Blackmist

Blackmist, 14 dni temu

7 is pretty damn good for that engine. Were you doing a speedrun?

Blackmist, 12 dni temu

I remember remarking at the time that they likely didn’t have much more than a terrain object and a title card.

Probably still don’t.

Blackmist, 15 dni temu

I really liked the first reboot, but felt Eternal overcomplicated it and made it like a memory game of working out which gun was best for each enemy, which isn’t really what I wanted from it. Too much finicky precision (like shooting the goddamn turrets off things), and not enough wanton carnage.

It took the story way too seriously as well, and the most enjoyable thing from the first game’s story was somebody starting some exposition, followed by Doomguy smashing the radio.

Just wasn’t feeling it as much as I was with the first. It was only the soundtrack that got me through it tbh, and with Mick Gordon very much not on speaking terms with id Software, I’ll keep my expectations lowered for this.

Blackmist, 15 dni temu

I didn’t even like the game, so the chance of this appealing to me is less than zero.

Blackmist, 23 dni temu

Pretty much par for the course with Sony exclusives tbh.

Blackmist, 23 dni temu

Running things like Days Gone at 60 FPS was a good enough reason for me.

Blackmist, 24 dni temu

I guess World of Walkcraft was too close to a takedown.

I’ll keep an eye on this one because I do like my long middle aged man walks, and don’t care for the constant fiddling needed for the likes of Pokémon Go, which seemed to reward laps of crowded spaces over meandering walks down rivers.

Blackmist, 27 dni temu

Animal Well

Reminds me of old Spectrum platform games, like Jet Set Willy or Dynamite Dan. Only with better controls.

Sort of Metroidvania. Not overly difficult for the most part, although some bits took me a fair few attempts. Lots of secrets and hidden areas.

Made by a single developer, Billy Basso, who sounds like a comic book character, but a British one who says things like “cor, eh readers?”

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

Most games don’t use Dolby anyway. It’s PCM (although the console can often convert to DTS or Dolby Digital if you have a crappy old sound system).

Dolby Surround was only needed for mixing the surround channels into stereo output.

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

I had to laugh when they described Far Cry 6 as AAAA.

It’s a buggy load of generic shite. I’ve never had to reboot my PS5 before because bullets stopped making sounds…

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

Honestly sounds like Sony need to just add those places to their list of supported countries.

A lot of them are just piddling little islands. It’s not like they need to open up a regional office on the fucking Isle of Man.

Sony are a lot bigger than Valve. This is very easily achievable.

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

Definitely my least favourite PS controller. Those convex shoulder buttons were terrible, and there was genuinely no comfortable way to use them.

The motion controls were used in a handful of early games (and I can only assume Sony forced them to implement them) and swiftly abandoned.

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

I’m still not 100% sold on the shoulder force feedback. Sometimes it works well, but many games do this odd thing where you hold it down and it clicks repeatedly and uncomfortably like you’re breaking it and I’ve no idea what they’re really trying to convey.

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

I’d think that too, but it does it on both of mine, and it doesn’t get worse over time indicating any kind of damage.

It’s only certain games that trigger it.

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

Yeah, that would be nice. I know people who lament the loss of the original Xbox Duke controller, and that the only thing closer was the similarly jumbo Dreamcast controller.

Could even unbundle them from the consoles, and just pick the size when you buy them. If they can make them in Hello Kitty pink, or endless CoD camouflage colours, then I’m not convinced it’s uneconomical to provide different size grips.

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

I don’t think anybody wants a monopoly, because it means the leader can stagnate, and honestly that’s already happened. Sony are getting complacent, the big releases are few and far between. We’re all getting less for our money, no matter what team you’re on.

I often buy multiple consoles in a generation, but I didn’t get the Xbox One or Xbox Series consoles, because there’s no reason to, and it’s not because I’ve got an expensive PC either, still being on a 1060. Being late to the game is fine, PS3 did that and ended up selling pretty much as many as the Xbox 360 in the end, but where is that spark from MS? They’ve gambled it all on Game Pass and I’m not sure you can run an entire gaming division on that, same as Netflix couldn’t compete with Hollywood without the box office money. The cloud growth just hasn’t happened for them. It doesn’t feel as good as local play, and I suspect it never will. A PS5 has hit pricing that isn’t really that expensive for fairly casual gamers, although the most casual went mobile ages ago and I doubt they’re coming back.

