ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

UFO 50 (Steam)

It’s a collection of 50 games, not mini games, from a fictional game developer called UFO Soft in the 1980s. Not every game is a winner, but a ton of them are. You see the advancement in technology and design techniques over the course of the 1980s, and there’s a bit of back story for each game that you can start to put together a throughline for the company and its fictional developers. About half of the games also have local multiplayer. I’d prefer that they also had manuals for each game, especially the more complicated ones, but that means that my favorites in this collection are the simpler games that speak for themselves more quickly.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Dread Delusion (Steam)

This a first person RPG in the style of the PS1 with Elder Scrolls influences worn on its sleeves. This isn’t so much about the RPG parts of the game as it is about the exploration aspect, which isn’t usually my jam, but it worked really well for me here. Despite having tons more draw distance than 5th gen consoles, it is of a similar scope and scale of games of that era, with a lot of the positives from back then that I tend to forget about. A lot of people complain about yellow paint in modern games, and this is the antithesis of that: everything worth exploring is visible from miles away, and there’s a lot of it, with no fluff to make it visually confusing.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Indika (Steam, GOG, Epic, PS5, Xbox X/S)

Indika is, at its core, a story-driven game about a woman and her troubled relationship with her religion. There are some light puzzles to be found here, but it is primarily about using interactivity in new ways to tell a story, and I think for those reasons, it’s very worth seeing. In the opening moments, it clearly conveys that it’s got some ideas. On top of that, it’s a looker. It’s using most of the benefit that Unreal Engine 5 offers, and someone on the development team really understands cinematic framing, at times resulting in some of the best real-time images my PC has ever rendered.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes (Steam, Switch)

Do you like escape rooms or the first Resident Evil? This is that, but unlike Resident Evil, there are no zombies, and to say it has combat would be misleading. It’s a very strange game, but it will test your puzzle solving abilities. I played through it with my wife, and we love escape rooms, but this game would have been much more challenging without the second person offering their perspective on things you might not have noticed, might have forgotten, or thinking about a puzzle a different way than you did. Give or take a few rare instances, the solutions are very rewarding, too. If you’ve got that other puzzle-solving person in your life to play with, I’d highly recommend it (and would probably still recommend it if you don’t).

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The Thaumaturge (Steam, GOG, Epic)

I’ve played the Witcher games before, but this RPG is the most Polish game I’ve ever played, in a very good way. The RPG systems are fairly light, and the progression system is very atypical, but probably the best way to describe this is a narrative adventure game like Life is Strange but with a turn based combat system along the lines of what I understand Child of Light to be, where each action takes a certain amount of time, and it displays that order at the top. The combat is fun, and the RPG systems and branching paths offer some replayability, but I think the real star of the show here is that the story is just so different than basically any other game I can think of. It takes place in 1905 Warsaw, where national boundaries are constantly redrawn around an expanding Russian empire, what that means for the citizens and their politics, and how the superstitions of their day play into that.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Animal Well (Steam, PS5, Switch)

This is a puzzle-driven metroidvania with a simple retro-inspired aesthetic that aims to teach you how to interact with it wordlessly, and it usually succeeds at it. I’m honestly not sure how to fill out the rest of this blurb without ruining the intended experience, but while I wasn’t this game’s biggest fan and wasn’t interested in digging into its secrets post-credits, I did enjoy my time with it.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The next Switch is getting bigger, so it looks like every handheld trying to maximize performance, battery, and price is ending up on a larger size right now.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

That’s not even the best metric. You save Destiny 2 to local storage, but you still don’t own that either.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

If they can’t take it away from you after you bought it, I think I can still call it ownership.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Broadcast content like a movie or TV show illegally, and see what happens.

