The original games are so old that it is quite messy to get them to run on PC these days and the remake changed the gameplay quite substantially. So this remaster is quite welcome and probably a lot cheaper to produce than a full 2 and 3 remake.
As for Anniversary, the story there is a bit weird, as Anniversary and Legend are basically completely independent games that have nothing much to do with each other other than the engine. Legend is a reboot and Anniversary is a remake. It’s only with Underworld that the the story of those two get wrangled together into a trilogy. Only the first game is taken into account there, all the other sequels of the original game are ignored.
It’s not just the playing, even the buying can be a chore, as you’ll have to dig through dozens of different versions, DLC, and season passes to figure out what you are even buying, most of the time the actual online shop doesn’t even tell you, you have to search around forums to figure out what you get. Starting one of those Ultimate Edition that includes everything also means spending 5min clicking though dozens of “You just bought DLC” notifications.
Getting late into a game series is also always “fun”, as you can’t even tell what is a prequel, sequel, spin-off or whatever, as most content no longer puts a number in the title. That’s another trip to Wikipedia, as I have yet to see any online shop providing that information.
Needless to say, I stick mostly with older or indie games. I can’t stand how every modern game needs to have skill trees, collectives, level ups and hundred different weapons that all look and feel the same.
That said, chores can also be quite subjective. The Riddler trophies in the Batman Arkham games can certainly be seen as chore when you just want to reach the end fast, collecting them takes around three times as long as the main game. I however found them to be the best part of those games, as they are very old school and based in exploration and puzzles, as opposed to just running from cutscene to cutscene. They give the player a lot of agency and freedom that is missing in the main plot.
Gimp was competition for Photoshop some 25 years ago. Photoshop has improved a lot since those days, Gimp hasn’t. Gimp isn’t even the best graphics app in the Free Software space anymore.
Very tricky to accomplish as long as people can interact with each other in the real world and bypass whatever rules and restrictions you have in the game rules, be it in terms of just communicating in situations where they shouldn’t be able to or running multiple accounts and characters at the same time to boost their power and influence.
You’d need to get extremely draconian with the anti-cheat, require real world ID for account creation, not allow new player once the game started and all that.
One of the big winners of the Unity debacle is the free and open source Godot Engine, which has seen its funding soar to a much more impressive level as Unity basically gave them free advertising.
Gimp’s problem is not so much the UI, but that it has fallen way behind Photoshop in terms of features. Fixing up the UI wouldn’t hurt, but you’d still be stuck with a graphics app that’s 20 years behind the competition. It would need a heck of a lot more work to catch up.
It’s good in the sense that Nintendo is sitting on a lot of old games and rather terrible at republishing them. Nintendo Switch still has no VirtualConsole support from what I understand, which is absolutely ridiculous. I’d expect Microsoft to address that. It would also mean Nintendo games becoming multiplatform, which would also be a welcome change.
The downside of course is that Nintendo is rather special in the gaming world. They are still doing a lot of quirky, innovative and family friendly stuff like it’s the 90s. That’ll be lost sooner or later when absorbed into Microsoft.
What I mean by this, is instead of when you fail and are met with a game over, the game finds some way to keep it going. Instead of being forced to reset to a previous save or an autosave checkpoint, the game’s story continues in an interesting path. Are there any games like this?...
Prince of Persia (2008) is a game where you can’t die. You get a companion, Elika, early on and whenever you are on the verge of dying, she jumps in and rescues you. They even use that mechanic for a little puzzle later in the game where you have to find the real Elika out of a bunch of illusions and the solution is to
spoilerjump of the nearest ledge towards your death, real Elika jumps in and saves you.
All the Wing Commander games featured branching story lines, where things would take different paths depending on if you lost or won a mission. Even if you got yourself killed you still got a funeral cutscene ending your story instead of just a Game Over screen.
