dual_sport_dork

dual_sport_dork, 2 dni temu

He’s definitely wearing gloves. You can also see it on the plasma gun recoil sprite:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0df745cd-c679-4fb6-a5c1-bfb80e9d2bdd.png

The shotgun:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6504c75c-db9d-4201-8546-2cfe2c51bbf2.png

And especially with the super shotgun in Doom 2:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b8e94362-89cf-4178-a1c5-3987e6aaa20c.png

And for good measure, these uncropped pistol sprites are in the “vault” thingy that came with the latest Bethesda rerelease:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c1321e4e-bd3e-490b-9c2e-33e0f247e870.png

dual_sport_dork, 25 dni temu

All controls should be remappable. All means all. Not most, not some, and certainly none of this bullshit where all you can do is toggle between “XBox 360 controller layout A/XBox 360 controller layout B.” This is especially true for titles on consoles, many of which still to this very day don’t allow you to remap their controls at all.

For 3D games, field of view. Far too many developers of FPS titles in particular have Console Disease, and feel it’s somehow acceptable to lock the FOV to 70° or some absurd number. If they allow you to adjust it at all they may be feeling “generous” enough to let you go as high as 90°. That’s completely unacceptable. On my 4K monitor that’s 25" from my face, I need at least 120°. Honestly, I want to see that slider go up to 180°. That’s right, I want to be able to look at your game world like a goddamned pigeon. On that note I really have to wonder what those people with those 3840x1080 überwide monitors do most of the time, other than spending their days in never ending torment.

Allow me to turn off the stupid pre-launch splash titles. Certainly at least after the first startup. I certainly don’t need to be told that nVidia is the way it’s meant to be played, or that your company licensed Havok, or who your publisher is, or who your publisher’s owner is, or who your publisher’s owner’s owner is, etc. Nobody cares. Usually instead you have to resort to replacing the .mkv or .bik files in the game folder with zero-byte text files or something. It’s dumb.

While we’re griping, and speaking of Console-Itis, does every PC game now need to have an unskippable message telling me that this game has auto save and urging me not to turn off my PC when the icon is being displayed? Really? Nobody’s going to do that. Tell me your game is a shitty console port without telling me your game is a shitty console port. To keep this on topic, let’s have a setting to turn that off, too, because it’s stupid. Off by default would be nice. Should there be an Idiot Mode toggle?

Granularity in subtitles. It seems too many games only have two settings: All subtitles off, or they assume you’re completely deaf. Typically I want to be able to read what characters are saying in their voice lines, but instead the developers also think I need to see the bottom third of my screen filled with [BOOM] [GUNFIRE] [JUKEBOX MUSIC] [FOOTSTEPS] [BOOM] [GUNFIRE] [BOOM] [BOOM] and so on and so forth, all the time. They should either categorize sounds and make their subtitling things individually selectable, or at least if they insist on making it a slider give it three or four levels: Off, cutscene/conversation dialog only, all spoken lines (“Cover me!” “Reloading!” “Never should have come here!” etc.), and then only the top level resulting in every single cricket and rustle of grass being captioned. Some games do manage to accomplish this. Many do not.

Oh, I thought of a good one to add to my wish list. I want every game to bring back the sound test menu. But they won’t, because every studio on Earth now wants you to spend an extra $15 for their game’s soundtrack. (As if it’s not all going to be on Youtube about twelve seconds after release anyway…)

dual_sport_dork, 25 dni temu

One of the latter Final Fantasies did this. I think it was 13? Despite that game’s many other rather glaring shortcomings, that part was pretty neat. I agree it should definitely be standard for most RPG and heavily story driven games.

dual_sport_dork, 25 dni temu

I’m glowering hard at No Man’s Sky’s permanent chromatic aberration effect applied to the top 20% of your viewport at all times, here.

dual_sport_dork, 25 dni temu

performance implications

That might be fine for consoles which have known performance limitations built in. But if I’m on my PC, let me make that decision. Don’t try to make it for me.

dual_sport_dork, 25 dni temu

Given I’ve never seen that actually become the case even in games with engines I had to apply configuration hacks to increase the FOV, I find all of that highly unlikely.

dual_sport_dork, 29 dni temu

I like this one:

Also, whacking the manhacks with your crowbar goes from being a panicked flailing in flatscreen, to being an elegant one-swing home-run hit in VR.

