No problem, hope you have fun with it!

This ended up way more rambly than intended but hopefully will be of some help. I might clean things up a bit if I have some time later.

Drakengard

First game is a bad Dynasty Warriors clone and can be a really rough experience.
It has very repetitive gameplay and pretty much requires the use of a guide if you want to get the true ending due to things like “get to this already cleared part of the map at this specific time” if I recall correctly. Final boss is… an experience.

It has a great story (with ending E being a direct connection to Nier Gestalt/Replicant), though depending on how resistant you are to the monotony and jank, getting there might be a challenge. There are some absolutely bonkers ideas here, beyond anything you’ll find in later games and that’s honestly the biggest draw for this title.

Finally there’s music. Oh boy, the music. It sounds like a cacophony of a madman and not in an enjoyable way. Don’t expect anything like Nier OSTs.

All in all, don’t feel bad about switching to/going with an LP - this text one by The Dark Id is a classic, with everything you could want (it’s pretty much a play-by-play, with lots of screenshots and music, just without the tedium).

Drakengard 2

Main thing to keep in mind is that this game is kind of its’ own thing and one I remember the least about.

Taro had no involvement beyond helping with a few CG cutscenes and the producer (I think?) of the first game had only a limited power over the development. Because of this writing can be a bit more generic and flat.
It’s not all bad and story has some connections to the first game but it was intended to be a more streamlined experience.

Gameplay is mostly improved but has some issues, like certain bosses requiring specific weapons (you can beat them otherwise but they’ll require a lot of hits).
Play it if you really want to complete the collection but it’s not necessary to experience the “main” series.

Drakengard 3

This one is technically a prequel to all the other games.

Yoko Taro is back in the writer’s seat for this one and the overall story is better than D2 in my opinion. I already mentioned the humor in this one - it can be a bit crude and vulgar so your enjoyment of those parts will depend on how well it clicks with you.
Story has the usual Taro flair and can be further enhanced with the DLC which expands on each of the antagonists (I don’t know how easy it is to get these days).

It’s not a great game from a technical perspective - it runs like garbage on the original hardware (framerate can fall to single digits at times) and can look a bit dated even compared to other games from 2013. Some of it can be improved with emulation but I’m not sure to what extent.

Gameplay is further improved (there’s still a lot of jank) and way easier to fully complete so there’s that. If you survived the original Nier you should be fine.

It can be an interesting experience if you like stories by Yoko Taro, just don’t expect a good game (this sentiment can be extended to all pre-Nier Automata games to various extent).

If you’re looking for something relaxing there’s Afrika - a photography game with a (light?) sim focus.

If you’re fine with kind of mediocre gameplay, rough performance and interesting writing: Drakengard 3. The occasional humor may or may not be your cup of tea but the overall story is worth it - it does require replaying stages and some grinding if you want to reach the true ending however.

This controversy was actually how I found out about the classic XCOM (I may have heard about it before but never really looked into the series before that).

Truth be told, the whole thing could’ve been avoided if not for 2K’s lack of foresight - not only they decided to call the game XCOM but also Enemy Unknown was already in production when they revealed the FPS version. All they had to do was let people know it wasn’t the only project in the pipeline (though lack of such announcement may have been caused by the development issues with EU at the time).

The big part of the initial reactions had to do with the fact that Enemy Unknown wasn’t announced at the time so people were worried series will move in a completely new direction (anybody remembers Close Combat: First to Fight?).

The other issue (post release) was how different it was from what we’ve seen initially - it was suppose to be set in 1950’s, have first-person perspective, open-ended levels, info gathering, research and horror vibes (check this trailer and this gameplay).

By release that game turned into a third-person shooter with simpler, more linear levels, no research of alien technology and other streamlining measures. That doesn’t mean the final product is bad (I enjoyed it quite a bit and the “twist” near the end was a pretty neat addition), it just didn’t live up to the expectations and slowly fell into relative obscurity.

All in all I agree, play The Bureau if you want a different take on the XCOM universe. It’s a decent game.

Steam page

Online focused, with battle royale and possibly co-op campaign (store page mentions pilot stories).

It actually does, funnily enough. You have to set an environment variable for it to work though.

Here’s a Steam guide.

Now the question is: are they going to be complete assholes and change this check to prevent non Deck players from using it or not?

Why do we need lemmy and kbin? Why do we need various linux distros? Why do we need different office suites?

Having a choice is always a positive, more so if those alternatives are compatible like various activity pub projects.

I don’t have an up to date feature comparison between Mastodon and Misskey but some of the things that differentiated the latter were:

• better threading
• improved markdown support (animated, also could render LaTeX formatting if I’m recall correctly)
• calendar
• drive
• emoji reactions (this replaces “likes” for example)
• trends
• tips for newcomers

Keep in mind, these are from few years ago so some things may have been changed or added to Mastodon (I’m not too familiar with Twitter like projects in general).

There’s also already mentioned focus on Japanese audience - some of it comes down to features (I feel like western social media aren’t as… animated? as Asian or at least Japanese ones), as well as culture (I think this picture of one of the tips is a good start.

I’m sure someone more familiar with both can come up with a better comparison but I think that the main point of just having an option is the most valid one.

Like many people I’m not particularly surprised by this news but it doesn’t make it any less unfortunate.

Good luck to all the people losing their jobs and rip SR2 patch. I just hope we’ll get another good game from one of their series some day.