Hm... I'm a bit mixed on that, because GameFAQs became relevant a bit later than that, but at the same time that type of format for ASCII game guides predates GameFAQs being the main place you went to get them, so... it evens out?
I probably didn't start going to GameFAQs for this stuff until like 2000, but I certainly was using text guides for games in the 90s.
I mean... MK1 predates it by what? 3-4 years? Which in 90s tech time is an eternity.
MK fatality guides were mostly in print. Magazines were all over that type of stuff at the time. But it wouldn't have been strange to get a familiarly formatted ASCII guide for them with, say, your pirated floppies of the DOS or Amiga versions.
I don't know that the timeline works out there. GameFAQs is, as this post reminds us, pretty old. Even assuming that it didn't break out until the very late 90s or early 00s as THE destination for guides, there was certainly a booming editoral market for highly produced guides all the way into the Xbox 360 era.
I'd say it was responsible for the press not focusing on guides as much and instead refocusing on news and reviews. And then news and reviews died out and the press that was left refocused on guides again because by that point the text-only crowdsourced output of GameFAQs was less interesting than the more fully produced, visually-driven guides in professional outlets. And now... well, who knows, it's a mess now. Mostly Reddit, I suppose?
It's not a "even if some existed" thing, Prima operated until 2018. I personally remember preorder bundles with Prima guides for 360 era games and beyond. They published incredibly elaborate collector's hardbook guides (that honestly doubled as artbooks) for stuff like Twilight Princess and Halo 3, all the way to the PS4 gen.
Even granting that "booming" is probably a bit hyperbolic, if GameFAQs being free in 1995 was going to kill them, bleeding out would probably not have taken 23 years. The death of retail, print and physical games probably hurt print guides way more than GameFAQs ever did. You didn't buy those because you were in a hurry to solve a puzzle or look up a special move. They were collectibles and art books first and foremost.
FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn't as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think. At least that's what IGN was doing, and they're the ones that went hard on that front first. Also for the record, that probably had something to do with IGN and GameFAQs being affiliated for a while. GameFAQs was bought off by CNET in '03, it was definitely part of the big online gaming press ecosystem. I can see how IGN thought they could do better.
Well, I'd argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn't have purchased GameFAQs. At the very least it served to bring people over to their media ecosystem, and I wanna say they did serve ads and affiliate links on the site proper (but adblocker is also old, so it's hard to tell).
Video contributed, for sure. This is a process of many years, the whole thing was evolving at once. But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn't fit the timeline at all. It's off by 5-10 years, at least. Guides weren't residual in the 00s when GameFAQs was at its peak and being bought as a company, they were doing alright. It'd take 10 years longer for them to struggle and 15 for them to disappear. You're two console gens off there. That's a lot. If guide makers like Prima were pivoting to collectible high end books out of desperation you'd expect that process to have failed faster than that.
Instead they failed at the same time GameFAQs started to struggle and get superseded, so I'm more inclined to read that as them both being part of the same thing and the whole thing struggling together as we move towards video on media and digital on game publishing. That fits the timeline better, I think.
In any case, it was what it was, and it's more enshittified now. I've been looking up a couple details on Blake Manor (which is good but buggy and flaky in pieces, so you may need some help even if you don't want to spoil yourself) and all you get is Steam forums and a couple of hard to navigate pages. The print guide/GameFAQs era was harder to search but more convenient, for sure.
Yeah, but nobody would argue that GameStop was dying in 2002, which is seven years into GameFAQs existing and very much the heyday of Prima and other dedicated print guide writers. Seriously, it just doesn't line up. GameFAQs and print guides were servicing the same need.
Again, I'm not saying it didn't have an impact. I'm saying if Prima guides existed as standalone publications in dedicated gaming stores it's partly because GameFAQs had killed monthly print magazines as a viable way to acquire strategy guides for games, so you instead had dedicated guide publishers working directly with devs and game publishers to have print guides ready to go at day one, sometimes shipping directly bundled with the game.
And then you had an army of crowdsourcer guide writers online that were catching up to those print products almost immediately but offering something very different (namely a searchable text-only lightweight doc different from the high quality art-heavy print guides).