Xbox hardware is fine, there just isn’t any reason to own it. If it ran Windows and I could install my Steam library on it, I’d have got it on day one, but how does that make MS money? There’s even been noises about the next Xbox allowing Steam, although I don’t know how true that it is. I would guess the only way that can happen is if MS get a chunk of Valve’s money every time somebody buys a game through Steam for Xbox. It’s the only real feature that would get me to buy one right now.

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

I think in this business you can survive a generation in the wilderness. Nintendo had it with the Wii U. Arguably Sony had one with the PS3.

Two in a row? Well you’re out. Saturn followed by Dreamcast. MS are in their second, and tbh, it looks like they’re pivoting towards being a cross platform publisher and subscription provider. They can certainly afford to keep throwing money at the issue, but if there’s no results, there’s only so long they’ll be allowed to continue doing that before the boss pulls the rug on it. He does not seem like a man who is excited by his gaming division.

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

If you ever wonder why gamers buy Playstation and not Xbox, here is your reason.

MS have no idea what they’re doing with gaming. There will be no The Last of Us or God of War coming from them. They don’t want to sell you games. They want to sell you GamePass. They don’t want you to have a great time. They want you to have a time that is just about acceptable enough to keep paying for it.

The only one of their games I’ve heard people get excited about is Hi-Fi Rush, and you can see here what they think of that. Clearly it didn’t maintain enough Monthly Active Users, or have a short enough Time To Purchase or whatever other bullshit mobile-era metric determines whether a studio lives or dies.

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

I think there’d have been a lot less pushback if the gamers had got something in return, like Steam/PSN cross-buy on Sony published titles.

It’s not even like they could claim it being needed for cross-play, because it demonstrably works without it.

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

I remember not wanting to make an account to play Half Life 2 back in the day, yet here we fucking well are…

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

It’s not on the physical box, so yes.

The only bit that said you needed it, appears to be the card included in the box.

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

It’s OK. I do miss the Steam sales actually being worthwhile. They used to be really good, where now I mostly use Steam for games bought elsewhere.

I miss ownership. At least I own my Playstation discs. I can trade them with others when I’m done with them. I can still buy games that have been delisted from digital stores.

Can you say the same about your PC games?

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

Sony took some headlines for doing it, but there’s loads of stuff disappeared from the Google Play store and I never saw anybody complaining about them.

Rayman Jungle Run and Fiesta Run are two (single player) games I paid for and they’ve vanished. I mean, it’s only a couple of quid, but that doesn’t make it OK.

At least Steam continue to host stuff, even if they’re not allowed to sell it.

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

One of them had Space Invaders. I can’t remember for the life of me which one. It was apparently used on the C64 quite a lot, under the name Invade-a-Load.

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

The ZX Spectrum was a home computer popular in the UK back in the 1980s.

Games loaded from audio tapes, and would frequently take 5-10 minutes to get into a state where you could actually play them.

Now get off my lawn!

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

I don’t think that’s the case at all. They run from the carts just fine.

Blackmist, miesiąc temu

Well it’s the only handheld that hasn’t given me cramp after 20 minutes, so at least there’s that. DS and 3DS were limited to stylus games for me.

Blackmist, 2 miesiące temu

I think what really started the current levels of rot was online passes for used games. They saw that people were playing without paying them directly, and wanted to stop it.

It was unpopular, as were map packs (which split the player base in online games), and here we are now with endless lootboxes and gacha elements. Sure, you can play without paying, but you’ll always feel like a second class citizen if you do. Everything you want will be held deliberately out of reach, and the aspect of “fun” has been reduced to collections and bars filling up.

It’s bred this generation of zombie gamers. I went to see my sister at Christmas, and her husband was playing Fallout 76 “doing his dailies”. I did ask what it was for and he said he didn’t really play it or want anything from the points it gives, and admitted what he was doing was kind of pointless. And then fired up the next game and did the same thing.

I tend to just stay away from multiplayer games these days. They’re pretty much all like that. The idea of playing because it’s fun is dead.

Blackmist, 2 miesiące temu

Stop, stop, we’re already dead.

