I feel like I did when I impulsively splurged on Motor Town because it clicked with me so well, which is a very confident feeling of no regrets. This game has already blown me away with the clarity of its gameplay vision.

I hope resource use can come a bitttt down on the deck but its fine it is an absolutely perfect handheld game in gameplay.

Oh damn I never knew that, see in games like that I never even bother to jump in a sailboat when I see one because I know chances are it is going to be lame and make me sad and the sailboat wasn’t put there as a drivable vehicle to make me happy but rather the programmers just made it so you could drive all the boats even if some of them were painfully boring and oversimplified to the point of being an utter waste of time and honestly kind of a middle finger to sailing. Like Saints Row style comedic games should just have the character go down into the cabin, come back up with a chainsaw, cut the mast down and then turn on the outboard to make it into a motor boat, that would be way less horrendous than programmers spending a bunch of time animating totally fake sails that just magically spin the wind direction every which way they go (it hurts my brain a little just trying to explain it from the standpoint of actually understanding the very barebones basics of sailing).

I have always had a bit of a grudge against Rockstar for not having their sailboats behave like sailboats in their games. They absolutely have the money and they have shown the aptitude to make mechanically superb focused games like the midnight club series or more specifically the table tennis game they made that is… just a damn fucking good table tennis game.

Rockstar could have made their sailboats behave like sailboats at least in GTA 5 and when people realized that was awesome they could have stupendously easily turned it into it’s own entire separate sailing game built on the GTA engine… from there small rowable sloops for inland waterways useful for running rum covertly to unexpected and unwatched places where cargo could be discretely offloaded would naturally slot PERFECTLY into a Red Dead Redemption 2 dlc focused on swamps and waterways….

…sigh

No excuses game developers, learn to sail, go play Pancake Sailor, I will not accept this level of extreme sailing ignorance going forward. Sailing is one of the dopest skills humans have ever mastered (and is certainly one sentient aliens on ocean planets all over the universe must have mastered as well, certainly before becoming a spacefaring race if that is even possible right?) and unlike space video games, the moment to moment skill of sailing a ship is fundamentally rich in sensory feedbacks and necessary minute control corrections.

Dredge looks pretty awesome. I have to say though, I get just as hot and bothered about the idea of a game like Ships At Sea/Fishing Barents Sea .

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1266540/Ships_At_Sea/?curator_clanid=40205009

I want both lol.

I will say Windbound looks like it kind of launched with some frustrating game bugs and confused players a bit, but it is at a crazy steep discount right now and looks like it is worth buying. It has real sailing mechanics as far as I can tell and involves the exploration and navigation aspect of sailing that I love.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1162130/Windbound/

Sail Forth also looks like another dime a dozen pirate ship games with ships that don’t act at all like a sailing ship but rather just look cool with animated sails and drive like a tank… but the sailing mechanics are actually apparently really deep and fun. They are arcadey, but the spirit is real sailing.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1031460/Sail_Forth/

I was so fucking hyped when I realized Valheim actually has the fundamentals of real sailing in it, certainly I had already fallen in love with Valheim at that point, discovering the sailboats weren’t half-asssed just reaffirmed to me in that moment that the lifelong partner I had been looking for and never finding in Minecraft was here, waiting for me, with a beard and torch. This whole time it wasn’t me for being weird and always getting really disconnected from the core gameplay loop of Minecraft after the initial rush of revisiting the game after awhile ran off in the way others who liked the game as much as me didn’t seem to… and this whole time I wondered what was wrong with ME.

Valheim whispered into my ear “honey, you KNOW what you want and I am going to give it to you” and shattered that whole complex in an instant when that shitty raft popped into the water in front of me after I crafted it for the first time.

Hey sorry if that was a long reach

joke rimshot sound

Oh gosh if I wasn’t broke right now I would instabuy Sailwind lol, it looks exactly like what my heart has wanted from sailing games forever, but have always gotten arcadey, shallow action experiences that use the theming of pirate ships as a thin veneer to mechanics that have nothing to with sailing.

