Speaking of, I got fucked over on the final hit AGAIN because he reversed direction while I was waiting for the launch. Which I've never seen him do before.
I really wanted that run to go through, too. Not just because it would have been a kill, but because I pulled a positively epic save. I baited him into a stomp, dropped a power bomb, then wiimote-springballed into his foot as it came down into the blast and the health pickup spawned directly on top of me while I was at 1 health. Other than that, the run was picture perfect and deserved to go through.
This fight has all the makings of a legitimately fun boss on a minimalist run, but it ends up worse than Boost Guardian. The RNG isn't quite as bad, but you rely on it for much, much longer. I've had a couple runs die in the second phase because he completely starved me on missiles, and many more against the final kneecap because he kept it rotated into the back every time it was vulnerable.
Record Keeper's in full festival mode. I managed to get insanely lucky on the first banner, scoring three of the most powerful relics in the game right now. I promptly used two of them to bring down one of the ludicrously powerful bosses out right now -- D350 Diamond Weapon.
This isn't me, I just have no way to record phone stuff myself. I used basically the same strategy but slightly different lineup to provide the specifics. I use Dr. Mog's wall instead of his atk/mag/haste; Ramza provides atk/mag, instacast, and a stronger chain; Rydia is my token summoner because fuck Hope; Eiko on heals for Last Stand, haste, and secondary summons; Marche instead of Tyro for more damage and Speed Combo; Orlandeau is still Orlandeau; and Evrae magicite pumps the chain because why the fuck does this guy use Unicorn on a fight with no statuses.
So this fight leads right off by insta-casting your entire party to 1 HP, which is just lovely. At least it means anyone with a trance gets it immediately, but there aren't really any that can take advantage of his weakness. Also he's crazy fast and can AOE you again on turn 2, so I hope you have a healer running Mako and an instant party heal USB! d-(^_^)z
While his core is closed, he's immune to all physical damage. This is bad, because he's weak to water and holy, resists all other elements, and has pretty damn high base resist on top of that. There aren't a lot of solid casters for either of those, and ALL of the really badass ones are physical. He has a chance to counterattack physical, which is slightly annoying but not the most threatening thing he does, so it's still worth it to have your physical attackers hit him with holy to charge up quicker. Also until you open the core he nukes the party repeatedly -- it's not that bad at the start, but by the end one of his attacks will randomly slap someone for 9k+. The guy in the video got lucky. I didn't.
The main gimmick, like in FF7, is that you crack him open with three summons or Soul Breaks (only ones that do damage obviously), at which point he stops moving and countering, and takes damage from all sources. You get 3 (of his very fast) turns to unload, and then he slaps you with a huge nuke. In FF7 this was 7/8 current HP plus silence. Here there's no silence, but it's 7/8 max HP. So I hope your first big heal came with a Stoneskin or Last Stand, because you're probably not topped off from the first nuke! d-(^_^)z
So of course the main strategy is to just open him up ASAP, and have your healer play partial offense to keep rushing to her next big healnuke to counter his big countdown shot. You'll probably use the first opening just to finish winding up, rip off about 50-60% of his HP on the second, finish on the third, and if he's still alive, you probably won't be much longer. It's not exactly a complicated fight, but it has a fuckton of HP and defenses, a very high burst damage requirement, and hits ludicrously hard if you choke at all.
This is the EASIEST of the five weapon bosses this fest. I can only manage it because my holy team is unusually strong. Most of these 350 bosses are straight-up whale bait, so I feel pretty jazzed taking one down as F2P. I...MIGHT be able to bring down Emerald Weapon too, but I'm not sure I can mix the right offense, survival, and longevity -- I built my fire team around Isgebind, and I'm not entirely convinced they can last against a longer boss.
EDIT: So Sapphire and Ruby Weapons just came out, and turns out they're WAY easier. I'll admit I leveraged a pretty powerful new thing I picked up for Ruby, but I probably could've managed with one of my older healers. Sapphire was just a generic tank and spank with scripted dispels -- it felt like fighting water magicite, if that was vulnerable to stat breaks. So right now I'm 3 for 4, and I guess they just blew their load early with the first pair.
