This feels like the Morbius re-release. Big Rigs is (in)famous for being one of the worst/most broken games ever made, who in their right mind would pay for it?
To be fair, I don’t think any of the MS releases ever suffered from bugs at launch. At least from my experience, they always worked pretty consistently on release, aside from maybe a few exceptions - I remember ReCore having excruciatingly long respawn times, Redfall suffering from stuttering and inconsistent framerate, and Ori 2 not being as fluid as the predecessor on console when it released, but all these were still perfectly playable at launch.
I feel like their problem is always the quality and quantity of the content. I wonder if the middling reception of Avowed convinced them that the game requires a bit more work to compete in the crowded and very competitive landscape of open world RPGs.
How many years of development has this game had? I wonder if it’s another case of Microsoft Mismanagement™ or if it’s actually so huge and detailed that it’s actually worth all of this time spent in the works.
Quite the big step for gaming rights in the EU. In the last page, the document also mentions “whales” as “vulnerable people”, adding that a game targeting them specifically may run afoul of EU legislation when precaution are not taken to protect them from their impulses.
This may have a gigantic ripple effect in the industry – or it may not, if the industry decides that targeting whales in the US and China is more profitable than bowing to the EU.
The soundtrack is fine. It works very well in its context and I still hum some of its tones every now and then, but that’s mostly it imo. The end credits song is one of the best end themes I’ve ever heard in a videogame, though.
2025 is the year of the X360. First the decomp tools, now this. Maybe we can even expect a serious attempt at emulating the system on PC? Xenia is still not good, unfortunately.
I’ll be honest, it doesn’t just “look like Advance Wars”. It looks like a rip-off. I love AW but I wish they went with a more original art style, like Wargroove did.
About the GoG store’s second class treatment: it’s always worth it to email the publisher and ask them if they plan on updating their game on GoG!
I did exactly that a few months ago when I wanted to buy I was a teenage exocolonist - emailed Finji and let them know that their game was not up to date on the platform I wanted to buy the game on. They replied rather quickly and the game was updated a few days later. It was very nice because the game was on sale and, thanks to their quick reply, I was able to not miss the sale.
AI techbros will have you believe that you can solve world hunger, cure cancer, and colonize Mars with a few prompts on ChatGPT.
Yet their AI is still incapable of answering two prompts consecutively without making shit up, or drawing a human without turning it into an eldritch abomination.
Game preservation could be fixed with open source emulators and fixing copyright laws so that I’m allowed to download a game nobody has profited from in two decades, but that’s not appealing to big corporations.
Mildly surprised to see another installment in this series after all these years, but I’m pretty excited.
For those who don’t know, Styx is a AA stealth game where you play as a goblin assassin (the titular Styx). It spawned as a spin off of another fantasy game (Of orcs and men) where you played as both the goblin and an orc warrior, which was unfortunately a bit too janky for my tastes.
The focus on stealth of the following installments really benefitted the series, imo. While they still carry a bit of janky-ness (as many AA titles do), they are nevertheless a lot of fun! The story in the first one was very good as well. I still haven’t finished the second one, so I can’t comment much on it.
The first two games are also currently discounted on Steam and GoG ($2 for the first one and $3 for the second), and I think they are very much worth that much.