OfficialThunderbolt

OfficialThunderbolt, 11 miesięcy temu

And if you’re on PC platforms other than Windows, it’s more like “never.”

OfficialThunderbolt, 11 miesięcy temu

I’m shocked that RE4 got a GotY nomination. I thought there were rules against remakes or remasters getting Game Awards nominations; am I wrong, or did that change at some point?

OfficialThunderbolt, 11 miesięcy temu

Star Ocean: The Second Story R.

The PS1 original was good, but it had some noticeable flaws. The book writing skill was more or less useless, side quests were often too well hidden from view (which was especially bad when most of them were time-limited), the accessories that gave you items were a bit in-your-face, there was no in-game mini-map, the invisible random encounters and lack of fast travel didn’t age well, and the voice acting… What were they thinking when they released this…

The remake fixes most of what went wrong in the original game, including re-casting the English voice actors, and even adds some new content (like fishing) that wasn’t in the original. I’m enjoying it a lot.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

Maybe. Have you tried using Whisky?

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

The problem is, we must care if the game is to have any sequels, follow-ups, or lasting legacy. If the game is awesome, but doesn’t sell well, then it probably won’t get sequels, and will be forgotten to everyone except Wikipedia & Moby Games over enough time.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

Character speed control is even older than that; many of Sierra’s games in the 1980s/early 1990s (like King’s Quest, Space Quest, etc.) had them. Adjusting them made some of them even easier, because it didn’t affect enemies, allowing you to easily evade them during chase scenes.

I can only think of a few games that have had customizable difficulty. The problem with them is they complicate the user experience, and most people would rather not tinker with them.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

What a sad day for gamers. Microsoft now has all it needs to extinguish PlayStation & assert a monopoly on consoles, just as they do on PCs already, and the regulators will give them a wink and a nudge.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

Because, to the majority of console gamers in the Americas and Europe, Call of Duty, FIFA, GTA, and Madden are the Only Games That Actually Matter™. There are a few million people that buy PlayStations just to play 1-2 of those games to the exclusion of everything else.

Now that they’ve taken out one of the four major reasons why people outside of Asia buy PlayStations, they can extinguish PlayStation & assert a monopoly on console gaming. It’s sickening.

And somehow, I don’t think that Sony resurrecting the Resistance series & making it into an annual release that always launches during the holiday season will make much of a difference.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

I’m talking about the platform, not the store front. Windows has far more than 90% of the PC gaming world market share, far more than what’s enough to monopolize the PC gaming scene; GNU and macOS are a super distant second and third place. Whenever most people talk about “PC gaming”, what they really mean is Windows, even though there are other PC platforms out there.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

With Minecraft, the Java edition was & still is available on many different platforms, but the later Minecraft games that were made after the Microsoft takeover have, for the most part, only come out for Microsoft platforms. Minecraft Dungeons, for instance, never came out on GNU or macOS.

The Bedrock edition was ported to PlayStation, but for how much longer will it be available, I wonder…

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

It will be once Call of Duty becomes a console Xbox exclusive, and the millions of people in the Americas & Europe switch from PlayStation to Xbox in order to get their CoD fix. We’ve already seen this in the PC market, where CoD has been a Windows exclusive for years now, to the point where people won’t buy Macs because they can’t play CoD on them.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

Yes.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

Apple has their own Proton, called the Game Porting Toolkit, and it works well for games that don’t need a launcher & are mainly played with a keyboard and mouse, but I’ve found that game controllers don’t work very well with it.

There’s also MoltenVK, which is Vulkan for macOS, and DXVK, a DirectX-to-Vulkan-to-Metal layer that was used to play some Windows games on macOS before the GPTK came out.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

Last month, one of the PS Plus Essential games of the month was by a developer that went out of business a few days before the game went live.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

But why? Disney has made several attempts before to break into gaming, none of which have worked out well. The best Disney games have all been licensed games by Square Enix, BioWare, Capcom, etc.

Also, Disney doesn’t have the cash to buy EA, so buying EA would involve them going deeply into debt. With today’s interest rates, that would be too risky.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

They can’t buy Square Enix or Capcom; Japan has laws protecting certain Japanese companies from being bought out by foreign companies.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

Not really, unless the game code was written in X86-64 assembly language, does low-level VM allocation for some reason, or otherwise has special dependencies on Intel CPU-isms. With a few exceptions, C/C++/Objective-C code written for X86-64 can be easily recompiled for ARM64.

The PowerPC to X86 transition was much rougher, because of the byte order change + PPC allowing integer division by zero while X86 disallowed it.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

I’ve brought various apps, bundles, and frameworks from PowerPC to Intel to 64-bit to ARM ever since macOS 10.0 first launched. Usually the most difficult parts were:

1. During the PPC to Intel transition, converting code that expected all data to be big-endian over to handling little-endian data, and catching integer division by zero before sending such operations to the CPU
2. During the 64-bit transition, switching from all the APIs Apple removed over to newer APIs, if not already done, and converting all code that expected integers and pointers to be 32-bit over to 64-bit
3. During the ARM transition, converting code that abused variadic functions to code that used them properly, and converting all code that expected long doubles to be 128-bit over to 64-bit (I know some developers were burned by the VM page size change, but that didn’t affect anything I did)

But yeah, usually the most difficult part of the transition is managing the dependencies. Whenever Apple transitions CPU architectures, if your app depends on a closed-source third-party library or kernel extension made by developers that went out of business years ago, you’re more or less screwed unless you can find or build a replacement.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

The GPUs aren’t really a problem; the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra chips are much more powerful than Intel’s integrated GPUs, are very competitive with other mobile GPUs, and are competitive with all but the high end of desktop GPUs. The main thing holding them back is they consume less electricity, which is important in a laptop, but is not necessarily important in a desktop PC.

