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!
The issue with a “The worst of …” list is that you need to find examples that are both really bad and also notorious/high-profile enough to be interesting. “random game I’ve never heard about is really bad” has very little value as a news/“news” item. It’s like buying a bottom-shelf liquor and complaining that it sucks ass.
There is no good reason for us to define, or seek out, the “worst games of the year”. Only outrage culture wants us to direct hate towards known bad games like Black Ops 7, even though by any practical analysis it’s a better game than hundreds of ignored, pretty bad asset flips, and even some high-effort low-thought indie games that have come out.
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.
polygon.com
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