Indie games deserve far more attention than AAA games.

Last year, there was only one new AAA that I considered top quality, and that was Black Myth: Wukong. Apart from that, all other AAA games ranged from “yuck” (Concorde) to “cromulent” (Indiana Jones and the Great Circle).

In contrast, when we look at indie games, we got Balatro, Nightmare Kart, MiSide, Mullet Madjack, and Crow Country. That’s just the top of my head because I know there are hundreds, if not thousands more.

This isn’t to say that AA gaming doesn’t exist. We all know about the success of PalWorld and Helldivers 2.

And this isn’t to say you have terrible taste in games if you only like big budget titles.

But it is to say that when it comes to sheer volume, there are more good indie games than AAA games. And this just makes sense: 20K games were released on Steam last year, and almost all of them are indies.

Now previously, I’ve asked, “Why, despite being beloved, do indie games receive so little attention in the gaming press?”

And the conclusion I always come back to is that you can’t expect the gaming press to cover indie because indies aren’t paying the gaming press. Sad but true.

So how do we solve the problem of good indie games going unnoticed? Well, it’s up to us to talk about them.

For one thing, I think it’s important to talk about PC gaming itself as the indie platform—because that’s what it is. When we move away from GPUs and RGB lighting, most PC gamers are playing indie games. More to the point, most indies aren’t released for PC first—and often stay on PC. Entire platforms, like itch.io, exist to serve indie developers—and most of those games are made for PC.

Indie gaming is PC gaming. And almost all PC gaming is indie gaming.

So why do we pretend that PC gaming is about face-melting GPU-pushing graphics when it’s clearly not? That’s just a tiny—though lucrative—portion of the PC gaming market.

I, for one, want to talk about new indie game releases on PC—they’re worth talking about.

@pcgaming@lemmy.ca

This is a unique experiment in the Fediverse.

What’s going on?

To explain what’s happening with my account:

I’ve created a new art form.

I don’t mean this in a pretentious “guy in a turtleneck sniffing his own farts” way. I mean, literally, I’ve invented a form of art that hasn’t been done before. And to understand it, you first need to understand what’s happening.

The Backstory

A long time ago, I organized photos into categories and themes for an ARG (alternate reality game) centered around r/Sizz. But then Reddit went and enshittified itself, forcing me to abandon the original plan.

From that, I learned a crucial lesson:

• Never depend on an external platform to host my work.
• Always build redundancies so the work can survive.

Keep that in mind—it’s key to what happens next.

The Problem with the Fediverse

I tried migrating the ARG to my personal server, atomicpoet.org, but I hit a wall:

The Fediverse makes it really hard to build an art community, and by extension, an ARG. The platform favors certain topics—politics and tech do well, but art? Not so much.

At first, I was frustrated. But then I had an idea:

What if the same content could look completely different depending on where you view it?

The Breakthrough

Mastodon and Lemmy attract different audiences, which means people interpret the same post in completely different ways. What if I leaned into that?

That’s when I discovered Piefed.

• Its moderation tools gave me exactly what I needed.
• Its masonry-style layout prioritized images over text—perfect for what I was building.

How It Works

On Mastodon, my posts look like scattered poetry, fiction, and chaotic personal musings: 🔗 Example

But on Piefed, those same posts take on an aesthetically unified theme: 🔗 Example

Two completely different experiences—from the exact same content. The way each platform processes posts creates a divergent reality.

The Artform

Think of it like this:

• My personal account = a light beam
• ActivityPub = a prism
• Piefed communities = different “colors” refracting from that prism

Each community on Piefed has its own theme and patterns: 🔗 Lumoura 🔗 Blue 🔗 Dustbloom 🔗 Sizz

Look closely, and you’ll see that these patterns form a larger story—one I’ll eventually compile into multiple books.

The Big Reveal

Instead of making you guess the “game,” I’m telling you upfront: this is how it works.

And none of it would be possible without ActivityPub and the way different platforms interpret content.

@fediverse@lemmy.world

I like to believe that everyone has a part of their brain reserved exclusively for "stupid." But maybe that’s just me.

Case in point: I hate opera. Specifically, I hate hearing soprano opera singers who hit notes so high, they wish I was deaf. It’s shrill, it’s grating, and it makes my ears file a restraining order.

But then, a few days ago, I stumbled upon a soprano opera singer who was rapping. That’s right—doing full-blown hip-hop in her best "singing-to-summon-spirits" voice. As in, to the hip, hip-hop, and you don’t stop the rockin’… but operatic.

And instead of shutting off that unholy fusion of sound and sin, my brain went: 😍🥵

I don’t know why. Something about it awakened a deep, primal urge in me. I was ready to pledge my undying loyalty, buy all her merch, and start an aggressive online campaign defending her against imaginary haters.

Like, goddamn. What’s wrong with me? Why do I suddenly want to start a shrine to a rapping opera diva?