The problem is, game developers tend to pick the platforms that will make them the most money, and Microsoft has held an uncontested monopoly on the PC OS market for more than thirty years now. They have held onto their monopoly for so long because they have the high ground on GPUs (Apple has a grudge against Nvidia that probably won’t go away until Tim Cook retires), and they also hold a number of popular games that are exclusive to Windows (Call of Duty, FIFA, Madden, Final Fantasy, Counter-Strike, Fortnite, Diablo, Far Cry) whereas Apple’s highest profile exclusive macOS game at the moment is Hello Kitty.

It seems like each time Apple makes gains in the PC market (iPod/iPhone halo effect, keeping controversial UI changes to a minimum), Microsoft gains one and a half times that.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

If it’s any consolation, the Windows version runs on macOS Sonoma, but you need to use Whisky to install Windows Steam & launch it from there. Also, you need to adjust some graphics settings that can only be adjusted using the command line, or the frame rate will be unplayably bad.

I feared that CS2 would use some kernel-level anti-cheat solution, which would prevent it from running on macOS, but it doesn’t.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

Your understanding is not quite correct. The regulations are for App Store apps only, which wouldn’t affect CS2, and even if they did, they are not much different from other platforms’ store regulations (no strong adult content, no gambling aides, no games that encourage you to damage peoples’ hardware, you can’t make games that would put private citizens’ safety at risk, etc.). And the only money you have to pay is for a developer subscription, which gets you code signatures & anti-malware validation.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

Even though they got burned really badly on OpenGL? It would’ve been better if Apple never discontinued QuickDraw 3D.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

Oopsies. Thanks. Corrected.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

Multiplayer trophies are the worst, in general, except in multiplayer-only games. Once the servers go offline, those multiplayer trophies become unattainable. It’s especially a problem on PlayStation where, once the trophies become unattainable, so does the platinum.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

I do. The originals were locked behind an anti-consumer EULA once Disney got ahold of them. Since I won’t agree to their EULA, I was holding out hope for the remake.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

It contains an arbitration clause. Arbitration clauses are evil. No one should ever agree to them.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

That’s only true if you compare game sales to movie box office revenues, and music sales (which have shrunk considerably since they peaked in the 1990s). Once you account for home video sales, streaming, theme park revenues, and merchandise sales, the movie industry dwarfs the gaming industry. Once you account for artist tour and merchandise sales, the music industry dwarfs the gaming industry.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

…except on macOS, apparently.

I wonder if the game works if I try playing it using the GPTK.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

I’ll give the console version a go. I just wished the console version supported the keyboard & mouse. The Windows version supports the keyboard and mouse, but the Windows version has a binding arbitration clause in its EULA that is not present in the console version, so I won’t buy the Windows version.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

How would they plan to do that? Foreign investment in Japanese companies is heavily regulated, much more than it is regulated in the Americas or Europe.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

It’s most likely licensing, plus the live service functionality. People are saying on Steam that the post-launch content won’t work without the live service functionality.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

FF XVI isn’t even an RPG; it’s an action-RPG; it’s like Stranger of Paradise, but it’s much easier.

And while the PS5 was supply-constrained for about two years, the chip shortage that constrained the supply ended a while back, so anyone can get a PS5 now without having to watch for drops or winning the PS Direct lottery.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu (edited rok temu)

The only turn-based Final Fantasy games were I, II, III, and X. All other games, except for XV, XVI, and Stranger of Paradise, use a global cooldown.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

Unless the developer opted out of allowing their iOS app(s) to run in macOS, which, unfortunately, many top games did. And of the games that were made available, there are those that only have touch controls, which are awkward at best and impossible at worst on macOS.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

Why? They got so badly burned on OpenGL, with the committee dragging their feet & releasing compromised designs while Direct3D became a lot better, that they should’ve stuck with QuickDraw 3D back in the aughts.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

“Dropping” as in discontinuing, or “dropping” as in releasing?

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

Simulation games, like the ones Maxis used to make (other than SimCity). SimEarth, SimAnt, SimTower, etc. Those were educational and fun.

I also once played a simulation game that realistically simulated running a shipping business where you shipped things by boat, sailing your fleet from port to port, dropping off your cargo and loading new cargo, giving the occasional bribe, etc. while avoiding bankruptcy. I think it was called “Port of Call.” It was made a long time ago, and I haven’t played anything quite like it since then.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

Good for Xbox users, I guess. Wish they would properly port the game to macOS.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

They still haven’t. The “Mac version” is really the Windows version running in a Cider wrapper.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

I would disagree; if the jobs weren’t homogenized, then the game would be very difficult to balance. That causes metas to spring up, which causes everyone to jump from the underpowered jobs to the overpowered jobs, and then they react very badly when a balancing patch is released, and the meta changes due to nerfs to popular jobs/buffs to unpopular jobs.

OfficialThunderbolt, rok temu

The lack of a DVD drive isn’t what killed the Dreamcast. I’d argue that the nail in the Dreamcast’s coffin was when software piracy on the platform became trivial.