[18:06:14] [GMH] i discovered a hilariously easy exploit of the steam sale minigame
[18:06:20] [GMH] your XP counts time
[18:06:24] [GMH] not aliens killed
[18:06:44] [GMH] if they knock down your barrier, you don't get score for the time it takes to set it back up
[18:07:01] [GMH] but what you can do is to simply tab away from the game after starting
[18:07:13] [GMH] time still counts, but enemies don't move
[18:07:39] [GMH] remember to tab back after 2 minutes -- if you go more than a few seconds past it, the game will count you as AFK and won't count your score
[18:07:55] [GMH] tab back and click through to go back to the grid map
[18:08:18] [GMH] if you want, tab back in justbefore 2 minutes are up and see how many you can kill
[18:08:30] [GMH] most of the time you'll get a score that's close to the maximum
[18:08:34] [GMH] sometimes even greater than it
[18:12:35] [GMH] normal max score: low threat 585, medium threat 1170, high threat 2340
The part that prompted that comment was learning that I apparently had to summon an old man at the magic fountain to withdraw cash, which is something that I would've never thought to do if I hadn't read about it.
On Steam, gifts can have region restrictions even if the price and currency are both exactly the same between the gifter and the recipient.
A year or so ago, Steam announced a change in its gifting procedures and policies, and said that game gifting would be prohibited between regions that had a greater than 10% price difference.
I've just found out that restrictions can exist EVEN IF the gifts were bought at the same price and in the same currency as in the recipient's region.
Friend in Venezuela tried to buy me two games. Paid US$4.49 and $0.49 for them, which are the prices here in the US store. The gifting process went through, and the gifts arrived at my account. Steam celebratorily notified me.
Then when I tried adding them to my account, it said that they were region-restricted.
seriously wtf steam
Well you're supposed to get around this by buying Steam Wallet credit to send to someone. Said friend didn't have access to new funds at the moment, which is necessary to generate a virtual Steam Wallet card like this. Said friend only had $5 in their own Steam Wallet account, and that store credit can't be transferred.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
Steam is basically just a DRM tool and I kind of wish there were more alternatives.
A few suggestions / reference list of DRM-free stores
* GOG - lots of classic PC games, and some newer AAA and indie titles. Great for older games because they actually take steps to make them work on PC. But it lacks the newest AAA releases due to being committed to DRM-free, and is also slow on picking up niche indie titles, but on the other hand their selection is arguably well-curated for classic PC gamer tastes. (Pretty much never provides Steam keys.)
* Humble Store - operated by Humble Bundle, a bundle site. A pretty decent assortment of games, sorta mirroring Steam, but tends to be missing more obscure titles. Many of their games are DRM-free + Steam key, though a lot are just Steam keys. The bundles themselves are an assortment of games and other things (typically soundtracks, comic books, ebooks, and such), and the core humble bundle series is generally DRM-free + Steam key, but the other bundles nowadays typically just feature Steam keys as they contain more famous games that don't do DRM-free.
* itch.io - indie games. A lot of newer indie games from western devs are on here. It's common for them to sell a DRM-free copy along with a Steam key.
* Playism ( playism-games.com ) - technically a publisher/localizer of games first, known as AGM/Playism, but they also run their own web store, for games that they've helped publish in various locales. Generally speaking, they offer DRM-free + Steam key. (A smaller proportion of their games are either DRM-free only, or Steam key only.) Unfortunately their sales events are rare; they seem to prefer making discount events on Steam.
* GamersGate - An assortment of games. Sells some DRM-free, some Steam keys, and so on. The advantage is that they'll let you know what DRM a game has.
* Groupees - a bundle site. Used to sell a number of games DRM-free + Steam key back in the day, but these days it's more typically Steam key or some obscure game that's DRM-free. Or music. They have a lot of music.
