Oh, I don't question the fun with friends. I had fun with friends with plenty of crappy old games.
I'm saying the pretense that it was one of the best games ever made and a seminal FPS and that it holds up and it was a great thing one would want to replay any of the times it's been re-released makes zero sense, decoupled from the memories.
OK, so this one is really interesting and I think people maybe don't realize how that brief moment in time played out in some places.
So the Internet wasn't as widely available everywhere worldwide. It was expensive over here, and you paid by the minute. You could feel money bleeding out of your pocket if you were using it to play games, and horror stories of people who forgot to log off and got hit by huge phone bills were all over the news.
So while arcades were dying, LAN cafés exploded. All the way from Quake 1 to early CounterStrike days people would pay some cash to rent a semi-competent PC in a big room of LAN-connected computers and play each other in multiplayer games. Or, you know, if you needed to send an email or you didn´t have a computer at home and needed to write something. But mostly games. It was not that much more expensive than using the Internet at home and the experience was so much better.
I played some Doom and Command & Conquer with a couple of specific weirdo friends who had a modem, but LAN cafés were certainly the main venue for that kind of thing. There were like half a dozen in my town, and they each had communities focused on specific games. There was the Quake 3 place, which then got taken over by CS, to my disappointment. There was the weird tiny place where people did Baldur's Gate MP runs, a place that insisted on focusing on Unreal. There was a cheap one in a basement that never got over Quake 1 and people were doing railgun only 24/7. One place had people pay in advance to leave their Ultima Online characters mining while they went to class. It was groddy and magical and it'll never come back.
And I remember in the Quake 3 place they had the PC port of Turok up and running and I kept wondering who would want to play that instead, and especially who would want to play it on a console with a single stick. And then moving on with my day. I think that's a big part of why GoldenEye and the N64 didn't quite work as well in this market.
Look, I get that there is a generation in anglo territories where the N64 sold ok that discovered multiplayer games with this thing, but it's a slideshow with barely functional single stick controls. Quakeworld was a thing over here.
Neat. I wasn't able to get into Isolation, it just takes a long time to get going and I don't click super hard with what you do moment to moment, but it looks super cool and a lot of people really liked it, so I'm glad they're getting another shot at it. I'd check it out.
I need to spend more time with it, but there is an unexpected level of nuance to that, isn't there? You can drag your feet a LOT, and you can promise a choice on the next law to be enacted or to research a technology without comitting to it actually being deployed. Accurately conveying democracy in a game is pretty much impossible, but I do like how well they let you play the policy delay game.
Right now I'd say on that continuum it's probably FP2>Against the Storm>FP1, but I need to play more FP2 to know for sure.
I mean, I will give you that Frostpunk does trade off some procedural complexity for the ability to give you narrative scenarios, but that's not a bad thing. I am waaaay past needing every game to be an evergreen forever thing these days.
That said, if anybody is just hearing about Against the Storm now, they should go play Against the Storm. Against the Storm is also good.
It is the exact opposite of that. Easily the best paced strategy game in years. This thing moves. It flows. If Anno had somehow managed to channel the narrative of Snowpiercer and the compulsive clicky crunch of Clash of Clans it would be this.
It's really, really good.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've promised mutually exclusive things to a bunch of council members and I have to somehow navigate a multi-party system without being forced to use the elderly for food.
“Ryan deeply believed in that project and bringing players together through the joy in it,” said one former developer, who said he felt Ellis had poured a great deal of himself into the game, leading to a ton of stress. “Regardless of there being things that could have been done differently throughout development...he’s a good human, and full of heart.”
Sources told Kotaku that Ellis was too emotional to speak at points during a post-launch studio-wide meeting after it had become clear that the game was bombing.
You are vastly overestimating how good contracts for creative roles in the industry are, especially for a mid-sized studio of under 200 people. But even if that wasn't the case, the guy isn't quitting the company, he's apparently stepping down as creative director and staying on in some other role, according to the article.
Man, this is true now, but this conversation makes me very nostalgic for the good old days of the 1080Ti, where PC games were absolutely a "max out and forget" affair.
Sure, that was because monitors were capped out at 1080p60, by and large. These days people are trying to run 20 year old games at 500fps or whatever. But man, the lack of having to think about it was bliss.
Well, sure, but that's also because on PC I can choose to buy DRM-free games and have guaranteed backwards compatibility for the foreseeable future. Plus it's not a closed system based on a console that launched with a drive. People (me included) already own PS5 discs, not from a previous generation, but from this one. It's bad enough that I need to keep my PS3 around to play PS3 games, it'd be absurd to not be able to play PS5 games I already own because the thing is physically unable to ingest them out of the box.
So yeah, for people in that position the Pro is a hundred bucks more expensive than it says on the sticker, which is already a ridiculously high number.
I do feel for Sony's PR teams. Trying to explain the concept of visual improvements in 4K over Youtube's increasingly vaseline-smeared compression is an impossible task.
I don't know that I have used the SL/SR buttons on my Joycons once in years, so I don't know that is a priority for me.
Drift is a problem, but I've had it more on PS5 controllers, frankly. I do think that at least some portion of drift issues are actually connectivity. The Switch fills in connectivity gaps with the last remembered input and if you have a weak signal that sometimes manifests as the stick being "stuck" off center.
I do think Nintendo should have gone for a slightly bigger battery and a more powerful antenna, although I see why they didn't want to. Still, as far as form factor and usability goes, those things are the best controller this generation, if not ever.
First of all, favorite for what? For accesibility reasons if it's not a dual stick game I am defaulting to a fightbox-type device these days. I favor a WASD configuration, rather than a thumb-for-up configuration and I currently favor a tiny, minimalist haute board box with cherry switches (blue for buttons, greys for WASD). It's great, it lies on my desktop and it causes minimal strain even in high APM games.
For dual stick stuff, it again depends. Is this a shooter where aiming is a factor? Because then I'm gonna want some gyro. The DualSense is amazing to hold, just bonkers build quality. It is heavy and ugly as sin, though. It also doesn't work perfectly with every PC game, so it feels like a hassle to use it as my default. There's the KK3, which has gyro in Switch mode and seems to be less fussy than the DualSense. Plus they are trying to sell their hall effect sticks to third parties, so those are very smooth. It is a jack of all trades, though, and I actively hate KK's dumb extra button configuration, with start and select all the way at the top, I keep pressing the screenshot buttons by accident.
If there's no twitch aiming, and thus no major need for gyro, Victrix's Pro BFG is fun. It has modular design where you can put the dpad on either location. The dpad isn't great, but hey, the fightbox's there for that. It does have a six button configuration, too, if you're a controller fighting game guy. The best feature, though? Replaceable eight-way gates for the sticks, Gamecube-style. If you're a Smash guy or emulating Gamecube it's such a no-brainer high end replacement.
But honestly? Honestly?
The JoyCon.
I know people hate the JoyCon, but the idea of a split controller is amazing to me, and everybody else who has tried to do it, Lenovo Legion Go included, gets it wrong. The big handles aren't the answer without a middle segment to hold the controllers. The two little boards are fantastic for 3D action games, the amount of tech in such a small frame is astounding and the button-based dpad is so good I'm using fightboxes on the regular now. It's a shame there are some reliability issues, but I would buy a device just like it for PC tomorrow if they could sort out connectivity reliably.