Those were both an alternative to how this worked in the 90s, which was by print magazines with no online competition deciding which game to feature with a map, guide or tricks and every now and then publishing a garbage compilation on toilet paper pulp they could bundle with a mag. I still have some of those crappy early guides. GameFAQs and collectible print guides are both counters to that filling two solutions to the equation and they both share a similar curve in time, from the Internet getting big and killing mag cheats to the enshittified Internet replacing text guides with video walkthroughs and paid editorial digital guides made in bulk.
Eden/Azahar seem to be the current meta replacement for the newer Nintendo platforms. I wonder how much of that is a crowdfunded assessment of quality and how much is a result of modern emu communities being driven by preinstalled bundles in launchers, handhelds and install scripts (think ES-DE standards or Retrodeck/Emudeck defaults).
Alright, this is great, but also people need to start confirming GOG drops before the Steam launch. I check for GOG launches whenever I buy a game, but just this month there's been a couple of big games that got stealth GOG launches just after their Steam release and it's been extremely frustrating. I don't know if it's a publisher thing to work around pirates waiting for DRM free versions or Steam being dicks about it, but it's infuriating.
Yeah, it sucks for Silent Hill especially because a) it's super expensive, at 80 bucks on PC, and b) I was on the fence about getting it at launch and only jumped in a few days ago. I'm just out of the refund window and... hey, I like it so far, but I don't like it 160 bucks' worth.
Whoever is screwing with GOG screwed them out of my purchase and I'm starting to think that not buying anything on Steam at all if I can help it may be the way to go.
It's come and gone a couple times. There was a period where a bunch of big games did simultaneous launches, then a big period of drought where a few large publishers withdrew entirely from new releases and recently a few isolated AA and AAA releases started popping back up. I wonder if it's driven by how much effort they can put into outreach or something like that.
And while Steam doesn't typically sign exclusive stuff they are known to use store positioning as a bargaining chip for preferential treatment. You'd think Konami would be above needing that, but who knows.
Anyway, good game, whatever the reason for the delay. Someone who is on the fence about getting it on Steam go get it on GOG instead to make up for them tricking me.
The hell does "piracy against big companies" even mean?
Man, pirate what you can't afford if you must, just... you know, be honest about it. I'm always annoyed by people doing the thing they wanted to do anyway and presenting it as activism. That's not how that works.
For the record, while I think there's plenty to be critical about in modern gaming, "DLC", "game has a launcher" and "game is ported from other platforms" are not that. "A game I played on the PS3 was too expensive when I wanted to rebuy it" is somebody giving you bad value up front, not some ideological stance you're taking.
For the record, I also didn't buy it because I also didn't think their launch price was right. In fairness, it has since been on sale for 30 bucks multiple times, which is a lot more reasonable.
And again, I'm not saying don't pirate it. Do what you want. Just don't be weird about it.
It's a "me" problem in that "I" think the indies vs AAA lines are increasingly inconsistent and nonsensical. "I" also find the concept of "pirating against" to be extremely disingenuous, which is why there is a whole post explaining that after the line you quoted.
I mean, all due respect, to the guy, but this doesn't go down until 2027. At least give them a minute to get in the position where they could feasibly fuck up before you berate them for it.
If you look at the Internet they are apparently definitely dismantling the company to sell the pieces but also definitely continuing to make what they make but with MAGA politics but also as a muslim theocracy and trimming down and speeding up but also doubling down on live service at the same time somehow.
And man, one or multiple of those may happen, but almost certainly not all of them and none have happened yet. Given how much of a public-ass public company chasing short term gains they've been historically I can't help but think there's a fair amount of projection going on.
Here's my stance: I have no idea what this means and I have no idea what they're going to do. This is all weird and I have zero frame of reference for how the new owners are going to gel with that organization or what their new objectives are going to be when compared to the old "make more money this quarter than last quarter" thing.
I mean, they published Split Fiction and Tales of Kenzera this year and their Star Wars games were more than decent (let's hear it for the atrociously underrated X-Wing revival they made with Squadrons). They also published the C&C Remaster that same year, which I feel doesn't get enough credit despite getting a lot of credit. Probably one of the best examples of one of those in recent memory.