It makes no sense. I am a rational man. Or at least I was a rational man, until that opera rapper opened her mouth and obliterated all logic and reason from my brain like a high note-powered nuke.

The stupid part of my brain has officially staged a coup.

Must. Hear. Rapping. Opera. Woman. Again.

@music@lemmy.world

Mutual aid spam is becoming a problem on the Fediverse.

And to be sure, I'm not against mutual aid. What I am against is spam.

This person has not verified who she is -- or even if the profile picture is hers. Additional research on her name states she is a scammer with a record of grifting. I am therefore skeptical that any donations will help anyone in need.

Folks, please be cautious with mutual aid requests. Yes, people sometimes need help. But people also lie.

@fediverse@lemmy.world

Hashtags do not replace groups.

No one moderates them. They’re easy to hijack and spam. And there’s simply no permanence to them.

Which is why, if you actually want to discuss something, it’s better to tag a group. For example, if you want to be part of an actual PC gaming community on the Fediverse, it’s better to tag @pcgaming@lemmy.ca than #pcgaming.

This needs to be common knowledge because people new to the Fediverse do not know about groups. Hell, I’d say people who have had Mastodon accounts for years still don’t know. And that’s a shame.

@fediverse@lemmy.world

Two new features are coming to #Fedify! Both have to do with controls over domain names:

1. Different domains for WebFinger handles and server URIs.
2. Canonical origin support to explicitly set your server’s authoritative domain

https://hollo.social/@fedify/01953693-1afd-7430-988a-23d649099e1c

@fediversenews@piefed.social

I was a North American kid who grew up without an NES, and for this reason, I have a different perspective on retro video games.

The common narrative in retro gaming circles is that the NES was everywhere—that it was totally dominant, and if you didn’t own one, you missed out. But when you look at the sales numbers, the story changes.

In North America, 30 million NES units were sold between 1985 and 1995. At the time, this was the most a video game console had ever sold—no question, it was huge. But compared to later systems like the PlayStation, PlayStation 2, or even the Nintendo Wii, it’s not that much. In fact, if you combine Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo sales, the NES didn’t outsell them.

So what did everyone else play? Because I guarantee that just because you didn’t own an NES didn’t mean you weren’t playing video games at home. I’m just going to talk about what I played, because I don’t think I was unique in this regard.

—-

My first video game console, the one I got when I was three years old, was an Atari 2600. I got it in 1984, and it was my only console for a few years. By no means was it as good as an NES in terms of graphics or sound—I mean, come on, the 2600 hardware came out in 1977, and even then, it was underpowered. But it had a lot of great games that kept me busy: Asteroids, Missile Command, Pac-Man (even though it wasn’t as good as the arcade version), Frostbite, Frogger—you name it.

It was easy to enjoy these games at the time because arcades were still huge in the ‘80s, and the Atari 2600 had a great selection of arcade ports. I remember wanting an NES because it was clearly better than the 2600, but my parents said they couldn’t afford one. And that was that.

—-

Sometime in the late ‘80s, though, my mom got me a Commodore 64. The funny thing is, she didn’t see it as a gaming machine—she thought it would help me with schoolwork, that I’d be using it for highly educational purposes. Little did she know.

Someone we knew found out I had a Commodore 64 and gave us a huge stack of floppy disks. My mom was thrilled, thinking it would help with my studies. What she didn’t realize was that those floppies were packed with pirated games. I had no idea at first—I’d just put in a random floppy, load it up, and see what was on it. Most of them weren’t labeled well, so it was always a surprise.

One day, I loaded up a floppy and saw “OutRun.” I was blown away. I remember thinking, “Okay, this thing is going to keep me busy for a long time.” And it did. I played Ultima, Lode Runner, Donkey Kong (which, believe it or not, was officially released on the Commodore 64), Ghosts ‘n Goblins—you name it. The amount of time I spent on that machine was insane.

What a lot of people don’t realize about the Commodore 64 is that many NES games were also released on it—Bubble Bobble, Castlevania, and while Super Mario Bros. wasn’t there, The Great Giana Sisters was. That game was basically Super Mario Bros., and I actually grew to like it more. The music, composed by Chris Hülsbeck, was amazing. I remember stumbling across a symphony orchestra playing the theme music on YouTube one day, which just confirmed that other people appreciated it as much as I did.

But the game that truly made me feel like I had something legendary on my hands? Turrican. Man, Turrican was magical. I have never had an experience quite like it. How people feel about Contra—that’s how I feel about Turrican.

—-

In the early ‘90s, I got a 286 PC, which introduced me to the world of shareware. I wanted the big games everyone was talking about, like Wing Commander, but my machine couldn’t handle it. Instead, I played stuff like Commander Keen and Duke Nukem, mostly games from Apogee and id Software. In some ways, it felt like a downgrade from my Commodore 64, so I still played on that, but my mom was pretty intent on us “keeping up with the times.”