It makes me like the fact that there are no melee weapons in Half Life: Alyx even less, though.

dual_sport_dork, 29 dni temu

Apparently Valve experimented with melee weapons early in development, but intentionally decided to cut them because of the perceived lack of impact and weightlessness of held items, but the main thing was that playtesters kept getting their long melee weapons snagged on stuff. Alyx notably does not allow your hands or held items to intersect with other objects, nor does it let your hands get too far away from your body’s position to prevent shenanigans. If you unexpectedly hook your crowbar on a door frame or a table or something you’ll find yourself inexplicably leashed to it after walking a couple of feet and then not be able to find your hands.

This article goes into some detail. Apparently the crowbar specifically was removed to prevent players from assuming they were Gordon Freeman, despite the constant stream of evidence to the contrary. But it doesn’t seem like too much of a leap to replace that with Alyx grabbing a random length of pipe or chunk of rebar or something from the multitudes of trashed urban environments she traverses throughout the game.

Anyway, as soon as modding support was opened up for HL:A the first things that inevitably appeared were about 4,987 mods that added the crowbar back in. So it’s an easy enough wish to fulfill, if that’s what you want.

dual_sport_dork, 29 dni temu

You can deflect leaping headcrabs this way (or block them with a held object, although this causes you to automatically drop it afterwards) but as far as I know it deals no damage to enemies.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

Or consistently fail to make Beyond Good and Evil 2 for several decades.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

I still have my boxed copy of the Orange Box on a shelf. It still sees use because every once in a while I get embroiled in a Kids These Days type of conversation and I need a prop to wave around.

I’d happily put an orange Gabecube right next to it.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu (edited miesiąc temu)

I just like that they have the complete compliment of normal controller buttons. It seems the world has agreed on twin sticks, a d-pad, ABXY (or triangle square cirlce et cetera, you know what I mean), and two shoulder buttons… Except for VR controllers. Every brand has their own dinky layout and they’re all sparse on buttons, I guess not to “intimidate” newbies, but it requires making weird compromises or binding actions to directions on one of the analog sticks or something, and that always feels lacking.

I hope they also stole the idea from the OG Oculus controllers where it can sense when your fingers are on the buttons but not pressing them, to so they can show your fingers in VR space and help people work the things by sight as well as feel.

Edit: I watched the LTT video. Yes, the buttons have capacitive finger tracking as well. Rejoyce.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

Linux Desktop!

Linux… facetop?

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

The only other major PC oriented inside-out system, Windows Mixed Reality, allowed controllers and headsets from all brands participating in the program to freely intermix. I’d doubt Valve would be dumb enough not to also follow this path, if there are ever successive iterations of this hardware.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

Valve’s strategy here seems to be to build physical inertial tracking into the controllers as well. They both have an IMU built in which presumably gives them a pretty decent ability to guess where they’ve been moved in physical space even if they’re outside of the cameras’ field of view. I don’t know if anyone has accurately assessed how well that works in this case.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

Eyy, Reverb gang.

Apparently there is third party support in Linux under Mondao but it still seems pretty developmental and I haven’t had the time to mess with it yet. I’m still clinging to mine as well, because at least for now it still works and I’ve blocked Windows from rug-pulling my WMR app. I’m sure that’ll only last until the next time I need to reformat and reinstall in a couple of years.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

It was pretty janky. I received a download code for Half Life 2 in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro several months before the game was actually released. I didn’t have a lot of use for Steam before then, but I installed it anyway and my account is so old that back when the account IDs were still numeric and sequential, mine was four digits.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

It could be either given that Alyx ended on a cliffhanger that ties it back to the original series. They’d better come up with something, or else they’re going to have another riot on their hands.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

World has everything 3 introduced, except you can’t be a frog.

Kek. 🐸

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

Kirby’s Adventure is the largest NES game ever officially released in terms of ROM size, and has a frankly absurd amount of graphics tiles. Just consider all of those required for the copy abilities thumbnails alone and you’ll see what I mean. It pulled basically every trick the MMC3 mapper is capable of, and was definitely a masterpiece of the system in the original sense, i.e. it displays astonishing mastery of the mechanics of the Famicom/NES.