Let's not be disingenuous, none of that is their bread and butter, but it's not like they were entirely dormant.
It's been EA since a different millenium. I think it's time to get over it.
FWIW, the remake itself was made by an external studio including members of the original team and they apparently collaborated closely with some sort of consulting group of modders and preservation-focused community people.
Well, yeah, but those principles don't typically relate to videogame companies nor to purchase habits regarding 30 year old videogames.
Voting with your wallet is ultracapitalist, self-serving non-activism people deploy performatively to make themselves feel better about stuff they don't care that much about, not "principles". No offense.
I mean, good on people getting this up and running, but "in case you've been living under a rock" may overrepresent how much the average person wants to play The Crew.
Any game involving Africans has to be woke, according to them and the devs have been fighting a barrage of trolling and obvious racism since the game was put up on steam.
And it's written in pretty much the same way as the UK anti-porn thing, where age ratings alone won't cut it, so if you want to make smut games in Brazil you need to have some sort of "effective" age gating on top of parental controls to allow parents to close it off to their kids.
Art. 12. Os provedores de lojas de aplicações de internet e de sistemas operacionais de terminais deverão:
I – tomar medidas proporcionais, auditáveis e tecnicamente seguras para aferir a idade ou a faixa etária dos usuários, observados os princípios previstos no art. 6º da Lei nº 13.709, de 14 de agosto de 2018 (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais);
II – permitir que os pais ou responsáveis legais configurem mecanismos de supervisão parental voluntários e supervisionem, de forma ativa, o acesso de crianças e de adolescentes a aplicativos e conteúdos; e
III – possibilitar, por meio de Interface de Programação de Aplicações (Application Programming Interface – API) segura e pautada pela proteção da privacidade desde o padrão, o fornecimento de sinal de idade aos provedores de aplicações de internet, exclusivamente para o cumprimento das finalidades desta Lei e com salvaguardas técnicas adequadas.
So where are we on this one? We gonna be the "fuck free speech, I hate loot boxes" or "fuck thinking of the children, we like our smutty stuff"?
How are they different? They're both activities we allow for adults but not for children. For, arguably, good reasons.
I mean, you can be into one more than into another, and you can argue whether or not loot boxes should qualify as gambling, but for practical purposes when it comes to regulation they are fairly interchangeable.
Not that it matters, because regardless of what you and I think, they are listed together in the law. I'm not mixing diffferent issues, the law is specifically, explicitly applying the exact same regulation to porn and loot boxes. Doesn't matter how you feel about it, the Brazilian regulators think they're the same here.
They are the same in the law. They will be treated the same way.
Also, what is your point anyway? That porn should be accessible to children but loot boxes shouldn't? Are you not OK with porn being for adults? The question here isn't whether the content is adults-only, we probably should all agree that's the case. The question is how that's enforced.
I mean, if you want to tell me what you actually think about that I'm happy to listen, but going "these two things feel different to me" doesn't bring anything to this conversation.
No, see, there is no logical mistake because at no point was there an argument about universal truths anywhere. There was a note that, despite the headline and article not flagging it, the same regulation covers porn and has some of the issues that anti-porn age verification has had in the past.
You're just doing the thing where you read something on the Internet and it made you angry by not immediately reinforcing your preferences so you nitpicked a random bit you thought didn't check out regardless of whether it was part of the argument or not.
Whose point is that? Because I don't think it's the previous guy's point, and it certainly isn't mine.
I mean, the law (not a bill, this isn't the US and it has been approved, as per the text) outright bans loot boxes in games "targeted at children or teenagers". No qualifiers. Doesn't even say "paid loot boxes", so technically all videogames are now illegal if they have a loot table anywhere. I'm going to assume cooler heads will prevail and a categorization will come from courts or specific regulatory development, but it's certainly not in the law.
So if you don't like this for doing both at once... well, that's weird, that's why laws have multiple articles. If you're worried that the inclusion is meant to stall the bill that's irrelevant, this has been published and comes in force in six months. If you think they're overreaching by outright banning loot boxes... well, I agree, but I don't think that's the point as the rest of the thread is defining it.
