ampersandrew

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I mean, if it’s a technical mess, that’s one thing, but I think this looks great. More importantly, we really haven’t gotten many games like this in so, so long, and I’m hungry for it.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Mindseye is $60, and it’s much easier to stand out from the crowd when the crowd is all the way back in 2010.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It’s going to be in a new city.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I don’t know how you one-up the first game.

Well, after playing Baldur’s Gate 3, I’ve got no shortage of ideas. I really enjoyed Cyberpunk, but “this is the strength option” and “this is the hacker option” are nothing compared to how BG3 lets you come up with your own solutions through its systems.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Yes, all of them. Wouldn’t hurt to fit more Deus Ex DNA in the game either.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I don’t know if it’s something that only happened in digital re-releases of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, or if it always did this back in the day, since I no longer have a Genesis, but the music is different in the official modern releases of Sonic 3 & Knuckles compared to original Sonic 3. It’s better in 3.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

His producer was. We got that answer in the past few years.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It might be, but the point of the Microsoft handheld is to grant access to Game Pass and games with lousy anti-cheat on a UI that doesn’t suck like desktop Windows does.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Did you know that Steam’s monthly active user base dwarfs any single console out there? At this point, it’s almost as large as PlayStation and Xbox combined; definitely bigger than the combined install base for each of their current gen consoles. Steam is more mainstream than PlayStation at this point. (However, the caveat is that the Steam Deck can’t be purchased at Walmart.)

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Dual booting has existed for a long time. Microsoft keeps making it more annoying to do. For my next PC, I’m not even keeping a dual boot around as a safety net; I’m just doing Linux.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Do you have a source for that? As far as I know, Microsoft never gave much of a damn about making Linux versions of games. They did have an Xbox parity clause for games that came to other consoles, but that’s pretty different than what you’re saying.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I haven’t tracked the performance in Proton for a long time, because I already used that information to make my purchasing decisions, but single digit percentage improvements in performance when running games via Proton has also been the case on desktops for a long time. If there’s any further improvement to be seen from SteamOS’s game mode rather than regular desktop, you should see it in Bazzite as well.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Well, the truth of that is quite a bit different than how you put it, and it’s also more carrot than stick. There were efforts to make Linux versions of games after this adoption of DirectX, and they didn’t take; I have a Linux disc for Unreal Tournament 2004 that came in the same box as the Windows one. What Microsoft did surely sucked for everyone, but fortunately, we live in a world where their recent efforts to do similar things aren’t working. They didn’t manage to siphon PC gaming over the Windows Store, and Windows handhelds are demonstrably worse and sell worse than the Linux ones. Consoles’ walled gardens are slowly crumbling from natural market forces to the openness of PC, and that includes a PC where almost all of those games work on Linux.

Microsoft does not have a position of strength here right now, and they know it, so they instead pivoted to just being an enormous publisher with a subscription service that’s lucrative but has already plateaued.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

If it’s the one that got them their recognition, it’s little more than arbitrary; luck, place and time; things that don’t have to do with how good the work is. Some “masterpieces” weren’t considered such until they were exposed to people over and over again, like The Mona Lisa at the Louvre or It’s a Wonderful Life on TBS. I’d have a hard time calling a number of games masterpieces that I didn’t care for, because this isn’t objective.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Some of the best co-op I ever played was in Rainbow Six 3, but I played with 7 players, and I don’t remember if it will let you mix and match humans with bots on your squad. You’ll need a gaming VPN to play co-op, also, since the servers are gone.

Halo is always a good time, as is Gears of War, and it kind of sucks that outside of Borderlands, these are the most recent recommendations I can come up with, but this genre has been left to rot in live service hell.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu (edited miesiąc temu)

Your mileage may vary, but there’s a bug on the PC version that causes a boss to regenerate health tied to the frame rate. It happened to a friend and me, and we watched it happen to two other friends. Higher frame rates cause it to regen faster. There’s a way you can cheese the fight to get around this, but maybe the method would be a spoiler.

(Also, I thought this game was bad and not in an interesting way like its successor is, but once again, your mileage may vary.)

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I guess I just don’t see what it offered that Gears of War didn’t, and I thought Gears was much better.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

We went through this song and dance with Indiana Jones and Avowed, too. If this was a strategy that lost them money, they’d stop doing it. It turns out they’re just fine with having tens of millions of subscribers that like the idea of getting access to games like these for, in plenty of cases, cheaper.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

That SteamOS compatible icon came to my Bazzite mini PC just before I brought it along with me for Combo Breaker. I suppose that leads into what I’ve been playing.

I competed in Guilty Gear Strive (0-2, sadly), Street Fighter 6 (2-2, which is better than I should have done given how little I practiced), and Skullgirls (a hard fought 3-2). Unless Street Fighter 6 gets a killer patch in the next few days with Elena’s release, I think this is where I depart the Street Fighter train.

I also played some Devil May Cry 4 on the plane, and I’ll likely do so again on the way back. I would have continued my save of Tales from the Borderlands, but I found out just before leaving that it doesn’t have cloud saves. I’ll continue with that and Kingdom Come: Deliverance back at my desktop at home.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Categorizing this as engagement rather than just the number of people who finished the game seems incredibly stupid.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu (edited miesiąc temu)

But you’ll see similar rates of players finishing the game that have far shorter runtimes. 100 hours is about how long it takes to finish the game, after all, and that percentage lines up quite well with the achievements for finishing the game. Engagement is a horrible metric for a game like Elden Ring that isn’t trying to keep you hooked with anything except a game you like playing; no battle pass, no dailies, no events, etc. I’ll bet A Dance With Dragons has far better engagement metrics than The Return of the King, but it’s a stupid metric regardless, because they’re books.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

