Carighan

Carighan, rok temu

I just finished it, and loved it.

But you need to know what you’re getting. The game looks fresh, and has some relatively minor QoL done with interactions and shooting and all (and the replaced Cyberspace), but it is a nearly 30 years old game.

And the remake fundamentally still is. A very good game that in many regards is still unmatched, but also one tremendously outdated in plenty other regards.

Carighan, rok temu

Eh? That’s not how a block chain works.

Carighan, rok temu

It makes them money off of desperate or in turn grifting people, I suppose. Just like all of crypto.

Carighan, rok temu

My big one, because I am playing the successor right now would be the Commandos-reinvention line of games by Mimimi Software:

• Shadow Tactics (feudal Japan)
• Desperados III (Wild West)
• Shadow Gambit (undead pirates)

They’re very faithful reproductions of the old Commandos-formula, real time tactics about sneaking and stabbing through a dense map full of guards covering each other, finding spots where to get in with specific abilities of your varying characters. In the newest one in particular, your pirates are recruited in any order you like, and being supernatural in nature they have some wild abilities. Your starting character can briefly freeze time for a target. Your Quartermaster can possess people. A skeleton has a golden head he can toss to make guards come over to try pick it up and then make their corpse disappear by using his fishing pole to drag it into the endless chest he has on his back.

Carighan, rok temu

You can always see your own nose BTW, your brain just usually excludes it from what you actively notice.

Carighan, rok temu

Oh, don’t mistake me preferring Steam (and GOG, for example, who have an actual value proposition to me as a consumer - unlike Epic!) to “Valve worship”. They’re simply the least bad option, but of course they’re all huge corporations. Realistically though Valve has actually surprisingly little bad given the amount of money and market control they have, so eh… for now, I’m happy buying about half my games there (usually ends up that way, though I prefer GOG for games also releasing on that).

Carighan, rok temu

Yeah, GOG is my preferred store if there’s feature parity, too. On that note, anyone here got AoW4 from GOG? Are all mods available through Paradox, or at least all you’d ever need? Or is most bound to Steam like back in the AoW3 days?

Carighan, rok temu

Oh that’s another really good point: Epic trained the consumers to open Epic weekly to get free games, then close it again. It’s a weird thing to be known for.

Sure, had them cornering the sellers market worked out - unrealistic as it was in hindsight - then having the buyers already all have the store installed for the free games would have been a genius way of getting more and more people onto the store. But it did not, and now it has just cemented the Epic store as a place you do not spend money on!

Carighan, rok temu

Also their near-infinite Fortnite money.

Carighan, rok temu

Same, I always check whether GOG has a game first, and whether it’s patched up to par. Sadly, surprisingly often while games release on GOG they then lack features (although personally I do not really care about achievements) or worse, the devs give up on releasing patches for the non-Steam versions.

Carighan, rok temu

In what way? Genuine question? The dev cited there has a reason for his opinion, after all.

Carighan, rok temu

💯

Although, I can imagine supporting Epic is annoying. Unlike even GOG, they don’t have their own support mechanism like a forum. I can see why someone would release on Steam (and hence stuff like GMG and Humble) and even GOG but not Epic. Example Baldur’s Gate 3, which released on everything except Epic. Although in their case Larian commented that the decision to not release on Epic was specifically to not show support for their exclusives-everything stance. Hence on everything except Epic.

Carighan, rok temu

This is almost always a situation that can be pinned on Steam, actually. The games that end up doing this are usually using Steamworks, which essentially forces them into a sort of soft-exclusivity on Steam since their multiplayer features and such can only exist there.

But Steam doesn’t force them to use Steamworks, so I don’t really see “steam’s fault” fault here. Although, of course, it’d be cool if Steamworks would work for non-steam games at least for modding/multiplayer. Granted.

Carighan, rok temu

I think the pseudo-quote you wanted to do the other way around.

The thing is, sure, I prefer buying things from say, GOG. But Epic is horrible, and that’s even just from my consumer perspective with it’s bad client, terrible discoverability and lack of forums or anything. So as a consumer I have no incentive to support Epic, no matter whether I want to give my money to Steam or another place.

Carighan, rok temu

I just finished playing the System Shock Remaster yesterday night after ~22 hours. I could still do everything from memory pretty much, and it remains an amazing game to this day, especially with the slick fresh paintcoat from the remaster.

