GameSieve

I read a lot. Mostly SF and fantasy. Something which has been 'taking over' a lot of online communities about those genres (probably also in other genres) in recent years is the concept of #reading challenges.

I finally figured out something which bothers me about them. They turn reading specific #books into something which you do because you're extrinsically motivated!

For me, reading has always been something I do because I'm intrinsically motivated, but I recently caught myself thinking far too much on how to make books fit into such challenges, including picking up books which I didn't actually feel like.

I'm all in favor of people reading more - and more broadly - than they would've done without these challenges, but I already was reading exactly as much as I want to!

Going forward, I'm going to stay far away from the inherent reward-loop from these challenges, and just read what I feel like, when I feel like it. Much healthier for my brain, which is far too susceptible to such things.

I'm working on a big feature for #GameSieve which will add nearly 400,000 uniquely addressable pages to the site. There are interesting challenges wrt balancing data storage vs efficiency of generating those pages, which I've solved to my satisfaction - but the thing I'm still struggling with is how I'm going to stop the fscking AI-scrapers from going wild over all that new content. (In a way which won't inconvenience actual humans; and of course #gog's userbase is such that I cater to many humans which block all JS, otherwise the solution would be easy enough.)

I hate this future. Did anyone think to back up a save game from a couple of years ago which they could share?

I picked up #Mahokenshi again, figuring I should at least shortly try to figure out reproducible steps to that game-breaking bug which I triggered twice, so I could post about it in the #gog forums and document it for other people to avoid. And then the bug didn't trigger any more with any of the steps I thought should be sufficient. And before I knew it, I was two maps further on.

Heh. I guess I wasn't quite done with this game yet after all. (I just wish it had an undo, as I always see my perfect combo seconds after moving in exactly the wrong direction.)

#gaming

RE: @gardiner_bryant@mastodon.online

I'm only ever in the mood for shooters for a tiny sliver of time, and then go for months (or years) playing all my regular favorite #gaming genres before I feel like playing a fps again.

As such, #Bioshock and its sequels are still lingering on my backlog (Infinite is the one which initially caught my attention).

It helps to read an article like this where the love shines through - gives me some calibration for what to expect, and helps bump up the priority on my backlog.

I picked up 4 #delistings of #Disney #games with #GameSieve's scans of #GOG's API - then went to steamdb to see that the damage on #Steam's side was even bigger:

* The Incredible Machine Mega Pack (GOG)
* Outlaws + A Handful of Missions (Classic, 1997) (GOG, Steam)
* STAR WARS™ Dark Forces (Classic, 1995) (GOG, Steam)
* STAR WARS™ Rebellion (GOG, Steam)
* Disney Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End (Steam)
* Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure (Steam)
* Disney Universe (Steam)
* Disney G-Force (Steam)
* Disney Tangled (Steam)
* Chicken Little (Steam)
* Disney Alice in Wonderland (Steam)
* Disney's Treasure Planet: Battle of Procyon (Steam)
* Bolt (Steam)
* Disney•Pixar Brave: The Video Game (Steam)
* High School Musical 3 (Steam)

#GOG made available a "hidden" bundle of Untold Tales #AdventureGames and story-rich #games at an insanely good price (particularly in pricier regions like Western Europe, as it doesn't have regional pricing enabled - but even in the US it's cheaper than the combined all-time low price of its contents: $37.11 rather than $42.21). You can't find it through the store, but you can buy it. Plus it gets proportionally cheaper if you already own any of its contents on GOG.

#GameSieve picked this up during its regular scans of GOG's API, and whenever something like this happens (a few times a year), I'm always hesitant about promoting it. This can't have been *intended*, can it? But it's been there for 4+ days now, so I guess I'm sharing it:

https://gamesieve.com/grouped_product-dynamic-pricing?q=%22Untold+Tales+Adventure%22

I haven't had much time for playing #games this week, but still finished two more #Mahokenshi maps. Two to go now, so it looks like I'll actually finish the game this weekend. Not 100%, as there are some challenges along the way which I skipped, and Misaki is likely the only one which will reach level 10 - but still, that's a lot more than I had expected when I encountered the first game-breaking bug.

I find #marketing difficult, so it's always a gigantic boost when someone responds thoroughly positively to me promoting #GameSieve

https://old.reddit.com/r/gog/comments/1snjafk/dynamically_priced_bundles_are_awesome_but_the/ogq3v27/?context=3

"Your site really needs more promotion and is the perfect example of something that we all need. You are obviously passionate about the cause and it shows. I just bought 3 #games from #GOG that I had never seen available simply because I saw them on your site. I will be using your site on repeat from now on. A seriously valuable resource and again, "Thank you :)"

I really should go add a testimonials page to my site, purely for myself to reread such things and stay motivated.

Got an important lesson in selection bias (is that the right term?) today.

To reduce the load on #GameSieve, I've been firewall-blocking recurring IP-ranges for one of the more obnoxious AI-scrapers when they use data centers rather than their residential proxies (those just get soft-blocks which humans can bypass). One of the more frequent sources, also for a bunch of annoying vulnerability scanners, is datacamp.

