Lots, but only a few that are worth a damn. I’ve come to call them “Han Solo Simulators”.
Its a genre that seems to attract a lot of half baked game designers. Make a big universe sandbox where you fly a spaceship to space stations and planets and moons and trade stuff and do pirate shit or anti-pirate shit. Lots of people have this idea, only a few make anything good out of it. Doesn’t seem like it can go wrong, and yet . . .
Battlecruiser 3000 AD is a particularly infamous case of 90s Internet lore. By all accounts, it did eventually patch the game up enough to be decent, but it took years to get there. At release, the game’s installer would crash for most people. However good it might have ended up, the Internet drama was better than the game ever could be. Look up “Derek Smart” if you’re interested.
The X series is one I want to like, but it’s been really buggy for me. Like rage quit when it destroys my progress kind of buggy. I haven’t played X4, though.
No Man’s Sky was an infamous mess at launch. Unlike Battlecruiser 3000 AD, it did eventually change its reputation, but it was a long, hard road. I played it a few years ago and found it uninteresting, but basically playable.
And then there’s Star Citizen. I’ll just leave it at that.
Anyway, the Elite series is probably the most successful for single player or smaller multiplayer, and Eve: Online for massively multiplayer.
Nvidia claims the 5070 will give 4090 performance. That’s a huge generation uplift if it’s true. Of course, we’ll have to wait for independent benchmarks to confirm that.
The best ray tracing games I’ve seen are applying it to older games, like Quake II or Minecraft.
Scalpers were basically non existent in the 4xxx series. They’re not some boogieman that always raises prices. They work under certain market conditions, conditions which don’t currently exist in the GPU space, and there’s no particular reason to think this generation will be much different than the last.
Maybe on the initial release, but not for long after.
That would be the point, yes. Balatro has cards and chips, but chips are just there for keeping points. If Balatro is 18+ for gambling imagery, then so should Solitaire. That would be stupid, so Balatro shouldn’t get it, either.
Right. I feel like they were a self correcting problem all along. They get buried in Sturgeon’s Law and that’s the end of it.
Except for that one guy who tried to copyright claim Steph’s channel. That guy needs something more. Like any kind of consequences at all for false copyright claims.
Given the contemporary examples, they weren’t wrong to think so. Everyone was trying to make a console in the 16/32-bit era.
PC Engine/Turbografx
Phillips CD-i (only sorta a console)
Atari Jaguar
Neo Geo
Amiga CD
Some of these are better than others–I’m fond of the PC Engine–but none can be called successful. Neo Geo is somewhat of an exception because it was used as arcade hardware. Some others here are the butt of jokes. There’s also a bunch of Japanese consoles around this time that go nowhere, and are little more than fodder for retro gaming YouTube channels.
And I feel like half of that 20 years was based on FOMO. “I better get the next Assassin’s Creed or I’ll miss out”, and then it’s all the same crap but they still sold a million of them. People do eventually wise up to FOMO.
This is the part they’re actually getting at. Not that the fundamental game design is for everyone (which, yes, is what they try and fail at), but rather they’re responding to people who think they’re failing because they put a woman as the protagonist in some game or another.
That said, lawyers can send a C&D letter for anything. Doesn’t mean it will hold up in court, but they’re betting the target won’t want to pay that kind of money to fight it.