Still, PC gaming had its advantages. Games were cheap—you could literally walk into a dollar store, pick up a shareware title for a buck, and go to town. I had so many variations of Tetris on my 286, it was ridiculous. A little later, we upgraded to a 386, and I finally got to experience Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. By then, the NES era was ending, and at that point, I felt like I didn’t need a console—PC gaming had everything I wanted. And 30 years later, I’m still playing Wolfenstein and Doom.

—-

Eventually, my mom did try to get me an NES. It was Christmas 1991, and I was overjoyed when I unwrapped my gift—finally, I had something to replace my old Atari 2600. But the NES was broken. My mom felt bad and told me, “We’ll return this, and you can pick out whatever console you want.”

This was 1991. The options were NES, Super NES, or Sega Genesis. I looked at the Genesis box and saw Sonic the Hedgehog, and to me, the choice was clear—I needed Sonic. By then, I was 10 years old, and Mario felt like it was for babies. Sonic had attitude, and being a kid in the early ‘90s, I obviously wanted the character with attitude.

I loved my Sega Genesis—it was like rock and roll to me. It did what my Commodore 64 and 286 couldn’t: display lots of colors, lots of sprites, with parallax scrolling to boot. I had so many games: Earthworm Jim, NHL ‘94, Sonic Spinball, and eventually Street Fighter II: Championship Edition. At that point, I didn’t want an NES—most people didn’t in 1991.

I became a full-blown Sega fan. Around this time, I found a Sega Master System in a pawn shop for $35. It wasn’t sold in stores anymore, but I grabbed it, and luckily, my local video store still rented and sold Master System games cheap. I got Phantasy Star, Alex Kidd in Miracle World, Space Harrier—hell, I even rented Sonic the Hedgehog for it.

It’s funny—when people think “8-bit console,” they immediately think NES, but my mind goes to Sega. And in places like Brazil, Australia, and Europe, plenty of people had similar experiences. But in North America, I was the only person I knew with a Master System. Still, it had an incredible library—Phantasy Star is one of the greatest RPGs ever made.

—-

I did own one Nintendo system—a Game Boy, which I got near launch in 1989. So it’s not like I was completely without Nintendo hardware, but it was handheld, not a home console. I played Super Mario Land, Tetris (obviously), Super Mario Land 2, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That was about it, until I lost it. My mom was furious, but I had it for two years and played those games to death.

—-

And finally, there were the Tiger Electronics handhelds. People don’t really talk about them now, but they were a big deal. While an NES game might cost $60, a Tiger handheld was $20-$30, and they were everywhere. They weren’t great, but they amused me, and kids would trade them at school.

So, while I missed out on the “NES experience,” I never felt deprived. Between the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, Sega consoles, PC gaming, and handhelds, I had plenty to play. And honestly? I wouldn’t trade my gaming history for anything.

@retrogaming

I'm leveraging Piefed for something incredibly neat.

You might notice that I'm tagging my photography posts with usernames. In fact, those are not usernames -- they are #Piefed communities.

And to get the full effect of what I'm doing, it's important to visit each individual community for the full aesthetic impact. So here's the links:

1. @dustbloom@piefed.social: https://piefed.social/c/dustbloom
2. @blue@piefed.social: https://piefed.social/c/blue
3. @lumoura@piefed.social: https://piefed.social/c/lumoura
4. @sizz@piefed.social: https://piefed.social/c/sizz
5. @recordpics@piefed.social: https://piefed.social/c/recordpics

More important is how I'm submitting content to those Piefed communities. From pixelfed.social and atomicpoet.org, I'm uploading photos from those two servers: pixelfed.social is my own artwork; atomicpoet.org is interesting art I stumble upon. After I upload a photo, I give it a description in a post, then tag it with the community "username" I want it to submit it towards.

Once the post is live, the originating server sends the post over to Piefed, and Piefed reposts it to the community I tag.

Voila! I now have submitted my post to an aesthetic and curated community, for which anyone can collaborate with me on.

Within a day, we got lots of activity here -- and several people are already interacting with photos posted there.

@fediverse@lemmy.world

I'm about to play Back 4 Blood, the "spiritual successor" to Left 4 Dead.

This game has mixed reviews. And based on comments, it looks like the online co-op and PvP is dead.

Now whenever I see blowback on games like this, I wonder if it's because Back 4 Blood is simply not exactly like Left 4 Dead even though it was made by the same developers. It's what I like to call the Yooka-Laylee Phenomenon.

Or is this more like the Mighty No. 9 Phenomenon where, it's not so much the spiritual successor isn't exactly like the original, but nowhere near as good as the original?

Hard to say without playing.

I do notice that, for whatever reason, Steam reviewers tend to privilege indie releases over AAA titles. So that might be something to do with it too.

I don't know. This is all conjecture from someone who's yet to play it yet. However, last Steam sale, I bought this for C$3.99 -- which was 95% off. So how bad can it really be?

Well, you know what they say -- YOLO!

@pcgaming@lemmy.ca