* DLSite - a site that sells direct downloads for Japanese doujin games. Mainly untranslated, from what I've heard, so obviously very niche.
Sites that sell mostly just Steam keys
* Gala Store - operated by Indie Gala, a bundle site. Sort of like a "poor man's version" of Humble Bundle; they have more bundles but the games are lesser-known. They also operate a store. They used to sell DRM-free versions of stuff, with Steam keys promised to those people who upvoted things on Greenlight, but they seem to mostly sell Steam keys nowadays.
* Fanatical (formerly known as BundleStars) - sells Steam keys individually. Has a coupon code that you can use to get stuff for an additional discount off the usual prices, I think.
Specific publishers with their own sites - Mainly Japanese stuff since I happen to know the doujin scene semi-well; there are almost certainly others out there.
* Playism - mentioned above.
* Fruitbat Factory - http://fruitbatfactory.com/ | store - https://sites.fastspring.com/fruitbatfactory/product/buy | itch.io - http://fruitbat-factory.itch.io/ A localizer of Japanese games, most famous for working on 100% Orange Juice. Many of their PC games are available in DRM-free format on their store or at their itch.io page, and they also commonly also give Steam keys. Note that game updates are not available for 100% Orange Juice (all its DLC/promo characters and the improved multiplayer implementation are offered only via Steam) and multiplayer may be curtailed(?) in 200% Mixed Juice.
* MangaGamer - https://www.mangagamer.com/ These people localize and sell mainly visual novels, primarily (though not all) "eroge" (i.e. "erotic games"). They offer direct downloads, and even some hard-copy versions. They also used to offer Steam keys, but then some scammers tried to take advantage of this by using stolen credit cards on their site, so they stopped offering Steam keys.
sites that are dead
* Desura - it was basically like an indie version of Steam, or alternatively, itch.io before it existed. However, the store is dead -- it went bankrupt, got sold to another company, then that company went bankrupt too. Occasionally the website is accessible so I've been able to redownload a few games. Desura used to run a bundle site called Indie Royale, which had several nifty indie games plus an album every few weeks. They also used to try to run a store type thing, which they called Daily Royale, where they had limited quantities of a game, at discount prices. Indie Royale is even more dead than Desura these days.
* Impulse - I think this was GameStop's attempt at a direct-download game store. I don't think it exists anymore.
* Rice Digital - I've heard this site used to sell games in direct-download format, but doesn't anymore, and only does physical release stuff nowadays.
So, some of you who may enjoy visual novels may be aware of a recent controversy involving the possible removal of visual novels, especially but apparently not limited to those with erotic content, from Steam.
Valve later issued a statement saying that Steam would not remove such works, but it did not stop some developers/localizers/publishers from taking their own steps to secure an alternate sales platform. Specifically, JAST USA, formerly an offshoot of the now-defunct Japanese VN company JAST but now a VN localizer/publisher in their own right, made its own web store, and expanded it by partnering with a number of other VN publishers.
I think all their games seem to be DRM-free, considering that they make a point of ragging on DRM for being intrusive on privacy. I don't think they provide Steam keys.
I forgot who told me this, but someone mentioned that Humble Bundle's keys are generally "rest of the world" keys, as opposed to specific to any region, which is why they work well.
I mean that's kind of a good kind of rigging though, because you're guaranteed to not only win the grand prize, but do so almost 30 years sooner than you would have if it were truly random. Though they should've probably tried the random check first, then quietly reassigned it to the counters if you failed. Resetting all the counters when you buy an extra ticket is BS though.
I do enjoy the dialogue for clock tampering though. Glurge, into creepypasta. That's great.
So Record Keeper just had an event whose final boss was Bizarro Sephiroth. Similar to FFVII, it's a big long gimmick fight with lots of targetable points protecting each other, and the first two you have to take down are immune to alternating elements, which pretty much mandates a dual-element team because non-element sucks in this game. You can attack the main body right away, and it actually has fairly low HP -- but unless you took down the arms and core first, he's immune to all elements and has ludicrously high defense.
