If I remember right, both Legend of Zelda Windwaker and Mario Sunshine were either rushed to an end or released early, leading both to come out unfinished. I the details on why are hazy, but I think they were pushed to try and make up for poor sales of the Gamecube at large or to make up for other gaps in the schedule.
Windwaker had a ton of content cut. The ice island and fire island were both supposed to be full dungeons. Both of those incomplete dungeons later ended up being used in Twilight Princess.
Tap for spoilerHyrule Castle was supposed to be a full dungeon.
Personally the movement mechanics and the tropical overworld were amazing in this game.
While the water jetpack may seem like a gimmick, I thought it really changed the platforming in a good way.
Additionally, I’m a sucker for a good overworld and the amount of things you can unlock or discover in delphino plaza turns it into its own sort of level.
There is definitely some jank and padding (blue coins) in the game, but it holds up better than Mario 64 in my opinion (just due to the camera issues IN Mario 64).
I would say theoretically not. If you only do new construction nothing you touch has had shit on it yet. But then again it is intended for shit so it depends on where you draw the line
And FFS don’t send me weird rage-filled basement-dweller DM’s on all my platforms demanding to know why I’m friendly to Epic. The last time I posted something with Epic news in it, some of you really took it badly.
“Omg how dare you write good news about another multibillionaire gaming platform that is not steam? I’m literally crying and shaking right now 😭”. It’s so sad that people go this low on the internet.
Anyways, don’t pay attention to them, love your work on the fediverse!
I’m shocked to see Donut County mentioned. But you’re right, it’s a perfect pleasant game similar to the perfection of the first Portal. In fact, it’s my son’s favorite video game, by far.
Biased because I’m pro steam deck, but yes, Steam Deck will offer you the full steam library of games, on top of games from other platforms / consoles through emulation
Steam Deck will offer you the full steam library of games
*some exclusions apply.
Of my nearly 300 games in my library, 36 are fully steam deck certified. While another ~70 have some layer of compatibility. Leaving almost 1/3rd of my library not usable on the Steam Deck.
1/3 sounds high. Just because it isn’t verified doesn’t mean it won’t work, and most of the non-anti-cheat-related compatibility problems are solved by installing Proton GE.
Some games that say not supported actually work fine. I was disappointed to not be able to play some older games like Jedi Academy, but I installed it, set a community made controller mapping, and it works with zero issues.
Sure there are some games that don’t work, but a lot more do than just the ones that are steam deck certified / playable.
Either that or this magical thing called GNSS :)
Openstreetmap has roads mapped down to a couple decimeters and Japan has its own satellite constellation QZSS, which in combination would be more than enough to find the center of the road and then slowly work your way outwards to the edges.
That doesn’t all fall at once haha. They continually plow after every snow fall and add to the existing piles. How they manage to keep stacking and carving it so perfectly and so high is a mystery to me, but I’m sure the snow is only this high in this particular area. It’s likely an attraction or something
Ok awesome! They use GPS and bulldozers and plows. That makes sense. That said, seems like they do wait for it to all fall then they carve it. Very fucking cool.
That was such a cool read. Thanks for that, I’ve had a rough few days and to read that at 630 this morning set me right for some reason. Have a great day, friend!
Sometime in early March, a bulldozer specially equipped with both a GPS and a mobile satellite phone is sent up the mountain and over the Snow Canyon. The GPS and sat phone work in tandem to provide the driver a detailed video screen image of the dozer’s location in relation to the center of the snow-buried highway. This driver’s job is not to clear snow, but simply to lay out an accurate track of the road itself. Following the GPS dozer is a team of dozers that will begin the clearing operations.
I feel the same. The atmosphere is decidedly less doom-like in my view and I’m a little skeptical of these new gameplay mechanics. Riding flying dragons? I’m also not a fan of the way Marty Stratton handled the situation with Mick Gordon, which has damped my goodwill for the studio. I bought Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal on launch. I will not buy this game until it is bargain bin prices.
2016 had the perfect balance between story and gameplay to me, in that the player character expressed flagrant disregard for any narrative elements. This was doom 1 af.
Just keep moving and turn the bad guys into chunks. Need nothing more.
I fucking hated the loop in eternal. I get that the developers wanted you to play in a specific way, they partially achieved this through arbitrary mechanics like ammo scarcity. I can appreciate that it’s a good game, but I didn’t get on with it.
The art style went full Hollywood horror, and the exposition was kinda dialed up to eleven by contrast to its direct predecessor. Very much disliked that you couldn’t crouch (definitely more of a me issue, though I think sliding is a missed opportunity in Eternal’s movement repertoire).
2016’s PvP was imperfect but still fun and much appreciated. Snapmap was super underrated and has many sick community made levels.
The later games are a phenomenal technical showcase; the absolute posterchild for the Vulkan gfx API, but it’s not very ‘doom’ in spirit to me any more
the player character expressed flagrant disregard for any narrative elements
They don’t. Doomguy does like two things in the very beginning, but it’s not like they don’t care, but rather about what Hayden has to say and his justifications for everything that has happened, that’s the part which he doesn’t want.
You meet Hayden later in his office, with a few minutes unskippable “cutscene,” but it’s not like Doomguy ignores him or jumps out of a window in the middle of it.
I love my original GameCube. Still have it hooked up to an old tube TV and there’s a lot of nostalgia around putting the little mini-CD in and booting it up. But it’s so much easier to fire up dolphin.
