I think Sony is trying for bankruptcy. With that whole PSN thing with, which game was it, Helldivers? Just…who would ever buy anything from Sony ever again?
I mean, I’m pretty sure you’d be able to see it from everywhere in Australia, so I bet many of them would be like “WTF?” But they’ll be dead soon. Fuckin’ kangaroos.
Well once upon a time a console was a small fraction of the cost of a PC and the experience was put game in, turn console on, play game. Sure a console had a fraction of the computing power of a contemporary desktop but typically they had hardware specifically for graphics and sound and games were usually coded very efficiently for the specific hardware often directly in assembly.
That hasn’t been the case for a good long while now. Consoles and their games receive updates just like PCs do. Yes the purchase price of a PC and its associated hardware is probably does still cost more than a console…until a few months of paying for those subscriptions go by. Console hardware is now very closely related to PC hardware. So the value proposition is for the price of a low-end gaming PC you get a lower-middle class gaming PC with a 90% less useful operating system, recurring costs and worsened versions of games.
Meanwhile Valve says “Yeah we made using a normal gaming PC on the living room TV work pretty well a WHILE ago. Also, you know the Nintendo Switch? Well we’ve built a full fat gaming laptop into a similar form factor of portable device. It’s an x86 PC, it runs PC games natively. It runs Linux, you can get to a desktop, hook it up to a keyboard and mouse and you can do spreadsheets and run CAD on it for all we care.” And it’s been such a big success that several competing products have been hastily pushed out that run off-the-shelf Windows and none of them are as good.
Unknown Worlds Entertainment is currently making another Subnautica game. They are publicly referring to it as “Subnautica 2.” So apparently they consider Below Zero to be a standalone expansion to Subnautica a bit like Half-Life: Opposing Force rather than a full sequel.
A few things that I have heard the developers confirm about this new game:
It will take place in the same universe as the first two games.
It will not take place on planet 4546B
There will be swimming in it
There will be submarines in it. Plural.
It will be co-op capable. If I understand what they’ve communicated right, it is going to be a single-player game that will have a “join game” button so you can invite a small number of buddies to join you.
From the screenshots they’ve shown, there’s going to be colorful ocean wildlife in it.
According to the Wiki, one of the original concept artists and the composer for Below Zero’s soundtrack are working on it.
They’re playing a lot of details close to the chest for now, very few gameplay or story concepts have been discussed. It is very likely going to be an ocean survival game with a nonzero chance of having your submarine bitten off by a 300 foot scream eel.
I think there’s two of those in a row. It’s on the island with the big boiler and Gehn’s study and such, there’s the door into the cavern(?) where you can find the frog trap thing, and you have to close those doors to find the corridor to the spinning orb, then you have to close the door you came in to find the little syncroscope in a side chamber in a wall to stop it.
Bringing up the topic of nostalgia, I think there are two audiences to talk to here: Those who had those old systems at the time they were relevant and those who weren’t.
I mentioned the game Extreme-G. That was a personal favorite of mine. I occasionally set up an old CRT and my old N64 and during my nostalgia trip Extreme-G and Extreme-G 2 both spend some time running. Just hearing the British cyberpunk announcer chick say “mull tee pull miss aisle” makes 25 year old neurons fire. And I also fully acknowledge that it was an above average 8.1/10 game, that it’s basically Mario Kart hosed down with Axe body spray, the Forsaken brand of 90’s drum & bass cyberpunk is a bit passe these days, and despite the very fast graphics kids these days are going to look at it and go “…okay. Pretty low resolution, isn’t it?”
And from that perspective, I don’t think the N64 aged well at all. Even Ocarina of Time, hailed for over a decade as the greatest video game ever made…is aging like a potato. It kept for a long time but it’s starting to show wrinkles and is distressingly wet on the bottom.
On c/games@sh.itjust.works or however you do that on Lemmy I answered the question “Was Wizardry a good series?” with “Was. Yes.” Because Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was phenomenal…in 1981. You just couldn’t get computer entertainment like that in the Carter administration. Not sure how well it holds up 43 years on.
On the Super Nintendo, I can name 20 great, all-time classic games if restricted to first and second party titles, so made by Nintendo and Rare. If you open me up to 3rd party titles I can probably come up with 100 all time classics like Lufia or Desert Strike.
On the N64, I’m going to struggle to make it to 20 all-time classics if restricted to first and second party titles, and I might make it to 25 if you let me have the whole catalog. Of the remaining 350+ games made for the system, some of them were unfinished garbage like Superman 64, some of them were badly designed crap like Quest 64, and a lot of them were competent but not memorable things like Extreme-G or The New Tetris, competently made and legitimately fun games we played, finished, put away and forgot about forever.
Us N64 owners tend to have very similar memories of the platform. There aren’t many hidden gems to rediscover.
I’m pretty sure I couldn’t with Sony because I don’t think I could name a single first-party game from Sony.
Microsoft is a tricky one because of how many studios they’ve bought, and I’m not sure how many platforms the PC counts as (at least three: DOS, the DOS-based Windows era and the Windows NT era.
I cannot for the Steam Deck because I’m not sure Valve has made a total of 25 games.
I’m not as familiar with Sega as I am Nintendo but they were and still are a developer in addition to the platform owner.
Atari is not impossible; it’s probably possible to come up with a list of 25 first party titles that were considered great that were published for the 2600 or for their 8-bit computers.
If I’m going to give it a go, I think I’d go for Nintendo on either the NES or SNES, though for the SNES I think I would have to ask if I’m allowed to count titles made by Rare and I bet someone would clap back if I included Super Mario All Stars.
I think I could name 20 legitimately great games that came out for the N64…and that is about it.
You know the NES and SNES minis they released that were basically ARM-powered emulator boxes in nostalgic shells with actually pretty good replica controllers? There was a lot of discussion around what games should have been included that weren’t. Like, “Here’s 25 MORE games that should have been on it.” and a lot of them were third party titles from Squaresoft, Enix, Quintet, Capcom etc. that people think of as iconic to the platform but Nintendo couldn’t wangle the rights for.
Those same discussions often drifted to a hypothetical N64 mini and what list of 25 games it should include and a lot of people struggled to finish that list. Especially if you rule out a lot of the third party publishers and basically go with Nintendo and Rare, which I would add Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Tooie, Majora’s Mask and Star Fox 64 to your list there and that’s basically it. You’d have to start putting things like Pilot Wings 64 on it. No Extreme-G, no 1080 Snowboarding, no Cruisin’ USA, and you’d never get the license for Shadows of the Empire or…whichever Mortal Kombat the system got.
I did once hear a theory as to why the N64 is publicly beloved in a way the Playstation isn’t, it’s because the kids who had an N64 all basically had the same library of games, we can ALL hum the song in Dire Dire Docks or Kokiri Forest. There was a huge library for the Playstation so the kids who had that system don’t all have the same memories.