If you haven’t played the demo, or couldn’t tell from the trailer, this game is almost exactly the same loop as This is the Police. I liked This is the Police, but it could certainly drag after a handful of hours. That’s probably more of a problem with the execution than the idea; already, Dispatch dresses up the day at the desk job by having very ever-present banter, and not annoying quips but dialogue that feels like it’s building characters or moving the story forward. I liked what I played of this game, but I wonder what they have to spruce up the gameplay after a few iterations through its loop that This is the Police couldn’t come up with.
I played the demo and really liked it at first, as it started out like a Telltalle-style narrative game.
The actual dispatching gameplay loop though, I did not enjoy all that much. It becomes quickly way too frantic for me to enjoy the banter. Plus the actual thing you are looking at and interacting with is a map with glowing icons, i.e. not what I enjoy in video games.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is media literacy as it relates to gaming - specifically about the design conversations developers are often having amongst each other that players only vaguely feel. Let me elaborate:
A good example is the Castlevania series. From early on, Castlevania was always both refining and reinventing itself. Vampire Killer and Castlevania feel to me like a kind of A/B testing to see what hits. When Castlevania prevailed, they immediately began iterating on the formula with both Simon’s Quest and Dracula’s Curse figuring out different modes of gameplay through nonlinear level design and changing characters. Super Castlevania IV was already a remaster of sorts starring Simon Belmont. Of course followed by the all time greats Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night. It had trouble jumping to 3D with the N64 entry which was just called Castlevania again and eschewed the burgeoning Metroidvania/RPG elements of its predecessors.
This eventually leads us to Lords of Shadow which I can certainly respect as a good game with a dedicated following, but it never appealed to me and I had a hard time putting my finger on why. It’s because it’s not just a reboot, but one that kind of wholesale grabs the QTE/cinematic/rage mode game mechanics of the 2010’s and stuffs them into a Castlevania package. It’s difficult to say anything isn’t a “true” Castlevania game in a series that was already very loosely defined as “gothic action probably with Dracula somewhere?” but it had very firmly stepped away from the conversation of its own series.
Even if you’re new to the Castlevania series today, I think you can find great satisfaction in trawling through the depths of the franchise, playing them in chronological release order, and appreciating the various thematic and gameplay elements that each entry contributed to the series. I think gamedevs could learn a lot by looking at this evolution, too. Take look at the Release timeline and note the space in between early entries.
Nowadays, a big game will spend multiple years in development. Inspirations it may have taken from the gaming landscape are years in the past, assuming it even picked up on them when they were peak. When that theoretical game exists, someone may then take inspiration from it and push it into their years long development. The needle moves sooooo … slowly …
And because of that, as we all know, they’re willing to take less of a risk on creating innovative games. There’s this prevailing notion that there are only “good” and “bad” game design concepts and if you mash enough of the good concepts together in a package, you’ll have a good game. They’re all homogenizing because they’re no long trying to deliver on a product to entice you to play it, they’re trying to force a platform/market on you. Take a look at Concord or Marathon or MindsEye or any of the other monumental flops. Kind of like the DCU in my mind; you know the proper thing to do is take the time to build out the world and characters by giving satisfying entries that serve people the things they’re craving. But they keep jumping the gun. If you really wanted Marathon to succeed as a GaaS, why not create a single player game first and allow players to get accustomed to the world and give them something to value to pull them away? The eagerness with which they keep sacrificing projects to snap the trap shut early and make their money back should be a big clue.
Anyways, speaking of MindsEye, I was watching this video earlier which speculates the game was supposed to be another metaverse platform called Everywhere, akin to Epic’s Fortnite. Nobody wants an everything game. Nobody wants an everything app. I don’t want ONE game that I play for the rest of forever, that’s not a thing I ever wanted. They’re trying to forcefully dictate the market at us and everyone is just gagging. As consumers I don’t think we can put effective boycotts together anymore but the market is so utterly saturated and overwhelmed that you literally cannot get people to care. It stands at the complete opposite end of what the article discusses and I think that’s worth meditating on.
