No next time you don’t condescendingly assume someone acting in a neurodivergent way is an AI/chatbot and you actually take the time to learn about humans who act in ways that confuse you.

That is how this goes.

I don’t need to change my behavior, sorry.

Honestly I don’t think I will ever be financially stable enough to drop ~1200 extra JUST for another computer monitor that is only compatible with 5% max of video games. I just have a lcd steamdeck, I can’t even afford a full gaming computer, asking if I have VR equipment is like asking a starving person if they have been taking any cooking classes at the expensive Italian restaurant nearby lately.

To be honest I don’t like the idea of video games being made ONLY for VR unless they are extremely focused on being a quirky unique VR experience as this whole “revolution” in video gaming feels like from the beginning it was meant to provide exclusivity like a status object not a gaming device.

Unlike other gaming revolutions that perhaps started with high end gaming requirements and then evolved into broader contexts and other games that worked on potato computers, from the beginning VR has felt like the point was to become part of an exclusive rich people club.

I will take VR seriously when VR heavy games developed by developers with access to multi-thousand dollar high end VR equipment actually begin to have a serious adult conversation about the barriers that requiring VR equipment creates for players (that they ignore hanging out play testing their game on a VR headset that costs more than my car), and the spirit of inclusivity that violates. Come up with a way for the rest of us to play, integrate gyroscope sensors for a 2d tablet, phone or steam deck screen so it can be rotated held out in front of you like a “window”into the VR world. If your solution longterm is “well maybe people without VR headsets just shouldn’t play my game” then I will not give you money, and I think your game design goals are misguided at a fundamental level whether I own a VR headset or not.

I know that isn’t the point and that people love VR because it is cool as fuck, but it is real hard for me not to get that vibe from VR I guess?

I did get the non-vr marineverse cup though, I honestly can’t tell if it is basically the same as VR regatta or an outdated version of the same engine, it is very hard to tell just from the steam listing and stuff lol. Which again… why??! I feel like they are just assuming if I want to have the real, current up to date experience I will have already purchased a VR headset.

My understanding I got was they are basically the same game at the heart of it, but that vr regatta has a bunch of VR stuff bolted on top of it, but if that turns out not to be the case I will definitely ask for a refund if the non-vr game is clearly being ignored in favor of development only for the VR game. I don’t think that is the case however, on the contrary a lot of people seem to mention the dev being really friendly and genuinely inspired to spread awareness about sailing.

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.

I loved windows phone, the UI was so clear (I still use square home on android to this day), the camera app was superb and it was a very efficient operating system for low end hardware.

It didn’t have a ton of apps but honestly I don’t know, sometimes that doesn’t feel like a bad thing for a thing I am always trying to make more into a tool than an addiction….

Sure windows phone wasn’t going to grow rapidly for years, but it was well situated to take advantage of an opportunity in the future when apple or google stumbled and created an opening. I think for a company as large as Microsoft just abandoning it entirely was a massively stupid move. Now Microsoft has a gigantic blind spot in mobile, and they are stuck in that position.

I said this earlier in the thread but I am very confident at this point that Microsoft already lost this battle to Linux in the longterm. Particularly because Linux operating system devs don’t care about AI and Microsoft is obsessed with it like all other dumb massive tech companies and honestly it is going to lead nowhere in terms of providing a useful basis for an operating system especially if the foundation you are working from sucks (glares at Microsoft and Windows). So volunteer Linux devs actually have a huge lead here even though Microsoft has wayyyyy more resources and money because Microsoft is firehosing it all at the stupidest shit while they fire core team members left and right destroying their longterm capability to create quality products.

You really have to understand AI as the dream come true from sociopathic tech CEOs standpoint, they can finally get rid of the humans, fire most of the programmers and suck up so much data that they can create an UBER AI that knows all…. except reality doesn’t work like that. No matter, reality is kept safely at bay always at least 4 kilometers from the Microsoft C-suite at all times.

The shift just hasn’t happened yet like a dead tree limb hanging on until that gust of wind comes along and the whole limb comes crashing down abruptly weeks after the storm that weakened it.

I guess but Microsoft truly feels like it is abandoning any commitment to making Windows function well for users.

They basically seem to think people have no choice and that they can focus their entire business on turning Windows into a surveillance advertisement platform.

In this environment, launching a windows handheld would be a laughable joke honestly.

The numbers don’t show it yet, but in the longterm Windows has catastrophically lost the home user operating system market and they deserve to for their awful stewardship of the market.

I mean if you get an xbox series x/s controller used off eBay for ~$30 and then the armor x pro

https://www.aliexpress.com/i/3256804278375316.html?gatewayAdapt=4itemAdapt

You have a mad decent gyro capable controller with four back buttons. Basically the controller Microsoft should have made.

Probably the best deal on a premium gyro capable controller on the market right now so shrugs.

Stardew Valley is a behemoth