Steam

[Davros]

I use WSQE because I find it more comfortable, this has caused me problem on occasion when a game assumes I want to use WASD
ps: If anyone is having problems with a game not allowing to choose what keys you want to use I recommend keytweak, you need to reboot after remapping keys, just remember that when you have to type in your windows password .

KeyTweak

Change your keyboard layout

keytweak.en.softonic.com

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I hate keyboard controls full stop. Having actions linked to Q and E buttons (or A and G) means taking your finger off movement to use an action. Controllers take one digit for movement, not four, leaving the rest to press buttons.

I guess you could use one finger on the direction keys, moving one to another, on KB and have the others resting on action buttons. That feels really weird though!

 

[hughJ]

I guess it depends on whether the game has a use for more keys, and whether the faster input by having dedicated keys is beneficial. Hitbox-style controllers for fighting games are objectively superior to arcade sticks or controllers, but that works because you don't have more actions than fingers. For WASD-style directional keys it's a half-way step between that and a d-pad in that you've got fingers resting on 3 of the 4 directions, and you've still got 5 other fingers (pinky, thumb, and 3 mouse buttons) that can handle independent simultaneous actions. I'd imagine that there are things you simply couldn't do as well if you were to try and replace WASD with a d-pad handled by a single finger or thumb. I'm too lazy to try this, but it'd be interesting to dig out my old Thinkpad and see if that joystick nib thing could be remapped to a 4-way dpad input. Or one of those Belkin n52 keypad things that have a built in dpad or stick.

But with modern games dictated by console audiences and controllers there's also not a huge need for precision, speed, or quantity of inputs anyways. Most buttons end up getting triple or quadruple-bound with some kind of clumsy context-sensitive logic choosing what action the button does. Rather than manually jumping and crouching to maneuver over something you have a mantle animation sequence triggered by jumping near an entity that has a special attribute tagged to it, so you don't need to worry about having jump and crouch keys bound to independent fingers, and you don't have to worry about aiming or shooting while it happens because your POV is locked while the game controls your character. Rather than directly binding weapons to unique keys you instead have weapon wheels or simplified primary/alt schemes that allow weapon switching to be reduced to 1 button.

 

[Cyan]

I hate keyboard controls full stop. Having actions linked to Q and E buttons (or A and G) means taking your finger off movement to use an action. Controllers take one digit for movement, not four, leaving the rest to press buttons.

I guess you could use one finger on the direction keys, moving one to another, on KB and have the others resting on action buttons. That feels really weird though!

kinda agree. Directional keys before WASD was invented worked well, 'cos they are a set of totally separated 4 keys. On driving games they worked like a charm, up accelerates, down brakes, left and right turns the vehicle. I never got used to WASD, mainly because I usually played strategy games back at the time, or games that didn't use WASD much.

On another note, do anyone knows how to search for a very specific kind of game? I mean, I want to play shoot em' ups, a la R-Type, Strikers 1945 and so on and so forth, but I want to perform a search on Steam for shmup games with local co-op.

Any help from a Steam expert -I am not-, would be appreciated.

 

[GhostofWar]

On another note, do anyone knows how to search for a very specific kind of game?

I'm no expert either but when i'm after a certain genre I normally look at the tags on the store page for a game in that genre. So in this case I just went to the r-type store page and looked at it's tags, popular tags were arcade, shootem up. So I went to search and used those 2 tags, then I refined it more by adding side scroller. You could probably also add top down shooter if your after vertical ones aswell.

Steam Search

store.steampowered.com

 

[Cyan]

I'm no expert either but when i'm after a certain genre I normally look at the tags on the store page for a game in that genre. So in this case I just went to the r-type store page and looked at it's tags, popular tags were arcade, shootem up. So I went to search and used those 2 tags, then I refined it more by adding side scroller. You could probably also add top down shooter if your after vertical ones aswell.

Steam Search

store.steampowered.com

thanks! That's been very helpful. I had found how to search for games by Genre and some other specifics, but I was missing the tags part. It was impossible for me to find the Shoot Em' Up tag so I had to choose Shooter, which is very generic, and narrowing the search was a pita.

