dual_sport_dork

dual_sport_dork, 4 godziny temu

Obligatory.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0c17e508-256f-472a-803b-20a986136006.gif

dual_sport_dork, wczoraj

And if you know anything about what he’s talking about, you quickly realize that in fact he does not know it all.

Can I be a big time Twitch celebrity too if I doodle a series of completely nondescriptive boxes and link them with little lines in MS Paint as I talk?

dual_sport_dork, 10 dni temu

They’ll release a “New!” version in a year with an improved screen as one of its bullet points, in a bid to get you to buy it again. And people will. See also:

• The Gameboy Advance SP/New SP
• The DS/DS Lite
• 3DS/New 3DS
• The Switch/Switch OLED

dual_sport_dork, 21 dni temu

Define “long.” I disagree with the Doomguy proposal explicitly, because Doom appeared on the Sega 32x in November of 1994 which was barely a year after the initial PC release. One of the defining aspects of gaming in the mid '90s was the monumentally cynical gold rush of trying to cram Doom onto any damn fool console as fast as possible, in a vain attempt to capture part of the lightning and make those sales. And until the Playstation and arguably the N64, every attempt failed spectacularly in various ways.

The definitive Doom experience remaining locked to the PC for those few years was absolutely not for a lack of trying. Every greedy video game exec on the planet wanted Doom on their system. id themselves assisted with several of these ports in various ways and they had absolutely no intention of leaving Doom only on PC, either, if they could help it.

dual_sport_dork, 21 dni temu

Pretty much all of those are characters from franchises that quickly jumped to consoles, or had the intention of multiplatform releases from the very start. I’m not sure any of them are very fitting.

So on that note, the least nonsensical mascot for PC gaming in particular I can think of is that dwarf, whoever he is, from the box art of World of Warcraft. Or possibly the orc from the alternate version. WoW is earth-shatteringly popular and has basically defined the entire private lives of a depressing number of people, not to mention it’s the sole and singular thing even non-gamers think of when you mention MMORPGs. And it has only appeared on home computers. Never consoles. Other Warcraft properties have, but not WoW.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

I’ve held multiple times before that it possibly would have been better off if it were a more focused, linear experience possibly akin to how the newer Deus Ex games worked. Within those you had the freedom to screw around in the area/mission you were in and given a wide latitude to complete things as you saw fit, but it definitely excised the wannabe GTA filler in the middle.

2077 had an excellent series of incredibly well-directed moments, both within the main story missions as well as several notable side missions, but the stuff in between made little sense especially given the story framework of V living on borrowed time with a ticking bomb in their head. But sure, let’s save up and buy nine apartments, collect all the gold class weapons, stock your garage with all the cars, traipse all over down finding all of Delamain’s rogue taxis, do a sidequest for this random chump, see a concert, check all these cyberpsychos off our list…

There is incredible detail in the world if – but only if – you stop to search for it. There are a lot of things most players will probably miss unless they’re specifically pointed out, and while that’s certainly neat it also means that the lack of discoverability means the time spent on many of those details ultimately turns out to be wasted. 2077 is thus a weird hybrid of a linear and open world game and as a result feels both too constrained and to unfocused at the same time. It’s all to easy to get derailed, and alas to some extent you have to let yourself get derailed to accrue enough XP and equipment so you don’t get your ass handed to you if you just try to stick to the main storyline, even though that storyline is written as if it’s supposed to be a single linear narrative.

Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed the game. I just would have presented it much differently if I were in charge.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

Historically a masterpiece has been a (or the) work that demonstrates an artist is capable of utilizing their medium to its fullest extent, i.e. it has been mastered. Per ye olde Wiki:

Historically, a “masterpiece” was a work of a very high standard produced by an apprentice to obtain full membership, as a “master”, of a guild or academy in various areas of the visual arts and crafts.

In that light, I’d say the best qualified would be games that completely utilized the capabilities of the platform they were designed for or, perhaps of interest to more people, expanded what everyone thought could be done with those systems. Games which were furthermore well polished and complete, and did not have much room for improvement taking into account the constraints they had to work with at the time. (For instance: No duh we could make Mario 64 run at a higher framerate and have better textures to look nicer on hardware now. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t arguably a masterpiece of its time, on the system it was on.) This doesn’t just have to be technical stuff – It could be the way the game used storytelling, its gameplay mechanics, or anything else.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

Journey is indeed absolutely fantastic. It finally got a PC port a while ago after languishing on the PS3 for quite some years, and its hardware requirements are probably low enough in the modern era that practically anybody should be able to experience it.

