dumpsterlid @ dumpsterlid @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Yeah I think you found a vehicle for the towing job that is purposefully broken down to make it a challenge to tow (I.e. the right front tire is totally flat so you have to lift the front with a winch for the tow). You only start with one vehicle (stinger) but there are various blue vehicles around you can drive for free to do jobs in exchange for a cut of your profits. Any vehicles you see with a yellow icon labeled “rescue request” on the map are vehicles intended to be recovered with a tow truck. You can get in them to “drive” them but that is just to facilitate repositioning them in order to help get them hooked into a tow truck. You cannot just get in and drive random vehicles in this game unless they are rental vehicles labeled with a blue icon.

Sorry you had a bad experience, it is definitely early access, I normally never recommend early access games it’s just there aren’t really any fleshed out alternatives of open world driving games with realistic physics and a large open worlds that even remotely try to do what Motor Town does, not to mention in a low poly graphics style well suited to lower end devices like the steam deck.

Yeah there are open world racing games, but that doesn’t really get at the vibe of Motor Town with all the vastly different kinds of vehicles and jobs all happening together at once. The closest peers like Forza or Beamng just don’t understand the basic gameplay loop of why Motor Town works so well, so while you might be able to get somewhat of a similar experience to parts of Motor Town elsewhere, even at this stage of development I think Motor Town provides a really unique fun that for a certain type of person is going to be an extremely addicting experience.

Some people will try the Motor Town demo and think “this is just all grinding driving jobs for money” and hate, people like me will have the same reaction and absolutely love it for focusing on that.

Controller support works no problem for me both with the steamdeck onboard controls and also with a gamepad when my steamdeck is docked. The game has premade bindings for controller that display onscreen and honestly driving with a controller gives you a massive advantage over mouse and keyboard given how subtle the vehicle handling is and how much easier it is to make smooth subtle adjustments with a controller.

There is a demo so you can see if it works for you.

I’m looking for a game with realistic handling where I can race down some roads with traffic.

Totally the right vibe for this game, just start out doing taxi jobs, turn on accepting urgent passengers and turn off accepting comfort passengers. Now you have a point to point racing game on roads with AI traffic (and also human players if you play online).

The starter taxi car doesn’t have crazy acceleration but go into your options and turn off all the steering and driving assists and put the car in sport mode and the car opens up a lot since the assists are there to help you drive calmly.

Still an early access game but the driving feel is just so good and you the customization of vehicles is so flexible that I don’t really care, it is a blast already. Also, jobs like delivery truck jobs might not usually be timed but the more jobs you do the more money you make… so even the jobs that aren’t framed as racing jobs you can totally treat like a racing game and soup up your delivery truck with an absurd engine.

The only job you can’t treat like a racing job is bus driving since you have to arrive on schedule and not too early (you can have AI drive bus routes for you while you drive a different car tho). Every other job you can just punch it and drive like an absolute psychopath. Think of it as a racing game about racing all kinds of different vehicles (wanna make a semi into a giant drift monster? You can do that) not just sports cars.

If you crank the settings yeah it won’t run well, but at lower settings that game runs fine even online in a multiplayer server with 30 people (though the net code is still a bit rough (I mean it’s a multiplayer physics game with multiple articulating physics pieces like 18 wheelers with trailers soooo) but that isn’t the steamdeck’s problem). It has a free demo, try it out to and see for yourself yooo

Because the graphics are stylized as low poly you are getting a whole lot of very advanced unreal engine physics delivered in a very resource efficient package. I bet Wreckfest runs as good at low graphics but Wreckfest defies logic with how well it runs.

Another good vehicle game that is fabulous for the steam deck is Offroad Mania. Opposite kind of game from Motor Town, very small bite sized rock crawling levels and procedurally generated endless obstacle runs. The game has superb physics, low poly graphics and runs like butter on the deck.

If your son is of the kid type “loves big machines that adults use to do work with” he will absolutely be obsessed with this game, I would have played the shit out of it when I was a kid. Wait I am playing the shit out of it, am I still a kid..?

Also, I get that it isn’t your type of game but if you can find a driving task you like doing in the game it is a really good way to spend time together, it is a superb social hangout game. Give the demo a try at least if your son ends up liking it!