Now I’m exploring Shadow Gambit a bit. Always loved the Commandoes games, and this is the third - and sadly final - Mimimi game that copies the gameplay verbatim. And from the little I’ve played so far, it’s fantastic. Having actual supernatural characters fits the abilities really well, and the voicework is done tremendously well, too.

Carighan, rok temu

Nah, it’s a very faithful remake - after a lot of back-and-forth of them considering changing the game more they ended up making a near 1-to-1 graphics update.

So I would recommend it. There are some parts that are made more challenging. Inventory management is a big one. OTOH that makes sense, as the modern controls enable *far more accurate combat and hence saving ammo is somewhat easy and you can easily use the shotgun or the magnum as staples.

I basically saved teflon ammo whenever I found it (dumped it all near the cargo lift) then before entering level 8 retrieved my modded Scorpion from there with nearly 1500 ammo and just went to town with that + leftover shotgun shells. But the drops are also changed, so both teflon bullets and magnesium ones for the Assault Rifle still commonly drop in the final few areas.

And of course, taken from the main game, EMP grenade into berserk-stim Laser Rapier is always an option and kills even the toughest enemies in the game before they recover.

That being said, one specific thing is annoying: Beta grove now deals constant and quite significant damage even with the enviropack on. You have to rush rush rush it, luckily it is brief. Other than that, it’s neatly improved, modern graphics with a cool retro-effect from the nearest-neighbor filter, modern controls and combat and some better and more convenient HUD, redone audio including new recordings from Terri Brosius (SHODAN), they also completely redid cyberspace. While I like the original, I can see why most did not, so I really don’t mind this part.

Carighan, rok temu

Yeah same, I always felt this game would be so much more awesome as a cozy co-op thing instead of a tense PvP thing.

Carighan, rok temu

The freaking Deviator the Ordos had in Dune II.

It turns your units against you. Sure the ROF is low, but damn. Plus, given how the controls worked (or didn’t) back in the days, this caused utter havoc not only with the unit control but also other unit’s pathing.

Carighan, rok temu

A golden parachute so big he could trivially buy into the next company. If he wanted to retire, he would have long done it.

Worse, what if he ends up as the boss fo GamePass or Xbox?

Carighan, rok temu

Why? As in, why are they “the last hope”? What can they do that ActiBlizzKing cannot?

Carighan, rok temu

They would just contract Blizzard to make that, so if they were able to do it they would have done so already.

Carighan, rok temu

And SS1 came out 29 years ago and just got a remaster. This isn’t a years-pissing context. Starcraft II was supported way long, and extensively. And like all good games, eventually the vast vast majority of players have moved on, and then the devs might move on, too.

Carighan, rok temu

It’s such a shame - and such a bizarre decision - that this is based on the vanilla Persona 3, not the Portable edition with the optional female MC and all the extras.

Carighan, rok temu

Really not my kind of game, but wow it looks spiff. I might be tempted to get it on a steep sale on the future just for looks.

Carighan, rok temu

MS wanted to buy Nintendo. The company that has so much money on hand that they are a noticable thing to the japanese banking sector?

Of all possible companies they were looking at buying? Heck, Sony might be more realistic by comparison, at least their gaming/console parts!

Carighan, rok temu

Interesting, and we also finally see the completely disc-less version we’ve been expecting for over a generation now.

Carighan, rok temu

I want to play a game of Dungeon Keeper now where the “good” side has gone wicked from repeatedly being beaten and goes wild building up their own horrific “utopia” and attacking everyone else.

Then again, they’d just build Florida I suppose. 🤔 and ban books in schools and shit.

Carighan, rok temu

Should localize them by using the Japanese title translation so it sound equally “foreign awesome” in English? ユニコーンオーバーロード is what Google Translate outputs and hey I will say, it immediately looks less silly to me, despite actually saying the exact same words. 😑 (I hate that this actually works)

Carighan, rok temu

Quite excited. A bit tricky because given how amazing Hades turned out I want to hold back with this and only play it once it’s complete. But that might be a long time. Still, from the little they’ve shown this is looking to shape up really really well.

Carighan, rok temu

Oh that’s interesting, quite a few new characters. Didn’t expect that to be a focus of this.

Overall I’m extremely happy with the booster pack. So many new courses, and while I thought I’d hate most of them, it’s quite the opposite.

Carighan, rok temu

You’re welcome to take on the rewrite of our auth-service too, since it seems so trivial in your world. Always fun to drag legacy services around for those 12 really loud and angry users.

