The modern American dream - figure out how to get paid tens of millions to spend someone else’s tens of billions chasing my own tail. No, I don’t create a fucking thing. I get rich by dismantling shit that used to have value!
Not too surprising they didn’t change much. The switch was a huge hit so fixing things like the joycons, adding a stand, etc. was the way to go.
My guess (hope) is that the only new titles exclusive to the switch 2 are ones that the original switch wouldn’t have the processor strength to play and that they won’t arbitrarily wall them but we’ll see.
The Nintendo switch came out in early 2017, and it really wasn’t all that powerful then. It’s 8 years later, and it really shows. I don’t think they should make new games for the Switch. If developers have to consider the original Switch, the games will suffer. It had a good run, and a good library. But it’s time for the original switch to retire.
Precisely this. Consideration for the original Switch is exactly how the Series S is causing problems for games on the Series X and PS5. Yes, a cheaper entry is great for gamers who can’t afford but dragging the potential down is a recipe for hamstringing the newer hardware.
Unfortunately games have been struggling on the Switch’s hardware for a couple years. There were a few parts of the newest Pokémon game that felt like a slideshow presentation.
Oh I don’t want them to hold back new games performance just for the OG switch, that was pretty underpowered even when it came out. I’m hoping the switch 2 gets a good upgrade in the area since it’s needed.
More for indie games and things like that was what I was thinking.
I think so, there isn’t much else that can explain the classroom scene where half the class are all playing the same goofy animation at 5 frames per second, mostly in sync. It would have looked better to have them not moving at all, so at least some of the jank was a stylistic choice on gamefreak’s part.
Am I the only one who thinks those prices are still too high for 25+ year old titles? Don’t get me wrong, absolutely love the games, but this “discount” feels closer to what it should be.
Am I hallucinating, because there was definitely a bundle that had all 6 remasters that I got… for $50 in 2022 I wanna say? All 6 are in my library and there is no way I spent $25x6 (or whatever the price is, I know FF I and II are lower in price).
They aren’t though? They’re not ports, they’re partial rebuilds of the games in Unity with native resolution support, new pixel art, full arrangement of most of the music, and huge QoL and gameplay improvements/modernization.
I’m not a huge fan of SqEnix’s money grabbing (see: literally any of their FF gatcha content), but the Pixel remasters are one of the few that are actually worth it…at $50 for the whole bundle. Not $25/ remastered game.
They aren’t though? They’re not ports, they’re partial rebuilds of the games in Unity with native resolution support, new pixel art, full arrangement of most of the music, and huge QoL and gameplay improvements/modernization.
Call them what you want, I recently paid 15 Euro for 62 1990s Capcom games. 30 for 6 Square games would be fine, given the bigger scope.
Ok but again, are they ports or did new content go into it? Did a whole new soundtrack and full orchestral recording go into your 60 Capcom games? There IS a labour difference between adding new/upscaling the content vs porting it to new hardware and calling it a day.
Saying “call it what you want” is pretty disrespectful to the people actually working on modernizing these games (I’m one of those people).
Ok but again, are they ports or did new content go into it? Did a whole new soundtrack and full orchestral recording go into your 60 Capcom games? There IS a labour difference between adding new/upscaling the content vs porting it to new hardware and calling it a day.
Then give me a bundle without all that crap. Now I’m emulating the games and you get no money on top of what I paid for the SNES originals back in the day. I’d happily pay again for some convenience but not 70 Euro for six 30 years old games.
Saying “call it what you want” is pretty disrespectful to the people actually working on modernizing these games (I’m one of those people).
Original price of $10 each feels about right. They put work into the graphics, music, and bug fixes. But stripped out all the additional content of later releases.
$18 for one of these games is ludicrous. I would have preferred to just pay for the older version that they removed from the app stores.