I did like how it was handled in Windwaker to some degree, but that may also be because you don’t lose all your stuff 30 mins from home because a random mosquito attacked you out of nowhere 😅

Oof I got attacked by a “mosquito” and lost all my stuff way far from home in valheim and it made me temporarily quit. The mosquito was weird though, it was like 100 feet long with a big menacing mouth full of teeth, no wings thankfully.

Also some of the most fun sailing is in the tiniest sailboats you can get like sunfishes, lasers, j20s etc… they are simple, quick to tack (i.e. they keep speed through turns) relatively inexpensive and easy to get in the water and a blast to sail like a fool and capsize. Sometimes there are sailing clubs/classes you can sail these at that are pretty affordable if you live near water.

But yeah in video games it’s usually just kind of boring. You’re mostly just waiting to get from A to B, with little to do inbetween.

This is true but it is so silly, if you ever get the chance to go out sailing on a windy day on like a 20 foot hobie cat style catamaran with someone who knows how to sail it and you would NOT say the experience was boring or full of long periods of nothing stimulating. Even if the water wasn’t its own unique dynamic environment just the mechanics of keeping the sailboat hiked over with your body weight to get maximum speed without flipping over are complex and stimulating and those things FLY. In a video game there is no reason game developers couldn’t dial up the arcadeyness and speed to make this experience even more fun, but I just don’t think most game developers give a shit about sailing so they don’t even think to try. They just program a motorboat and animate a cosmetic sail on top of it that swings around to whatever direction you are going and call it a day.

I am utterly addicted to an early access game called Motor Town: Behind The Wheel. It sells itself as a driving simulator kind of like if Euro Truck Simulator not only had semis but also taxis, box trucks, garbage trucks, tow trucks, busses, sedans, SUVs vans, sports cars etc.. you name it.

There are many different ways to earn money in the game from pizza delivery to logging trucking to driving a garbage truck to urgent taxi rides.

Because you can heavily customize and tune each vehicle, including being able to drop ridiculously powerful engines into vehicles, it means that while this game doesn’t sell itself as a racing game necessarily, it is one of the most fun racing games I have ever played. When I do deliveries with my box truck I’m not playing a chill simulator, I am hurtling a box truck across fields and power sliding around corners with my custom tuned v12 monster.

The physics are superb and it is just a blast to race around in the vastly different feeling vehicles.

What seals the addictive feel to the game is that it has an autopilot feature where your vehicle will automatically drive to waypoints so you can interact with this game anywhere along a continuum from a sort of idle game all the way to a balls to the wall open world racing game.

If you are the kind of person that enjoys just racing around in GTAV aimlessly rather than doing missions or if you love open world racing games like Burnout Paradise or if you want to play Euro Truck Simulator with your friends you will love Motor Town.

Motor Town has multiplayer and it is really fun to be on the same road networks as people playing the game in a totally different way than you. A lot of times semis and trucks go by in autopilot, sometimes you pass someone driving a logging truck like an utter psychopath addicted to speed, sometimes you pass a player loading a broken down vehicle onto their towtruck, sometimes you are racing along and see someone else racing in their souped up car and a mini informal street race happens. It is my ideal version of a chill social game, especially because again the driving mechanics/physics are superb, it is hard to go back to other games after it.

Finally, it runs awesome on the steam deck particularly because of the low poly graphics style (that might fool you into thinking the driving mechanics are arcadey but trust me they aren’t).

Lol for most of this conversation I was sure this was a total overhaul mod for Oblivion.

Which was the Trine that was panned on release, was it 4 or 5?

What was insanity was the stupidity of the fear of a red communist wave taking over the planet like some kind of cartoon, what was insanity was the Vietnam war that even when it became unpopular the US government basically just refused and colluded to keep us there.

Yeah but also I think the nature of viral content is just spinning out into chaos with the amount of AI generated content and bots. I am sure palworld deserves its popularity to an extent but it’s the velocity and utter completeness of palworld’s popularity that feels weird. At some level I think algorithms are heavily distorting cultural phenomena like this to be much more “winner takes all” in terms of popularity. It is not only how humans tend to act but it is also the most profitable way to monetize culture.

I mean tell that to the countless people murdered or living in countries that had their democratically elected government overthrown for no good reason in favor of violent rightwing nut jobs because the CIA wanted to do it.

I think it would be better if we just didn’t have an intelligence agency in the US given the absolutely incomprehensibly careless way the CIA and other clandestine US agencies have caused massed suffering around the world.