Usually this requires a dual-element team with very specific limits and so on, and extremely high ability hones to get through some 2M HP of everything around. Or...you can just use Tifa and bypass the entire gimmick.
I'm missing a couple things from that strategy, but what I had was still strong enough to fill in the gaps. The gist of it is:
* Tifa puts up some self-buffs to max her attack, boost monk skills, and speed up casts. She also has realm synergy for fighting a boss from her own game.
* Rest of party adds buffs. Tyro walls up, Ramza boosts critical damage, and Elarra uses an offense bard song.
* Choose Cloud Ultra as your Roaming Warrior from your friend list, which causes all hits to auto-crit and break damage cap. Tifa uses this.
* Tifa uses her own Ultra, which causes monk skills to doublecast.
* Elarra gets entrust support from the rest of the party to spam her Ultra, which is a completely bonkers instant heal + regenga, plus two turns of quickcast for the party.
* Tifa spams Piercing Strike on the boss's main body, completely bypassing its defenses and shredding it in just a few quick/doublecast turns of 99999x2.
The only really specifically required thing here is a monk with some form of 100% doublecast, preferably Tifa (physical attack has a pretty low softcap and diminishing returns are pretty harsh past it). Most of the rest is flashy fluff to cap out damage and make other players giggle at absurdity. You can even get by without the quickcast and crit-damage buff, but it drags out into a second cycle of rebuffing and takes all 10 uses of Piercing.
So I picked up World of Warcraft again a bit before the most recent expansion came out. I haven't played it since Cataclysm. It's a mixed bag.
Personal loot is awesome. It completely removes the drama of loot rolls. You choose your preferred specialization during the dungeon (which really only matters for weapons and trinkets, and can be changed boss-to-boss), and each person just has a random chance of getting something in that spec. Most items can also be traded to other people in the same armor class, which makes it easier to gear guildies by just running a party heavily stacked with leather or plate or whatever.
There were a lot of really neat changes like autoscaling, where enemies level with you in a set range so you can actually go through a whole zone's story thread without trivializing it halfway. Enemies just do and take proportional damage, so even when people of different levels fight the same enemy, they each see a mob of their own level with appropriate stats. It really makes lowbie dungeons more flexible in finding groups. Dungeons and quests also yield gear based on your level -- basically everything until the endgame acts as a frozen snapshot of an heirloom item.
There were a few hiccups though. The old Icecrown dungeons, which were as comically easy as the rest of Wrath back in the day, are hideously overtuned now. They were originally tuned for Wrath's easy epics, but with autoscaling they're pretty much locked to about 30 levels above what you're mechanically capable of obtaining. So ironically, the expansion that first trivialized dungeons into faceroll now has some of the only lowbie dungeons that are actually really hard and require tight CC that nobody remembers how to do.
Speaking of faceroll, Draenor and Legion dungeons and overworld were a complete joke. I expected that Mythic was actually Old Heroic, Heroic was Old Normal, and Normal was plain faceroll. I wasn't expecting Mythic to also be near-faceroll. I get that it was the end of Legion so everyone was overgeared even for Mythic by the time I came in, and I also get that they did a big stat squish while I was halfway into Broken Isles and I'm not sure how endgame was tuned before that. But even when the tank spaced out and stuff started mauling me it was barely hitting hard enough to go through resto spec's passive self-healing. Several times I deliberately walked into boss mechanics and barely felt the difference. Overworld mobs actually got weaker in Draenor and Legion, to the point where level 110 monsters in Argus were weaker than level 80s in Pandaria -- not just relative to your level and stats at the time, but literally, numerically weaker.
So I was pretty skeptical of the new expansion's dungeons. But they feel more like what I hoped for. Mythic is a solid challenge, albeit a different one from before. Hard crowd control seems to largely be a thing of the past, but instead of just blind AOE spam there's a lot of focus on field awareness, frequent area attacks, complex mechanics, and soft control of key mobs through interrupts and stuns even if they're not necessarily kill priorities. It's pretty fun, and we'll see next week how the first raid holds up.