I totally agree. I recently bought on sale Final Fantasy 1 for mobile, mostly because I didn’t feel like digging out my PlayStation and putting in one of the original remastered disks. To be honest, the load times were pretty long on a kind of it being PS1. But the prices they’re asking for for all of these remasters are excessive. Also some of them have 3D instead of pixel sprites; FF4:TAY in particular was ruined that way. You know what I’d like to see; all of the newer Final Fantasy is done in pixel art style. Like from 7 onward. That would be fun.
The problem in most big companies (and organisations or countries) is that leaders promote people who think like themselves or at least are very agreeable. And as time passes they end up surrounding themselves with yes-people; every bad idea is cheered on, because all the critics have been fired or are way down in the hierarchy.
And in that environment, everyone who actually understands how things work quits or gets quit. It’s my understanding that there are large sections of code bases that MS just doesn’t touch, because everyone who understood how they function is gone. Continuity of institutional knowledge is difficult in the best cases and impossible under leaders that discourage dissenting perspectives.
/gestures about wildly
Releasing what is essentially two different consoles at the same time was such a bad idea. I can’t imagine that anyone in the engineering team thought it was a good idea. It seems like the kind of decision that is made in a board meeting that gets handed to the engineers with the caveat, “you don’t have to agree with the idea; just make it work!”
While I’m sure there will be a lot of false starts with this tech and it will take a while to iron out the kinks, I’ve been waiting for something like this for a long time. This will probably be similar to the switch from small, limited world maps in games to expansive open-worlds. It’s going to be a massive boost to immersion and will probably lead to some hilarious bugs/unexpected behaviours. Can’t wait!
It will be interesting for sure, but let’s not fool ourselves into believing that NPCs with AI behaviours will be better in all cases like modern game players seem to with open world game design.
Not every game needs an open world, and in some cases open world game design can end up doing more harm than good. This will be something that developers should look at on a game by game basis, and not a default plugin that everyone uses for every NPC in their game.
This will probably be similar to the switch from small, limited world maps in games to expansive open-worlds.
Interesting comparison, because I'd argue that that switch has, lately, been worse more often than it's been better, and that a lot of games would have been far better off if they stuck to the more limited equivalent.
I agree, huge open worlds are often exhausting for me, and the developer need to fill it often ends up with cheap copy and past Ubisoft methods (collectibles, etc)
If Skyrim was the size of say, Assassins Creed Odyssey, it would’ve honestly suffered horribly, largely because one of Skyrims best features was the fact that their map was handcrafted and full of detail and secrets.
Sure you can add secrets to a procgen map, but that developer process that lead to the best ones are largely gone.
On the contrary, I’d expect individual NPCs to be refined first. Like if the cast of Baldur’s Gate 3 was mostly improvising. Or if you had a halfway genuine friendship with your buddy Superfly.
That is actually an excellent point! I’m imagining a Lydia from Skyrim who would actually comment on your actual quest progression without just resorting to canned responses.
Or lean into that passive-aggressive vibe the actress took. She got assigned to some half-naked cat who stumbled into town smelling like an execution, five minutes after he killed a creature of legend. There’s a bit of Commander Kiff in that “I am sworn to carry your burdens.”
On the other hand - I don’t do tagalongs. I sat her ass in Breezehome as it got larger, fancier, and piled high with obscenely rare weaponry. It was kinda sad every time she stands up like we’re gonna go somewhere. Lydia, honey - this is your house. I use the chests, the bookshelves, and the gratuitous enchanting table that might actually be a mod. Go hook up with Farkas in one sense or other. I should come in and find you drunk on mead, out in some dungeon, or improvising whatever a sock on the doorknob is for a culture that has neither.
Stardew Valley expanded?? What is that? Is it something that is available to us long-term SV users? I bought Stardew Valley when it first came out and people looked at me like I was crazy for buying such an obviously casual and pixelated game.
If you’re playing on pc, just look up the mod and try the additional mod “grandpas map” as well! After around 1,500h in SV it feels like a new game with those two mods installed. Cannot recommend it enough!