What I find more amazing is that the MMC3 isn’t one of the mappers that confers any additional sound channels and the American NES didn’t support that capability anyway. So the entirety of the game’s iconic soundtrack fits within the confines of the NES’ two square waves, one triangle wave, one noise channel, and singular PCM channel.

I think ultimately it ran into memory constraints, even with the additional 8 KB provided by the mapper. If you sit back and look at them as a whole, its levels are all quite short. It’s still my favorite NES game bar none, though.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

But that part was so wholesome. Not to mention physically improbable.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

Some AI or central computer going haywire and destroying everything is, like, the third or fourth stock RPG trope just behind the Dark Lord burning down the protagonist’s village in the first act or the mysterious waif girl actually turning out to be a princess.

You really think they’d know better.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

You can use the same license for both, and your purchase includes access to both versions regardless of how you buy it, unless that’s changed very recently when I wasn’t looking.

Officially, both versions also explicitly require you to create (or already have) a Microsoft account to sign-in and play. Unofficially, the Java version is dead easy to pirate.

dual_sport_dork, miesiąc temu

Yes, but Minetest/Luanti is not a fork of Minecraft, it is its own separate thing.

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu

Crono needs a legendary sword that requires a time-hopping fetch quest to get all the ingredients. Frog requires a sword that’s already legendary, and a whole episode devoted to getting it powered up further. Marle, Luca, and even Magus require triple techs and in the case of the former two, a deliberate power up by Spekkio to even be able to access them in the first place.

…Ayla can merely punch people for 9999 damage.

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 was pretty close to the peak of the series if you ask me, and the PS2 version was the superior one. THPS4 also came out on the Playstation 2. I see you already have Underground on there.

If you’d like something you can handily use to consume the rest of your entire life, Disgaea and/or its sequel will probably do you.

Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are also legendary. I haven’t tried in ages, I have no idea if modern emulators can get the latter to run at a non-crap frame rate. It’d be a lot nicer if so.

Odin Sphere is an often overlooked 2D action sidescrolling fighting thing wherein you Norse In The North and beat the shit out of absolutely everyone. Its sequel, Muramasa: The Demon Blade is much the same thing except therein you Ninja In The Night instead. The latter stayed locked to the Wii to my knowledge but the former was on the PS2.

The PS2’s library is quite vast. I’m not going to go looking this up to prove it right now, but I’m pretty sure it’s got the most titles ever released for a home video game console (i.e. not the PC) in history. Even just trying out unknown games at complete random, it’s likely to be able to keep you entertained in one way or another basically forever.

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu

Re: Final Fantasy games not tying together or having continuities.

Yes. Except, ironically, specifically Final Fantasy X, which had a direct sequel in X-2. Final Fantasy XIII also managed to have a direct sequel in Lightning Returns. Thankfully, if you care to think of it that way, it was crap and can be safely ignored.

Anyway, have an upvote for not blithely suggesting that everyone start with VII.

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

I’m just being that guy on the internet as usual, but Symphony Of The Night is a PS1 title, not PS2. I’m sure OP can run a PS1 emulator on his her Deck if she wants to, though. It is a great game.

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu

I was not aware it was released in that packaging, but I’m pretty sure that’s still a Playstation 1 disk dressed up in a PS2 style DVD case, meant to be used with the PS2’s backwards compatibility mode. To my knowledge SotN was never rereleased as a native PS2 title and wasn’t rereleased at all until the PSP version. (And then later the Xbox 360 and PS4 as downloadable titles, and also the ghastly mobile phone versions.) If you have a PS1 kicking around you can try it and see, I suppose.

For what it’s worth my copy is the green-stripe “Greatest Hits” reprinting, so what it’s worth is alas not much.

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/3a74b238-322a-4017-9fdd-6a4b4f60e7c8.webp?format=webp

Her, and him, and whoever!

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu

The synopsis in the manual also states that Bowser turned the residents of the Mushroom Kingdom into “stones, bricks, and field horse-hair plants.” In a given playthrough, most players probably smash a lot of bricks. Bricks which used to be Mushroom Kingdom people, who are now dead. Because Mario killed them.