The gear gimmick is cool. Like Legion, you get an artifact necklace early on that levels up with you. All of the chest/head/shoulder pieces in the new areas synergize with the neck to choose pseudo-talents on a per-item basis. Most of them are just passive boosts, but some are significant enough to change your rotation and loadout -- for instance a boomkin could pick up three pieces that all have Streaking Stars, then pop their cooldown and go around spamming Moonfire old school style.
What's not so great is the solo progression. Each faction gets a mini-continent with three zones and reps where their big storylines play out, and another rep for establishing a foothold and world questing on the other faction's continent. The problem is the three main zone threads for your own continent are relatively short and their associated reps are borderline worthless -- the rewards are mostly gear you'll replace in heroics, and crafting recipes so underpowered as to not be worth leveling at all. Meanwhile, the quest thread for the enemy continent is a bare bones lead-in to world quests, with little story going on there at all, but the rep for doing stuff there gates access to the last couple dungeons, so it's mandatory for endgame progression. So what you see in practice is that more 120s are active at nearly all times of day on each other's continents than they are on their own, and anyone who isn't 120 yet spends most of their time thinking they're getting camped by a raid of 20+ people, but really those people are just a rotating crowd all soloing their own stuff in the same place and ganking everyone they see.
Speaking of, War Mode is a hot mess. They replaced the entire PVP server breakdown with a setting you toggle in Stormwind/Orgrimmar. If you don't have it turned on, you're put on a different server phase that doesn't interact with anyone that does. This effectively splits every server in half, which reduces potential party visibility within your zone. Moreover, it also replaces the "you knew what you signed on for" attitude of a PVP server with one where people just ragequit the setting the first time they get stabbed by a rogue. When players aren't committed to defending themselves and can nope out forever with a quick port back to town (more often on Alliance, natch), it dramatically reduces the number of people able to band together and fight back, which in turn creates ever more hopeless and frustrating odds. Combined with the skewed value of the new reputations, Alliance basically owns one of Horde's zones, and Horde owns 2/3 of Alliance's so thoroughly that it's almost impossible to level there and complete your own storylines. And of course, War Mode directly incentivizes camping the helpless -- you get weekly quests to kill opposite players in X zone, and getting a kill streak gives you a sizable damage/health buff and rep/reward bonuses. So it directly incentivizes camping people who can't fight back.
Your friendly continent's town guards are regular mobs that don't even have basic snare attacks, but the foothold towns on the opposite continent are full of beefy chain-spawning elites that often pack significant regen skills. Your home continent's flight masters don't even spawn the crazy gryphon spam, only the footholds. So half the time the opposite faction will just be occupying the towns and emissaries. Half the time you'll just die instantly while flying in unless you're a rogue or druid who can stealth, and even then you have painfully small windows to be able to turn in your quests because the NPCs are all fucking dead. Again, War Mode directly incentivizes this, which is an idea that sounds great on paper because constant dynamic war sounds cool, but in practice it means you've just turned lowbies into a farmable resource while giving everyone who could've helped defend them better things to do.
It's a very mixed experience, and would need a lot of things to really feel "fixed". You'd have to adjust the rep balance so there's at least a plausible reason to world quest at home, and remove the gate for the final dungeons. PVP servers should have locked their players into War Mode all the time, so at least you'd have the numbers stay consistent enough to be able to fight back -- the gear difference between mid-110s and geared 120s is significant but not beyond sight in groups. The storyline on the other continent desperately needs to be expanded, for variety if nothing else.
So I finished Shadowrun: Dragonfall recently and that game is, really really good. I'm kind of shocked given how little I hear about it? It's imo better in every conceivable way than Returns (which was good!) and it's also "full-length" compared to its fairly short predecessor, but I didn't even know it existed until looking at the Steam store after I finished the first one.