Carighan, rok temu

I wonder, if the rumors about the Switch 2 are actually true - which so far I don’t think they are simply because it’s a Boy Who Cried Wolf thing by now - then at some point they ought to start firing up marketing for it. Remains to be seen whether anything official pops up in this, because by you’d think it would.

Carighan, rok temu

Yeah exactly. Because to me it implies that less than 90% is shovelware crap, and I cannot quite believe this. It doesn’t feel that way, even with all the filtering Steam offers nowadays.

Compare the Nintendo eShop, which doesn’t filter and where Nintendo doesn’t care, and the endless pages and pages and pages of shovelware you need to scroll through (and 15 iterations of AAA Clock for 2€, 80% off! 😅) to find each single proper game.

I would have thought 2%-3% make money, honestly.

Carighan, rok temu

I’ll be honest, I had never even heard the name. Neither of the company, nor of any of their products. Still sucks for the employees of course, the current downturn is huge and as it accelerates and more and more investors pull out, the money the C-suites care about disappears and they panic even more about their bonuses so they fire and shutter even harder.

The made-up money that is the stock market can sadly have very real effects on employees’ livelihoods. :( But of course not on the CEOs who happily cash their 6-/7-digit base salary and then just fuck off to the next company they can drive into the ground.

Carighan, rok temu

Ah, I enjoyed the tour maps in the packs. Berlin is my favorite, but Shanghai is also really pretty.

Excited for the last pack to come out, and then honestly MK8 has more than enough tracks for anybody.

…

Oh this is about the actual mobile game? Damn. Wild that it’s still around, considering what a sad fart it was both in gameplay and reception. Reading up a bit on it, it apparently even ran quite well, interesting to hear that. It went completely off the radar after just a handful of months.

Carighan, rok temu

Feels like they got like 1% tops then. >.> It’s weird what a cheating problem this game has, especially with the tag-along thing where only one person cheats but others who do not cheat intentionally group with them to farm wins.

Carighan, rok temu

Very much so, because to me it openly announces that the game is centered in its design about something between:

• Microtransactions
• Extrinsic motivation
• FOMO

None of those are a good story, great characters, good world building or good intrinsic gameplay design. And they don’t need to be for a live service game, but it also means it’s inherently worse as a game than the same underlying idea not developed as a money squeeze service.

Carighan, rok temu

To me it’s less about the user reviews, and more about how as now some time is passing, listening to professional reviewers in podcasts etc, more and more the mood turns… tepid?

It’s not that anyone is underwhelmed. More just… whelmed.

Carighan, rok temu

I expected it to be way more next gen after all these years

It is “next generation”:

• It’s the next generation of huge.
• It’s also the next generation of empty.
• It’s the next generation of pretty.
• It’s also the next generation of soulless.

I mean, it basically heightens all previous design parameters for open world games, does it not?

Carighan, rok temu

Interesting, it seems to not be available at all in Germany, nevermind as a giveaway.

Carighan, rok temu

Uh huh.

I mean sure, two outlets reporting it, but I’ll believe it when I see it. With the Switch Pro/2/U/360/Series N in particular, the leaks were always so outlandish and in the end turned out false, while we can clearly assume the overall news about a Switch successor being in development to be real, any specific piece of news I’d immediately discard and put into the “made up stuff”-folder for the time being.

Carighan, rok temu

RockPaperShotgun’s review is out now, and I could not agree more. The game is so meaningless.

It’s crazy impressive. Especially on a technical level. But it feels like a tech demo more than a game almost. It’s still fun to idle time away in, but it’s not engaging. At all. It’s brain idle time. In a positive way, but also no more than that.

Carighan, rok temu

But Elden Ring is a japanese ARPG. That was what the jab was about I’d imagine.

Or do you mean you want an ARPG instead of a JRPG/CRPG, as in, manual combat instead of menu-based party combat?

Carighan, rok temu

Would branching out into spectacle brawlers work for you?

In that case, check out Bayonetta 3 on the Switch and Armored Core VI on PC/whatever!

For something closer in combat feel to Elden Ring, Atlas Fallen maybe? But I haven’t personally played it and reviews are mixed, so can’t really say how enjoyable that would be.

Carighan, rok temu

The problem is more that generative AI is trained on the actual work done by other, actual people. And we have no legal framework so far how those people should get paid in turn.

Plus, let’s not for a moment imagine that Sweeney is saying this out of a firmly held personal belief. He’s entirely based on his reactionary stance to Steam. Steam goes against generative AI -> Sweeney is in favor of it. If Steam would say they’re against eating live babies, you can sure as hell bet he’d sing praises for that, too.