It’s a big maybe on Mario being the hero because he may or may not actually succeed in reaching Bowser and rescuing the princess depending on how much the player happens to suck, and/or of Luigi winds up being the victor instead.

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu

I think the implication is supposed to be that when you beat Bowser they’ll be turned back.

dual_sport_dork, 2 miesiące temu

With the best will in the world, given the dire performance of Borderlands 4 even on much more powerful hardware, the notion that it was ever going to work on the Switch 2… how should we phrase this… was never realistic.

Randy seems more interested in running his mouth than getting anything done about the game’s performance issues on any platform, so this decision is hardly unsurprising at this juncture. The fact that they were able to pull the plug this close to the alleged release date also points to the fact that this was to be yet another one of those game-not-actually-on-the-cartridge deals, if they were even planning to make cartridges for it at all, so that would have been yet another nonstarter for many potential buyers. This whole thing was dead on arrival. The only difference is, now we know it’s official.

Borderlands as a whole doesn’t have a great track record on portable platforms anyway. The OG Switch version also had less than stellar performance, and the best that can be said about the PS Vita version of BL2 is that even with all the cuts and downgrades its frame rate is probably better measured in seconds-per-frame rather than frames-per-second. (I have direct experience with that one, being one of the six people on Earth dumb enough to actually own the Vita version of Borderlands 2. But in my defense, it was literally cheaper to buy the BL2+Vita bundle than to buy a Vita on its own. That’s right: It’s so bad, the Vita release had a negative retail value.)

dual_sport_dork, 3 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

Here’s one that’ll hit them closer to home: The original Donkey Kong is literally a mod for the earlier Radar Scope cabinets. Nintendo had better hope they don’t wind up with any video game nerds in any juries or they’re going to open a can of worms on themselves that they really don’t want to have wriggling all over their lap.

dual_sport_dork, 3 miesiące temu

I believe initially this was supposed to be part of the appeal. Any item may or may not screw you over if you don’t know what it does which is in keeping with Isaac’s theme of being beat down by your circumstances. Part of gutting gud was intended to be memorizing what the often idiosyncratic items actually did. Except now with years of updates and content expansions there are so many items it’s unrealistic to keep track of it all anymore. In the early days I might have disagreed with this but now it makes sense.

At least according to the patch notes you still have to collect an item the first time to get its full description, and the new descriptions don’t show at all until you beat Mom for the first time (i.e. you clear at least one basic run), so new players still get to experience the Fun and excitement of potentially getting hosed by an unfamiliar pickup.

dual_sport_dork, 3 miesiące temu

Binding of Isaac items are explicitly in that vein, in fact, given that its version of potions (pills) are indeed randomized on every run. I haven’t checked out the new update yet but insofar as I’m aware those still are.

dual_sport_dork, 3 miesiące temu

All of the updates and content expansions and so on and so forth have really made Isaac unmanageable in that regard. Throw in the fact that there are quite a few item drops that are objectively detrimental in basically every situation so that a not insignificant fraction of the item pool is just trash drops that nobody in their right mind would ever pick up, and it gets ridiculous quickly. Once you have enough unlocked that you’re regularly getting runs down into the lower sub-basements of hell, unless you’re an absolute guru the meta is literally just to meta. Know a couple of the game-breaking combinations off the top of your head and cross your fingers that you’ll run across all of the components. Ignore all other risks.

This is in stark contrast to e.g. Dead Cells, which is why I’ve got such an immense respect for the latter. If you’re willing to adjust your play style slightly, every single drop in Dead Cells is a viable weapon that can be deadly in the right hands. You could be wielding a legendary golden abyssal trident, sure, but you can also just as well beat the shit out of all the boss monsters with a pair of frying pans tied together with some rope. It must have taken an immense amount of work to get all of that even vaguely balanced and ensure that there were no duds, wheras Isaac’s strategy seems to be more just throwing shit at the wall (probably literally…) to see what sticks, with a garnishing of deliberately adding things to troll the player for the lulz.

dual_sport_dork, 3 miesiące temu

But there will be an actual NES version. Hot damn.

dual_sport_dork, 3 miesiące temu

It really says something that like the first mod that was ever published after release was the one that eliminates the damn hold-to-confirm mechanic that is on every. Single. Stupid. Interaction. (At least this became an official feature and you can natively disable it on most interaction prompts now.)