My only gripe is that online randos seem not to understand the meditation achievement, and get antsy when you try to entice them to sit there with you until the achievement pops. And since you can’t type at them you can’t communicate to them what’s going on.

I got the trophy on PS3 back in the day but I haven’t successfully wrangled anybody into helping me get the Steam achievement for that yet…

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

I also maintain that Breath of the Wild was superior to Tears of the Kingdom. Apparently this opinion makes Zelda fans incredibly salty.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

I thought at first you guys were thinking of this, and I was puzzled. Then I looked it up.

Crivens, it’s like a combination of Tempest and Flappy Bird, but since it’s a Terry Cavanagh game it’s also been whacked over the head soundly with VVVVVV.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

…Just don’t look at it too hard when you go to the Great Deku Tree in BotW.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

Bethesda ought to just let the Doom IP go and give it to someone who actually cares.

I will never give a single red cent to Bethesda ever again and I sure as hell ain’t doing it for this. Whatever this is has no business claiming to be a Doom game. They probably would have had slightly better luck if they slapped the veneer of some other IP over it rather than Doom.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

I kind of get the thing about the map even without seeing the world design of the new game, because even Borderlands 1-3 (especially 3) already had a lot of vertical aspects to many of their maps. The prevalence of paths looping over other paths, hills, tunnels, holes, inexplicably impassable ditches dividing the map, and generally the entire path to anywhere being designed like the queue at an amusement park ride made using the 2D minimap to actually navigate anywhere basically impossible. (And the main full screen map wasn’t much better.) Showing your local terrain, such as it even did, was not really very helpful because even if you tried to use it to proceed in a straight line to your target you would inevitably find yourself blocked by an invisible wall surrounding waist high pile of rubble, and that the actual way to get there required looping all the way around the map anticlockwise, with nine switchbacks, four gates, and a one-way cliff jump in between.

At the end of the day it’s a fancy radar only useful to help you snout out nearby enemies, especially in the ever-so-many instances where your current mission objective outright requires you to find where each and every one of those stupid red diamonds is hiding so you can murder them all to proceed.

So I hope there is at least still a local enemy radar. They need to either make their map usable and 3D (like e.g. Doom 2016 did) or fix their level pathing so it’s not like a tornado just tore through the spaghetti factory.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

IIRC all of the past ones have worked over LAN, including over a private VPN if you so desire. I definitely played pirated copies of 1 and 2 with my mates. I had no real desire to get very deep into 3 because the campaign storyline was so stupid, but I don’t doubt you could.

It’s only online matchmaking with randos that you’ll be blocked from, which if you ask me is not really that much of a detriment.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

Panel 3, that’s me right there.

Yes, I have several working controllers. Including a couple of spares, unused, still sealed.

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu

If the cliffhanger at the end of HL:2 Episode 2 annoyed you, the one at the end of Half Life: Alyx will annoy you even more because it not only returns to that moment but the G Man uses reality warping shenanigans to overwrite what happens in it, and replaces it with a different cliffhanger.

Son of a bitch and his unforeseen consequences, indeed.

On the bright side, this also circumvents the need for the original events of Half Life 3 to happen, since Valve has consistently said they were not willing to make it as it was originally drafted (especially now since Marc Laidlaw leaked/released the entire plot online). So now I guess they’re free to do something new with the story direction… Whatever that might be.

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

I sort of get it, but also “Half Life game ends with G Man time-freeze BS and a random abrupt cliffhanger that will not be resolved for years, if ever” isn’t exactly an unexpected outcome for anyone who’s interested in Half Life.

You may as well just watch a Youtube LP of Alyx anyway, since I imagine the majority of players do not have the equipment to play it themselves.

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

People also lost their shit over the PSP Go being digital distro only in a physical handheld console, and lost their shit so hard that Sony of all people walked it back with the Vita and built cartridges back into the spec. (And it became retroactively excusable once it was discovered how easily the PSP/Go could be hacked, and suddenly the Go was the desirable model for emulation and, er, backups. But that’s neither here nor there. Under its intended use, within its original lifespan, it was a stupid idea.)