Eurofighter Typhoon had an interesting concept where you took controller over multiple pilots at once across a lengthy war campaign. You could switch between them freely at any time, the remaining ones switch to AI when not controlled by you. If one got killed, injured or ended up as POW, you could just switch to another one and continue as usual. The missions you would have to fly were dynamically generated based on how the war progressed and your success and failures. Basically a flightsim with an RTS running underneath, along with story cutscenes for some important moments. The game had some rough spots and arguably EF2000 or Falcon 4 did the dynamic war campaign better, but at least on paper what Typhoon was trying to do was really interesting. Rather sad that 20 years later we still hardly ever see games that do the small scale and large scale simulation at the same time.
IMDB is especially useless when it comes to comedies, they hardly ever reach a 7/10. Hot Shots - 6.7/10, Ghostbusters2 - 6.6/10, Naked Gun 33 1/3 - 6.5/10, Gremlins 2 - 6.4/10, there is a whole lot of amazing movies hidden in the 6-7/10 range.
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
Street Fighter 1 is an interesting case of an historically extremely important game, that just wasn’t very good. Which in turn explains why it was largely forgotten and completely overshadowed by its sequel. While it invented most of the conventions for the fighting game genre, it implemented them all in a really clunky way. Special moves can’t be triggered with any kind of reliability, jumps don’t even follow a smooth arc but just jerk around and the thing is a button masher, due to originally not having the six-button layout of the sequel, but two huge buttons that would register how hard you pushed them. It’s barely even a functioning game by modern standards, yet it is the birthplace of a franchise that lasts to this day. It’s fascinating seeing all the elements from later fighting game on display in such a rough shape.
Some of the original developers made a modern version with Overload.
There is also Miner Wars 2081, a criminal underrated Descent-like game from the makers of Space Engineers, has great story campaign, destructible environments and a lot of other really nice touches. Failed however on the mulitplayer aspects that were promised in the EarlyAccess thus lots of negative reviews.
I kind of stopped caring about graphics at the end of the PS3 days. That was the last time were graphics made a substantial gameplay difference, namely it allowed bigger environments and more verticality (e.g. Assassins Creed). The 10 years after that it just turned into a wash, the shaders got better, we got PBR, subsurface scattering and all the jazz, but none of it really mattered. Something like Dead Space or Red Faction: Guerrilla still has more interesting interaction with enemies and environments than most modern games.
I care about graphics only in so far that you need to have enough of it to render the interactive elements of your game. Past that it’s just fluff or even detrimental, as uber realstic graphics often lead to a much harder to read game environment, as it’s no longer clear what you can interact with and what not (and ginormous floating hologram icons ain’t exactly a good solution here either).
The one area that still needs powerful graphics is Virtual Reality. The screen covering a much bigger FOV than a monitor game requires a ton more pixels to push around, as well as higher refresh rate (~4k@90fps is were it starts getting acceptable). However, VR so far still hasn’t gained any real traction in the gaming space and Facebook Meta trying monopolize it ain’t helping either. This might take quite a few more years before it becomes relevant.
These days my graphics card is mostly running StableDiffusion for AI image generation. While my gaming is mostly just 16bit games or indie stuff that could run on a 10 or 20 year old PC just fine.
I don’t really see a problem with this, quite the opposite, it’s an important step forward for gaming. It’s similar to the transition from FMV to motion capture. You can complain all day long that the actors will be out of the job when games can render them in real time, but for the time being at least, you still need them, it’s just that their recorded performance will not be the final result you see in the game. Voice recordings are malleable now and can be changed and edited in ways that weren’t possible before. This opens up a lot of possibility that just wouldn’t have been affordable before, e.g. similar to how a real time rendered sequence can reflect your current equipment, which a FMV could not, a AI-voice can now reflect your custom character, name, race, health, age, gender and whatever, without having an actor record the same line a million times.
And yeah, maybe the celebrity voice actor might lose a bit of status and become more like the mo-cap stunt man. But for gaming as a whole, I just see nothing but upsides. And it’s not just AAA games either, just look at all the small indie games that can’t afford voice acting, only for some lines or only English, with AI they can offer all the languages and all the lines, for which it would have been impossible to pay for without AI.