The fact that basically none of the inventory and crafting screens are consistent with each other is one of the main things that still bugs the hell out of me with NMS. Especially when you’re using refiners and so forth, because the dumb popup they give you that only shows you like four options at a time doesn’t even arrange the items within it in the same order as they are in your main inventory. They should have just stolen the paradigm from Minecraft and used it for everything.

dual_sport_dork, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

But you just don’t understand. Sean Murray personally lied to me nine years ago!!! Boycotted forevar!!!

(Edit: I thought the sarcasm in this was clear enough but maybe it’s tough to get through to some people.)

dual_sport_dork, 3 miesiące temu

Me too, pretty much, but I’m fine with that. Every couple of months we get a new content drop (for free!) and I go experience the new stuff, max out everything new there is to be maxed out, and then I can put it down and play something else. I appreciate that NMS doesn’t try to make itself my full time job or require such an asinine time investment that it forces you not to play anything else.

I think the only FOMO aspect built in to NMS at all is the expeditions, and even then you can replay them any time you want with a third party tool (on PC, anyway).

dual_sport_dork, 3 miesiące temu

They have brought a few expeditions back for replay a couple of times. However, another user here alerted me a while back to the presence of this:

cwmonkey.github.io/nms-expeditions/

On select platforms (PC and strangely also the Switch) you can replay the expeditions and get their rewards payouts any time you like.

dual_sport_dork, 3 miesiące temu

Did you include the fuel port in the glovebox in case you need to install any Liquid Schwartz?

dual_sport_dork, 4 miesiące temu

It’s a melee oriented Metroidvania. Think Ori And The Blind Forest but with more insects and inexplicable frilly faux-Victorian edifices, and less pokey combat. You could play it on a SNES pad if you wanted to. I got to 100% on it back when using a cheap wireless keyboard from my couch.

I don’t know about you, but Hollow Knight’s main contribution to my household is that my wife and I still call any filigree wrought ironwork benches we see “save points.”

dual_sport_dork, 4 miesiące temu

+1 for a Chrono Trigger ranking. For as popular as it still is in retrospect, I think people still don’t quite give it the full recognition it’s due for smashing pretty much every dreary console RPG convention that the genre had been persistently saddled with up until that point, while still remaining a console RPG. Believe it or not the developers had plans to make it even more ambitious at the beginning but they weren’t able to pull it off in the time allotted.

There are a lot of subsequent RPG titles (like even Final Fantasy goddamned Seven, not to mention Pokémon) that should have learned a bevvy of lessons from Chrono Trigger, but still didn’t. It was well ahead of its time.

dual_sport_dork, 4 miesiące temu

Those are what’s known as knowledge gated games, where your progression as a player is either wholly or mostly tied to your own personal knowledge of how the game world works. Indeed, many of the mechanics may make no sense due to being crude mockeries of how the real world works. But some of them have become so ingrained in the popular consciousness that developers of later Indie Crafty Survival Sandboxy games can rely on the notion that most players will reflexively begin their adventure by punching a tree, and can probably accurately guess what the crafting shape of a pickaxe will be. This is no doubt down to the Earth-shattering popularity of Minecraft itself.

If you ask me, these games refusing to handhold the player and letting them discover things for themselves is part of their appeal. Expecting to be able to dive right in and know everything right from the starting block really rather misses the point. You have to admit that if you’ve been playing, say, Minecraft since the alpha days, your experience and approach to the game if you spun up a new world right now would be vastly different from your first playthrough, and none of the wonder or sense of discovery would be present.

Gating progression by knowledge (byzantine knowledge though it may be, e.g. in the case of specifically knowing not only how to construct a portal out of obsidian but also activate it by lighting it on fire) mirrors real life in an ineffable way that skill or time/microtransaction/XP accrual gated games can’t.

Some games do both. For instance, ask any Dark Souls player. The Souls games are both knowledge gated and very, infamously, exasperatingly skill gated.

dual_sport_dork, 4 miesiące temu

That case I advise you to never, ever play Noita.

dual_sport_dork, 4 miesiące temu

Obviously our solution here is to send a pissed off bard to beat up Mastercard, then.