If you ask me the entire point of a game console is to be a dedicated platform that you stick games in and it always works. If I wanted to fuck around with downloadable only content, games that are only keycodes, patches, day 1 DLC, always-online DRM, and the inevitable day the servers all go dark I’d just game on PC. Which, come to think of it, in these modern times is exactly what I do anyway. I have game systems dating all the way back to the Atari VCS which I can to this very day if I feel like it slap a cartridge or disk in and they play. To me, there is immense value in that. Without that, there’s really no need for the “real hardware experience” for me. I can just emulate if any title comes out that I truly give enough of a shit about that I must play it. Anything else is just selling you a rental, but at full price. I find that immensely distasteful.

So I have zero interest in the Switch 2, and thus it will be the first Nintendo console in history I don’t own, or aim to own (I do not have a Virtual Boy, much to my shame and embarrassment.) I imagine I’m not the only one. Nintendo’s been trying very hard to lose the plot, which for a company as profitable and famous as they are takes a real concerted effort. Congratulations to them, then, if that’s the goal – What we are witnessing here is very possibly the beginning of the end for big N.

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu

And I also have a VR headset and VirtualBoyGo if I really feel like giving myself an authentic headache.

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu

Megaman Legends 3.

“We cancelled it because the fans didn’t show enough interest or act like they wanted it badly enough!”

I think a sizable fraction of the world’s population is still salty about that, and it’s been 14 years.

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu

To be fair, they haven’t managed to put out a whole hell of a lot that’s actually compelling in the intervening years that weren’t rereleases. “Hey guys, DAE remember Resident Evil 4? The good one? We just re-re-re-released it. And some old Megaman games you already have. Full price!”

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu

It’s a great trio of games (Legends 1 and 2, and the Misadventures of Tron Bonne) with quite a bit of depth and if you ask me a fantastic art direction for their time. The one thing I will say is that the controls did not age very well. You get used to it after a while. These games predate modern dual-stick movement and aiming and use the shoulder buttons for strafing. I think the Playstation versions are superior due to the increased number of buttons available on the controller.

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu

It is now. It wasn’t at first.

It was part of the Valve Orange Box and that was a big deal at the time. There was also a huge deal of whining from people who paid for it when Valve announced they were changing it to a free to play model.

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu

Definitely not. Test Drive Unlimited 2 leaps to mind, which while it certainly had racing events and racing related content in it, you could also just drive around doing nothing in particular as much as you wanted.

There are several other racing oriented games that nevertheless had open worlds and you’re never actually forced to race anybody in any of them, albeit usually at the expense of sacrificing any game progression and thus having a rather limited vehicle selection. Need For Speed Underground 2 and Forza Horizon, for instance.

dual_sport_dork, 3 miesiące temu

The trouble with this is that every single statement in it is true.

dual_sport_dork, 3 miesiące temu

Minecraft has a long and storied history of cribbing features from modders and integrating them into the official base game. This includes hoppers, light senors, pistons, slime blocks, several of the types of trees, armor stands, displaying maps in frames, quite a few mobs, several of the current biome types, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I can’t remember offhand.

So yeah, stealing the idea (even if not the outright code) from shader mods would be completely on brand, and not at all unexpected. It’s up to the player base to decide how they feel about this, but honestly it seems nothing short of kidnapping babies and setting them on fire would get any significant portion of people to turn away from Microsoft’s stewardship of the game, given how hard they’ve tried to screw it up post-acquisition and yet it continues to print them money.

dual_sport_dork, 3 miesiące temu

But Ted Woolsey’s original SNES translation is gold for what it is. Remember that he did the whole thing basically by himself and had to get extremely creative to cram the script into the ROM space since English text takes up more characters than Japanese, while also avoiding NoA’s insane censorship rules at the time.

dual_sport_dork, 3 miesiące temu

Getting the full experience from Chrono Trigger specifically, unlike most other similar games, is getting all of the endings. The New Game+ mode will help there.