Shoutout to Chris Perkins! I got to help playtest parts of 5E back in the day and he was the DM. Getting paid to play D&D is nice work if you can get it!
There was a podcast that Irrational did before putting out BioShock Infinite that would interview game developers and other creatives, and they had one that interviewed the BioWare doctors. BioWare was always set up to be a multi project studio, and Irrational was a single project studio. At that time in the industry, lots of companies were pivoting from the former to the latter, due to how many more hands on deck a 7th gen console AAA game took to make. BioWare was set up the way it was so that one underperforming game could easily be carried by another reasonably successful one. By the end of that interview, I thought you’d have to be nuts to employ that many people and only work on one game at a time. Sure enough, Irrational buckled under that weight right after shipping BioShock Infinite’s DLC, and modern, single-project BioWare is looking worse for wear.
I also remember when people would constantly say that games were too short. I didn't play them at the time, but there was a period when everyone was complaining about waiting for a long time for games - paying a lot for a game, and then finishing it in 5-7 hours and never playing it again.
That led into the used market, I suppose (a boogeyman for the games industry that birthed lots of the worst monetization today). I never really had that problem, outside of outliers like Pokemon Snap that were unusually short. In the 00s, it was pretty common to get 8-15 hours for an action game that you paid $50-$60 for, often times with multiplayer modes alongside the single player modes, and that felt like great value to me at the time.
I've never had that problem myself either. I took a break there for quite some time with my gaming but I did grow up with it, and I have returned to it. I can't think of a time when I have played a game - even a story based one, and liked it and haven't returned to it at least once more. I think I've noticed though, I am kind of a gaming minority. I think the funniest thing I can say about games is that back when I played with a big rowdy group of guys a game would last however long it lasted because the guys would fight and swap for whoever was controlling the character and we'd play that shit into the ground regardless of how long a game was. The last system I had was a PS2, so idk but I knew a lot of complaints started coming out PS3 era. Snap even was a game that we played like crazy. I had a friend who had a N64, and Pokemon was so hot! And we'd all just sit there and see if we could do "perfect" runs even though it was pretty much the same game over and over again.
Speaking of trends, I mean I guess these things have always existed but I think the PS3 began the genre my girlfriend lovingly describes as "penis games" which have hyper-masculine protagonist smashing the shit out of everything with dynamic lighting. I don't mean to offend anyone with this, but the trend is still here (I am just guessing it's Unreal graphics). I know it existed before the PS3, but it really took off then and was part of what actually turned me off of gaming as a whole.
I’ll admit: I play games that are sexualized in a cringey way. But I don’t want those themes aggravating people that just want a fun zombie apocalypse, forced to play as a hero that randomly reverts to a horndog at random times.
That said, saying it now I wonder about Snake’s personality in the MGS3 remake, since every bit of that game is classic…
I never really considered how weird some of this stuff really was until remakes changed it. Like the voice line for looking up Ashley’s skirt in RE4. Lots of weird stuff like this in games where it kind of doesn’t fit, although I did think the erotic bonus in dead rising was funny in a kind of campy B movie way. Sexualized zombies are kind of a staple of the culture in a way, I think.
Now, I hear they’re making a Lollipop Chainsaw remake and I hope they don’t change anything there, as an achievement of shame for looking up the characters skirt was pretty funny and fit the general aesthetic of the game well.
Something that I think is a good criteria is whether an inclusion negatively affects the experience of someone who’s, let’s say, “normal”.
Ex: A female streamer plays Resident Evil 4, really enjoys the characters for Leon and Ashley. Then, Leon for some reason tries to peek under her skirt in a cutscene. Even if some people find it funny, it makes the streamer feel uncomfortable - both for a character she likes getting violated, and for making it clear “Even if you like fighting zombies, this game was made for horny BOYS. Not for YOU.”
Contrast that with players, in gameplay, spending time at a ladder with a sniper rifle to set up a curious angle. That requires specific player intention, and once it’s clear the player is involving themselves with that stupidity, it’s perhaps more appropriate to quickly lampshade it.
