ampersandrew
8h ago
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100%
I also described Fallout 4.
ampersandrew
9h ago
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75%
You know that in the wake of Suicide Squad and Saga from Alan Wake II, they stated quite clearly that what was "obviously" their contributions were totally wrong, with Remedy confirming on their end? It may not be inaccurate to state that sensitivity reading or consulting for authenticity when writing diverse characters are services that they offer, but their contributions to each game are not itemized. It's like when a bad port happens and people see Iron Galaxy in the credits, they want to see this pattern of Iron Galaxy being responsible rather than <beloved creator of game you like> and then throw out any evidence of Iron Galaxy actually being a really good port studio. I get that you want to form patterns of why something you perceive to be wrong is happening, but the truth is that these companies' contributions are not itemized, because video games work more like a traditional business than Hollywood, and it's no one's policy to break out which work was done by a contractor versus in-house, so you'll actually never know. Instead, Endymion, or whoever it is you watch that picked up on the week's trending rage bait topic, cosplays as a journalist and infers a whole lot of what Sweet Baby does that they just didn't do, whereas an actual journalist would get quotes from sources to confirm that it's true.
ampersandrew
13h ago
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100%
I think that's a different company.
ampersandrew
13h ago
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100%
It's part of a transmedia push. It started with a podcast, and they were pushing out a video game, a comic book, and I think a TV show? So they're trying to keep everything a part of the same brand that hasn't had time to breathe yet, perhaps rushing out the video game.
ampersandrew
14h ago
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83%
This was by far the worst part of the RPG systems in their games. This sort of design always encourages really dumb and counter intuitive play.
ampersandrew
14h ago
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100%
It will do something. It will be a resource sink for a while, and then it will become a resource faucet. Nothing more interesting than that.
ampersandrew
15h ago
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66%
They are contract writers for hire, and you have been misled, either intentionally or unintentionally, by the YouTubers you follow. Both Sweet Baby and their clients have denied this interpretation of what they do.
ampersandrew
1d ago
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50%
I think it's pretty clear what the game is from the trailers, and it looks awesome. Hopefully the temple puzzles are actual puzzles, as opposed to something like Uncharted where Drake always has the answers in his deus ex machina book.
ampersandrew
1d ago
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80%
"Criticism" is a charitable word for what that is.
ampersandrew
1d ago
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100%
Does it? It's the people who made two very highly regarded Wolfenstein games making another game like those but with Indiana Jones.
ampersandrew
1d ago
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33%
Remember that when Indiana Jones comes back with 8s and 9s.
ampersandrew
1d ago
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85%
The good games they've worked on have included some of the most praised games in recent years. If you want to ask why this keeps happening, you have to have massive blinders on to ignore the likes of God of War: Ragnarok and Alan Wake II, both firmly in recent memory, and also realize that basically no writer on earth could save something like Suicide Squad from its criticisms.
ampersandrew
2d ago
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85%
Do we want more content? If you're talking to the likes of EA and Ubisoft, I'd say they've typically bloated their games with tons of stuff I don't want in an effort to justify a higher price tag and microtransactions.
ampersandrew
3d ago
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100%
Nintendo will last longer on what is quickly becoming an outdated business model because they sell to a large audience of children. Their older Zelda or Metroid fans are more likely to be bothered by the fact that, for arbitrary business reasons, they're prohibited from running those games at higher frame rates or resolutions. But I'm a tinkerer. If I want to do something my way, and there's a way to do it, I'm going to. Nintendo could monetize me, but they opt not to.
ampersandrew
3d ago
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100%
You brought up your interpretation of why people pirate Nintendo games. I think it's pretty clear that if stealing is better, people have an incentive to steal it. It's also a harder sell to say that those poor creators need to get paid when the way they made it available is not how their customers want it. All of this is relevant to the discussion of the diminishing role consoles play these days compared to the old days.
ampersandrew
3d ago
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100%
It's interesting that you assume I pirate Switch games just because I can see why people pirate. I probably booted up Yuzu at some point to just see it running, but I only actually played Switch games on an actual Switch. My preferred method of playing Switch games these days is to not play them at all.