Chrono Trigger has 18 endings, if I recall correctly, including various permutations. Plus one additional one in the rereleases from the DS version forward. Some of them are only very subtly different from each other depending on which combination of character side quests you fully completed, and they all vary depending at which point your manage to defeat the final boss in the main story sequence. Several of them are significantly different interpretations of the future (or the past) post the defeat of the final boss with various for-want-of-a-nail factors causing huge changes to the outcome.

You have quite a few opportunities to fight the final boss up to and including immediately after discovering the first time gate all the way back at the beginning of the game. (Do that in New Game+ with an overpowered Crono, though, unless you want to get steamrolled instantly…)

dual_sport_dork, 4 miesiące temu

mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/effects/solitaire/

You’re welcome.

dual_sport_dork, 4 miesiące temu

Maybe the rights went cheap. Or maybe you’re right.

For what it’s worth there was an NES game back when the Pizza Cats were originally notionally relevant. It was alright.

dual_sport_dork, 4 miesiące temu

I think it’s more that hysterical moral guardians and corporate boobs only see the traditionally casino-like superficial imagery of cards, dice, spades, clubs, slots, etc. and instantly knee-jerk themselves into declaring it “immoral” without actually bothering to take the twelve seconds required to experience the gameplay. At which point they would immediately realize that they are wrong.

This is Kyle’s Mom’s version of only reading the headline, or not bothering to look beyond the dust jacket and only screeching about imaginary content that exists only inside their own assumptions and based purely on the picture on the cover.

dual_sport_dork, 4 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

Precisely that.

I will add that Sheila Broflovski (a.k.a. Kyle’s Mom) through her sheer incessant nagging (and also blame shifting away from herself and the other parents as spelled out in “Blame Canada”) misses the mark so far that she manages to incite a hot war with Canada that gets enough people killed to spill sufficient blood to fulfill an ancient evil prophecy that literally incarnates both Satan himself and Saddam Hussein’s revenant form back onto the face of the Earth.

Note that this not only predated Saddam’s actual real world death, but Matt and Trey also successfully predicted the eruption of the Karen trend, probably a good decade or so before it’d risen to the height – or sunk to the depths – it’s achieved today. Although senseless moral panics were well known and quite popular in the '80’s and '90’s already, to the extent that they not only managed to accurately predict the response to their own movie, but also parody it within the same movie.

dual_sport_dork, 4 miesiące temu

With Bethesda you can never really tell if it is deliberate malice or simply their typical blistering incompetence. But the end result is the same either way.

dual_sport_dork, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Nerd powers activate… (And yes, the redraws are really quite ridiculous. But tiddies sell microtransactions, I guess.)

As a side note, I never quite understood why Fio is wearing glasses in the Metal Gear Slug 2 character select screen except, possibly, so the artists could have this gag where they shatter for a quick freeze-frame when you select her:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/07f66758-22bf-431e-af43-fc26857b4c2e.png

Because she definitely is not wearing glasses during gameplay, visible even when her face turns towards the camera during her reload animation:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/41863814-cc10-453d-8374-f1bef8e56be8.png

Yes, Metal Slug has reload animations. Metal Slug has animations for everything.

dual_sport_dork, 5 miesięcy temu

That recycled yank-the-keycard-off-the-corpse animation, though…

It doesn’t look like they learned much from Eternal. I think I’m going to give this one a miss. All I’m seeing is more mechanic overload, and a really annoying parry system that’s just going to result in about 1/3 of the monster roster being, “The only way to deal with this guy is to wait for his green attack and parry it, then you get to hit him once. Other than that he’s functionally invulnerable.” Yeah, because the Marauders were totally the highlight of Eternal, and absolutely didn’t grind the entire game to a tedious three minute halt every time you encountered one and played its silly song-and-dance.

I will happily don my asbestos underpants and declare that I really don’t like the direction the new Doom games are taking. Whatever this is isn’t Doom; they could have just as well slapped a new original IP over top of it without any difference.

dual_sport_dork, 5 miesięcy temu

I can beat the Marauders no problem, and I can even cheese them with the shotgun trick. That doesn’t magically make them good game design.

dual_sport_dork, 5 miesięcy temu

I don’t know that this has been revealed yet, but it is likely that it runs in id Tech 7, which is the same as Doom Eternal (and not Doom 2016).

dual_sport_dork, 5 miesięcy temu

And here’s the thing with the Marauders, too. They were just in the wrong game.