I don’t know when I will get Sailwind but when I do I will play the ever living shit out of it.

edit well I watched too many Sailwind videos because I was curious and then suddenly out of nowhere I smelled something weird and I realized I had in my excitement for imagining being able to stack cargo in my sailing ship like a kid in a sandbox playing with toys that I had already lit a $20 bill on fire with a lighter I had unconsciously pulled out of my pocket and at that point it would have been a waste not to buy Sailwind so shrugs no way I can win I guess, you got me corned again life.

Well, video games are a good distraction from being hungry at least!

yeah the free pancake game I linked is very very simple in scope,it isnt meant to be a main game or anything (marineverse cup is the nonvr “main” version I think).

The sailing model is good though and the simplicity is a perfect intro into sailing skills, which I think is the point. Think of it as a simple meditative idle game where you learn a very real skill.

I am interested in trying other companies sailing games like sailwind, sail forth (arcadey but apparently true sailing in spirit) and maybesome of the more expensive ones at somepoint idk.

I think I will get marineverse cup for $5 on sale but idk I havent played it yet and other sailing games look really good too (sailwind thoooo).

What I can say for sure is Pancake Sailor is perfect at what it is trying to be and it is a pleasure.

I would love to hear other’s recommendations on games with deep and nuanced true sailing mechanics, it is almost impossible to deduce from the outside with a game even if sailboats are everywhere in the theme. I also dont vibe with sailing for the intense racing vibes, more for the experience of wandering, that is what a sunfish always represented to me growing up, I could care less about zooming around a specific track, small pancake sailors are the mountainbikes of nearshore choppy but moderate inland coastal waters.

I really wanted to live in the timeline where I grew into adulthood in a society that accepted neurodivergent people and loved them beyond a superficial performance of acceptance.

Instead I got one full of people that poorly hide their disgust for the way I stim and get excited in conversations about a current hyperfocus under a myriad of disguises, I guess the latest one being that I am clearly too weird and inchoherent to be human, the AI thing being an unconscious way to gatekeep what “human” and “non-human” conversations look like.

I struggle not to hate people like you, you destroy my life over and over again simply because I don’t make sense to you. Then you get upset when people like me react aggressively because it isn’t your fault you didn’t allow space for a mind like mine to exist, how could you have known?

Maybe you could work on listening better so you aren’t so incredibly lost when it comes to evaluating whether a human being or algorithm is talking. I will not defend myself, I am wordy, annoying, opinionated and holy fuck my sentences run on and on but my oh my it is insulting to your own intelligence to lazily pass my words off as maybe AI generated you fool.

Do you have a mod pack you like or a list you have made?

Motor Town - I am now on the top 10 leaderboard for taxi driving because I play on my steam deck lots. It is perfect for it. Sometimes it gets the steam deck too hot I need to fiddle with settings.

Easy Red 2 - just buy it, it runs awesome on the steam deck, and with joysticks you can get a p51 mustang deadly locked in, maybe not quite a joystick but close.

Operation Harsh Doorstep - free realistic modern shooter with vehicles and modding support with a lot of potential, most maps run decent and scoped weapons arent bad on steam deck with gyroscope on, it really helps with recoil.

Maniac - yes

Have you heard of Driftwood? Gotta get in your diversity of skateboards

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2223700/Driftwood/

The 2d one or 3D one?

Damn alright good to know. I figured the reduction in price came from surveillance capitalism in some form or other but I have never had a payment or key issue with them. I just thought I was dumpsterdiving and might get kind of dirty, but thought fanatical was relatively legit… but yeah fuck fandom it is cancer for web browsers ughhhh.

If you need more focus to the game play Sky Island, also / and ? are your best friends

Rubber Bandits is a nice alternative to Boomerang Fu too

In terms of twin stick games, Voidigo is currently giving Enter The Gungeon a run for its money.

https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-revival-bundle

i recommend this bundle, donut dodo, round guard, indie guards in that bundle,

Also Hyperparasite in this one https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/platinum-collection-build-your-own-bundle

Spelunky 2

Chronicon

Caveblazers

Heroes Of Hammerwatch

Helldivers 1

Barony

Terraria (of course)

Broforce

Duck Game

Don’t Starve Together

Nuclear Throne (of course!!!)

Streets Of Rogue!! (keep your eye out for Streets Of Rogue 2!!!)