Ok for sure, no judgement if you don’t like sailing but I grew up learning how to sail sunfishes and other derpy small sailboats.

Sailing is fun as shit. Yeah intense racing type sailors are absolutely insufferable but if you have ever had the pleasure of having a sailboat to fuck around in, it is like kayaking except you don’t have to do work. Wonderful. Amazing. Sailing is so god damn underrated in video games.

The basics of sailing are pretty simple and easy to grasp. Yet… 99% of games with sailboats as optional craft never actually make the sailboats behave like sailboats. They are just lame motorboats you drive until you can manage to hijack a speedboat. It sucks.

Or there are pirate/tall ship games where the ships just magically go in any direction you want and it just utterly kills the vibe.

There should be entire genres of sailing games by now that are basically just open world space trading games but with actually interesting vehicle controls and living dynamic universes (the fucking ocean) with regional wind patterns.

WHERE ARE ALL THE SAILING GAMES????

sigh but again no judgement if you hate sailboats but as long as a game implements them like Valheim, than rowing gets you there plenty fast enough i.e. you can just ignore them. Valheim sadly undersells sailing though since if the wind is blowing against you sailing upwind is slower than rowing which robs you of one of the fundamental magical feelings of sailing (how am I rapidly traveling my in the opposite way fronthe force powering me??).

There are so many reasons to love sailing, it connects us with human history, it is fun, and it provides a vehicle piloting experience with lots of mechanical depth.

/endrant

Idk I guess I still didn’t get the vibe it was anywhere as special as the hype train is treating it. It honestly feels weirdly artificial for a hype train too.

I just feel like what you are saying is “once the game is actually developed it will be good”. It sounds like an early access starfield.

Once the world is fleshed out I will play it, I could care less about an empty open world with vague promises. I could also care less about mediocre mechanics (is anything in pal world as fun as trying to nail a deer with a spear in valheim?).

To be fair Valheim has actual sailboats that sail according to the wind which is my pet peeve that other games don’t ever play around with this (sailboats are magic motorboats usually) so it is going to be hard to beat for me.

Gotta be honest, rockpapershotgun’s coverage of this game hasn’t gotten me very interested in this being anything other than a hyped flash in the pan but we’ll see

I don’t disagree, but also the existence of the CIA is a mistake of historic proportions so I don’t really care what this guy has to say.

Every single time Bill Gates gets mentioned in public conversation this needs to be the first thing said about him for the rest of his life. Given the power Bill Gates has he could have easily pushed for Covid vaccines to be made generic and saved tens of thousands? of lives.

This isn’t some pipe dream or unrealistic 20-20 hindsight no one could have had. All he had to was decide it was important to advocate for it and use his power to make it happen. It was no guarantee, but more than anyone else on the planet he has the public, private and monetary unilateral leverage to make something like that happen.

Given the complete lack of desperation or forced choices in Bill Gates life, the choice not to push for generics (and be a talking head on tv actively against them) can and should be seen as indiscriminate mass murder on a societal scale. In terms of world impact it obliterates everything Bill Gates built with windows, computers, all his philanthropy and involvement in medical science… ALL of it in one tidal wave of violence and brutal lack of compassion.

Makes me angry when I hear dumb conspiracies about Bill Gates when this is aspect is sitting there right in the open and it is so much more evil than most of the conspiracies (you know what is worse than having a chip in your head?Your loved one dying from Covid).

There is a precise technical answer to your question a finance person can probably give you but it doesn’t really answer the question no matter how many acronyms they throw at you.

The actual answer is that there is no reason any of this has to be rational. Business people believe so strongly that companies like embracer are valuable and have a function in society that they detect zero cognitive dissonance when said companies don’t actually do anything but buy smaller companies, dissect them and destroy value.

You can’t understand business and finance people like they are scientists, they are closer to priests of a religious sect that believe in things because of their belief system not because of some rational framework that actually supports their ideas.

I think for the rich, it is just “good practice” to commit economic violence against smaller companies, it is good hygiene for keeping the power in the hands of the rich like mowing a field once a year or something. This doesn’t fully explain how poorly some of these companies function like embracer however.

The astounding thing is history is full of these types of people when you peel back the “couple great men” narrative of history and actually look at how good things happened, it is kind of bewildering.

No war but the class war