Got 1700hrs in it; 42 bases across a 30+ galaxies. Mines for Sodium, Indium, Phosphorus, Rusted Metal, Sulpherine, Pyrite, and a few more. Built a few architectural wonders, too. Good times
The Jabroni Mike one was done with Fredrik Knudsen like 4 years ago. Also if you want to watch Fredrick Knudsen do a Mage the Ascension game he does one with some of Bruva Alfabusas crew, also it’s on Bruva Alfabusas channel.
I’m not really excited about anything because I don’t care much for AAA but it‘s funny to me that a show like the Game Awards was never about the awards but just an excuse to show some world premier trailers.
They keep telling us how this is a celebration of this year while trailers for games in the coming years take center stage. It feels more like the most cynical funeral of old games while the new ones get coronated with their announcements.
And I know this is comment isn‘t deep or profound to anybody who ever watched the Game Awards but I just find it comical every year.
On the other hand, winning an award from this show has a tangible effect on game sales, so it’s nice when a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 can beat the mainstays like The Legend of Zelda and earn that bump for themselves.
The awards are done by the big studios anyway, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft etc, thats the jury, it always has a bias. Anything else only wins something if its so popular that it has to. It's just a AAA circle jerk mostly.
But its not about the awards anyway, its about advertising.
The jury is composed of the review outlets, not the studios. It does have a bias toward larger games, because the outlets reviewing games have an incentive to more reliably cover the games that most of their audience will be interested in, but it’s not because Sony’s voting for themselves to win.
Not exactly no, they are directly involved in the process. They pick which outlets can vote, so you immediately have conflict of interest.
As a fair awards show, its fucking awful, but as we know, thats just the facade to selling people new products. It's just advertising, hyped up.
Also media publications are often biased anyway as their entire business relies on exposure, which is infinitely harder to get if you are critical of games. Nobody is gonna slap a 5/10 on their product.
Not to mention its always games with money behind them, there's lots of actual quality games released that never get a mention, let alone a nomination, because they simply werent published by a big company. They have fucking DLC nominated instead of games if the big guys didnt release anything that year.
It‘s definitely clever to wrap the Award show into a Superbowl type of event for the gaming industry. It ensures there will be a lot of eyes on award winners. But they still have to share the attention with the new shiny things that are being advertised so it‘s always a little awkward. It‘s bizarre but part of the experience and let‘s be honest, most of don‘t care about popularity contests. We tune in for the trailers.
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond feels like a game stuck between two worlds. When it’s emulating the series’ past, Beyond is an entertaining, if overly conservative, sequel. However, as the shadowy corridors make way for open-world fetch quests, and Halo-style expeditions with AI companions, it’s left feeling like a diluted experience that doesn’t fully deliver on the spirit of earlier entries.
exactly what everyone was worried about. it sounds like it’s still worth playing but doesn’t reach the highs of the series, and those open world bike sections look boring and unnecessary
Its a Nintendo game with a well known name. Of course some people are going to call it a 10/10 game of the year, even if it doesn’t deserve it.
People said that Zelda BotW was a 10/10, and then Tears came out and made all of those people look like idiots. BotW was really more like what I said it was, a 6/10.
I have literally never once heard anyone call BotW anything other than a masterpiece. I’m sorry, really not trying to come for you, but I think it’s fucking nuts to call that game a 6/10.
Were you around when it released? There was a somewhat small but steady voice online that disliked the weapon degradation, lack of traditional dungeons, the small scale of what dungeons there were, and the clunkiness of the UI.
This is a pretty terrible comparison considering those cartridges didn’t include any game data… You could probably still use them today, the only thing they held was game save data…
If I'm going to put 100+ hours into a game, there better be a setting to mute BGM, because no matter how good the OST is I will eventually tire of it and want to listen to something else.
Similarly, granular audio options that separate dialogue from ambient from music from system sounds. Definitely don’t need my ears blown out just to hear dialogue.
I like having the background music very low, but not off, system sounds a bit above that, sound effects higher than system but lower than dialogue, which is maxed. And of course ambient sound levels really depend on the game and what kind of ambiance it has.
Same thing with granular contrast/gamma/etc. Don’t just provide a few preset options, especially if they can only be set before you start the game (also they should never only be set from the main menu, never). Let the player choose whatever they want on the fly. I love playing with everything bright so I can see wtf I’m doing, I don’t give half a shit if the devs think it should be so dark it’s not navigable. I disagree.
I’d love it if a group could collude on a standard for music signals.
Imagine this: You have a music player following this signal standard.
Game starts, it signals GAME_STARTED, and the media player signals STOP_GAME_MUSIC, so the game itself plays no BGM, leaving it to the music player. But, then the game can also signal later on: THEME_MENUS, THEME_EXPLORE, THEME_COMBAT, THEME_BOSS; and the media player can respond to that by cross fading between playlists built for each.
I’m all for easy difficulty options in games, but I’m never, ever going to use them. I just can’t motivate myself to play if I’m not accomplishing something.
Well that’s not true either. I mean sometimes, sure, but in general if you know what you want and you work towards it, you can accomplish things and be rewarded.
This is the thing, everyone is different. What is difficult for some, will be easy for others, and it will even flip for the same people on different games.
The best option is having a wide array of difficulty options. In stone games I get bored of it’s too easy, in others I get bored of it’s too hard.