1/3 sounds high. Just because it isn’t verified doesn’t mean it won’t work, and most of the non-anti-cheat-related compatibility problems are solved by installing Proton GE.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Definitely go Steam Deck then. No question. You’ll have far more to choose from, and the Deck’s suspend and resume is shockingly good considering you’d never expect that feature to work on a Windows PC mid-game.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The other way to read this is that they cancelled the marketing so that they’re not throwing good money after bad, like with Concord.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Sorry, but it is a possibility.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It shouldn’t require a server that I can’t control for multiplayer either.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Yes, I know, Fortnite bad, but this is a big deal. The way we got here is often embarrassing, but this is a major step toward tearing down walled garden ecosystems.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Yes, we want to tear it down. This is a company that was taking a revenue share of any purchase made on their device, whether or not they incurred a cost in facilitating it. It’s universally bad for consumers. It’s why game prices on consoles don’t have competition like they do on PC, and it’s responsible for consumers feeling lock-in to an ecosystem, feeling as though they can’t respond to a bad product by moving to the competitor.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Happens all the time. Netflix is moneyhatting, promises someone who knows how to do the job a great salary to do it for them instead.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Or perhaps even find it to be worth the price.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I never saw it as a dick move. It always seemed to me like any other creative person putting their life experiences into their work. That didn’t make it good, but his best work in a comedy comic isn’t likely to come out while he’s grieving. It was sort of a shark jump moment for that site, but it always seemed way more distasteful to me to make it into a meme.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I believe that in the life experience that he’s drawing from, that he based his self-insert character on, he’s in every panel, yes. I certainly took it to mean that he too was grieving the child that he expected to be born into the world. I found it distasteful to make it into a meme because the subject matter it’s mocking is fucked up, plus bullying is kind of disconcerting in general.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

You are free to make your own interpretations as far as how he portrays/portrayed women in his comics. It’s been almost 20 years since that comic went up, and standards in social mores and comedy have changed a ton in that time, but when I read those comics back then, only being familiar with Buckley through CAD comics and nothing else, he never struck me as a narcissist or a misogynist. His self-insert character was a Homer Simpson type (“which was the style at the time”), which is hardly the caricature of a narcissist in my opinion. I find it’s very easy to invent a narrative about who someone is from how they portray themselves publicly, and also…it’s been 17 years. Whoever he was 17 years ago is very likely not who he is today. I don’t know that he’s a bad person, I don’t know that he ever was a bad person, and I don’t think it’s admirable to hound someone with a joke about something that they put out into the world so long ago. Surely whatever he learned from that experience has been learned, and we can move on. I didn’t feel good when I saw that comic the first time, nor was I intended to, but I definitely don’t feel great whenever it’s brought back up either.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Which could just as easily be interpreted as steering into the skid, like a strategy someone might use when they’re relentlessly bullied. But you’re clearly more interested in Tim Buckley’s life than I am.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Nintendo bets you’ll buy Mario Kart even if it’s $80. Focus bets you won’t buy Roadcraft unless it’s $40.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

This one and FairGame$ are both screwed, and they’ll mark the end of an era for Sony and live service. What’s funny too is that Bungie was purchased in large part for being experts in making successful live service games, but it reminds me of something in investing where those who appear to be very smart after a string of successes are compared to being “expert coin flippers” who just got heads a number of times in a row. As we’ve gotten a peak or two behind the curtain after the purchase, it certainly looks like Bungie was only lucky.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

“Recently” also means something different in a time where BioWare makes one game every 5 years rather two games in the same year.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Yes, but then their lives are often uprooted, since the entire existence of their job was based on a bad bet.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I can name plenty of shooters that don’t let you take attachments off of guns. That might not be your best example of ignoring feedback, because the presence or omission of that feature can be for any number of very good reasons.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

As a customer, why would I ever shop at Epic if the game is also available on Steam and typically has more features? Epic doesn’t solve any problems for me and actively introduces others, like a lack of Linux support. Do I want to play Alan Wake II? Of course I do. Am I going to buy it when they could push an update tomorrow that breaks compatibility with my operating system and offers me no recourse as a customer since it was unsupported in the first place? No, I’m not.

There are things worth solving that Steam does poorly (if they also support Linux customers). Finding out if my multiplayer game will be playable without external servers is a nightmare; DRM sucks, and I want none of it; Steam’s multiplayer/friends network has more downtime than is acceptable; Steam Input should be a platform agnostic library; etc. Instead of solving those problems, they made the store enticing for suppliers (publishers) but not customers. If I’m shopping someplace other than Steam, it’s GOG and not Epic.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It’s a lot of cutting out for about a minute, but that’s just enough to interrupt a fighting game match. If it was once per week at a predictable time, that might be okay, but it’s been happening more and more lately when it used to only be on Tuesdays.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

GOG is competitive for my dollar. DRM-free is a compelling proposition, and they’ve got an excellent refund program. There are a lot of things they could stand to do better, but those two things alone give me an actual reason to shop there over Steam.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Typically, when Steam handles the matchmaking, it’s peer to peer. But in general, they also sort of broker the connection between you and the other player or server. Street Fighter 6 runs its own servers and matchmaking, but if Steam cuts out, I lose my connection to them.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Every time you buy a PC, you’re buying a platform that Microsoft couldn’t care less if it sells at all, and that’s all this will be. It will be supported by Microsoft as any other Windows PC, for better or worse.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Well, playing through the first KC:D now, I can tell you it was rough to go from Avowed’s combat to KC:D’s, but that’s okay, because KC:D has other strengths. When development gets restarted, it’s not because it was shaping up into a better game than what we ended up with.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Do you think there’s any stopping the industry’s shift to digital at this point? Because we just saw another quarter where we went even harder in that direction.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Are you under the impression that Metal Gear Rising is an Obsidian game?