The ROMs I've got for their old platforms are games I've mostly bought before, and the rest are those that can't be purchased digitally at all. I just organize them and play them my way, which is better than Nintendo has ever made them available. If they have people they need to pay, then maybe they ought to sell me those old ROMs rather than sue the people who make them available.
ampersandrew
3d ago
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100%
Nor I them. If they want to curb piracy, they can offer a better product than you'd get if you stole it. At this point, that means making their games available on PC. Likewise, when their back catalog is only legally available to rent and not purchase, I don't know how they expect anything other than piracy to result from that.
ampersandrew
3d ago
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100%
The other console makers put their games on PC already. That you can pirate Nintendo games on PC and run them better than if you bought them legitimately is further evidence that the console exclusive model doesn't make sense anymore.
ampersandrew
3d ago
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30%
This community only believes the news when it's bad.
ampersandrew
4d ago
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85%
It stopped me from buying those games, because while the first one is DRM-free, the second and third games have an always online requirement. Now it's the DRM of those middle two games preventing me from playing any of them.
Tencent would be capped at a 10% stake. The Guillemot family would remain in control, just the way they want it.
# The Prompt Anecdotally, I've seen a lot of people jaded with modern gaming. I understand why. If you only see the games that have the most marketing, which are the ones you're most likely to see for obvious reasons, then you're primarily seeing the likes of AAA games with second-job-esque battle pass FOMO tactics, loot box gambling, pay to win, and constant reminders that you're missing out on the full experience of the game like coming across fan favorite characters in the DLC of an already-expensive Star Wars game. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but it could be this fatigue with the games that the average person is aware of that has led to a drop in spending and the crash that the industry is currently facing (but let's not sugar coat it; there are surely other factors, too). I sympathize with these people, but respectfully, there's a whole wide world out there of great games that never ask for a dime after it's in your possession, so let's call out those games and spread the word. # The Rules 1. One game per top level comment, with the game name behind a "#" symbol so that it forms a heading, and platforms it's available on in parentheses. Leave a brief synopsis with no spoilers and a brief critique. I'll be starting us off with a number of examples. Upvote the ones you agree with, and leave a comment on the top level one for discussion. 2. The game should have no paid DLC, no announced paid DLC, and feel like a complete product as it stands right now. I actually don't mind the most common types of DLC, like what you would find in the Paradox model, but I know there's a large enough contingent of folks who really do mind, so any DLC whatsoever is a deal-breaker for this thread. **I'm making an exception for soundtrack and artbook DLC** since, as far as I know, the existence of this stuff doesn't bother anyone and just allows for avenues for certain artists to get a better cut for their work from super fans. I'm *not* making an exception for cosmetic DLC like you'd find in V Rising, as innocuous as I personally find it to be. 3. The game's first release must have been in 2024. By this, I mean that if it came out on PS5 two years ago but launched on PC this year, it doesn't count, so no God of War: Ragnarok. No collections of old games like Marvel vs. Capcom. 4. No early access games, except for games that *were* in early access and hit v1.0 this year. So no Palworld, but Satisfactory is on the table if you'd like to recommend it. I personally didn't care for it, but if you did, feel free to list it! 5. Only games you've played thoroughly enough to be sure you'd recommend it. If you only started playing the early chapters or levels, maybe let someone else recommend it, just in case the quality nosedives later on. I'm personally only recommending games I've finished or beaten, though that definition admittedly becomes challenging with the likes of UFO 50.
www.theverge.com
If you don't retain some kind of actual ownership, they will not be allowed to use terms like "buy" or "purchase" on the store page button. I hope there aren't huge holes in this that allow bad actors to get around it, but I certainly loathe the fact that there's no real way to buy a movie or TV show digitally. Not really. EDIT: On re-reading it, there may be huge holes in it. Like if they just "clearly tell you" how little you're getting when you buy it, they can still say "buy" and "purchase".
