Thanks to Steam Input, he can use any controller

It's trivially easy, but you'd be pulling in a lot of noise along with the signal, creating more moderation headaches for yourself (think of all the low-effort and spam stuff you usually have to filter out). You'd be better off scraping the content you want from primary sources directly rather than mirroring every post that goes to your old forum.

The game is outstanding, guys. Nuff said. Made by four people. It goes to show how out of touch big development studios are when gameplay takes a back seat and they can't make something with the fun factor.

16 times the detail

In practice it's not so easy without some manual curation. News sites post a lot of filler stuff and you don't want to start spamming yourself with every article posted to <insert magazine here>. Even on higher-traffic subs you don't generally see more than one or two posts from the same site on a given day. It's generally more effective with something repeatable and reliable like a weekly column where the expected "quality" is invariate. Certainly you can front-load the manual curation by building a set of filters into your scraper, but whether you filter the results at the front or the end of the pipe, you still need some kind of heuristic for what constitutes "good" content, and that's frequently a moving target.

Thief: Deadly Shadows. A soulless console adaptation of an OG immersive sim.

This guy single-handedly kept /r/pcgaming churning with news for the last eleventymillion years

Post your favorite demos that you played in the comments, guys. I have a number in the pipeline and will update once I review them all

My patience is rewarded. I always wait long enough for games to get an FPS mod. It's the only way to play, baby

Wazhack. Still haven't beaten it. It's a traditional roguelike (cf. nethack) presented in the unusual format of a 3D sidescroller. The dev is prolific about updating it year over year. Trust me on this one, game is a mix of hilarious and infuriating

Monkey Island/Grim Fandango/Leisure Suit Larry

Nothing is perfect, but you can always change mods and extend them further. Third person games take me really out of the action and feel weird to me. Rigging a camera is easier said than done, but still, peering over the shoulder of some character just feels like a console game to me.

For Karl

Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. Played it on a monochrome green EGA monitor. The "copy protection," such as it was, asked us who Richard Nixon's running mate was and we didn't know enough English at the time to comprehend. After trial and error, managed to get into the game and didn't have a flaming clue what we were doing. A ripping good time, it was.

It is outstanding, the ergonomics are much more comfortable than Steam Deck, and the disc-shaped pads are roomier. I'd love to see a Frankenstein mod of Steam Deck that adds Steam Controller grips to it. But honestly, I think the sheer length and weight of the thing is a limiting factor in terms of comfortability.

Don't play official servers, modded servers (moderated) are where it's at. Many unique, standalone maps like Namalsk and Deer Isle. There are zillions of servers catering to everything from hardcore survival to basebuilding

You raise a good point. Little overhead, the endpoints are well-formatted, you can get a digest of articles in one blow without API keys, and you just need to parse the resulting XML.

Fun demo on this one if you like perspective shift type games like Superliminal

STALKER. The A-Life AI system is something else, and the open-ended survival gameplay and atmosphere are really in a league of their own. Similarly, as a latter-day choice, INFRA. That's a Source engine total conversion that has a similar uncanny and immersive atmosphere where you are just blown away at the total package, map design, and the thought process that went into it. Those are easily the two most immersive games I've played.

I am jonesing hard for The Crimson Diamond too, the demo was perfectly pitched. Although it seems to be evolving at a glacial pace and if the streams are to an indication, the dev is focused on singular minutiae of pixel placement over iterative development, I guess.

Old Skies has weird but good feels. The story should be kind of boilerplate on paper, but it stayed with me for awhile afterwards. Maybe something about the execution and mise en scene made the package memorable. Or maybe they got the cliffhanger just right.

Two that recently came out and I demoed are Dreams in the Witch House and The Excavation of Hob's Barrow (formerly INCANTAMENTUM).

These were both utterly fantastic, the latter with its pacing and suspense, and the former with the dev's ingenious idea to combine survival/RPG-ish mechanics with a traditional point and click game and add a sense of urgency to a Cthulhu survival experience. A minority of staunch players on the Steam forums criticized these elements for being "difficult" (i.e, "give me zero consequences, comfy adventure gameplay"), but the game is not about unfair timers or chase sequences like in games of yore. It's a highly original marriage of inventory/time management/branching path mechanics with a more traditional story, and gives you the tools to tackle both the puzzle and survival aspects of the game in your own way while having that ever-present feeling of dread like in the IF game Anchorhead. And from what I can tell, the game was universally praised on Big Blue Cup forums, so I think those that care have taken note of the innovation-within-tradition being done here.

I'm excited to play both of those games and have them top of mind in my backlog.