EDIT: Someone in a different thread pointed out that despite referencing slightly differently there IS a definition of lootbox in the law and it does include a requirement for them to be paid, so I'm correcting the record here:
IV – caixa de recompensa: funcionalidade disponível em certos jogos eletrônicos que permite a aquisição, mediante pagamento, pelo jogador, de itens virtuais consumíveis ou de vantagens aleatórias, resgatáveis pelo jogador ou usuário, sem conhecimento prévio de seu conteúdo ou garantia de sua efetiva utilidade;
It’s true. Reviewers rave about a game, I pick it up and play it, and they’re raving about a new one before I’ve finished that last one. I’ve got a list of 20+ games that came out this year that I still haven’t gotten around to. I might get through 5 of them before the new year. And you know, if wouldn’t hurt my...
And you know, if wouldn't hurt my ability to play more games if more of them were shorter.
From the article:
In 2024, a staggering 18,626 games were released on Steam, according to SteamDB, a website that tracks data on the popular PC platform. That’s an increase of around 93% from 2020, when 9,656 games were released.
By my count, if you don't sleep or eat and only play videogames you need every game to be about 30 minutes long on average.
I mean, it wouldn't hurt, but I'm gonna say it's not enough.
In all seriousness, I'm more concerned by the competition from social media and on demand video. I'm typing this, which isn't that interesting of an activity. Idling online is a huge time sink, and it's getting bigger.
My experience with it has been solid, but I do run high end hardware that is muscling past a lot of stuff.
I think as usual there is some confusion between compilation stutters and the game just being very heavy for the way it looks (which it is). People online seem to be scattershot about it.
And then there's the people talking about it who don't care but like to be mad online, which is also a thing.
And then there's the weird dev that keeps mouthing off for no reason in ways that can't possibly help.
Lots of things on this one.
Still I don't think you're expected to idle for fifteen minutes. That's the point of the background compilation. You can still play more or less fine. Particularly on first boot the first fifteen of this should be a bunch of cutscenes anyway, and those lock at 30 (which I don't like at all and so many games do now for some reason).
Yeah, the process will be different depending on CPU, so I'm assuming 15 min is the upper bound they're expecting on the minimum supported spec or whatever.
Supposedly that's why it does things this way, right? Instead of the very long compile up front they do a smaller one up front and then run it in the background.
They seem to imply that because the game is heavy by default this is what's causing people's performance issues. I don't know that I agree, but there's probably part of it.
Hey, say what you will, but I do think the solution is technological. MS at least has an approach. About time, too. I don't want to overplay it, because a lot of these arguments is very... terminally online, but it's nuts that the DX12/UE5 combo of tech that has now been a thing for ages is still so poorly understood and unadressed on a wider scale.
Also crazy that dev teams don't have enough systems engineers bitchy enough to insist on figuring this out.
I think for BL4 specifically the problem is the game is just... heavy. Not chuggy or stuttery on good enough hardware, but good enough starts kinda high here.
And yeah, it looks better than previous games, but it's a stylized look and it's taking shortcuts meant for photorealism into a space where a lot of stylization is going to cut into the extra bits of indirect lighting or vegetation or environmental detail you're getting out of it.
Blend the confusing shader issues with the disproportionately high frame budget even when things are working fine and you get this stuff. But I'll say that I was shocked at how playable the game is on higher end hardware given what the Internet was saying.
I swear I have no idea why they let him talk. He doesn't even own the company, surely someone at 2K could just go... you know... shush.
I don't even think the BL4 thing is that bad, on the face of it. There is really no need to make it worse.
"We have been made aware of some performance issues in certain systems in our new release, we'll be looking into performance improvements in future patches". It's not that hard. At this point just copy/paste whatever the other thousand UE5 games said, go fix the wonky precompilation boot step and stop digging a hole.
Hell, it's even easier than that, because they have actually pretty much put that out. All he really needed to do was shut up about it.
The vast majority of people to be read as "a tiny fraction of players". It's just probably the players more likely to be part of the online community around the game or to play it consistently this long after release. I wouldn't be surprised if only a very, very small percentage of the twenty thousand people playing the game right now ever had installed any mods at all.
