Something I love about this game is how there’s no hud, all the info is conveyed through lights on the backpack.
I know other games have done similar, like all the menus in Dead Space existing as projections from your suit in the game world and not stopping time. I’m a sucker for that little bit of extra diagetics (pretty sure that’s the right term).
When the hell did they start updating the site database to include downloads of externally hosted patches?
That effectively means the site is back!
Why the fuck wasn’t that posted about fucking anywhere?
All I can find is articles about the site going read only except for the forum and news posts back in August 2024. I used to check the site weekly, but stopped in September after none of the community made continuation projects seemed to be taking off.
Yeah, I get that the devs probably don’t want to rehash the same level editor mechanics ad-naseum so instead they made the far more complex/in-depth Dreams, but I think there’s still value in simpler creation tools. I’m sad they moved away from LBP.
Simpler tools lower the bar for entry and can make creating things easier. For LBP it also enforced a cohesive art style, and unless the creator was insane it enforced a specific set of game mechanics.
With Dreams you have no idea what you’re in for, and there’s countless people taking time poorly reinventing the wheel for basic gameplay functionality. You can’t just go and use a highly polished “platformer mechanics” pack created and tested by a professional team like you got with LBP or more recently (and far more restricted) with Mario Maker. Every “starter kit” is going to have differing levels of amatuer jank.
It’s a great “intro to game development” tool, but I personally think it’s lacking in the “play high quality user created content” realm because there’s less quality content as a result of the complexity.
They have been “working” on Half Life 3 for over a decade, with many promising leads found through datamining things left in other source games over that time. There is almost always absurd levels of speculation over the smallest crumbs of datamined material.
The recent documentary they released had what was effectively a post-mortem section where they talked about why Episode 3/Half Life 3 never came out.
I can see why you might think that their new controller and headset might be enough of a game changer that they feel like making 3 is worth it again, but the overall feeling I’ve gotten from them from following all of this closely since the pre-Orange Box days is that: 3 isn’t happening due to the immense pressure and expectations that have built up over the many years people have been waiting. Maybe we get Alyx 2 or some other spin off, but the only thing they’d accomplish with 3 at this point is disappointing a wide variety of people with countless conflicting expectations.
At the very least you also have to contend with “Valve Time”. What would take a normal studio a year takes them four due to their obsession with polishing everything. Team Fortress 2 started development in 1998 and didn’t release for 9 years.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to see where they go next, and I hope this means more than a voice actor sending a fun new years message. But you need to understand that “definitive evidence” of 3 coming based off datamined material has been floating around for 15+ years now.
The term Ante in the game is used instead of “round” or “level”. It’s a measure of how far you’ve gotten. Each “ante” is made up of three “stakes”, point totals you need to beat in a set number of hands played and cards discarded.
There’s no aspect of choosing how much you risk, of “ante-ing up”, or how much you stake. You either beat the points goal (called “chips”) or you lose. There’s no playing of your hand against other hands, bluffing about how good your hand may be to convince others to fold, etc. It’s just you against the score goal. If you beat it faster than the amount of hands you’re given to work with you get extra rewards.
The game has no elements where you stake chips for rewards or anything like that. It borrows basic elements of scoring mechanics from poker, and uses a lot of poker terms for other purposes, but the closest part to gambling is the ability to buy random card packs between rounds (to customize your deck instead of just having the standard 52 card deck).
In between rounds you have access to buy various things to add further modifiers to your scoring, and to adjust the composition of your deck in order to make getting specific combinations more likely.
You can learn most of this in about 5 minutes with the demo, or by taking some time to watch someone else play on youtube.
Something I haven’t seen talked about too much is that there is a hidden meta-puzzle involving a hidden 51st game, and one of the fictional in-universe devs trying to catalog what happened to/at the company.
You should definitely check out the original Monkey Island games when you have a chance! 1 and 2 got well done remasters, and 3 onward don’t really need any remastering.
The first switch emulator that was taken down (I think yuzu), was justified by Nintendo as copyright infringement because people (including moderators) were sharing copyrighted material openly on their public discord. BIOS files, links to games, and early leaks.
The more recent one (Ryujinx I think) was the one that did things right, so Nintendo didn’t have that copyright leg to stand on. So instead (according to the maintainer of the Mac fork) they sent goons to the house of the head dev in Brazil… to “talk” him into taking it down.
The funny thing to me is, I think that 3D render is either from Conker’s Pocket Tales (an isometric GameBoy game using the original family friendly plan for the character), or for the original family friendly N64 game before they shifted gears entirely into Bad Fur Day.
The team that made Banjo-Kazooie, a cutesy animal mascot platforming game, made another animal mascot platforming game that was as not child friendly as possible and had tons of references to pop culture media and movies at the time.
One of your first goals is to cure your hangover. Along the way, you give laxatives to cows, collect bees to tickle a flower with big boobs to stop covering them up so you can use them as a jump pad, murder living teddy bears filled with meat in a war, have a boss battle against a giant opera singing pile of shit (probably the most well known scene of the game, the great mighty poo), and more. It was shocking for the N64 era, and they really worked some programming magic to get absolutely every ounce of power they could out of it.
If you have xbox gamepass, it’s included in Rare Replay (which at least used to be part of gamepass).