I’m sure there are people out there that will leap at the opportunity to buy one of these, but between emulation with modern controller mapping, and og hardware on a CRT, I’ve never stopped playing N64 games since 1996 and the prospect of buying another $250+ piece of hardware just doesn’t appeal to me. I guess if you totally missed out on the 64 era, this is a great way to bypass the tinkering emulation requires to get to a playable state (N64 peeps already know), while getting the technically best image quality possible, and be a buy. The N64 has a fantastic (albeit sort of small) library of bangers. The issue now is finding carts that aren’t priced to the moon.
Yeah, with the need for the cartridges, I don’t know who this appeals to. I would think it appeals to people who already have a library of games, but they also probably have original hardware, and running on a CRT is probably ideal, not a modern display in 4k. The CRT hides the low detail from the time and has built-in AA, so it (subjectively) looks better.
So, if it’s not for those people, is it for new people? In which case they better be loaded because getting the games isn’t easy. In which case, getting an original console probably isn’t an issue.
Native 4k output instead of a crappy upscaler or a RetroTink which costs more alone than this Analogue product. N64’s native composite is laggy and hideous on a flatscreen TV, you need something like this or a retrotink or a CRT to make the games look good. Even if the Analogue couldn’t play ROMs off an SD card (it can, if Analogue’s previous products are any indication), you could just stick a Summercart in it.
I personally am a ride-or-die CRT player for my retro consoles, but big CRTs are getting rarer and living rooms less accommodating. And N64’s library has a ton of absolutely killer party games that are best experienced on a big TV with your friends, not a dark retro cave on a 20" CRT the way SNES RPGs are. If someone I knew wanted to go a “step past” emulation, I’d absolutely recommended this thing as the second shopping list priority. In order (imo):
Real N64, Real CRT, Summercart/ED64X7 (most authentic, and also cheapest if and only if you can source a CRT that fits your needs)
Analogue 3D, HDTV they already have
Real N64, RetroTink, Summercart/ED64X7 (more expensive than option 2 even if they already have the console and summercart lol)
Real N64, RetroTink or CRT, buying real copies of games at jacked-up collector prices
In a follow-up posted to social media this morning, NetEase went on to "apologize for any unpleasant experiences or doubts caused by the miscommunication of these terms...
Call me crazy, but I think if a game can be “retired” by Warner Brothers (or another megacorp), and the dev doesn’t control it anymore, then it’s not really an “indie”.
An indie game, short for independent video game, is a video game created by individuals or smaller development teams without the financial and technical support of a large game publisher. …The term is synonymous with that of independent music or independent film in those respective mediums. -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_game
And then:
Independent music (also commonly known as indie music, or simply indie) is music produced independently from commercial record labels or their subsidiaries
An independent film, independent movie, indie film, or indie movie is a feature film or short film that is produced outside the major film studio system in addition to being produced and distributed by independent entertainment companies
They are independent, because they don’t have a publishing company calling the shots. That’s literally where the term comes from.
And that is why I said people have only two labels - they use “single person or small team = indie, big team or company = triple-A”. When they should be looking at who is publishing, and therefore who is funding the project, i.e are they actually independent, or do they depend on someone else for that monetary/technical/marketing support.
are they actually independent, or do they depend on someone else for that monetary/technical/marketing support.
People don’t look at that because that’s not a useful metric. All the big publishers have their own studios so most things they publish are ‘independent’ by that definition, but they are the very thing people try to exclude when they say indie. In the indie definitions of both music and films, it is stated that they are independent from the established distributors, not that they are entirely self-distributed. It’s unreasonable to expect that from indie games.
And conversely for ‘independent’ to have any meaning it mustn’t include those who are in a position where others could depend on them whether through money, name recognition or some other thing. CDPR for instance, by the merit of being very well known and owning one of the most popular online stores is absolutely not an independent studio.
Edit: furthermore even when a large distributor is involved for marketing etc, this doesn’t mean the production of the art can’t still be largely independent.