I got a Steam Deck recently and have been surprised at how well the 6th (GC, PS2, Xbox) and 7th (Wii, PS3, 360) generations can be emulated now compared to a few years ago. I hadn’t messed with emulating systems past 5th gen (N64, PS1, Saturn) for many years. It’s wild to me that I can smoothly emulate Dragon’s Crown, a PS4 game I currently have on my PS5, on the Steam Deck if I want, although I chose the PS3 one for less power needed since they’re pretty much identical. Even given it’s a less demanding 2D game, emulating a PS4 is impressive.
Bethesda’s version had expansive and impressive maps and visuals, but the writing and world-building were subpar compared to Fallout 1/2 and New Vegas.
But would this game have been successful, given the kind of games that were being released at the time? It would most likely have been the end of the series.
I think it probably would have been the biggest success of the 3 games. But you’re also probably right that it likely would have been the end of the series. Bethesda making them into 1st person open world games was probably the best thing that ever happened to the series. At least in terms of achieveing widespread success.
What was your experience like? Interesting to hear from someone who tried it now as opposed to when it was released. I will add that it’s not merely a matter of nostalgia, but you also have a better grasp of the core gameplay and the general storyline beats if you’ve played it several times since release.
I played the Multiverse Edition which had a bunch of patches and fixes integrated. Including HD I believe.
I think the world building is pretty good, at least parts of it. There is some disappointingly boilerplate Tolkienesque fantasy in there, but the conflict between magic and technology is well realised and interesting and feels grounded in the world. The steampunk aesthetic is cool and I like the Victorian racism angle they’re doing with half orcs and ogres. I liked the newspapers and there are some interesting quests, like the half ogre conspiracy. I thought the peace negotiation was going to end up being absolutely amazing but in the end it is just an anticlimactic stat check.
The combat is absolutely atrocious in every possible way, from balance to animations and whether you play turn based or real time doesn’t really matter, both are horrible. It’s quite possibly the worst AI I’ve ever seen and every fight is just every creature mashing into eachother until one dies. I don’t think anyone or anything has special abilities or different AI behaviour. You can’t use Mage followers because they don’t use their magic, opting instead to charge into melee with their fists or staves.
The tech skills are the most interesting and unique aspect of the game, but involves a horrendous amount of parts collecting, crafting, inventory management and over-encumberance for very little rewards.
The companions feel extremely bare bones by modern standards and it’s extremely disappointing that none of them even get ending slides. I liked Virgil but not even he got any sort of closure at the end.
The main story was okay, it had some twists and funny moments like with Nasrudin. The whole “life was a mistake” angle by the BBEG felt a little tired to me, but maybe if playing Arcanum was the first time I came across that concept it would have blown me away.
The actual writing itself is not bad in terms of the prose and dialogue etc and the game has some funny moments.
The vast freedom you get with character building is probably the best part. I like how varied you can make your characters, although I don’t know that all builds are viable. Props for following the example of Fallout 1 and 2 and including specific “dumb dialogue”, even though I didn’t go for that personally. Having to balance tech and magic with your character build is a fun concept.
Overall I understand why it has its cult following and I’m glad to have played it, but it’s hard to recommend it to people unless they have an extremely high retro game/clunk tolerance.
I mostly agree. The combat is indeed terrible with both real-time and turn based. Turn based just feels off and pure real time is not viable. I play with real-time with pause.
I had the misfortune of playing as a technologist on my first playthrough in the early 2000s. It was really rough. Over time you can figure out strategies/approaches to make it easier, but I would argue many of them almost break the game.
I agree you need a measure of tolerance for retro gameplay/jankyness and honestly combat was subpar even for its time (Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).
To be fair to Arcanum in terms of companions Baldur’s Gate 2 was really the watershed moment in terms of how companions were treated in RPGs. Arcanum released less than a year after it and so while development timelines were shorter back then I doubt they had much time to adjust and get influenced by BG2. Fallout 1&2 doesn’t have it much better in terms of fleshed out companions.
(Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).
I would definitely recommend FO 1&2 easier than Arcanum and with fewer caveats. Maybe that’s just because I think they are fundamentally better and more important games than Arcanum though and so they are more worth suffering through some jank for. They still have a fiendishly retro interface that is quite clunky and the combat is not great, especially without mods. There is some really questionable encounter design in there and they both suffer from tremendous RNG heavy potential misery and loads and loads of reloads. Not least with random encounters.
Also the first few hours of Fallout 2 are absolutely miserable. It’s still one of my favourite games of all time though.
The whole aimed shots thing makes combat magnitudes more fun in the classic Fallouts. Maybe this is telling of when I first played the games (hint: I was a teen), but there is something about taking cheap shots at people’s groin that doesn’t get old. Becoming a Prizefighter by exclusively and indiscriminately punching your opposition in the dick is always going to be funny.
The critical hits and misses are also very entertaining, though definitely add to the notorious RNG. The animations and effects, like disintegrations and splatter, also make combat a lot more satisfying.
Black Isle Studios planned to include a dual-combat system in the game that allowed for the player to choose between real-time (Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout games and Micro Forté and 14° East’s Fallout Tactics) or turn-based combat (Fallout and Fallout 2) but real-time was only included due to Interplay’s demands.
I am most probably not good at the game, but in Wasteland 3, it felt like you needed the first round advantage, otherwise you would get blown to pieces before you could even act once. That burned the game for me.
Thanks to the design documents being leaked back in 2007 (I think) and the original designers being open to contact from some dedicated people, there are actually a couple of fan made attempts at creating what would have been Van Buren. I know of both Project Van Buren and Fallout: Yesterday.
bin.pol.social
Ważne