I'm the worst at explaining why I like things but, it had an engaging story that was repeatedly quite successful at giving me the feels, and a good cast of characters who I enjoyed getting to know over the course of the game. (The latter being something that, iirc, the first game mostly lacked.)
In WoW, we're at the end of the first week of the Uldir raid's release. My guild ran three teams in Normal that went 6/8, and tonight we ran a best-of smattering of them that finally killed Mythrax and G'huun. We also have 2/8 Heroic, with a 3rd that should be on lock pretty quickly.
Uldir was fun. A lot of fights that were really strange, but in a good way. A couple that were kind of obnoxious (Mythrax). It's tuned quite a bit harder than usual -- from what the leader said, they've pretty much one-nighted every Normal since Pandaria, but Uldir was closer to Cata difficulty. Which is good for me, because I liked when raids took, you know, effort, and actually punish you for fucking up. We're going to have fun pushing Heroic and Mythic.
Speaking of Mythic, that comes out tomorrow, and the top progression guild is streaming their run in the race to first clear.
So I did that thing where I got to the end of Bravely Default several years ago and forgot to actually finish it even though I was past the tedious part (much like Xenoblade). I was beating my head against the Adventurer bonus boss. Ended up polishing him off tonight.
So the Adventurer is a pretty nasty damage fight, even at lv99 with max jobs. He comes with a pet who feeds him heals and extra BP, and occasionally dispels the whole party. If either of them is alive when the other is dead, they Arise each other to full, and the Adventurer has like 800,000 HP or something ridiculous so you don't want to let the pet raise him.
Adventurer himself will use AOE physical attacks for 2 BP that will very nearly oneshot the entire party even if you break his atk and buff your own pdef (and remember, the pet can dispel those buffs off at the start of the turn before the attack lands). At about 75% he starts using Brave to double up on the AOE physical, which puts him at a big BP deficit but does a stupid amount of burst damage. The first way I found to properly counter that was a ninja/templar keeping up Rampart -- but that's dispellable before he launches the attack.
At about 50% he starts spamming Meteor, which is like 6 random hits and three of them will instakill people through buffs. A little bit later he starts Braving that too. Also it's 1 BP instead of 2, so he'll likely be doubling that every turn. The first way I found to counter THAT was Reraise -- but that's also dispellable before he launches the attack.
The answer I found, like everything else in the end/postgame of Bravely Default, is complete hilarious cheese.
Agnes - Performer/Time. Keeps up Reraise, Slowga, and buffs.
Tiz - White Mage/Merchant. Uses Low Leverage (Merchant) to halve all incoming/outgoing damage and BP costs. Equips Slow World (Time) to cause everyone on the field to lose a BP every other turn.
Ringabel - Dark Knight/Spellblade. So, Rage (Dark Knight) makes him spam the classic Dark Knight sacrifice HP thing until he drops to 1. But he's also equiping Dark Amp (Dark Knight), Drain Amp (Vampire), Two-Handed (Knight), Sword Magic Amp (Spellblade), a Blood Blade sword, and uses Drain Spellblade. The drain multipliers are all cumulative, and even through Low Leverage's penalty he's still hitting a very respectable 6.5k per and leeches back more than he loses. Rage normally burns BP like a mofo, but Low Leverage drops that enough that he can start at 3 BP and burn himself to -3 to get three casts -- total 6.5k x 15 (plus 9999 crits). That's half the cheese.
Edea - Black Mage/Freelancer. Freelancer is just to scan enemy HP and make sure the kill is timed right, but Black Mage is the other half of the cheese. Edea equips Group Cast All (Black Mage) and Status Amp (Arcanist). And the entire party is running BP Recovery (Red Mage), which gives you two BP whenever you're hit with a status ailment. Edea spends every turn casting 4x AOE Poison on the party (Status Amp helps pierce Tiz's White Mage innate resist) to keep them at max BP in spite of Slow World.