I also wanted it to be local co-op (a truly underrated feature, and it's so important, for siblings to play together, family etc, it makes games a LOT more fun for them).

I prefer side scrolling shmups, but that's a not essential tag, still I went with it. I want shmup games with local co-op for when I want to play them with my 6 and 4 years old nephews, or let them play at their pace. Contrary to their arcade roots, these games aren't meant to fleece the player so you the Steam ports have many difficulty options. My search was based on yours and ended up with this;

Steam Search

store.steampowered.com

For now, I ended up getting Deathsmiles and TouHou Makuka Sai Fantastic Danmaku Festival Part II (no Co-Op nor side-scroller but I liked it very much), both on sale:

Save 65% on Deathsmiles on Steam

Deathsmiles is CAVE's bullet-hell shoot-'em-up where you take the role of one of five Angels to defend the magical land of Gilverado from an invasion by Hell itself! Eradicate this devilish assault!

store.steampowered.com

TouHou Makuka Sai ~ Fantastic Danmaku Festival Part II on Steam

Touhou Makuka Sai ~ Fantastic Danmaku Festival part II is a danmaku shooting game, which is the second part of Touhou Makuka Sai. The repeat of incident is coming again. Can the girls going to the netherworld solve the mystery?

store.steampowered.com

 

[GhostofWar]

thanks! That's been very helpful.

No problem, glad it helped. I've been doing a similar thing with 2 of my nephews, although I hadn't really given a thought about these having local coop so had just defaulted to local coop beatem ups (ninja turtles, streets of rage etc). I've got some of the darius games and crimson clover world ignition plus a bunch of other ones I could probably try them with and possibly save me having to buy any for while

 

[Cyan]

No problem, glad it helped. I've been doing a similar thing with 2 of my nephews, although I hadn't really given a thought about these having local coop so had just defaulted to local coop beatem ups (ninja turtles, streets of rage etc). I've got some of the darius games and crimson clover world ignition plus a bunch of other ones I could probably try them with and possibly save me having to buy any for while

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/pc-local-co-op-games.63164/

this thread might be helpful. When you have friends or family with you, there is nothing like local co-op, imho. Seeing my nephews talking when they play Rocket League, Paw Patrol Games and a Disney game on PC Gamepass, etc etc, is a sight to behold. They interact together and talk to one another all the time and imho that's more important than anything in a game at their age.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Hmm, missed that thread. Whenever anyone asks about Coop, I direct them to here:

Co-Optimus - Your Prime Source for Co-Op Gaming - Home Page

www.co-optimus.com

Website cataloguing co-op games with supported modes, platforms, and reviews.

 

[Cyan]

the entire EA library on sale, with heavy discounts.

Save up to 85%* with the EA Publisher Sale

Offers available now until May 13, 2024.

store.steampowered.com

edit: please @Shifty Geezer or any other mod I'd be thankful if one of moved this to the sales thread

 

[GhostofWar]

the entire EA library on sale, with heavy discounts.

Unravel 2 has local coop, not sure if the pair of knuckleheads I am playing with will be able to work out the puzzles but it could be worth finding out at that price.

 

[Cyan]

something I've observed that doesn't happen to me on PC gamepass, where controllers work fine from the get go, is that when I play games on Steam, the setting Steam Input for the controller can easily get in the way.


i.e. to play Hotshot Racing, a 90s racing style game, one of the favourite games of my 4 y.o. and -since a few days ago- 7 y.o. nephews, which they LOVE playing. specially the mode where they escape from police but if you get caught you become a police and pursuit the other racers, it has been a pita to set up to play with 2 gamepads until I discovered how to disable Steam Input. For single player games it's fine, but when you are using more than 1 controller, it can be a huge nuisance or make it impossible to play local coop and so on until you find out that Steam Input -a clearly visible option but still- is the culprit.

Once I disable Steam Input both controllers work just fine like on PC gamepass games.