While I don't have hard data on this, I can tell you I've played the game since the Flash days and certainly never modded it for this reason or even considered it. Wiki page open onthe side just in case? Sure. Mods? Nope.
I'm struggling with this question, because these days I almost do that backwards. I will get a game and ask "what's the device I'd like to use for this"?
I mean, I've been playing a fair amount of Monster Train 2. I have no interest in sitting at a desk for that, or to put it up on a massive screen. Been playing a bunch of Tetris the Grand Master, which is not a great fit for a heavy handheld. Donkey Kong Bananza? Mostly TV, felt off on the handheld screen.
I think when you go back to emulation there's a bunch of games that are deceptively better on the go. That was the Switch's original party tirck, right? Hey, turns out Mario 64's short star runs are a great fit for sitting on the toilet. Who knew? Random JRPG being played one-handed on a tiny Android device? Surprisingly decent.
But at this point software is just this weird blob, I just pick a controller/device combo that fits for each game.
Yeah, I'm gonna say this person doesn't hate to keep knocking on Veilguard, because that seems to be the one example they can bring up. I mean, there's a cursory name check of Dawntrail, but otherwise... yeah, not sure what games this is talking about other than Dragon Age.
Clair Obscur didn't do that. It went to absolute pains to not do that, in fact, to the point where I find the deceptive twist-building a bit over the top, in retrospect. I wouldn't accuse the CDPR games of going that route. Baldur's Gate does overexplain often, but in their defense the game has a million characters, plot points you go through out of order and a runtime in the hundreds of hours, so I wouldn't change that.
What else is even doing this? I feel like we're back in "AAA sucks" territory where AAA stands in for "this one game I didn't like". Writing in games runs the gamut. I would struggle to find a single defining thing to praise or criticise across the board.
I'm not gonna tell you this is impossible to set up for a worldwide online company because unlike the OP I have no problem acknowledging that I don't know enough about something to understand how hard it is.
I will tell you that it's absurd to propose that by working with the three biggest payment processors in the world, covering a huge share of all online payments, Steam has somehow been negligent.
That doesn't follow even a little bit. It's an absolute non-sequitur. It's someone trying very hard to be mad at somebody they know for a thing they don't fully understand.
Valve works with the same handful of payment providers everybody else does. Literally everybody else. I don't have a stance on how feasible it is to handle your own payment processing, but claiming that any company on the planet is negligent for not doing so is insane.
I am all on board for taking regulatory action against anticompetitive practices in this space from the oligopolistic few companies available in it.
My educated guess is that seems too remote for you to feel righteous by being angry at someone specific so we're talking about Valve instead.
Hell, I'm all for taking regulatory action against Valve for their own monopolistic practices. I'm just not here to posture ineffectual anger.
Hey, I'm all for creating a public online payment processor. An international one, even.
I'm not even pulling any punches. There are no reasons to leave this in private hands.
But this reeks of people being mad at the thing they know and feel have some influence with instead of with the actual problem, and it's a bummer because it encapsulates Internet outrage and why it's so often ineffectual.
FWIW, the piece here is remarkably light on its headline issue. The most I can see in there is:
Policymakers need to protect both players and the workers creating games. That means, among other things, rethinking release schedules, enforcing rest periods for development teams and holding companies accountable for the well-being of their staff. The overall health of the industry depends on it.
That is almost entirely meaningless. Rest periods for dev teams are already established in legislation, as they are for any other EU worker. It's called holidays and we got to that way earlier than to live service gaming. There are also maximum caps on overtime in the labor legislation of most EU countries.
The next console wars will be the Switch 2 vs the horrible sinking feeling in your gut.
People seemingly forget that the Switch moved as many consoles as the PS4 and Xbox One combined. I don't even mean people in online forums, because sure. I mean people in the games industry.
For the record, people also suck at selling new live service games despite (and possibly because) Fortnite, Call of Duty, CS and Roblox have all the players and won't let them go. Don't see anybody stop trying, for better and worse.
I'm sure Nintendo is very happy to let everybody ignore that they've locked in 150 million players and routinely tap into many millions of them for their first party releases, I'm just here to remind people when they forget and overstate the position of Sony, MS or even Valve.
