Yeah, Steam Input could have been huge for the entire gaming industry, but instead it’s only for Steam and so only can get fixed by Valve, who just doesn’t really care about coming back to things and keeping them working after initially building something. Frustrating to see something almost so good just kinda limp along, accumulating bugs no one will fix because Valve doesn’t really care beyond the simple button mapping use.

Just like how dynamic collections could have been pretty great, but Valve got a rudimentary version working, patted themselves on the back, and left forever without even implementing the most basic tools anyone would need to actually use them (boolean combinations, actually using the tags you set on games, etc). It could even have been a slick new interface to Steam’s tagging (imagine if you set a collection specifically as a tag, and Steam took your manually adding and removing games there as tag votes) that might’ve helped ease some of the dumb problems tags have (there’d be a lot more info for Steam to draw on than just the people actually updating tags on the store page).

I’m kind of impressed no one makes a better gaming social-launch client than Steam, but then Steam’s own client has a massive lock in advantage so you basically can’t make something that wholly replaces it, and Valve doesn’t care to play nice when they want that obvious Steam-game vs non-Steam-game divide.

No it isn’t. They explicitly renamed themselves to “GOG” and removed the “Good”.

Tooling around and checking some Guild Wars 2 boxes as usual, but the new arcade twin-stick Sektori has been eating dedicated playtime all through holidays. A couple of my Steam friends went for some scoring in the side modes, but I got some solid runs in they will have to work pretty hard to pass again. I’m still trash against the games heinous bosses, though. Those things were designed to grind mistakes out of you, and I only occasionally get by even the first tier boss versions without some mistake. I definitely get tired of playing boss rush, but until I’m more consistently passing those without eating hits, campaign mode just isn’t going anywhere, and I’d really like to be over that hump. Good thing the other side modes are all pretty great and focus on the core play rather than the fancy but tiresome bosses. Too bad side modes got short-changed on achievements, because the dev annoyingly limited the Steam achievements based on consoles, so there are a bunch of pseudo-achievements that are only displayed in-game.

Sure, I knew which game you meant. It was just an oddly dismissive and mildly inaccurate way to refer to a legit top-tier game.

I play a lot of twin-sticks, so Robotron was a real curve to throw in. From my perspective, those are pretty different ;P

Shooting shapes in Sektori, a stunningly good arcade twin-stick, bashing dragon toes and playing bells in Guild Wars 2, a fun ARPG-MMO where we recently added a few more dress-up dolls to our roster just because we play a lot and like a few more ways to play, and third, mowing down hallways full of bugs in Combat Complex, a top-down shooter ARPG that’s weak on the ARPG aspects but the shooter side manages to feel like a great arcade twin-stick, plus some neat enemy-enemy friendly-fire mechanics.

Much more the first two than the third, as CC is good but it’s in early access and they recently changed and botched the progression, so playing right now at my level/floor is basically worthless, and I just have to hope they eventually do something to fix it.

Sektori, though, is seriously good.

geometry wars meets robotron type deal.

That makes no sense. Both of those are just arcade twin-stick shooters, and Sektori is no more Robotron than Geometry Wars was. Also, while Sektori very obviously draws a lot on Geometry Wars, it’s an amazingly good arcade twin-stick that improves so much on what GW did, and really deserves recognition. It’s niche, but it’s genuinely a top game in that niche, and I mean best in ten years top game.

If you like arcade twin-stick shoot-em-ups, Sektori is one of the best the genre has seen. Hard though: if one doesn’t know the genre, play Waves and Assault Android Cactus first.

They don’t want to hurt some dev’s numbers, but they don’t like the game either.

Or they just can’t handle giving the thumbs down. A lot of people like that nowadays. Only likes are allowed.

Top-down/twin-stick games where the aim (especially on controller) uses camera handling features, like smoothing the input or a cross-shaped deadzone.

Screenshake enabled by default, or not even an option to disable.

Have you looked at Zero-K? They have some TA history.