How about both? Writing your elected reps is definitely smart, but will be much more effective if there are numerous people calling for the same. I appreciate OP sharing their views, and catloaf sharing a specific action step all of us can do it we are concerned about this matter.
I worked for a few years as a gambling addiction counselor, and these types of games definitely prime people for addiction to gambling. Also, it’s worth noting that the demographic with the highest rates of gambling addiction are young men, aged 18-24.
Anyone that’s been to a casino can attest that major video game companies also make slot machines. The industry are aware of what they’re doing.
Companies aren’t innovative. Once they land on a formula they just keep using it. Eventually it gets stale and the company crashes or buys another company that had a good idea and runs it into the ground. Innovative games happen when a AAA company happens to acquire an indie studio at the right time to give them runway to properly polish their game.
we really need to archive archive.org tbh. If there was an open source fediverse alternative that would be great. The hard part would be the amount of storage needed for the whole thing.
How much innovation can you get when you have to spend millions of dollars on large teams to develop games now, compared to even 10 years ago? It’s not really all that surprising that companies want to play it safe. It’s a large investment, and they don’t know if there will be a return on it.
That doesn’t even get into the fact that there’s only so many combinations of things you can do in a video game.
If the intent here is to discuss games that are actually doing something new and different, Space Marine 2 really needs to be in this conversation.
At first glance it’s just a very, very polished third person action game, but the more you pay attention the more you’ll notice the excellent mechanical design of the combat. There are some very smart, very subtle choices that have been made in the gameplay mechanics that affect the dramatic flow and tension of combat in surprising ways. Someone designing this game actually thought about the pacing of fights, and that’s something you just don’t see in games all that often.
Also on a purely technical level there’s the extremely smart bit of coding that allows them to render ungodly numbers of enemies in screen at once, behaving as coherent swarms that move and flow together, and dear God is it incredible to watch.
The first game was a great Warhammer game (for the time). This one is just a great game, no qualification needed.
Ogólnie w kwestii Dolnego Śląska polecam zarówno przeglądanie strony Radia Wrocław, a jak ktoś jest lokalnie to ogarnięcie radioodbiornika (najlepiej na baterie, jeśli zabraknie prądu) i słuchanie na częstotliwościach:
As I see it, the difference is that we now have capable game engines freely available. Indie studios can, for the most part, offer the same quality of gameplay. AAA studios can only really differentiate themselves by how much content they shove into a game.
In particular, this also somewhat limits creativity of AAA games. In order to shove tons of content into there, the player character has to be a human, the gameplay has to involve an open world, there has to be a quest system etc…
I got back into emulation recently with one of those handheld emulators (like Retroid, but a different brand). It’s mind blowing to me to play old Gameboy or GBA games on there because it feels just like playing on the genuine article, except the screen is like 3x better and backlit and all that. Plus all the games are just right there at your fingertips!
I don’t find myself using it as much as I should. I think retro games just don’t interest me as much as modern ones. I think they are cool and worth playing, I just find it hard to let go of the conveniences of modern gaming.
I am not sure if ps2 is considered retro yet but I find that era to be a good compromise between classic games and the convenience of modern control schemes. the only gameboy games I remember playing was mario and pokemon though I preferred the original 8bit mario games. I also recently found out about a week ago that pcsx2 has its own gameplay record feature which made this video easier than my previous one to make due to not having to use a screen recorder.
I do emulation since early 2000s (since I have a PC) and its one of the best things not only in gaming, but in computing and technology in general!
If you are new to emulation, then I recommend to use standalone emulators first. There are emulators for single systems, like Snes9x for SNES and others are multi-system emulators, like Mesen or Ares that can play many console systems.
Following is a bit more advanced:
RetroArch: My favorite is RetroArch, but that is not recommended if you are just new to emulation and want a simple emulator to access a few games without configuring too much.
MAME and FinalBurn: Arcade emulation with MAME in example can also be tedious, because that works a bit different than a normal console emulator.
DOSBox: PC emulators for old systems can play old DOS games, but you need to have an understanding how DOS works in order to be able to use it correctly. Because some games require setups in DOS and such. You can also install old Windows versions like Win98 to play Windows games. But you really need to install and handle Windows like a real operating system, and install each game as well.