And it’s not like the voice actor is out of a job, if you want some AAA level performance, you can’t just get that out of AI just yet. AI is great at transforming and editing content, but much less good at generating original content from scratch, especially if it needs to fit a given artistic vision.
M.2 SATA drives are still a thing, same port, but different slower protocol as NVMe. They are less common, but still around and available in TB size. Don’t think there is any reason to get this outside of compatibility with old hardware.
There is also mSATA, which is a different port from M.2, but has a very similar look and size. Also slower than NVMe and no reason to get them unless you have hardware that uses them (e.g. some old Beelink miniPC have them).
I was interested in buying a Steam Deck… Until I discovered all the (apparently) better alternatives. Asus Rog Ally, OneXPlayer, Aya Neo etc… I like the idea of an handheld console and obviously I would like to have a device that can run almost everything, so the Windows based handhelds seem better than the Steam Deck. Is it...
better alternatives. Asus Rog Ally, OneXPlayer, Aya Neo etc…
Don’t they all cost double or tripple of the SteamDeck? Call me oldschool, but spending $1000 on a handheld just sounds crazy to me. SteamDeck is already pretty much the max price I’d call acceptable.
The biggest problem for me with the SteamDeck, and why I haven’t bought one, is simply its 1280x800 resolution, that might be acceptable for gaming, but it’s really no good when you want to read a PDF or do other non-gaming things. Kind of limits it’s versatility and is just not a good look when you have the same resolution as a cheap China tablet from five years ago, or a Nintendo Switch for that matter, which itself already felt a little out of date at its launch.
At some point in this millenium, it became ubiquitous in games to ask for a button press before switching to the main menu and it has become a pet peeve off mine....
It’s there due to the technical certification requirements of XBox. All games are required to become interactive after a set number of seconds. When you have a complex game with long loading times, that might be difficult. The load start screen works around that, it’s simple enough to load quickly and it is interactive, i.e. “Press any key to continue”. It’s not useful, but it fulfills the certification requirements, all loading time that follows or might happen in the background while that screen is shown, doesn’t count.
It the same reason why you see so many games have the same “You’ll lose all your unsaved progress if you exit the game” screen, even in games that save so often to be a non-issue. It’s a certification requirement too. There is a whole bunch of stuff like this in games (and movies) that is not there because anybody wants it, but because some contract somewhere says it has to be there or you aren’t allowed to publish your game (see also the way names in movie posters never line up with the people on that poster).
PS: This has been around since at least the Xbox360s, don’t know what Sony requires or how Microsoft might have updated their requirements since then.
The problem is that the majority of games do not tell you what you are actually losing or how to prevent it. Do you lose the last five seconds or do you go right back to the beginning of the game? How far away is the next save point? Games don’t tell you. You have to try to find out. There are a few smart games that will tell you “2min since your last save”, but they are pretty rare.
And of course in modern times that screen is rather unnecessary to begin with: Just save the damn game and let me continue were I left of. Xbox has QuickResume, but a lot of other platforms still have nothing like it.
Games must enter an interactive state that accepts player input within 20 seconds after the initial start-up sequence. If an animation or cinematic shown during the start-up sequence runs longer than 20 seconds, it must be skippable using the START button.
What earlier games were doing was very similar, but was done for different reasons. Arcade games had an attract mode that would show gameplay or intro cutscenes in a loop when the device wasn’t in active use and had an “Insert Coin” flashing to attract players. The normal game would only started once coin got inserted into the arcade machine. Early console games had that attract mode too, just “insert coin” replaced with a “press start”.
What makes the modern start screen different is that there is often no cutscene to skip, no gameplay to watch, it’s just a pointless screen before you go to the main menu.
Yes, but you’d have to get there in 20sec first, which in case of very elaborate main menus, might not always be the case. The start screen provides a safety buffer so that you never fail at this certification criteria, as all the loading time after the start screen doesn’t count.
He added: “So when it comes to the term ‘JRPG’, this is something that ties into this – these are RPG games that, in a sense, only Japanese creators can make with their unique sensitivity when it comes to creating these experiences. “I think it’s certainly something that should be celebrated moving forward, and...