They seem to be very caught off guard by Star Wars: Outlaws' underperformance, and after investor pressure, are trying to massively course correct. This is what happens when you vote with your dollars!
blog.playstation.com
A half hour, 20 PS5 games, at least one PSVR2, ahead of TGS.
www.videogameschronicle.com
$200M before the Sony acquisition and $200M after. It's a little hard to believe. The story seems to only be coming from Colin Moriarty right now, but I trust Jordan Middler to consider it at least reasonably plausible if he wrote it up for VGC. **UPDATE:** Sources not corroborating $400M number. https://80.lv/articles/multiple-sources-dispute-concord-s-usd400-million-budget/
www.theverge.com
$700, and the side by sides look barely different, from my perspective. The chat seemed to have the same opinion.
www.gamingonlinux.com
Luckily it's DRM-free. Back up your installers. I wanted to call attention to this, because in a very unusual move, it's being removed even for people who own a copy, whereas usually stores will only remove a game from sale and still host the files for existing owners to download.
The virtual rival thing could be cool. There's a lot of room for it to go wrong, and we're no worse off if it does. But replay takeover is huge. This is the holy grail of fighting game training mode features. You can go into a replay of a match and correct the things you did wrong or find answers to situations that are difficult or time consuming to recreate yourself in training mode.
I know most are probably talking about Path of Exile II or Diablo IV's latest expansion, but those are online-only, and I don't care even a little bit about "seasonal" content, so this is the one I'm excited for.
store.steampowered.com
$50 for the base game, $70 with DLC included. Steam link provided. Also available on Epic.
This game has made the rounds before, but now it's got a slightly new title and plenty of new gameplay footage. Finally, more campaign FPS games!
This one's been in early access for a while, but it's finally hitting 1.0. If you're unfamiliar, it's a procedurally generated murder mystery immersive sim. A murder happens, you scan for evidence, track people by their address in the phone book, and make connections with red string yourself. When I played the demo a while back, someone came home while I was snooping in their apartment, so I escaped in a vent and ended up in the apartment on the floor below them. I waited for *that* resident to finish preparing their dinner and sit in front of the TV so I could leave through their front door and get out of there. This game is awesome.
I'm on Kubuntu 24.04, rocking a build that was pretty darn high end in 2021 with an AMD 6800 XT, and of course, Wolfenstein: The New Order was already old news by then. Proton does miracles, but this game freezes my entire machine. The last time I saw something like this happen was with Monster Hunter World in 2018, on a much older version of Proton. I can reliably get the game to freeze my machine in the opening level of The New Order, even across multiple versions of Proton, even with the renderapi launch parameter that should switch it back to OpenGL. Of course, even if I report this to Steam support, they'll tell me that they only support Steam Deck and not bespoke Linux desktops, and the game works fine on my Steam Deck, but would they be interested in some logs and a bug reported against the GitHub project? This is assuming no one here has an easy fix, of course. But if not, how would I get the logs? I wouldn't know what I'm looking at in those logs, personally. I'm also not sure if they'll write out correctly. Because it freezes the entire machine, I end up having to hard shut down the computer by the power button, and once or twice during my experiments, it failed to mount my game SSD (a separate drive from where my OS is installed) at boot, and I had to set up the automatic mount in the partition manager again. So assuming that doesn't impact the ability to write out the logs, I can collect them with some instructions, if you kind strangers in the know wouldn't mind providing them, please. And if Valve is interested in looking at them.
They are no longer going to be any form of independent from Sony/PlayStation anymore. The Final Shape's sales were never going to be able to prevent this from happening, says Jeff Grubb on his morning news show (paraphrased).
www.vg247.com
Whelp...I'm out. (I expected this to happen before they said anything though, honestly.)
