I must be on a kick for hyper action roguelike shooters rn.

I just got Sektori and it’s giving me locked-in syndrome in the best way. I can just play one run after another indefinitely. It’s so immersive and satisfying like the best Housemarque games like Resogun and Returnal.

Also playing a lot of RoboQuest. That’s another one that I can just turn on and make two hours disappear. The pacing never lets up while the huge selection of fun weapons keeps me experimenting constantly.

I’m still grinding away on Nuclear Throne too. There’s something about the game loop that feels just right to pick up a quick game. I keep getting a little further each time.

I picked back up with Cult of the Lamb. I’m playing it on extreme accessibility settings because I don’t want to hassle too much with the cult management stuff or the combat – I just want to see where the story goes.

I just got Sektori and it’s gripped my mind completely. It’s developed by a former Housemarque dev and it shows – balls to the wall action, kaleidoscopic visuals, and excellent roguelike mechanics. Lots of play modes to choose from, lots of run variety.

I also gotta plug Denshattack for those who don’t know. The concept is crazy - Tony Hawk style skateboard tricks with railway trains on roller coaster tracks across Japan - but it’s absolute frenzied fun. I can’t describe it but if you watch a video of it you’ll know if it’s for you. It’s constantly full of surprises and the mechanical fundamentals of the game are just so refined and perfect.

Both of these games make me feel like they’re tuning my nervous system, sharpening my reflexes, and challenging me to make sense of a chaotic visual field. It turns out I really like that feeling, and it’s what made Returnal my #1 favorite game of all time.

Another like this that I’m getting into is RoboQuest. Fast fun fps roguelite with lots of guns, lots of action, and great comic book inspired graphics. This one is a bit older and can usually be found on sale but it’s a lot of fun.

A quieter, slower one (for after the three above have wrung out my brain) is Klei’s phenomenal Mark of the Ninja. It’s a tactical stealth game where you’re a ninja methodically clearing rooms of bad guys. Each room is a thinky puzzle of how to use your limited tools and abilities creatively to neutralize all the enemies and progress. Excellent art style and animation. Expect to try, fail, and try again - the game will patiently wait with you as you figure out how to gracefully ascend each level.

I recently discovered Shape Of Dreams and it’s a lot of fun solo, might be fun for you in co-op. Others you might look at:

• Sulfur
• Sworn
• Abyssus

Services like eBay are part platform, part people. eBay’s people do a lot behind the scenes to ensure it runs smoothly and ethically… AND they take a significant chunk of the proceeds. You could put up some free software that does auctions but you wouldn’t have all those high paid security and trust workers working for you.

I just started Have a Nice Death and it’s so instantly appealing! I love the action, the art, the story. It stands besides the best action roguelite platformers I’ve ever played like Dead Cells, Blazblue Entropy Effect X, Rogue Prince of Persia, and Astral Ascent.

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Neat. But it’s not pre social media. Social media has been around since the 1980s.

That’s why I alternately call it the “platform web” in which social media stopped running on open and interoperable protocols and started being walled gardens on commercial platforms.

And to your other point - it shouldn’t be solely up to forum admins to opt-in to the Fediverse, end users should be able to subscribe to the forums they belong to with Fedi-powered tools.

The Fediverse could and should be the place where all those things can converge but I’m pointing out that it currently is failing to be that.

Not a stupid question, but I should clarify that I’m approaching this as a reader, not an admin. I’m trying to find a reading solution that encompasses forums running on Discourse, NodeBB, and whatever else older platforms might still have thriving communities around topics I’m interested in.

I found the DiscourseHub app that lets you browse and subscribe to a wide cross section of communities powered by Discourse, but no NodeBB or others. The solution I’m envisioning would be like that but agnostic of platforms.

Real interoperability should allow the publisher (them) to set the level of access (public/private) to their content AND THEN the end user (you and me) to choose the kind of client experience we use to consume that content so we can customize the user experience to our needs. That’s how email and websites work. If a forum software exposed its posts and comments to the open web or RSS (or even just to logged in users), anyone should be able to open that content with the browser or app of their choice. Commercial social platforms have distorted this very basic relationship between publishers and users but we can never forget that is the way it should be.

I’ve been delving back through my backlog and checking out some roguelites that I wasn’t done with — or that weren’t done with me…

• REDACTED
• Children of Morta
• Inscryption
• Soulstone Survivors
• Atomicrops
• Nuclear Throne
• Pathogenic
• The Land Beneath Us
• Ember Knights

How many Jeffrey Epsteins and Martin Shkrelis would we have BTW?

Couldn’t a sub moderator regulate that in real time though? Ideally they shouldn’t have to do too much of that, but in my experience many RSS feeds have a consistent volume of posts per day. I’m talking about choosing 1-2 feeds that post under 10 posts per day total, and an attentive mod could kibosh up to 3-4 if they’re not relevant to what the community wants. Could even put keyword filters on the feeds so relevant posts never hit the sub in the first place.

I mean… The other reason to start in a niche is because one is interested in a narrow subset of the wider topic and wants to avoid the bigger, louder, more mainstream content that dominates the conversation. I get that going up to c/games might have more content but if it’s all about Call of Duty and Madden Football, it’s not for me.

Then we have a real chicken/egg problem - not enough content to discuss and nobody discussing it.

Take a specific c/ like /us_news as an example. The feed is largely made up of timely posts from specific US news sites that are presumably acceptable to members. They can read a digest of the day’s news and react.

Then take a niche example like c/roguelites. There’s maybe one blog about roguelite games I know of where every post is worth reading, rogueliker.com. In Reddit that blog has its own sub but reposts almost every post into r/roguelites. No one minds because (a) the content is good and (b) there’s enough other organic activity in that sub that it doesn’t feel like it’s all just that blog. We have less organic activity overall here, but I’m trying to think of ways to spur engagement so communities have something going on in them.

I like the idea of choosing to focus deeply on enriching the content in certain communities. I think a huge tool in that fight is carefully using an “RSS to Lemmy” bot to pipe good quality feeds of relevant content into communities for further discussion around. If there’s an authoritative blog site that reliably writes good content that’d be relevant to a subLemmy audience, it might be a welcome addition.