I love hearing about unique takes on game mechanics. Someone recently convinced me that limited inventories are kind of abused currently and that unlimited inventory systems would give more player choices.
I absolutely hate that concept, as even when, or especially if, it matters, it’s in the most cookie-cutter binary in-your-face kind of way, literally “(a) eat baby (b) safe baby”.
I don’t mind choice in games, but it should be actual choice, i.e. you do things because you want to do them, not because you think they will make the story go to the “good ending” or worse yet, be forced on you to stay on the good path, as the game is only build for good and bad path and everything in the middle is just mechanically broken.
The best choices in games are fully mechanics driven or just cosmetic, though that’s pretty damn rare in narrative games. In most games choice is generally just bad and annoying, as you aren’t focused on the actual game or story, but on what the writer might consider to be the “good way”.
That good old fragile “suspension of disbelief” gets shattered by choice systems very very easily.
With games it’s kind of unavoidable in a long run, they are interactive and dynamic, be it outright mods or just new situations arriving out of gameplay. Being able to adopt the voice or automatically or generate variations of a sentences would be a huge benefit. Not exactly a new idea, we had things like iMUSE that dynamically adjust music for 30 years and effects like reverb have been dynamically added for at least 20. Most cutscenes are also realtime rendered for exactly this reason, you can’t reflect a costume change in a static FMV sequences. Now imagine you want a character to make a comment on the costume or weapon you are currently wearing, you’ll quickly end up with a combinatorial explosion of the amount of stuff you’d have to record.
Expanding it all with AI voices or AI filtered voices (think RPG with character creator) is just unavoidable. You can’t drive a dynamic medium with static content to it’s fullest potential. And of course many smaller indie games just don’t have the money for full voice over to begin with.
I also wouldn’t mind AI just as filter to change a voice, since some voice actors are just way to recognizable.
AI-generated content is not eligible for copyright.
That’s just not true, no matter how often clueless artists repeat that. What’s not copyrightable is completely AI generated simple stuff, like type “car” into StableDiffusion and copyright that image of a car. That’s not eligible for copyright and rightfully so, since that would turn AI generation into a minefield if people could copyright sections of it in bulk. But nobody does that anyway.
People want full books and games and stuff, not singular images of a car. For the time being at least, any full game or book will still be full of human input, it’s not something the AI will spit out without effort. You still need numerous different AI systems, custom training and a whole lot of manual back and forth before you get something to your liking. And the result of all that effort will still be copyrightable.
There might come a day in the not so distance future when AI can do it all by itself and make the whole game or movie from start to finish with no human input. But at that point you aren’t just replacing the actor, you are making Disney obsolete, as you no longer need static content, you can just generate it dynamic on the fly like you are on the Star Trek Holodeck. But at that point the fate of the voice actor will be the least of your problems, as you just made a whole lot of other human jobs obsolete too.
In a response to a post from the AntiDRM Twitter account, Ubisoft Support has clarified that users who don’t sign in to their account can potentially lose access to Ubisoft games they’ve purchased. The initial post from AntiDRM featured a snippet of an e-mail sent to a user from Ubisoft notifying them that their account had...
GDPR allows you to keep data as long as you need it to run your business, which in the case of online game store would be basically forever. The only data that has a time limit is stuff like log files and the like, which you might need to catch cheaters and hackers, but is useless after a few weeks or months.
Have you ever played a game and wondered what if you could do something that it doesn’t really allow you to do, for example being able to move around blocks in Minecraft fluidly instead of in sectors, edit the world in Hogwarts legacy with spells, be able to fly in a world like Elden Ring or Elder Scrolls with epic sky...
I miss a modern alternative to PlaystationHome. Something that is not really a full game by itself, but just a space to hang around in with other gamers. VRChat, SecondLife and a few other things go into that direction, but what made PlaystationHome special is that it wasn’t just a public place to meet up, but also doubled as advertising platform. Every major game release would get its own special room with mini games and stuff, you had movie theaters showing trailers, special rooms when E3 took place and all that kind of other stuff.