 

[Cyan]

After you die, your Steam games will be stuck in legal limbo

So much for your descendants posthumously clearing out that massive backlog…

arstechnica.com

As long as you give your email to the person you want to have your games, it's fine, right?

Unless they realise 100 years from now that someone is using your account and games from your account created in 2020....

 

[Cyan]

Look out, Shadowplay: Steam now has a built-in 'Game Recording' feature that will automatically record gameplay videos you can clip, share, and export

Look out, Shadowplay: Steam now has a built-in 'Game Recording' feature that will automatically record gameplay videos you can clip, share, and export

The new system is currently in beta, but it looks very good.

www.pcgamer.com

https://twitter.com/x/status/1806035699248009674

 

[Cyan]

now you can know the total money you spent on games on Steam, and the Pile of Shame -games that you barely played or didn't play at all despite the price you paid for them- and the Best Value games -the games whose cost was clearly worth it because you played them a lot-.

The math on unplayed Steam “shame” is way off—and no cause for guilt

It’s fun to speculate, but sales and library quirks make it impossible to know.

arstechnica.com

You just have to go to this page, type your id and if you set your games' profile to public you can know some interesting details.

SteamIDFinder

Steam ID Finder is a tool to find your Steam ID, find or convert your Steam ID into a Hex ID, and calculate your Steam Pile of Shame

www.steamidfinder.com

This is the result I got:

Best Value games.

Game	Hours	Cost Per Hour
	Army of Ruin	76	$0.11
	Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition	232	$0.17
	Lossless Scaling	30	$0.17
	Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Definitive Edition	191	$0.24
	Resident Evil 2	105	$0.38
	NBA 2K22	148	$0.41
	Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance	31	$0.43
	Sky Force Reloaded	19	$0.55
	DOOM	24	$0.87
	Redout: Enhanced Edition	21	$0.99

 

[Cyan]

My pile of shame (had to use two different posts 'cos the amount of characters was superior than 20000 according to B3D)

My pile of shame.

Name	Game Cost
	EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 5	$59.99​
	Sid Meier’s Civilization® VI	$59.99​
	RESIDENT EVIL RESISTANCE	$59.99​
	Sonic Frontiers	$59.99​
	Resident Evil Re:Verse	$39.99​
	MONSTER HUNTER RISE	$39.99​
	Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War	$39.99​
	Leisure Suit Larry - Wet Dreams Dry Twice	$34.99​
	Total War: SHOGUN 2	$29.99​
	Field of Glory II	$29.99​
	Mafia II: Definitive Edition	$29.99​
	Warhammer: Vermintide 2	$29.99​
	ENDLESS™ Legend	$29.99​
	Sonic Lost World	$29.99​
	The Darkness II	$29.99​
	Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation	$29.99​
	Miscreated	$29.99​
	Space Crew: Legendary Edition	$24.99​
	Last Days of Old Earth	$24.99​

 

[Cyan]

Court documents show that not only is Valve a fraction the size of companies like EA or Ubisoft, it's smaller than a lot of triple-A developers

Court documents show that not only is Valve a fraction the size of companies like EA or Ubisoft, it's smaller than a lot of triple-A developers

According to improperly redacted documents from a recent lawsuit, Valve had 336 employees in 2021.

www.pcgamer.com

 

[see colon]

Didn't we know this? Most of the people they had that made games are no longer at Valve anymore.

 

[Frenetic Pony]

Didn't we know this? Most of the people they had that made games are no longer at Valve anymore.

They never had many, it's never been a huge company.

That they've still got like 150ish people working on games, but those are updating CS2, Dota 2, and building that new FPS/MOBA hybrid at the same time while that number wouldn't fill out a typical triple A studios "core team" is still impressive. And yes Gabe Newell has bragged about how profitable Valve is per person, cool to have specific numbers though.

 

[RobertR1]

https://wccftech.com/steam-achieves-37-2-million-concurrent-players-breaking-all-previous-records/

Insane numbers. PC gaming continues an upward trend.