It’s not speculation with MindsEye. Everywhere was shown off first, and it’s still happening. That studio was funded with VC money, and VCs want “the next big thing”. That thing at the time was “metaverse”. MindsEye seems to be the smaller project they can get out in the meantime and, charitably, is one of a number of things they’ll churn out that all comes from a similar process flow and builds on each other (they hope).
As to boycotts, your individual purchases always matter; not just with what you don’t buy but also what you do buy.
As to boycotts, your individual purchases always matter; not just with what you don’t buy but also what you do buy.
Agreed. I’m having a bit of a hard time articulating my ideas properly.
I think my overall point is just that it’s really hard to organize purposeful and effective boycotts these days, especially since no matter what the issue, there’s usually a counter movement dampening it. Whatever market forces are causing these companies to register the lack of interest and disdain the consumer market has, I’d like to identify it and capitalize on it because when the market adapts, it most likely won’t be to the consumer’s benefit.
You could live quite happily off indies these days, but it’s hard to ignore the thrashing leviathans. I’m not sure how much I really care about them anymore, but they do take up a lot of the oxygen in the room. And they seem to control a lot of platforms/storefronts as well …
That oxygen is in a different room. The person who only plays Fortnite probably never heard of MindsEye or Concord. At some point, I wonder why games media even covers certain companies anymore. Sure, EA and Ubisoft made games we all liked 20-25 years ago, but they don’t really make games for those same customers anymore, largely.
I absolutely recommend it! Slope’s Game Room has an excellent, 2 hour retrospective you can put on while you work if you want a pretty good deep dive. Other than that, I recommend getting yourself set with some emulators so you can kind of dig through the series. A lot of the early games are difficult and I think it’s perfectly fine to kind of just pick through them a bit, get a taste, move on, return to the ones you like, etc.
You can absolutely feel the arc of design elements through the early series up to the pinnacle, Rondo of Blood. That’s because it was all being done by Konami teams, often who knew eachother or were handing the projects off. Rondo hits this sweet spot where you can feel the inspiration of old vampire novels combined with dramatic stage plays (the stages have dynamic names like Feast of Flames instead of just area descriptors), told with 80’s anime cutscenes, wrapped into a videogame package. It’s truly a work of art that both wears its influences on its sleeve and also that couldn’t really exist the way that it does in any other medium. So where do you even go from there? Symphony of the Night! It takes everything that works about Rondo and kicks it to 11 while flipping the franchise on its head with an absolutely rocking soundtrack and sprawling castle. You can enjoy these games in a vacuum, sure. But playing the series up to that point gives you a real appreciation for what they were going for and how they accomplished it. I don’t even think you really need to play them in order because going back and returning to previous entries almost feels like fitting in missing pieces of a puzzle.
The series flounders a bit when it hits 3D, but it will always have a special place in my heart. Koji Igarashi takes the Symphony of the Night formula and basically owns the handheld world, especially from Aria of Sorrow into the DS trilogy, A++. Ultimately I think he developed that formula enough on his own that breaking it off into the Bloodstained series feels right and good, I think he’s better off this way not weighed down by Konami and the Castlevania franchise, but in this way, we still feel that arc of development. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night actually took a bit to grow on me, but once it did, I saw it as the most Igavania game that ever existed, he has refined the formula.
All this to say that we just don’t get experiences like this anymore, where series have the proper time to cook and develop. Instead we get Concord where they pour millions into something and try and ram it down your throat, “You WILL enjoy this new franchise. You WILL pick one of these characters as your favorite to get invested in, even though we’ve given you no reason. You WILL make this your ONE game you play because … reasons?” Ditto Marathon. Ditto MindsEye (likely). Ditto all the other rubbish they keep pushing out.
EDIT: OH MY GOD! And the Castlevania DLC for Vampire Survivors, how could I even forget. It’s been a Castlevania wasteland for years and that DLC is some of the best I ever played. Completely the Richter scenario and getting to the end of it legit made me cry, it was such a love letter to fans and felt like a huge emotional, respectful sendoff for the series that Konami will never give us 😭 It’s so good, if you’re a Castlevania fan you should absolutely play it and if not, save it til the end because it’s incredible and bittersweet.
