When Payday 2 was released in 2013 with only four characters, a handful of maps and a fistful of guns, it was a lean masterpiece of taught co-op gameplay, a perfect balance of challenge and reward. And it was a massive hit.

I have over 2000 hours in Payday 2 on Steam, with another thousand or so on Xbox before that. I was an early adopter, a true believer that preached the brilliance of the game and brought in many, many new converts. Indeed, almost all of my friends on both Xbox and Steam can be traced back to Payday 2 heists.

I was a huge fan.

But six years later it's like every cliche of a former Somebody Important, who's gone from getting free beers at the pub in exchange for stories about the glory years to a bleary existence of broken promises and begging for booze in exchange for blowjobs in the back alley, turning tricks behind truck stops for a syphilitic pimp named Starbreeze. It's bloated, broken, and sad, clinging to a life long since over. Its death would be a mercy.

Nowadays I play Payday: The Heist. Thank God for Steamplay.

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Quoting: Baemir

Quoting: lectrodeI never got into this game as much as I would have liked. It took forever to figure out how to finally get a non-xbox controller to work with the game (workaround [External Link] may no longer be needed...haven't tested in quite a while). There were other small issues as well.

Looking forward to seeing what improvements and new content they add to the game.

With all due respect... why would you want to play a first person shooter with a controller?

Couch player? That's why I use a (Steam) controller, at any rate, for everything. :)

That said, my first Antimicro profile for Steam was Payday 2, as was my first Steam Controller profile.

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Good on you, Britain!

As they're a commercial game of chance, loot boxes are, in fact, gambling.

Whether or not a society decides that children should or shouldn't be allowed to engage in this form of gambling is a corollary, but otherwise separate, issue, and is up to the society in question. Personally, I'm opposed to loot boxes in video games, but inasmuch as they are allowed to be there, then let those games be subject to the same laws governing gambling.

I think that the use of loot boxes in video games is wholly predatory in nature. seeking as it does to profit by taking advantage of the naive and unformed minds of children. At the very least, games which include loot boxes should be subject to the same laws that regulate other commercial gambling in a society.

But there's really no practical debate here. Loot boxes are gambling. They're just a very new form of gambling and society is still reacting to them. But we are reacting, and as we have decided to regulate other forms of gambling, so too we'll regulate loot boxes. Right now we're just going through the process.

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I've been trying to get into something new for the last few months, but to no avail. On the plus side, I have been (very, very) slowly winnowing down my backlog of games. In the last month or so I have played:

• Ostrich Island: I was enjoying this well enough in the beginning, but became bored when the action moved off of the titular island and into a series of poorly illuminated dungeon hallways. I left after 6 hours.


• Payday 2: For a few hours with a friend, but after 2K hours on Steam and about as many on the X360 before that, I'm pretty played out with this.


• King Oddball: A super chill physics game where you play as the aforementioned monarch---a giant, floating orb with a face and Gene Simmons' tongue---conquering your enemies by flinging boulders onto them. I play it often, if never for very long.


• *Rombie: Phroot's latest open world robot joint. Similar to his excellent XX89 trilogy, but dingy, monotonous, and unrewarding. I gave it 4 hours before uninstalling it with a sigh.


• 3089 and 4089: The first two games of Phroot's delightful XX89 series, neither of which would run from their initial launcher.


• Runic Rampage: Played it all the way through and (finally) beat the end-boss, which was the real victory here. Not because it was particularly hard, but because I tend to find boss battles immensely tedious, frustrating excercises in pattern recognition. Nevertheless, a fun enough hack-n-slash-lite game spoilt only by the 'Dash' button being a common button used in attack combos. Instead of 'dashing' at or away from enemies, I often found myself walloping the ground with a bloody huge axe for no rhyme or reason.


• Jettomero: This is one of the most unique looking games I've ever played. Unfortunately, the game has a number of issues centered on controls which render using a Steampad as anything but an Xbox controller simply moot. I may get back to it at somepoint.


• Everything: A delightful experience peppered with mind-blowing sound bites of Alan Watts lectures. After 2 hours, though I hadn't seen everything, I'd seen enough. I stopped playing and began downloading Alan Watts lectures from Youtube.


• Insignificant: I bought it and returned it all within a few hours. I've no idea how good the game is or isn't. It appears to be one of the most imaginatively conceived games ever, but it sees the Steam Controller as a gamepad. Full stop. I use a Steam Controller mapped with keyboard + mouse for all FPS games and the inability to get Insignificant to accept this meant asking for and getting a refund.


• Bard's Tale: I downloaded it last night but haven't played it yet. Here's hoping.

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Perfect timing! I just went back to Steam client stable because the beta library was just too broken to deal with any longer, I'm very keen to learn more about alternative launchers. To tell the truth, I'm about always in the market because Steam's UI is just so mercilessly etched in stone.

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I wishlisted Insignificant when it popped up in my Discovery Queue a while back because it was just so damn clever looking. At first I was a bit hesitant, but when I read

EXPlore unique, hand-crafted areas with absolutely no procedural generation at all! This is 100% artisanal, bespoke, keyboard-to-table game juice.

I laughed aloud. Steam has like a bazillion games and I bet none of them claim to be "100% artisanal" or, better yet bespoke.---you know what? Fuck it ...

There, I just bought it. Talked myself into it. And since I'll be playing with my Mighty Steam Controller, I bet adjusting the mouse sensitivity will be a snap.

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Our next game will definitely not have OSX support anymore. Way too much trouble with the system and no/nearly no sales at all. It does just not make sense at all.

This made me smile. ^

Linux for sure. Also low sales but works way better then OSX and the community is super supportive and helps if something does not work on an obscure distribution.

This made me proud to be a member of the Linux Community. ^

This is why it's important to be polite and useful when reporting issues. Some people constantly underestimate the affect being nice will have on another human.

And this is why I'm happy to support Liam and GoL. ^

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This game keeps getting better and better. I hadn't played since alpha 10 when I began playing alpha 17.2 --- whoa it blew me away in so many ways. My favorite thing, hands down, was the level of game customization the Pimps give players to make the world act and react the way they like, and my only quibble, the thing I mentioned in my last review of the game, the way schematics were "consumed" upon usage, has been changed!

7D2D is updating on Steam even as i write this, so I see myself returning once again to the roof of the Bookstore in Navesgane very soon and updating my (positive) Steam review shortly thereafter.

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I might use Stadia if it were included as a part of a Google high-speed broadband internet service, but otherwise, screw them.

Even if AT&T deigned improve our .6Mbps DSL, I wouldn't pay Google for a game subscription service, not when they're making money off the data they'll be hoovering up from my---and everyone else's---gameplay habits.

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Are these new weapons ones that you 'just start with' at the beginning of the game? Or are they earned/unlocked/found in the course of gameplay? Since I'm no fan of beginning gameplay with OP weapons (not that I would have to use them, admittedly), I'm hoping that it's the latter.

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