Oh man. We had just gotten a PS1 and Need for Speed. We lived in a little apartment over a beer store. Friday night would come and we'd spend the entire weekend racing each other and drinking way too much. We'd let the loser of the race stay on and the winner would sit out. That way we all got practice and got really, really good. Good times.
I love this. Out of curiosity, do you play any modern racing games, like maybe the Forza Horizon series? If you’re still buds with those buds, no reason you couldn’t be having this kind of experience online (assuming y’all can find the time). I am curious what all the former NFS fans play these days. There isn’t anything QUITE like it but a few modern games get close.
I don't have the time to play many games now but I recently bought Dirt 5 for my arcade fix and Dirt Rally 2 for my sim fix. I've always loved rally games.
And yeah, still super close with one of those guys. When I can find the time, we spend our time playing Day Z, Arma Reforger, Sea of Thieves. He plays Forza, but I'm trying to get gud at DR2 before getting him into it so I can win at least a handful of games first.
One of our first games for the original xbox was NFSU2. On so many Saturday morning’s I’d wake up revving engines from the other room as a friend played through the campaign
Oof, can’t lie, that significantly impacts my desire to get the game. They did such a good job with 1+2 in fighting years of licensing rot, I’d assumed they’d have equivalent success with 3+4.
there are apparently a few cases where they didn’t get the same song, but they got a new song from the same artists. But yeah…it’s a bummer from a game preservation perspective
definitely licensing issues, 100%. The record company owns the old song and doesn’t want to allow it in the game again, at least not for a reasonable price. Could the artists re-record songs to bypass the record company, like Taylor Swift did? Yeah sure, but only if they are still around, and only if they care that much about being in the Tony Hawk remake. Re-recording songs includes re-doing all the mixing and mastering, and that is a decent chunk of time and money for essentially no return on investment. Most of the bands in original Tony Hawk that are still around are pretty focused on ROI at this point.
Meh. Still a great soundtrack from the same artists. It’s a remake, not a remaster. It preserves the original games in spirit but also offers something fresh to the old-school fans.
I reckon Rare must have given him a lot of creative freedom that he felt he might not get elsewhere. There’s ways to keep your employees for decades even in the modern software and games industries and it’s not pizza parties and calling your company a family. It’s letting long-time employees be decision-makers and rewarding them for the company’s successes.
Virtuos is crazy prolific. They've touched a massive amount of games. Some ports were really bad (basically anything from Take2 Interactive) but most were really good. They've done some remakes too, Oblivion being the most recent.
I'd trust their word on it.
Still not going to buy the Switch 2 though.
I did two full playthroughs plus a lot of restarts mid-way to try different endings or different side things. The only voice I can clearly hear in my head is the mage, whose name I can’t even remember. I can’t even remember what my own character’s voice sounded like (the vampire).
Tim Downey is Gales’ voice actor (the mage), he was also the only one to use his real voice for the role. Astarion’s voice acting (the vampire) is very memorable as well (by Neil Newbon), but if you play as any of the characters you barely hear them, or so I’ve heard.(haven’t done it myself)
but if you play as any of the characters you barely hear them, or so I’ve heard.(haven’t done it myself)
This is the case. There are a small set of instances where the character might get a one-off voice line, but in general you’re left mute, even during high impact story moments where the character would usually get a spotlight (e.g. Astarion confronting Cazador).
It’s just a bit of a shame because you’d think people would opt to play characters they like because they want to experience more of them while playing, but ironically you get less that way.
Maybe playing as an origin character would require a whole buch of “internal dialoge” that added too much extra work, so they scrapped it. Its indeed a shame 'cause you are right, I’d like to experience more of said character. So in the end it’s counter intuitive. ( I can’t imagine a mute Astarion during the Cazador scene! Wtf)
That’s exactly it, they have the ability to go about certain scenes in different ways.
I still only have the Astarion/Cazador example, because that’s the only origin character I played as, but one moment I remember as different between Astarion as party member versus Astarion as player is the conversation with his former lover Sebastian before confronting Cazador.
In my playthrough with Astarion as an NPC, he basically auto-piloted through most of that conversation. He remembered who Sebastian was, it was somewhat touching, and the player was able to ask Astarion questions for context.
In my playthrough as Astarion as the player, you can navigate that conversation in different ways, but there are also certain things that are no longer a given. You actually have to roll to remember who Sebastian is (which I flubbed) and that changes the course of the conversation away from the NPC “default” conversation.
Edit: I found some examples of that specific scene on YouTube, to compare the differences.
Oh nooo it’s bad.But it also kinda lets you "roleplay"the character so there’s that … I was considering a Karlach origin run but maybe not. :/ pointless .
Fuck Microsoft for buying studios for billions upon billions and then going for layoffs after layoffs, but…
Including its prototype phase, Everwild had been in development for over a decade, with anonymous developers indicating they had struggled to nail down a clear direction for the title, even after a recent reboot of the project.
Quite understandable to me to axe a project that hasn‘t been going anywhere for a decade, only this part is understandable though.
That’s actually pretty standard for Rare. If I had a nickel for every project that they spun their wheels on, I’d have enough money to start my own game studio.
Founded in 1985, Rare is one of the UK’s most historic game developers, best known for Battletoads, Donkey Kong Country, GoldenEye 007, and Banjo-Kazooie.
Microsoft acquired Rare in 2002, and it has since gone on to create titles such as Kameo, Viva Piñata, Kinect Sports, and Sea of Thieves under the Xbox banner.
Says it all, really. Rare has been mismanaged into the ground for the past 20+ years.
The industry rather wants to hire Troy Baker for every project. Also voice actors, even in animation, rarely get a career boost after a single popular project. Even for live action actors it’s rare. Like how many actors that played in Lost still play in high profile projects.
Samantha Béart (who plays Karlach in the game), Theo Solomon (Wyll) and Dave Jones (Halsin) were asked how the success of the game had changed their lives and careers.
Okay listen I don’t want to sound rude, but I’m not that surprised. Maybe Karlach deserves a bit more recognition but while both Wyll and Halsin were both fine and perfectly adequate, I can’t say that either was the kind of memorable performance that gets you tons of new roles. Though it’s also in part due to the script and direction of course.
Got to agree. The voice work that really stood out in my opinion was done by Amelia Tyler (narrator) and Devora Wilde (Lae’zel). Everyone else was good and I REALLY enjoyed Karlach. I even did a play through with her as the origin character but it was because of the character design and writing more than the voice acting.
The game had a huge cast with many memorable characters and moments. Not everyone was going to shine through especially with some fantastic performances like you mentioned.
I think the title of the post is just deceiving and should be changed to the title of the actual article. And perhaps the article title was changed too but it is a more accurate title of the situation.
videogameschronicle.com
Aktywne