Indie is used to refer to independent and small literally because that’s usually how it is. You’re completely ignoring the first thing you quoted which is about it being just a few people, which is by far the definition today. Witcher 3 is in absolutely no terms an indie game. It was produced by hundreds of people. It is so far from the actual definition that it’s laughable.
By your definition Stardew Valley isn’t an indie because Chucklefish published it. That’s just not how it works. Video games aren’t music or movies. The same rules don’t apply, literally exactly for this reason.
Stardew Valley was published by the developer themselves. He can do whatever he wants with the game and there is no publisher to tell him he can’t because it’s bad for business. If they want the next update to be the “Fuck Russia, fuck Israel, Taiwan is the real China!” update, they can do it. Cp2077 can do that too. Because they are independent.
D’ya think that goes for the games in question of the article published by Warner Brothers that are being pulled by them? Are they independent of the publishers, free to do what the creator wants?
That is why having just the two labels makes them rather useless. Which is the point I’m trying to make.
Stardew was published by chucklefish in the beginning, it was not published by Eric. He publishes it himself now, but that was not true several years ago.
I really hope it was Billy that caved and not TG. Dude really is awful in quite a few ways.
If anyone wants a ridiculously long deep dive on the Billy Mitchell stuff(and is willing to read instead of watching a video), I recommend checking out this. There’s also on that website a huge deep dive into the story about his alleged “perfect Pacman” run, and his history of gaslighting the classic gaming community into thinking he was the greatest gamer ever.
Considering the trust they've lost I don't think they've planned to do it this way. And if they didn't plan it, they assumed that their original plan wasn't going to result in much opposition, so that was the plan they wanted to go with.
On one hand I’m happy its dead because paradox deserves this. But on the other hand I spent $80 on this and I really thought it had the base to be an amazing game.
The biggest issue I have with all of these is that the dialogue is never connected to the actual actions of the npcs.
Its easy to have an npc say something, but tying it to gameplay mechanics isn’t. So we end up with people asking for this in new games, but all you get is conversations disconnected from the gameplay. I’m sure there is someway to make it feel more “right”, but we’re a farcry away from making true open world games like this.
That sounds like no one really tried. Like, sure, you’ll get bullshit occasionally, but in the code you know exactly what the NPC is doing, so crafting a prompt based on that is not really that hard and will work most of the time, especially for the simple NPCs.
It’s not that the dialogue doesn’t sound right, it’s that the dialogue is disconnected from the game.
A great example was someone did this with Skyrim a while back. In the dialogue they convinced the NPC to join their party. But there isn’t any code logic to allow that, so the NPC is talking like they joined the person’s party, but the gameplay itself doesn’t support it.
Now for animal crossing you could make it work a bit easier cause the character can’t directly interact with the NPCs, but then again it also makes the endless dialogue less impactful.
A great example was someone did this with Skyrim a while back. In the dialogue they convinced the NPC to join their party. But there isn’t any code logic to allow that, so the NPC is talking like they joined the person’s party, but the gameplay itself doesn’t support it.
That’s the exact type of scenario I was thinking as well. I had seen another video for Skyrim with AI dialog where they used it to haggle with a merchant who agreed to drop the price of an item in the shop. But an item’s gold value is baked into the game itself. An NPC can say they’ll lower the price, but it will still cost the exact same (barring the normal modifiers based on skills/quest completion/disposition/etc.)
The concept is really cool, and I hope to see some more interesting attempts to incorporate more of that adaptive kind of dialogue and gameplay, but its not going to be easy to figure out how to make it work.
That’s essentially the thing that makes LLMs as unreliable as they are in everything else; they run on probabilities that have no anchor in reality. The game is just another contained reality to which the model has no direct connection.
Idk about you but if it levels 1287 km² of forest, I don’t think that would exactly be good news for a populated area. On the upper range, it could be equivalent to a 40 megatonne bomb.
Because this genre of games is a whoooole lot of fun! I can’t wait to see the next 800, and number 3562, which is gonna elevate the genre to the next level.
Except of course, when it’s cloudy. The only eclipse that ever happened where I lived in my lifetime was a total disappointment because you couldn’t see anything.
arstechnica.com
Ważne