Wobbly Life

PlateUp

Glitchbusters

Ember Knights

Bones Cafe

Shovel Knight

Rainworld Downpour

Petal Crash

Definitely Sneaky But Not Sneaky

Sigma Impact

Cassette Beasts

Spirits Abyss

Cosmos Quickstop

DIG

Farm Together

Death Road To Canada !!! <-----

Knight Squad 2

One Step From Eden

Mutant Football League

Rampage Knights

Maniac (who cares it isn’t co-op it is hilarious as a pass and play)

X Morph Defense

Monaco

Tricky Towers

Himno the silent melody

Dungeon Of The Endless

Adventures Of Shuggy

Renegade Ops

Omega Strikers (online team based)

Cryptark

Ms Splosion Man

Full Metal Furies

Battleblock Theater

Colt Canyon

Cook Serve Delicious series

I’m talking from a perspective of reality. What you “predict” or “feel” or imagine the industry is or going to be, doesn’t really interest me much.

Damn… not sure how you work in an industry that requires good interpersonal skills with an attitude like this but you didn’t really listen to what I was saying at all. I am not defending AI or even claiming it can actually replace human graphic designers in any serious fashion longterm.

Let me lay this out for you really simple, this is a class war, and vapid MBA majors who will always placed by the ruling class in charge of most graphic design jobs don’t give a flying fuck if AI is a scam, the whole point of being a business major is to scam people. At the end of this when the AI hype bubble bursts most of yall aren’t getting your jobs back, and even if you do those jobs will longer be the good quality sustainable jobs they used to be because you will be now seen as an expensive temporary stopgap to AI (independent of the reality of AIs inane bullshit), a temporary “return to using horses while we get cars figured out better” approach that never treats the horses as worthy of a future…

It is hilarious given that you are a storyteller and artist by trade that at this late stage in the game you actually genuinely believe the truth actually matters here compared to the overwhelming roar of economic narratives set by the ruling class…and yeah you mighttt personally get lucky and be fine for the rest of your career but how cruel and naive to use your experience as a device to divorce your empathy from less talented/experienced graphic designers fighting tooth and nail for the privilege to follow in your footsteps.

Stop being a coward and hiding behind the niche little square you have cut out of your industry to support yourself, stand up and actually defend the futures and quality of life of the countless younger versions of you getting ground to dust by the industry before it is too late and the decent future of your career is rationalized away to capitalists and the path you walked in life becomes a mocking foreclosed dream to the next generation.

Like wake the fuck up please, this is catastrophic for graphic designers and it has nothing to do with whether AI works or not

I get sooooo much schadenfreude from programmers smugly acting like their jobs aren’t going to be obliterated by AI… because the AI won’t be able to do the job correctly, as if that matters in this late stage of collapse and end state capitalism.

Y’all (programmers and tech people) cheered this on and facilitated the ruling class destroying countless decent, good careers and now it is everybody else’s turn to laugh at programmers as they go from having one of the few non-dysfunctional careers left to being worthless chatgpt prompt monkeys that can never convince management they are valuable and not just a subpar, expensive alternative to “AI”.

This is going to be awful, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find the silver linings!

Maybe if programming wasn’t full of overconfident naive libertarian adjacent people y’all could have stopped this by unionizing but again… just check hacker news and all the boot licking for the ruling class there to see why that didn’t happen lol.

Not only are you a fool, you spit in the face of people trying to begin careers in your field because you are so naively confident that this massive change in the labor market conditions of your industry won’t affect you or other graphic designers negatively.

Please retire, change careers or at least keep your mouth shut and actually listen to less experienced people in your industry. Stop acting like a boomer, it is just embarrassing yourself and publicly committing your online identity to words that will age so terribly it will make your future self’s head spin.

Almost, the likeliest answer is that CEOs and the ruling class have no fucking clue whether AI can be good enough to replace graphic designers but they also know that this was never the point, AI is a weapon of class warfare, and a nuclear one at that.

Even if the entire industry crashes and decides it does actually have to hire lots of human artists back, those artists will be hired as alternatives to cheap AI and graphic design will have permanently been dissected and destroyed as a decent career for hardworking people who may or may not be the most talented people in the world.

If you (as in anybody reading this not who I am responding too) think this isn’t happening you need to shut your mouth trap and go read a book about the Industrial Revolution not written by an apologist for the ruling class.