Yeah, that’s because you own the property, not the intellectual property. This is copyright law, not an affront to your ownership. When you “buy” a movie digitally on Amazon, you’re only buying access to their copy of the movie. Amazon bought the right to distribute it to you. When that contract expires, they can’t distribute it to you anymore. That’s why it’s not ownership. When you buy a game on GOG, you download the installer, and they cannot take it away from you, no matter how hard they try; that’s their whole shtick.

But literally every single time I say this people get upset about it and nobody can explain why.

Someone has probably explained the above to you before.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

They’ve already invented ways to keep us from just copying files: in that they don’t provide us with all of the files in a lot of cases anymore.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Seriously. If I bought GTA before those licenses expired, my download should always have them, even if newer ones do not (which, to be clear, still sucks that that’s acceptable).

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I don’t buy it in that case, but it takes me a lot of leg work a lot of times just to figure out what I’m buying, because no one is interested in making it clear besides GOG; even then, there are things I wish they did better on that front.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

So what if they did? Are they going to give me a court summons to destroy my copy and all of my backups of the game? I don’t think so.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I can think of some other exceptions, but they’re usually large, dangerous, or otherwise regulated as such, yet you’re still an owner of it.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

That direction is straight toward the courthouse.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Despite the best efforts of major publishers including Activision, Electronic Arts, Rockstar, Bethesda, and others, not to mention the far better deal offered to developers by Epic, Steam is more dominant than ever—and in the end, they all came crawlin’ back.

They’re all crawling back because they did not give it their best effort. They just wanted the full 100% of the sale revenue without doing the hard parts. To be fair to EA, for the first few years, it looked like they were actually going to try.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Eh, it’s so easy to hop between streaming services that I don’t have the same hangup there. You subscribe for a month, watch what you want to watch, cancel, and then go to the next one. You can always resubscribe later. When you buy a game on a given storefront, you’re stuck with their feature set forever.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

All of the big publishers from 20 years ago doubled down on a couple of key franchises that make the most money and appeal to the widest demographic, rather than the old strategy of having a diverse portfolio across most genres.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

That new one is a solid metroidvania. It would have been better if they shrunk the map a bit or introduced meaningful upgrades more frequently, but it was still very good.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I’m old enough to remember when Siege was a Rainbow Six game.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

9 years old is pretty old for a video game. When it first came out, the goofiest thing about it was the guy who could heal you by throwing a syringe at you. Now everyone has goofy super powers and things that would never make sense in the same world as something like a Jack Ryan novel.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Epic’s exclusivity deals haven’t been working for anyone, so they’re dropping them across the board, other than for games they publish themselves.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It’s been this way for over 20 years.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Maybe it didn’t do as well as they’d hoped, but back of the napkin guesstimates sure make it hard to believe DD2 wasn’t profitable.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

No one jams culture war shit into things like people complaining about culture war shit.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I don’t think that’s what’s happening here, unless you’re expanding your definition to be that you’re renting this legacy library with a subscription.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Best Nintendo can offer you is renting them in perpetuity with no enhancements.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

But that’s not the cycle chronicled in this article. These are old games released onto subscription services in their original versions, more or less, give or take some resolution.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Random encounters tend to be trash mobs, and I hate trash mobs. I know even in the late 90s, there were some prehistoric internet memes about FF7, and having just played it recently, I remember why. There were so many of them. You’d easily forget where you were going and what you were doing because you’d be interrupted by random encounter trash mobs every couple of seconds. They weren’t too hard, so you didn’t have to think very much to get through them, which made them uninteresting, and they also, like you said, just kind of screwed with the flow of the game. So generally, I don’t like them.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It’s worth noting too that trash mobs aren’t limited to random encounters. Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 are littered with trash mobs, and none of them are random except for maybe traversing between towns.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Hold Start and press A when continuing to continue from the current level.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I could take one look at those models and animations and tell you it wasn’t cheap. Then probably a lot of money went into those CG cut-scenes that were intended to be rolled out weekly.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

They also outsourced a ton to make CG cut-scenes and such, which can rack up a bill very quickly. ProbablyMonsters was an incubator, not a parent company, as I understand it. I too am skeptical of there only being one source in Colin Moriarty, but I trust Jordan Middler to vet the story, even if he isn’t corroborating it, and as others have mentioned, the credits are literally over an hour long, which is evidence that supports the high costs.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

If you were in such a role that you could correct anything in the story, I’d encourage you to reach out to a journalist and do so.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

why would I do what you suggest? So that games journalism can continue to beat a dead horse?