If having to play silly distance and timing games with solitary enemies were Doom’s jam – If this were ever Doom’s jam – it would be one thing. But it’s not, and it never has been. The fuckers would fit right in the Dark Souls universe and nobody would even notice. But that’s just not how the rest of the game is structured.

The telltale heart thumping under the floorboard here is that the game feels the need to literally give you a popup that pauses the action the first time you encounter one for the explicit purpose of teaching you how to work the fight. If your mechanics are so non-discoverable that this is necessary, maybe that’s a clue that a stop and rethink is in order.

Doom Eternal was actually really bad at that across the board. You will recall that almost every new mechanic was preceded by an action stopping popup and in some cases an incongruous teleportation to a tutorial room to force-feed you the correct course of action (and the only correct course of action, which is my other gripe) for that monster or situation. Very few of its mechanics beyond stick-shotgun-down-monster’s-throat-pull-trigger are organically discoverable, and even the ones that could have been aren’t because of the tutorial popups.

I guess at least you can turn them off… If you know about them in advance.

dual_sport_dork, 5 miesięcy temu

Apparently Undertale works this way as well. All of its dialog is one massive switch statement.

dual_sport_dork, 5 miesięcy temu

That and with stylized graphics you stand a much greater chance of being able to see just what the hell is happening on the screen.

dual_sport_dork, 5 miesięcy temu

But I don’t particularly feel like being eaten by a Grue.

dual_sport_dork, 5 miesięcy temu

'Member when Kyle’s Mom freaked the fuck out and tried to ban Pokémon Red and Blue because they “depicted gambling” in the game corner, which had no links to the outside world and could not be fed with real money in any capacity, was completely contained within the monochrome screen on your Gameboy, and could be save scummed anyway? Pepperidge Farm 'members.

My, how far the bullshit has come.

Anyway, 16 is sure a funny way to spell 18. Why the hell is the age requirement 16 when you can’t buy a lottery ticket until you’re 18 and in most places you can’t enter a casino until you’re 21? It’s the same thing.

Lootboxes is gambling. So are gacha pulls, and doubly so for both of the above when they can be fueled with real world money. People who are not adults should not be enabled to gamble.

dual_sport_dork, 5 miesięcy temu

A God of War live service game? Who the fuck signed off on that? I’m glad the article was able to zero in on the blistering stupidity of such a thing.

dual_sport_dork, 5 miesięcy temu

Dead Cells?

Emphasis, perhaps, on the “lite” part of Roguelite. But it does have that Roguelike run structure where the levels and the items you find therein are randomized. But with side scrolling platforming gameplay with a very distinct set of fast double-jump-dodge-roll-parry-combo mechanics that I think can best be summed up as ninja gameplay. And you will get killed… a lot. There is a permanent progression system of a sort in the form of unlocking more weapons and items (and later, to re lock items you don’t like), but your core stats remain the same. This is one of those games where the real progression is on your own personal quest to git gud.

I think it’s pretty unique in that it has no dud weapons or items whatsoever. Everything – literally everything – has the potential to be viable and can be absolutely deadly when wielded in the right hands. Even the joke items.

It also has not one, but two weapons which involve beating the shit out of your enemies with frying pans. What’s not to love?

There is indeed a Switch version.

dual_sport_dork, 6 miesięcy temu

Dead Cells: The leading cause of gamepad breakages among PC players. 9 out of 10 ninjas agree.

dual_sport_dork, 6 miesięcy temu

Wow, I can’t believe I get to dredge up this ancient photo again:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6bbf8996-3bcc-45b0-b2a7-429c2e20c06b.jpeg

(Obviously this is satire. I furthermore still haven’t quite made peace with the fact that every single item on Daniel Rutter’s web site can now be considered “retro.”)

dual_sport_dork, 6 miesięcy temu

…Says the chick who has made a total of $3,950 worth of microtransactions in “Fashion Gacha Glowup Idol Makeover Dressup Saga Deluxe 3.”

“But that’s different!”

dual_sport_dork, 6 miesięcy temu

A friend of mine bought an Aliexpress grade Chinese stereo for his car and I swear it makes the exact same cursor movement noise every time you press one of its buttons.

We’re still deeply amused by this and he’s had it for years.