Browsing around the Steam Store just can’t compare to an actual 3D space you can walk around in and explore with your avatar.
Tomb Raider I-II-III Remastered details enhancements, new features (www.gematsu.com) angielski
Whats your favorite Main Menu music? angielski
I’ll start it off - Legend of Dragoon has my heart with this one...
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GTA 6 has patented a new locomotion system to make "highly dynamic and realistic animations" (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
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Epic Games to update Unreal Engine pricing for devs not making games (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Excerpts:...
What type of game you want to see that doesn't fully exist yet?
Godot Engine hits over 50K euros per month in funding (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
One of the big winners of the Unity debacle is the free and open source Godot Engine, which has seen its funding soar to a much more impressive level as Unity basically gave them free advertising.
Phil Spencer: "getting [acquiring] Nintendo would be a career moment for me"; Nintendo's future "exists off of their own hardware" (www.resetera.com) angielski
Archive link: archive.ph/NF2r0...
Was Unity lying yesterday or are they lying today? (lemmy.today)
Unity: We have to charge for every install because we only see totals. Also Unity: We can tell which install is which, so you won’t be overcharged.
What are some games that "spin" failure states? angielski
What I mean by this, is instead of when you fail and are met with a game over, the game finds some way to keep it going. Instead of being forced to reset to a previous save or an autosave checkpoint, the game’s story continues in an interesting path. Are there any games like this?...
Hi, I'm A Stupid Person Who Gets Mad At Review Scores (www.thegamer.com) angielski
A 7/10 is basically a complete failure, so why didn't reviewers take my feelings into account before publishing their scores?
Baldur's Gate 3's companions were overly horny due to a bug (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun? (kbin.cafe) angielski
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
Volition (Saints Row developer) shuts down (arstechnica.com) angielski
There goes my dream of an Agents of Mayhem sequel.
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Hi-Rez Studios, the people behind Paladins and Smite, have stated that they will be using AI to clone voices and refused to add in any words to contracts that would protect actors from it (twitter.com)
cross-posted from: kbin.social/m/gaming/t/354777...
Starfield install size revealed, available to preload now (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/2277558...
Steam Deck VS rivals
I was interested in buying a Steam Deck… Until I discovered all the (apparently) better alternatives. Asus Rog Ally, OneXPlayer, Aya Neo etc… I like the idea of an handheld console and obviously I would like to have a device that can run almost everything, so the Windows based handhelds seem better than the Steam Deck. Is it...
I don't want to "Press any key to continue" to the main menu
At some point in this millenium, it became ubiquitous in games to ask for a button press before switching to the main menu and it has become a pet peeve off mine....
Hideki Kamiya thinks Japan should be proud of ‘JRPG’ and wants to use ‘J-Action’ (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
He added: “So when it comes to the term ‘JRPG’, this is something that ties into this – these are RPG games that, in a sense, only Japanese creators can make with their unique sensitivity when it comes to creating these experiences. “I think it’s certainly something that should be celebrated moving forward, and...
What game mechanics do you love and hate? angielski
I love hearing about unique takes on game mechanics. Someone recently convinced me that limited inventories are kind of abused currently and that unlimited inventory systems would give more player choices.
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Ubisoft Can Delete Inactive Accounts, Making Users Lose Access to Their Games (gamerant.com) angielski
In a response to a post from the AntiDRM Twitter account, Ubisoft Support has clarified that users who don’t sign in to their account can potentially lose access to Ubisoft games they’ve purchased. The initial post from AntiDRM featured a snippet of an e-mail sent to a user from Ubisoft notifying them that their account had...
What type of game do you want to play that doesn't really exist?
Have you ever played a game and wondered what if you could do something that it doesn’t really allow you to do, for example being able to move around blocks in Minecraft fluidly instead of in sectors, edit the world in Hogwarts legacy with spells, be able to fly in a world like Elden Ring or Elder Scrolls with epic sky...