatically even if it can't hit where a punch might be able to land or vice versa.

It has changed since that writing and automatically picks 'kick' most of the time now.

Also, mechs with no arms and 4 legs kick with both front legs at the same time, doubling damage! My 55 ton Scorpion kicks harder than an AC/20!

 

[Zed Clampet]

I just thought of something that might be kind of funny, maybe.

I made a brief opening cinematic for a game I'm probably never going to make. I'm using pictures of my game characters. So the thing is, the AI video generator is extremely conservative. That's either an intentional attempt to keep it on the rails or maybe I'm doing it wrong, not sure. But if I type "the woman looks left. Her expression immediately changes to joyous surprise," then I'm lucky if the character in the video does much of anything, and if it does, it often does the whole thing in slow motion.

What I have to do is tell it a very descriptive story filled with very good and dramatic reasons for the movement I'm asking for. To make matters even funnier, I've found the only way to insure strong facial expressions is to use a training that someone made to solve this problem and is triggered, for some reason, by prompts indicating a mental breakdown. Also, I've found it often necessary to repeat parts of the prompts where I'm telling the AI not to do something that I know it's going to want to do.

Me being me, I've just been telling it whatever, and it's occurred to me that it might be funny for me to actually narrate the videos in a deadpan voice. For instance, here's my prompt for the woman looking left and being happily surprised:

Immediately, instantly, she jerks her head ultra very quickly to the left because she hears the explosive sound of a commercial airliner crashing in her backyard. A penny! She sees a penny! It's a penny that is out of the picture and invisible! There is not a penny in the picture at all! The invisible penny is in the direction that she is looking. Immediately, instantly upon turning her head, she sees the invisible penny that is not in the picture. What an amazing surprise! She is an obsessive-compulsive neurotic coin collector and she loves pennies more than anything! Instantly, immediately upon seeing the invisible penny she has a nervous breakdown and is overcome with joyous wonder. She holds this pose of joyous wonder persistently forever.

Edit: Since writing that prompt, I've discovered that telling it that things are invisible doesn't actually do anything. I'm guessing that's because when captioning its training videos you would never mention something that couldn't be seen in the picture. Or maybe you need to give an explanation for why something is invisible. Don't know.

Also, that's a terrible prompt that only the truest of morons would use. Probably no one else prompts that way. It just works for me.

 

[Pifanjr]

My friend and I continued our Barotrauma game yesterday. We reached the start of the last biome last time, which is completely empty of outposts, so we need to go around activating beacon stations and defeating abyss creatures so new outposts can be established.

We decided to go for a 4 hop journey to an abandoned outpost, which led us past an abyss creature and beacon station as well. I was a bit worried about our supplies, but it all went really smoothly.

When we left the abandoned outpost we saw a new outpost had spawned on the very first hop we did, but it belongs to the rebels who hate us and will shoot on sight, which was a bit of a shame. However, after the next hop back another outpost spawned on the second hop from the Coalition, the other faction that we're allied with, so that worked out really well for us.

We spent all of our money on upgrades and supplies, accepted a couple of missions and set out and this is where it all went wrong.
Our sub has 5 guns, 3 on the bottom and 2 on the top. 4 of those are always manned by bots, but the top right one is a railgun and the ammo for that is quite expensive and the bots don't distinguish between ammo types and enemies, so that one is usually unmanned.
Which is not usually a problem, but on this specific occasion we happened to be in a narrow cave going to the top right when we ran right into a swarm of spinelings. Since I had no room to maneuver and no one was on the railgun, we smacked right into the full swarm and they obliterated our hull in seconds, leaving us stranded with all bottom guns stuck on the floor of the cave.

We eventually managed to kill them, but not before losing well over half of our crew and requiring me to swim outside to shoot the last one with my newly crafted handgun. Since we just spent all our money it's going to take a while to buy replacements too, which is really not ideal when we just reached the most dangerous biome.