Blackmist, 2 miesiące temu

Went into CEX the other week, and saw PS1 games I’d bought when I was already an adult with a job, being sold second hand for more than I’d originally bought them for.

Blackmist, 2 miesiące temu

Immortals Fenyx Rising.

Feels a lot like Ubisoft still don’t understand the appeal of BotW vs their usual icon vomit on a map, but the gameplay and traversal are decent.

Blackmist, 2 miesiące temu

But just remember that during the 360/PS3 era when MS were in the lead, it was Sony trying to by all consumer friendly, advocating online cross play and having free online service.

MS weren’t interested then.

Blackmist, 2 miesiące temu

In fairness here, you can’t predict the future.

Cell was just PowerPC as was the Xbox 360’s Xenon chip. PowerPC is all but dead now, but the same thing could happen to x86 or ARM in the future. No king rules forever.

Blackmist, 2 miesiące temu

I think the early 3D era is the worst for this. We really had no idea how movement or cameras should work, and there was a lot of flailing trying to get it right, and people didn’t even realise when it was right.

I was there 3000 years ago when Alien Resurrection came out and you used the left stick to walk and sidestep, and the right stick to pan and tilt, and it felt like utter unplayable madness.

Blackmist, 2 miesiące temu

I do miss manuals though.

Blackmist, 2 miesiące temu

Or indeed some bigger games not from shitty publishers.

God of War, for example. A lot of Sony’s exclusives (and many are now on PC) are completely MTX-free. Even EA’s It Takes Two was free of them.

The issue is that they don’t make the return on investment that an exploitative multiplayer game does. So the big publishers prefer to make those.

Blackmist, 2 miesiące temu

I actually looked up when the next total eclipse passes over my house, and the good news is I’ve only got to live to be about 170 years old.

Blackmist, 2 miesiące temu

They did milk the fuck out of that, I’ll grant you.

But at the same time you couldn’t take them online and end up playing somebody who’d got the latest one and have to fight new characters you’d have no access to.

Blackmist, 2 miesiące temu

It’s just Android iirc.

Dunno how much enthusiasm there is for a homebrew scene because the 1st gen was weak as shit, and the main selling point is you can use them as a PC headset, which is going to get you a better experience than any game run natively on it.

Blackmist, 2 miesiące temu

I mean, this will carry on working as a PC headset too. Doesn’t say they’re taking that away.

Blackmist, 2 miesiące temu

Meanwhile in Star Citizen.

https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/1901296d-17c4-454d-98e8-a6a76cfa63c1.png

And they’re all “in stock”. How lucky!

Blackmist, 2 miesiące temu

I mean sure, but at the end of the day it’s a pretend spaceship, that you don’t own in any meaningful way, in a videogame that could go offline forever at any point that they deem it unprofitable to continue.

I can’t be alone in finding even the “deeply discounted” prices to be somewhat unreasonable. This is horse armour with ideas above its station.

Blackmist, 2 miesiące temu

You can at least play to 70 on the free trial now. So you can take some breaks through some of the more laborious sections.

I do think Heavensward is where it gets good, and the story becomes more focused. ARR is a real slog though.

There’s almost enough XP in the main story quest to level two jobs. Don’t be afraid to make a tank so you can queue for dungeons faster. It’s piss easy, and the community is chill af with new players.

Blackmist, 3 miesiące temu

Ron Livingstone’s YouTube channel had just one video on it for 8 years.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu0qtEwb9gE

Blackmist, 3 miesiące temu

Says a lot for the quality of voice acting in BG3 that it had Jason Isaacs and JK Simmons and I didn’t really notice either of them standing out.

Although I did notice Gale in an episode of Good Omens.

Blackmist, 3 miesiące temu

The post-apocalyptic zombie shooter allegedly had more than 300 developers on it and a budget of nearly 1 billion yuan (around $140 million)

The word “allegedly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. There is no way on this Earth that a mess like that cost $140 million to develop, unless somebody pocketed $130m of that and then just outsourced the rest to a tinpot Z tier studio.

Blackmist, 3 miesiące temu

He wishes he got that from it, and looks like he was barely involved other than a quick poorly made advert and use of his face. It’s not even his voice in game.

The whole thing looks like it was thrown together in Unity by a dozen people from mostly stock assets. If that figure is anywhere near accurate then Tencent got scammed.