Frankly, I don't think any of the originals are particularly good, and I was done with the new one just before the first one was over. They aren't terrible, but I've always found the praise and hype for the series entirely disproportionate to the content.
I don't particularly love the floaty, sloppy "just put some damage in this 180 degree arc" basis of the combat system much. I am also not at all on board with most of the early teenage edgelord narrative stuff in there. Maybe I was a bit too old by the time these came out.
The Harryhausen references are neat and some of the boss fights are cool set pieces that did set some of the groundwork for later AAA action games, but I would much rather spend time in the more expressive, free-flowing Devil May Cry side of things if I'm going for snappy, precise combat... or all the way into Musou slop, I suppose, although I'm not much into that, either.
They definitely moved towards... I'm gonna say better references later in the franchise.
Still, there's also a reason they moved to a whole different genre.
GoW's core combat premise is that you have absurd range and can deal damage in a wide arc. It was REALLY hard to tighten that all the way via iteration while keeping the way the game plays.
GoW 3 was a huge step above its predecessors in setting up big standout setpieces, and it played... I'm gonna say "better", but it was still limited by the core framework of the series so far, and my argument is that framework was fundamentally flawed.
I don't have much to disagree with there, frankly. I mean, I like GoW 3 less than you do. I'd genuinely play the Ninja Theory DMC, if I'm honest, but at that point we're splitting hairs.
To be clear, I don't hate these games, I just don't like them much and generally don't play them on purpose. We're coming at it from different angles but meeting pretty much halfway.
To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
The State of Switch Emulation right now is objectively hilarious (blog.curiousquail.com) angielski
Silent Hill f, now on GOG (www.gog.com) angielski
I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies angielski
Tired of this abusive business model that big companies use on games....
Amid EA's unpopular $55 billion buyout, Baldur's Gate 3 director takes time "to remind people that making games faster and cheaper while charging more has never worked before" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Confirmed - Electronic Arts (EA) sold off to investors including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Just in case you've been living under a rock: The Crew is playable again! (thecrewunlimited.com) angielski
Dedicated fans have finished the server emulator. For now it’s single player only, but they want to release multiplayer later....
Relooted - Game made by South Africans has been bombarded by right-wingers (steamcommunity.com) angielski
Any game involving Africans has to be woke, according to them and the devs have been fighting a barrage of trolling and obvious racism since the game was put up on steam.
The campaign against predatory in-game practices takes a step forward in Brazil, as President Lula bans loot boxes targeted at under-18s (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
The Video-Game Industry Has a Problem: There Are Too Many Games (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
It’s true. Reviewers rave about a game, I pick it up and play it, and they’re raving about a new one before I’ve finished that last one. I’ve got a list of 20+ games that came out this year that I still haven’t gotten around to. I might get through 5 of them before the new year. And you know, if wouldn’t hurt my...
Borderlands 4 Dev Gearbox Asks PC Gamers to Wait 15 Minutes for Shaders to Compile in the Background While Playing After Reports Indicate Recent Update Causes Stuttering - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Premium experience for premium gamers /s
'My Advice to Users Is to Accept Reality and Tune, or to Not Play' — Randy Pitchford Is at the 'Get a Refund From Steam' Stage of the Borderlands 4 PC Performance Backlash (www.ign.com) angielski
The Binding of Isaac Update adds Internal Item descriptions (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Also includes big balance changes.
What game(s) could you not get into but with a handheld device you started to like the game(s)
Title basically. Which games did you not like on PlayStation, Xbox or PC but once you got a handheld device you really liked it?
We can't keep making videogame stories for players who aren't paying attention to them (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
I’ve noticed a trend—particularly in some recent RPGs—of, well, let’s call it ‘Netflixiness’....
Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy (www.polygon.com) angielski
‘Stop Killing Games’: Demands for game ownership must also include workers’ rights (theconversation.com) angielski
Xbox Series X and S: Microsoft Has Reportedly Sold Less Than 30 Million Consoles This Generation (in.ign.com) angielski
For reference, Sony was recently boasting that PS5 sold over 80 million copies. This is terrible for Xbox.
Let's discuss: God of War (beehaw.org) angielski
The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!...