I mostly only emulate playstation games.(pcsx and pcsx2) I did try an NES emulator for a romhack which was nice. Recently I tried Aethersx which is a fork of pcsx2 but for android. A lot has changed since a few years ago I remember pcsx2 lagging alot but now it runs pretty smooth.
Playstation 2 is already solid, that’s for sure. Since my new PC from last year, I am also able to emulate Playstation 3 (some claim even the Steam Deck is capable of doing so, but I’m not sure how good). And PSP emulator runs on most computers nowadays. We even enter in emulating a Playstation 4, but off course this is in early stages at the moment.
So yeah, there is lot of Playstation food for the coming years for you. :D Its really exciting. I still need to figure out PS Vita, and didn’t get into it yet. The original Playstation is still my biggest Sony love I have and probably right behind my favorite console, the SNES.
Romhacks are also huge part of why I love the emulation scene. If you allow me to plug an article I wrote, with lot of Romhacks and Mods for NES as a recommendation. There is so much cool stuff out there: …game.blog/…/nes-mods-and-romhacks-collection/
Someone even ported the original NES Super Mario Bros to SNES, and then modified that to add in a Super Mario Maker style editor; on the SNES! I can’t link it here if you are interested, unfortunately I only know a prepatched ROM source for it. And that is not something this community / place allows to link.
When I heard of ps4 emulation I thought it was amazing since I still have not tried emulating ps3 but I remember it use to be only for high end machines. I also assume ps5 emulation will be a thing eventually but I think it will be a while. I am curious how psx3 runs compared to psx2 since pcsx2 lagged when I first used it years ago. But now its runs about the same as the ps1 version. I imagine ps3 is probably more complicated to emulate than ps4 due to the architecture though.
Exactly (referring to more complicated), you are right about the architecture. The PS3 is that complicated, not even Sony themselves have a working emulator for their catalog of games in Playstation monthly subscriptions. Sony emulates PS1 and 2, and PS3 is only streaming and PS4 games are directly compatible with PS5. That’s because PS4 and 5 are similar in the architecture and basically a PC (obviously there is more to it, but CPU is similar).
And that’s why the most advanced PS4 emulator, ChadPS4 … I mean ShadPS4 (the community makes jokes and calls it Chad), doesn’t actually emulate the CPU entirely! Because its similar to a PC CPU, it can use lot of instructions directly. There are other PS4 emulators who try to emulate it entirely, like a traditional emulator.
As for PS3, it is still not in a state like PS2 emulator. Some games work fine and I can play lot of them in full speed without major or any issues. It’s under heavy development still. Some games still are totally unplayable. And depending on how heavy a game is, it can be really demanding on the current modern PCs (I know its a vague statement, its hard to make exact statement for situations like these). I think its still a few years away from how the PS2 performs right now. And then the question if anyone wants to port the emulator to a different architecture… phew!
I suspect a big part of the process has shifted focus from making an enjoyable experience to how we can milk this for every dollar it’s worth and then some.
It’s risky trying to explore new avenues as a large company you’re expected to deliver unimaginable returns on your investment. So copying the games that did well will hopefully perform better that quarter. As opposed to spending resources on expanding the engine or trying out a novel idea.
On top of that I suspect the executives are envious of the addictive cash burning cycle that gacha games provide.
I feel like too many games have and continue to copy the formula established by Minecraft and Far Cry 3. I find the experience of exploring a new zone, climbing a tower, unlocking material xyz then rinse and repeat. To be boring and unimaginative. But it seems like I’m the weird one here and people seemingly adore it.
I thought the inventory management of BoTW was awful. It’s not fun to complete a cool quest line get a cool item and for it to break forever after two fights. Wtf
Crafting games such as Valheim have nothing to do aside from grinding for the sake of grinding. Sure building a cool house had some appeal but it’s overall just intentionally tedious.
Baldur’s Gate III was a breath of fresh air. I actually have been thinking for a while that maybe I just didn’t like games anymore until it came out.
I’m also about to start my first Elden Ring run with a group of friends for the first time soon. Excited for that.
The Dark Pictures Anthology has some fantastic stories if anyone is interested.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne