Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll check it out. I’ve got Phantom Fury from this past year, and even with a ton of criticism heaped toward it, it was still in the ballpark of what I wanted to scratch this itch.
Games of that era were frequently made a dozen or so people in 18 months. Whether that passes some arbitrary line in the sand for what counts as “indie” or not, I don’t much care; it’s just a market segment that’s been left behind by AAA that I’m waiting for someone to pick up the mantle on. Most genres that AAA have left behind have been filled by now, but FPS games that fit the mold of what we got between ~1998 and ~2016 are still an itch I need scratched. From what I can see on the horizon, there’s Fallen Aces in early access that I’d like to see once it’s 1.0, Core Decay going for a Deus Ex sort of thing, and then Mouse: P.I. for Hire, but I’d still like to see the full package with co-op and deathmatch modes like we got back in the day.
I can only speak for the games I’m most familiar with, and apparently that same problem exists with how these nominees are chosen too, just like the Keighleys. For a second, I thought perhaps the people suggesting the nominees had not heard of Indika, because Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was nominated for narrative and Indika was not. The fighting game category doesn’t hold up very well either, because while the Khaos Reigns expansion is a bit of a stretch, Underdogs is even more of a stretch. Sure, maybe the people submitting nominees haven’t heard of Diesel Legacy (which would be my pick for fighting game of the year), but could you at least be aware of Rivals of Aether II? They didn’t even get Under Night on the list!
They wanted to release it 6 months ago, rumor has it. But they postponed it to shore up supply to meet launch demand, give extra development time to its key launch games, or to squeeze the last bit of juice out of the Switch 1 – or some combination of those things.
The Switch 2 will do just fine, better even, compared to its next closest competition.
The private equity that would control it after it goes private, in all likelihood, would be the same family who controls it today and always has controlled it. They’re not interested in stripping it for parts, but they’re also not interested in scaling their operations down and learning some hard lessons to make a sustainable video game company.
It’s a lot more than that. SteamOS isn’t just Steam Big Picture Mode. There’s some special sauce in there to capture the active window so that you never lose focus of the game window and such. If you just run a Windows machine set to boot into Steam Big Picture on startup, you’ll find lots of times that you have to break out a keyboard to Alt+Tab for a variety of reasons that SteamOS never encounters. And given the other problems Windows has introduced over the past decade, that’s the least of their problems now.
A decade or more ago, I thought surely that was what the app was going to do, considering Humble would package Steam + Android keys in the same purchase back then.