I also monitor what gets past the soft-block, as I made that initially trivial to bypass, and want to see if I warrant (and can then waste) human attention from the organizations behind those AI-scrapers.

Today I saw a bypass from a datacamp IP-address.

Because I check the source of all evil traffic, and have seen datacamp a lot in that traffic, I immediately concluded that the datacamp source meant that it was an evil party bypassing my soft-block.

The thing is, I have no basis for comparison! I have no idea how much of my human traffic originates from there! I am aware of the fallacy here, and despite the actual behaviour not being indicative of scraping, I still nearly firewalled it. (Before realizing that hey, this was probably a legit human using a VPN!)

One map further on in #Mahokenshi - Gateway to the Underworld: Kill three sorcerers before they reach their goal at the far end of the map. Challenge: Kill two in the same turn. So I kill one, whittle down the health of the other two, then painstakingly block one to make it backtrack and come close to the other, making certain to have enough teleports in my deck that I can really kill them in the same turn. I do so, and... the game doesn't end. Neither kill registered?! Yet another game breaking bug, yet another map that I have to replay.

There is so much to love about this game, yet the bugs... So! Frustrating!

#gaming

'Unique Selling Point' for #GameSieve which I'm sad about: Games on my site have URLs which point to the right game page, unlike the same on #GOG :/

I'm manually working around a GOG bug, where the base game, the prologue expansion, and the soundtrack for that expansion of the recent Neva release all link to the page for the complete edition. But the way I've set up data harvesting, this fixed URL will be overridden if there's any other change to the 100 products on the same API page. So until they notice the reports about the bug and fix it, I need to keep an eye out for that override happening, and re-apply the fix.

Correcting faulty or lacking data from GOG's side is one of the intended improvements of GameSieve, but I never expected it to hit such core functionality, so of course that field is one where I don't have things set up for a permanent override. I *really* hope I don't have to go change that...

I finished #Mahokenshi yesterday. Took longer than expected as the last level had - of course - another major bug (the boss retained a quarter of its massive armor where it shouldn't have, so I needed 50+ rounds to increase its vulnerability until I could finally damage it). I documented all the bugs I consciously noticed on the GOG forum: https://www.gog.com/forum/mahokenshi/bugs_encountered_from_minor_to_gamebreaking

That I finished the game despite these bugs is a testament that the core gameplay loop works quite well. Lots of fun combos to discover, and the combination of deck-building with tactical gameplay on the main map (so no transition to a smaller arena for each fight) works very well. It helps that it's moderately pretty, and has a decent soundscape.

Without the bugs, I'd be singing its praises. With, I might cautiously recommend it to fans of the deckbuilding genre with a really high level of frustration tolerance - but yeah, probably not.

#gaming

The issue with implementing larger features is that development takes enough time that my mind can really come to grip with the space, and then conjures up ALL THE WAYS in which it can be even better (and bigger).

As they tend to be good ideas, I then take some time to figure out what all would be needed to make them a reality, which tends to involve going back a bit, cleaning up or enriching my data a bit more (requiring just a few small adjustments to my existing tooling to support this new usecase), and...

I do take a step back and have my product owner self point out that I should focus on first finishing and releasing the basic big feature and see if it meets expectations in actual usage, but my fledgling marketeer self thinks the good ideas could make a far bigger splash by doing something cool no one else in this space is doing yet so I should go with that, and my developer self is simply ignoring the other two and already deep into the innards of sketching out how this will all come together.

#GameSieve

#GOG is really going all out with teasing Freelancer (the #videogame) on reddit. There have been hints before, but nothing quite like this. I'm guessing they must be getting quite close to releasing it.

This originally was released at the start of the decade or so where I didn't do any #gaming, so I have no memories of it, but based on the games I've enjoyed which have been compared to it, I'm quite looking forward to it!

https://old.reddit.com/user/GOGcom

#pcgaming #games

Since #GOG is so much smaller than Steam, it's sadly logical that a percentage of publishers/developers treat their releases there as an afterthought. When that morphs in a small percentage of them completely forgetting to update their #games on GOG with the latest patches, that becomes a serious issue.

With noticeably increased energy under its new owner, GOG has now started an initiative to tackle this and slowly whittle down the list of such games, where they promise biweekly updates on their progress: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/from_good_to_great_improving_our_games_together

#GOG just made acquiring the recent freebie Robbo dependent on owning its remake Robbo Millennium. Fair enough, except they did a similar thing before where getting OpenTTD became dependent on owning Transport Tycoon Deluxe. I could ignore one case, but with two it's a pattern, so I need a new relation type to account for that when displaying grouped products in #GameSieve. Easy enough, except for the naming...

(I settled on "unlock" / "unlock bonus", as short enough while still being understandable, but not really happy with it. Why couldn't this new relation just require some easy cache invalidation challenge?!) :P