And also knock it off with the fucking microtransactions and shit. I wouldn’t mind games costing something appropriate for inflation if we were getting complete, high quality games without the expectation that we spend even more money afterwards. As it stands, they’re complaining about the low cost of games while also milking players for every penny they can on top of the purchase price. Fuck these guys.
I think the trailer and Steam page makes it pretty clear that this isn’t just aimed at furries. Not that furries won’t jump on it - we will, but it’s not just for furries.
The last page of this survey is heavy handed and full of leading questions. It feels like you’re less trying to gather research data and more trying to push an agenda; it would not pass scientific review. The fact that I agree with the agenda being pushed doesn’t change my feelings on that.
A better method would have been to ask the question in a neutral way (e.g. ‘Do you believe that storing game cartridges qualifies as preservation?’ or even better, ‘Storing game cartridges qualifies as preservation’ as a statement, with a Strongly Disagree - Strongly Agree scale), then at the end of the survey provide the information you’re providing in the links below each question.
There’s probably already games where AI generated “every pixel”, just not the code that displays those pixels… This headline only implies art, even though it’s pretty clear they meant the whole game, code and all, and without seeing the whole article, we can’t really effectively comment.
It’s worth noting that Risk of Rain 1 and 2 are very different games (3rd person 3D vs. 2D side scroller), and both are good - so if 2 didn’t grab you, maybe check out 1 and see if that’s more your thing. (The remastered version has a lot of nice QOL stuff and some new game modes and items.)
Even if there weren’t a million examples of prior art, the fact that patents on game mechanics are even allowed is just awful for the industry as a whole, and we as players should absolutely rail against this. Every game borrows from other games’ ideas and mechanics - I’d bet money that there hasn’t been a single fully “original” game in 20+ years. If companies are allowed to patent every little mechanic (even ones they didn’t come up with), the industry as a whole will just become impossible to operate in.
The only downside is that the participants need to be familiar enough with their chosen game to do a randomizer which means roping in casual players is difficult.
Casual players can be fine with some games. Some actually become easier with Archipelago (e.g. Noita, Risk of Rain 2) since you’re getting meta-progression between runs that normally wouldn’t be there. Others though are especially punishing for new players (Doom comes to mind - you have to be pretty intimately familiar with the levels. There’s keys hidden in secret areas sometimes, for example, and ammo can be very scarce.)
Every time I see this, I can’t help but feel like it works better without the third panel. Showing it happening dulls the comedic impact of the final panel. Anyone who doesn’t know what Kirby is about isn’t going to understand the comic anyway, and anyone who does doesn’t need the third panel to understand what happened.