Because the truth is worth knowing, and it sucks that this stuff is obfuscated the way it is compared to something like the movie industry. If true, I’d call it constructive reporting if the message becomes clear that this is an example of what’s ravaging the industry; trend chasing with absurd amounts of money designed to extract some mythical amount of money from people rather than building good products on sane budgets that keep people employed. But the point is moot if you not only don’t agree but also aren’t in a position to refute it.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The average person has absolutely no idea how much it costs to make a game, so any report that comes out for any game is enlightening. When Skullgirls developers tell people that it’ll cost $150k to make a single new character, and when other fighting game developers weighed in and said, “actually, that’s insanely cheap,” it level sets expectations for what a customer can actually expect out of a producer. The largest productions of their day during the era of the original Xbox and PS2 didn’t even typically come in at $50M per game. There are a lot of reasons why it can’t be exactly that anymore, but ballooning budgets are why the industry is in this spot where it’s wholly unsustainable, because if you’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars and you didn’t make one of the most successful games in the history of the medium, it won’t be making its money back.

Iterating on a trend is smart business. Iterating on a trend over the course of 6 to 8 years is not, not only because it makes the game more expensive to make and raises the floor for success, but also because the audience for that trend has likely moved on. If Concord truly cost $400M to make, it adds one more data point for people to understand how much a game can cost, and maybe, just maybe, it will make more companies focus on building a game that they know they can afford to make rather than being all or nothing on one of the riskiest projects in history. That will keep people employed rather than rapid expansion from investment into a bubble and hundreds of layoffs when the project goes south.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I don’t think I have anything new to add to answer your questions that I haven’t already said, so I think we can agree to disagree.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Unity was the best in my opinion. Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla are all the new design of Assassin’s Creed games that earned their own set of fans, but they’re so different from what came before with their faux RPG design. The fantasy is broken for me when I sneak up behind someone, stab them in the neck, and their health bar only goes down a little bit.

The first Assassin’s Creed game was very repetitive, but they gave you small assassination missions for you to figure out how to get, kill your target, and get out. The next several games in the series were better in every way except for perhaps these missions that mattered most, which they made extremely linear and scripted action missions.

Unity (set in Paris in the late 1700s) was an answer to those frustrations. There was a point in the dialogue where they specifically called it out. “So what’s the plan?” “The plan? Come up with your own plan. I’m not here to hold your hand.” They gave you expansive areas to carry out your mission, and you could find your own way in, kill your target, and get out. The game has some of its own baggage, like the loot system taking any challenge out of the combat later in the game, when the whole idea was that you were squishy that you should avoid combat, but it delivered on the experience the best since the first game.

Then Syndicate came out next, and they highlighted different ways to do your assassination like you were a big dummy, and they made a significant part of the game about street brawling, so I gave it a hard pass. The next game in the series was Origins, which brings us to the modern faux RPG era.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Surely you’ve upgraded your PC in the last ten years since the game came out, right? I’d recommend checking it out on a sale or something sometime.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I played it on Xbox and then PC even back in the day, and I’d 100% believe that it’s poorly optimized; they patched it a few months after launch to remove a lot of extraneous, unseen detail on the map that was hurting performance. It’s still surprising if you can’t run a 10 year old game well on a modest modern PC.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

When the game had a free beta, there was hardly anyone playing it. At some point you’ve just got server costs and promises of live service content rollouts that can only cost you money.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

None of those made hundreds of millions of dollars.