One of my main tools has been SteamDB's instant search - it's basically a giant list of all steam games, sorted by review score, with a TON of different filters you can apply. Looking specifically for something released this year? You can filter for it. Looking specifically for a co-op action shooter, or a singleplayer 2d platformer? You can filter for those too. Wanting to exclude early access games or exclude games with a min/max number of reviews? You can do that too. Very handy tool
If you or your family care about privacy, their Android app has fewer trackers (see Spotify v. Apple Music).
Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed Collection is a blast if you're okay with a kart racer.
Flatout 2 is the OG combat racer.
If you're looking for a true "racing sim" type game I would probably recommend one of the Assetto Corsa games, either the original or competizione.
CarX Drift Racing Online is probably not what you expect, but is really fun. Not exactly a traditional "racing" game because you don't compete for time, but rather compete for "drift points," with longer/wider drifts getting more score. It has a surprisingly thorough singleplayer mode, and the multiplayer is relatively relaxed. Multiplayer is setup in an open-world style; you join a big lobby and can just drive around with friends or randoms without actually competing for anything, although people in each lobby can start competitions that everyone else can opt-in to. The main reason I'm recommending it is it has very thorough car customization and is a chill, non-competitive driving game, whether that be singleplayer or multiplayer.
Valve has taken a single step on the treadmill. I'm hopeful they'll keep it up, but we saw what happened after #SaveTF2 2yrs ago.
English-speaking population is about 1.5 billion worldwide and 300 million of that is in the US (first language or additional language), so the US is about 20% of the world's English speakers. The 2nd and 3rd countries with the most English-speakers are India and Nigeria, so factor in internet access, and the US is almost certainly >20% of the English-speaking internet.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population
Looks like Lemmy.world has the entire instance blocked: https://lemmy.world/instances
Was wondering why I hadn't heard of this bot before...
Seems like a peaceful hobby. [email protected] has a whopping 3.4k subscribers, so it seems to be relatively popular around here too.
Not too different. The bot problem started in... early 2020 maybe? Then it took about 2yrs for community leaders to start the first push of #SaveTF2 in 2022. Valve did a little bit back then to help (votekick changes especially helped), and things were good for a few months... but ultimately, things have slowly gotten bad again (if not worse). It's been 2yrs since #SaveTF2, so it was about time for another round, this time rebranded as #FixTF2.
Save.tf has the full rundown. But basically, if you join TF2's casual mode (TF2's most popular game mode), there's a 50/50 chance the server will be overrun with user-created bots. These bots have aimbot, pick sniper, and instantly kill anyone who comes into their line of sight. They also try to votekick real players, and if there are enough bots in the match, usually succeed. The bot hosters are trolls who just want to ruin the game for everyone, and have gone as far as swatting the lead developer of MegaAntiCheat, a user-created anti-cheat for TF2.
There's been a big #FixTF2 / #SaveTF2 social media push recently, trying to push Valve to do anything to try to solve the bot problem. After a day or two of getting no response from Valve, people resorted to review-bombing the game.
I thought this might be a similar situation to Ghost of Tsushima where a PSN account is only required for online play, but Ragnarok has no multiplayer.
I don't understand why Sony is so insistent on this. PSN is still unsupported in 170+ territories; this requirement is just going to turn most of those "would-be" buyers in those territories into pirates.
Comet has a list of supported requests on their github readme, and at least the achievement requests seem to be present. I'm not sure if Heroic utilizes them though