It's quite funny that Strange Scaffolding seems to embrace uncertainty with er...uncertainty. As in, they keep things explicitly contract based in order to keep people from expending too much time and energy into a singular project. I've always thought of contract work as something rockier due to taxes, benefits, etc. I think though, they're just ahead of the curb and if they're successful enough more power to them. Clearly something is a bit amiss though, if the head of the place can't afford a ticket to GDC. I do like however, that they showed up to socialize regardless. Which is pretty much the main reason to show up to one of these anyways.
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.
Since when do you have to link your phone number to your Steam account? I’ve had an account for as long as Steam has existed, and I’ve never been asked to provide my phone number.
It’s good to have a constant in the current world, steam seems okay, I love what they’re doing for Linux gamers, I think they should reduce their share by at least 5%,but they do a good service and seem competent.
It was put out that everyone should change their passwords. That kind of info for like 90 million steam accounts would fetch a much higher price or ransom than some personal info on a bunch of people like names, phone numbers and an address.
Why not both? My main argument was that while some seem to be saying that the outcry wasn’t justified, it probably made many people have a closer look at their security.
I believe the main concern for periodic password changes is that most people won’t take the time to generate unique passwords each time. They will typically iterate a password over time, meaning a couple leaked passwords will narrow down guesswork to a trivial number of guesses and remove the benefit of the timed changes.
NIST no longer recommends password expirations except for cases where it is believed that a breach occurred.
The other issue with periodic password changes, particularly in the workplace but also relevant in normal life, is that it causes people to write down their password. The issues with that should be glaring enough
What if they write it down in a single, centralizedz password manager? Which itself could be compromised?
That’s the only way I can keep the literally 100 accounts ive accumulated over the years straight, without reusing passwords.
And while I believe that is reasonably secure in my case, if that got compromised I’d be pretty screwed (well, 2fa would probably still limit the worst of it). But most people probably wouldn’t even be that secure about it.
Because it’s about reducing attack vectors, and your password manager isn’t likely going to be a vector. Attackers are going to try and net as many users as possible, which means (aside from heads of state or C-suite executives being spear phished) they aren’t targeting individuals… They’re targeting the companies that those individuals have accounts with. Essentially, you as an individual aren’t important enough to bother trying to hack individually. As long as your password manager has a sufficiently long password, (and you’re not one of the 1% of individuals who are rich or powerful enough to actually target), hackers won’t even bother trying.
With shared passwords, every single service you use is a potential attack vector; A breach on any of them becomes a breach on all of them, because they’re all using the same credentials. And breaches happen all the time, both because any single individual employee can be a potential weakness in the company’s security, (looking at the accountant who plugged a “lost and found” flash drive into their computer, and got the entire department hit with ransomware), and because the company is more likely to be targeted by attackers. With unique passwords and a manager, a breach on any service is only a breach on that service.
So by using a password manager, you essentially accept that breaches in individual companies are inevitable and out of your control, and work to minimize the damage that each one can do.
I asked my company if I could use a password manager and they said no. So now they get a set of rotating passwords that are the same for all my work accounts. It doesn’t really bother me - it’s their data, not mine.
You may have seen reports of leaks of older text messages that had previously been sent to Steam customers. We have examined the leak sample and have determined this was NOT a breach of Steam systems.
We’re still digging into the source of the leak, which is compounded by the fact that any SMS messages are unencrypted in transit, and routed through multiple providers on the way to your phone.
The leak consisted of older text messages that included one-time codes that were only valid for 15-minute time frames and the phone numbers they were sent to. The leaked data did not associate the phone numbers with a Steam account, password information, payment information or other personal data. Old text messages cannot be used to breach the security of your Steam account, and whenever a code is used to change your Steam email or password using SMS, you will receive a confirmation via email and/or Steam secure messages.
You do not need to change your passwords or phone numbers as a result of this event. It is a good reminder to treat any account security messages that you have not explicitly requested as suspicious. We recommend regularly checking your Steam account security at any time at
We also recommend setting up the Steam Mobile Authenticator if you haven’t already, as it gives us the best way to send secure messages about your account and your account’s safety.
polygon.com
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