# The Tournaments These are going to be skewed through the lens of what I was personally interested in watching, but there was a lot worth watching. **Mortal Kombat 1** SonicFox took their 7th Evo championship this past weekend using at least three different characters, by my count. Strangely, they took the title in a mirror match against Nicolas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEYVZzJnQEs Nicolas and his twin brother ScorpionProcs have been on a tear through the Mortal Kombat scene since the world emerged from the pandemic, and they're both so young that they still need a parental escort to these events. The two of them have both been taking wins at different majors, typically only challenged by the likes of SonicFox and Rewind. ScorpionProcs didn't make it into top 6 this time around, but Nicolas got very close this time. **Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike** 3rd Strike is a game I tend to like more in theory than in practice. The parry system is awesome, but it's also so pervasive that it basically invalidates zoning, a major component of most fighting games that introduces some variety to play styles. Being 25 years old with no patches, in an era where characters like Sean were designed to be bad on purpose, it also settled into a rigid meta. That meta is Yun and, if you're lucky, Chun-Li, which is what the top 6 looked like in Evo Japan this year. The top 6 this weekend somehow had 6 different characters, if I'm not mistaken, including when players picked a pocket character, like Elena as a counter pick. Ordinarily, the most exciting match will be grand finals, not just because the most is at stake but also because it tends to be where you'll find the two best players in the closest competition. 3rd Strike this year is the exception. The star of the show is a player I'd heard about months ago from Justin Wong videos, Hayao. I had been following this person in particular through the entire bracket, hoping for him to bring a Hugo to top 6, and he delivered. He unfortunately was masterfully counter picked by his opponent in winners with a knowledge check that he just didn't have the answer to, but Hayao's match in losers quarterfinals was one of the all time greatest fighting game matches I've ever seen, on the 20th anniversary of Evo Moment 37. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8DpmASk_ho **Skullgirls (community tournament)** Personally, this is my main game, so it means more to me than any of the 8 games that Evo ran in an official capacity this year. It may have only been a 47 person bracket (it's harder to convince great players to sign up for a community tournament when there's no promise that Evo will avoid scheduling conflicts with other games), but the developer threw up a pretty substantial prize pool--from what I can tell, it was over $16k--and there were at least three great players who had a shot at winning the whole thing, Dekillsage, Reis, and SonicFox. Dekillsage finally took a bracket over SonicFox, winning decisively from the winners side of the bracket after sending SonicFox to losers. Unfortunately, there will be a bit of lag on the VOD, so I don't have it ready this morning to link to. **Guilty Gear Strive** One by one, my friends and I watched all sorts of top players get eliminated as they narrowed it down to top 6. The Strive scene is packed full of people who could have taken it all, and neither of the previous two Evo Vegas champions, Umisho and Leffen, made it into top 6. I like watching him play, but I never would have predicted Nitro would take it all, playing Jack-O', no less; the previous two years were both won by Happy Chaos players. Congrats to Nitro! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwUYASA9hc4 EDIT: Oh, I almost forgot! I love the things that the crowd gets into at big majors. There will be "See ya later!"s during Marvel 3 and "TO MEMPHIS!" in Street Fighter 6, but I heard a new one when Zando came on stage and played his Asuka. Asuka is a zoner who's playing Magic: The Gathering in the middle of a fighting game match, and he can cast a bunch of spells that send out cubes, giving the opponent no choice except to block for 10, 15, or 20 seconds in some cases. It's strong, but it sucks for the viewing experience and for the defender. So, facetiously, the crowd will yell "CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUBES!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ik06KNRJIo **Street Fighter 6** I didn't follow the Street Fighter V scene very closely, largely because I didn't really like Street Fighter V, but Punk got his win that sounds like it was a long time coming. There was some phenomenal adaptation from both players. Punk with his masterful shimmies, that his opponents would catch on to a bit too late, and then Punk getting stingy with his meter on three different rounds that cost him three different games as his opponent Big Bird capitalized. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-C435HjNhg # The Reveals SVC Chaos shadow dropped after the KOF XV finals, which caught everyone off guard. I would have thought that this would be part of a Capcom Vs. SNK collection, but the fact that this game is re-released at all bodes well for a CVS collection later. The reputation this game has is that it's the worst of those three games that SNK and Capcom collaborated on, but it's good to have it re-released with rollback anyway. Somehow, Heihachi returned. Death is already meaningless in fighting game stories, but Bandai Namco has been beating the "Heihachi is dead" drum for a while now and even leaned into it in the reveal. It seems the only thing they're capable of killing is Soul Calibur. RIP. Guilty Gear Strive showed off the next four characters coming to the game. Dizzy is a fan favorite, and I'm excited for her XX era song, "Awe of She", to be added to the Strive soundtrack. Venom is another fan favorite, but I wasn't sure if he'd be added due to his similarities to the current version of Jack-O' in the game. I never would have predicted Lucy from Cyberpunk Edgerunners. Street Fighter 6 showed off Terry Bogard, and his face looks weird.