At this point, Ringabel just firehoses the bastard down with 3x Rage every turn. The first time he uses a 2 BP turn, you survive it once with Low Leverage + Reraise and he'll drop to negative and likely never recover -- the Rage spam will drop his pet fairly quickly, and when he eventually claws his way back up to 0 BP he'll have to use it to rez the pet and they'll both take the Slow World tick back down to -1, giving plenty of time to just kill the pet again. I think I took one more offense turn from him after that which was also comfortably soaked and Reraised, and I had time stop moves waiting in the wing just in case.
Anyway, I'm headed into the real endgame and I think I've proven at this point that this game cracks open even wider than FF5. Because I'm sure there are even more absurd strategies out there to deal with this shit.
EDIT: Okay, the final boss was kind of awesome. But poor Friend-Bot T_T
Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey are both amazing. Obviously Smash is going to be great. Octopath Traveler and Splatoon are good if that's your thing. Probably Xenoblade 2.
I'm...honestly having a hard time coming up with other Switch exclusives worth playing. The usual "reasons to get a Switch" usually list a bunch of downloadable indie games, which is really more reasons to not sell your Switch than to get one.
Comments
[18:06:20] [GMH] your XP counts time
[18:06:24] [GMH] not aliens killed
[18:06:44] [GMH] if they knock down your barrier, you don't get score for the time it takes to set it back up
[18:07:01] [GMH] but what you can do is to simply tab away from the game after starting
[18:07:13] [GMH] time still counts, but enemies don't move
[18:07:39] [GMH] remember to tab back after 2 minutes -- if you go more
than a few seconds past it, the game will count you as AFK and won't
count your score
[18:07:55] [GMH] tab back and click through to go back to the grid map
[18:08:18] [GMH] if you want, tab back in justbefore 2 minutes are up and see how many you can kill
[18:08:30] [GMH] most of the time you'll get a score that's close to the maximum
[18:08:34] [GMH] sometimes even greater than it
[18:12:35] [GMH] normal max score: low threat 585, medium threat 1170, high threat 2340
Incidentally, Magicant appeared surprisingly early in the game, given my experience with Mother 2.
On Steam, gifts can have region restrictions even if the price and currency are both exactly the same between the gifter and the recipient.
A year or so ago, Steam announced a change in its gifting procedures and policies, and said that game gifting would be prohibited between regions that had a greater than 10% price difference.
I've just found out that restrictions can exist EVEN IF the gifts were bought at the same price and in the same currency as in the recipient's region.
Friend in Venezuela tried to buy me two games. Paid US$4.49 and $0.49 for them, which are the prices here in the US store. The gifting process went through, and the gifts arrived at my account. Steam celebratorily notified me.
Then when I tried adding them to my account, it said that they were region-restricted.
seriously wtf steam
Well you're supposed to get around this by buying Steam Wallet credit to send to someone. Said friend didn't have access to new funds at the moment, which is necessary to generate a virtual Steam Wallet card like this. Said friend only had $5 in their own Steam Wallet account, and that store credit can't be transferred.
* GOG - lots of classic PC games, and some newer AAA and indie titles. Great for older games because they actually take steps to make them work on PC. But it lacks the newest AAA releases due to being committed to DRM-free, and is also slow on picking up niche indie titles, but on the other hand their selection is arguably well-curated for classic PC gamer tastes. (Pretty much never provides Steam keys.)
* Humble Store - operated by Humble Bundle, a bundle site. A pretty decent assortment of games, sorta mirroring Steam, but tends to be missing more obscure titles. Many of their games are DRM-free + Steam key, though a lot are just Steam keys. The bundles themselves are an assortment of games and other things (typically soundtracks, comic books, ebooks, and such), and the core humble bundle series is generally DRM-free + Steam key, but the other bundles nowadays typically just feature Steam keys as they contain more famous games that don't do DRM-free.
* itch.io - indie games. A lot of newer indie games from western devs are on here. It's common for them to sell a DRM-free copy along with a Steam key.