That said, I’m glad the remake had enough creativity it wasn’t invested in remaking tired jokes like that. You could say Lollipop Chainsaw is perhaps more ready to keep those elements given that the intention is clear from its cover art.
Yeah that’s a fair take, for sure. Although tbf there was never an explicit cutscene where Leon looks up Ashley’s skirt in the game, it was something that only happened when the player or Leons head in general looked up her skirt. That being said, it still felt weird and out of place regardless. Not to mention it just happened too often in weird ways, like suplexing an enemy near Ashley.
Never played it, but it sounds like the achievement is meant to surprise you. Like, it’s not meant to encourage people looking up skirts, it’s more like the console going “Busted!”
I like that as a framing question, and it helps me to further understand why it is that scenes like the RE4 one feels so weird to me.
I think the thing that makes me uncomfortable in that scenario is the fact that Leon is the hero. I’m a woman who has loved gaming for basically my whole life, so I’m used to playing as someone who doesn’t look like me — there’s a certain amount of abstracting away of gender that’s necessary if I want to be able to participate in some heroic escapism. That’s why scenes like Leon being a creep are so jarring, because he’s the hero. The narrative of the game is endorsing this kind of behaviour because it’s being done by the hero.
Dead Rising is a somewhat more ambiguous example, but still weird overall. I don’t necessarily even mind that the photography intro quest highlights the fact you can take sexy(?) photos, because the NPC in that quest is written in a way where it’s like the game itself is saying “yeah, this guy is a weird creep”. Getting points for “erotic” photos is a bit weird though, because whilst you can choose to not take photos like that, it feels like the mechanics of the game are endorsing the creepy dude’s mentality overall.
So, to be clear: The idea of Leon doing that in a cutscene was theoretical. The only thing the first game had was an Easter egg triggered from looking at Ashley via low angle, which as described takes specific intentions to pull off.
Luis, a sleazy side character, does say something raunchy to her, and that was removed in the remake. It’s a little more fitting because he’s painted as untrustworthy and imperfect; but, I also realize with how many people like Ashley, it’s the sort of line that has no good response to let her be cool. In the original she just pouted “How rude!!”
But I don’t want those themes aggravating people that just want a fun zombie apocalypse, forced to play as a hero that randomly reverts to a horndog at random times.
To be fair, nobody is forcing them to play the game. Zombie game market has a lot of options.
This really feels like a cop-out answer. I understand it’s the same feeling as when difficulty is too high for a game. But I think it’s different when someone has an opinion like “This game feels exactly like what I wanted!…Except for this one big issue.”
Sexualized scenes that make people really uncomfortable (or just un-immersed) can be one of those issues, and high difficulty can often put a barrier on content.
In this case, I genuinely cannot think of too many open-world zombie swarm evasion games that work quite like Dead Rising, complete with its arcadey aesthetics. Having that “one thing” can exclude some people from that exact type of game, even if that doesn’t affect many people. And for those seeking sexualized scenes - the same could be said. No one is outlawing them, just ensuring people get what they’re expecting.
And, to be clear since I brought up difficulty, Dark Souls has so little in the way of direct storytelling, people arguably wouldn’t find much interesting if the game had a story mode that skipped/trivialized gameplay. So in that case, the “one thing” isn’t really a barrier to much other than the credits.
I don’t care that they remove it from the base version of the game, but if you’re going to remake the damn thing I want the full, authentic, experience. If it requires me to download “horndog pack” as a free add on, so be it. Getting anything less is just a subpar product that isn’t worth discussing.
I remember when I was a kid, (around 15 years ago if I had to guess), there was an exhibit at a science museum where they used EEG to make a ball move on a table. Then they set up a game where two people would wear EEG on opposite sides of the table and the ball would roll toward whichever person could get their brainwaves to match a certain pattern better. I think the idea was if you quieted your mind then you would win.
polygon.com
Ważne