I tend to err on ‘normal’ to ‘slightly more difficult than normal’. But some games I don’t want difficulty at all because I’m there for the ride.
I keep on getting told this by people, especially fans of FeomSoft and soulslikes.
I figured I’d take a crack at them this year, and also Bloodborne is my boyfriend’s favorite game, so I played it. And that feeling that everyone describes about the satisfaction and accomplishment… Never happened. I beat the bosses and was just like… Okay, on to the next one then I guess. I did have a much better time playing through co-op with him, but I still wouldn’t say I felt accomplished by it.
I don’t really like tower defense games, but I would never dream about trying to tell devs that they’re doing it wrong because I don’t like how they do it. I just don’t play them.
Well… You totally can. I like towerr defense games too, but I’ve never played one that I would call perfect. Even my favorite games I could dig deep and give design notes on. Where it’s feasible a lot of games have mods or hacks. A lot of people like Pokemon romhacks more than actual games. I put hundreds of hours into Civ 6 starting vanilla, but mods can fix a lot of the little inconveniences and add new content to the game. I think I’m in the minority of Skyrim players who prefers to keep it vanilla- most people mod the hell out of it.
Bloodborne was still fun, especially on subsequent runs and with co-op. I think it would be a way better game overall if they designed any sort of real onboarding experience. A training dummy in the hunter’s dream, maybe the ability to try out different weapons there before investing resources into them. Using better language (shooting someone is not a “parry”, and why does the axe do blunt damage while the hammer does piercing damage?). An actual goddamn map. A journal system to keep track of what you’ve done in the game so it’s easier to pick up again 3 months later. Clear item descriptions that include numbers. Explanations for what the stats actually do. None of this is what I would call “difficulty”, and once you gain the initial knowledge and experience these problems aren’t as big of a deal, but it does make the game a lot less accessible for new players.
And I question how much value their absence really adds to the players who do stick around to push through and get that experience. It seems like more of a marketing gimmick to be “different” and foment an elitist, hipster-esque fan base. Or maybe it’s a question allocating of the development resources. It’s a shame because there’s a lot of great design too, it’s just hidden behind these frustrating problems that the rest of the industry solved decades ago.
If I wasn’t motivated to play it for my boyfriend I would have just dropped it early on. I don’t feel like I accomplished anything by suffering through that frustration, I just feel annoyed that I had to deal with these problems I feel like I should not have existed in a 2015 game.
For me, good story and/or fun gameplay is the accomplishment, whether it’s difficult or not. If it’s too difficult, I just won’t bother. I don’t have time for that.
So I remember once “playing” a visual novel.
Over the period of ~10 hrs of reading (maybe ~ 4 hrs for a normal-speed reader), there was exactly 1 (one) point, where I had a choice to make.
The rest was just clicking “next”.
That could have been a PDF (or 4, because there were 4 options in the choice) instead of a Windows executable.
Then there is this thing in scripted events, that some of the high budget games are guilty of.
It’s stuff like press button to open door or sth, where you are essentially stuck in place with nothing else to do other than press the button and whatever action is done, doesn’t end up increasing immersion in the least, because it is just like a cut-scene getting paused in between, just to say, ‘press button to continue watching the cut-scene’.
I recently played the new silent hill and I didn’t hesitate to put combat difficulty on easy, it was a matter of my own health at that point.
I could endure a horror story, but the stress of getting beaten up and having to run away from grotesque monsters while trying to solve cryptic puzzles was too much for me.
Minecraft Java edition got 1.19.1 back in July of 2022 that enabled chat reporting, message signing and server wide bans. It was the turning point where Microsoft pulled trust and control away from its users and begun acting more like a middleman.
The issue then would be migrating all of your existing server to an offline server auth method. If there’s anyone who doesn’t log in during the migration period, anyone else could nab their account name (and presumably everything that account has on it) once it’s fully swapped over.
Plus, if the server remains popular after this, Microsoft lawyers could pursue legal action on the operation to bypass their auth servers as well
It’s inevitable. Microsoft didn’t give Notch a billion dollars because they thought they could improve the product for the users. They bought it because of the number of users. They saw a revenue stream that wouldn’t require very many resources to maintain and that they could also expand to multiple microsoft platforms and then lock behind a walled-garden to sell access as a service. Of course they wanted to confine the player population to servers that microsfot controlled. That is the only way they could ensure that any add-ons/mods/players etc were gated behind their own storefront.
Nice choice, but personally I always found Terra a bit hard to relate to, very fey and even sort of creepy in her half-Esper form.
Celes, on the other hand, is a bonafide badass, and her storyline was among the better developed ones and more humanizing than most of the other characters in the game. Although romantically I think she could probably do better than Locke. That boy needs some help.
I kinda feel like Terra developed a bit more over the course of the game, from orphan half-fey under the control of the empire to joining a rebel group while finding herself and discovering her past. In the end she doesn’t get assigned a “love interest” and become mother to a bunch of war-orphans as she gets in touch with her humanity.
Celes comes in a bit more badass to start - as a super-soldier-serum (magic infused) general who turned against the same immoral empire - but a lot of her side story aside from the island is a bit… weird what with the whole Locke Ultros opera thing. It’s like the story writers couldn’t decide whether she was a superhero or damsel in distress.
Locke’s own backstory with the Phoenix quest is neat though.
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