* Playism ( playism-games.com ) - technically a publisher/localizer of games first, known as AGM/Playism, but they also run their own web store, for games that they've helped publish in various locales. Generally speaking, they offer DRM-free + Steam key. (A smaller proportion of their games are either DRM-free only, or Steam key only.) Unfortunately their sales events are rare; they seem to prefer making discount events on Steam.
* GamersGate - An assortment of games. Sells some DRM-free, some Steam keys, and so on. The advantage is that they'll let you know what DRM a game has.
* Groupees - a bundle site. Used to sell a number of games DRM-free + Steam key back in the day, but these days it's more typically Steam key or some obscure game that's DRM-free. Or music. They have a lot of music.
* DLSite - a site that sells direct downloads for Japanese doujin games. Mainly untranslated, from what I've heard, so obviously very niche.
Sites that sell mostly just Steam keys
* Gala Store - operated by Indie Gala, a bundle site. Sort of like a "poor man's version" of Humble Bundle; they have more bundles but the games are lesser-known. They also operate a store. They used to sell DRM-free versions of stuff, with Steam keys promised to those people who upvoted things on Greenlight, but they seem to mostly sell Steam keys nowadays.
* Fanatical (formerly known as BundleStars) - sells Steam keys individually. Has a coupon code that you can use to get stuff for an additional discount off the usual prices, I think.
Specific publishers with their own sites - Mainly Japanese stuff since I happen to know the doujin scene semi-well; there are almost certainly others out there.
* Playism - mentioned above.
* Fruitbat Factory - http://fruitbatfactory.com/ | store - https://sites.fastspring.com/fruitbatfactory/product/buy | itch.io - http://fruitbat-factory.itch.io/
A localizer of Japanese games, most famous for working on 100% Orange Juice. Many of their PC games are available in DRM-free format on their store or at their itch.io page, and they also commonly also give Steam keys. Note that game updates are not available for 100% Orange Juice (all its DLC/promo characters and the improved multiplayer implementation are offered only via Steam) and multiplayer may be curtailed(?) in 200% Mixed Juice.
* MangaGamer - https://www.mangagamer.com/
These people localize and sell mainly visual novels, primarily (though not all) "eroge" (i.e. "erotic games"). They offer direct downloads, and even some hard-copy versions. They also used to offer Steam keys, but then some scammers tried to take advantage of this by using stolen credit cards on their site, so they stopped offering Steam keys.
sites that are dead
* Desura - it was basically like an indie version of Steam, or alternatively, itch.io before it existed. However, the store is dead -- it went bankrupt, got sold to another company, then that company went bankrupt too. Occasionally the website is accessible so I've been able to redownload a few games. Desura used to run a bundle site called Indie Royale, which had several nifty indie games plus an album every few weeks. They also used to try to run a store type thing, which they called Daily Royale, where they had limited quantities of a game, at discount prices. Indie Royale is even more dead than Desura these days.
* Impulse - I think this was GameStop's attempt at a direct-download game store. I don't think it exists anymore.
* Rice Digital - I've heard this site used to sell games in direct-download format, but doesn't anymore, and only does physical release stuff nowadays.
Valve later issued a statement saying that Steam would not remove such works, but it did not stop some developers/localizers/publishers from taking their own steps to secure an alternate sales platform. Specifically, JAST USA, formerly an offshoot of the now-defunct Japanese VN company JAST but now a VN localizer/publisher in their own right, made its own web store, and expanded it by partnering with a number of other VN publishers.
https://jastusa.com/2018/come-welcome-our-new-store-partners
The JAST USA store is here: https://jastusa.com/games
I think all their games seem to be DRM-free, considering that they make a point of ragging on DRM for being intrusive on privacy. I don't think they provide Steam keys.
https://www.wolfquest.org/game_info.php
Old version is free; new version is $10. Get it direct-download + Steam key, on itch.io.
https://eduweb.itch.io/wolfquest
Also available on Humble Store (Steam key only) and Steam.
People seem to like that new Smash Bros