You ain’t got to buy the game on there, you can get codes at other retailers

You actually can’t buy the vast majority of Steam games elsewhere. 18,800 games released new this year on Steam. Do you know any legit retailers that even sell 18,000 games total?

It’s something I’ve been noticing with all the routine seasonal complaining about sales on Steam not being worth looking at anymore… Sure, I don’t only buy from Steam, but I do buy more from Steam than elsewhere, because those games–good games–just are not other places to be bought. So on the one hand, I see a lot of value from Steam sales and people shouldn’t dis them so out of hand, but on the other, yeah Steam clearly controls the market. And that’s not even getting into how Steam deliberately reduces the value-to-the-devs of your off-Steam purchases, so buying elsewhere keeps your purchase and reviews from helping the dev earn much needed Steam visibility.

So it’s far from as simple as “You can just buy codes elsewhere”.

Combat Complex

Twin-stick shooter against various bugs and robots with some ARPG gearing, and the action here is fantastically tight with probably three key factors:

• Enemies target you but hit each other, so you manage their attacks to help your fighting instead of just staying out of trouble.
• “Frenzy” orb pickups, which act a bit like combo meter fuel except instead of chaining hits you make frequent choices about whether an orb drop is worth chasing, keeping you close to danger.
• Instant gun switching with overheating instead of reloading, so you fight hard and switch constantly between your three guns to keep any one from overheating while getting the best out of their specific properties.

I play a lot of twin-stick and top-down shooters, and this does a great job mixing the arcade twin-stick feel of high intensity fending off a swarm with tactical top-down dungeon crawling elements, and it’s just really special feeling to play. The core action feels not just well designed but like it was made just for me, and I’m genuinely glad someone made it (or is making it, since it’s early access). Plus, it’s extraction style instead of being a roguelite, so you’re always right at the best action while still getting procedural levels, so each run is a little different.

the EA is also missing a lot of content that isn’t ready yet

Sure, but there’s also plenty to explore, especially for people who haven’t played PoE1 and have to learn how things work from scratch. Given you don’t pay extra for EA and premium stuff like stash space you buy goes to both PoE1 and 2, you get quite a bit for your early access ticket.

But probably more important that early access characters and stuff aren’t available out of early access, so you are explicitly playing temp characters. Fine if one treats their early/seasonal characters as temp characters anyway, but someone else might not want to play characters with no future after early access.

Yeah, the insistence on trading as a key part of the game (despite the garbage trading system) absolutely murders your loot, which is just a huge drag in a loot game.

Global trading means drop rates and gear quality have to be kept down across the entire playerbase, so stinginess is built in deeply on top of GGG’s inherent worship of time-wasting and RNG.

BTW, PoE2 separates skill gems from gear and removes color gem slot restrictions, so that at least frees you of the way PoE1 needed a drop to be good and to get good links and to get the colors you needed on those links. On the other hand, the simplified gem system is missing some life and fun. You don’t even level gems by using them anymore. You just burn a higher level gem drop to level a gem you already have.

No, at least six months is the plan.

It does have a price in a sense, but that price also gets you that exact value in premium currency, so you don’t actually pay anything extra for early access, you’re just required to buy that much currency to open the doors.

I used to be very patientgamer, but my patience model changed after finding again and again that buying late meant devs had wholly moved on from a game by the time I got it, and would hardly ever do basic needed fixes, things that needed to have been talked about earlier in the project. I also noticed how some early access sales would take years for the price to go up and then back down again for what amounted to only a few dollars of savings. Savings that, as I watch games I’m interested in fail in obscurity over and over, I don’t feel quite right about strictly withholding from the few devs taking chances on such projects for me, on top of not being around to try and help the project deliver a better game to players.

So, now I do buy some games in early access or even newly released, where I can poke the dev while they are still around, and my patience includes waiting for games to get through those after-buying growing pains instead of just waiting for them to drop into the discount bins, mostly forgotten by their devs and players both.

I’m still generally more strictly price-patient on most anything larger scale, both by devs and by audience.

Get a controller with underside buttons. I also consider stick-clicks an abomination, but it’s great now that there are under-buttons we can hard-remap to L3 and R3.

8BitDo Ultimate Bluetooth controller has some awful ergonomics on several things, but the underbuttons are excellent examples.

The slightly more bulbous wings on the 360 controller actually do a lot for ergonomics, but it’s very hand-sized based. For me, the 360 is almost perfect in how the wings tuck into my palms. With the controller about 6 or so inches in front of me, my arms are at a natural angle with wrists straight and the controller is securely held without even a finger on it, and I can press any button without even having to brace it. Take even a little of those wings away, and that gets lost, and edges instead of the smooth roundness get annoying. My partner on the other hand, would need a smaller controller to get that same feel or to cross-thumb the dpad as easily as I do. As much as I originally preferred the symmetry of the playstation layout, I have to give the nod to the xbox layout for being able to dpad with the right thumb.

We desperately need controller makers to stop acting like controllers are one size fits all, when that’s not even close to true.

Jeez, the laziness of reviewing it based just on the store page. It’s been in early access for like five years, getting better every update, and not one person there can even bother to actually play the game they recommend to others?

Cactus is probably the single best mastery/arcade style twin-stick shooter out there. Don’t let the cute looks fool you, while this game is solid to just enjoy, the chaining and level design offer great challenge if you want it, and the way each character changes both the basic play and the way you chain a level show a just fantastic design level.

It usually goes $5 in sales, but it’s still crazy we can get games that good for so little.