SnotFlickerman

SnotFlickerman, 26 minutes ago

I just want it to still have co-op so I can play with a friend who uses a different skill tree and we can complement our skills.

SnotFlickerman, 8 hours ago

Like Musk, Zuckerberg is just trying to create a world where people actually like him.

Also like Musk, he will fail.

SnotFlickerman, 3 days ago

Chrono Trigger Is Timeless

I see what you did there.

SnotFlickerman, 4 days ago

If space dwarves drinking, burping, and dancing isn’t innovation then who needs innovation?

For Karl!

SnotFlickerman, 5 days ago

AMA

So, are you a masochist in other aspects of your life, too?

The video worked excellently, just so you know.

SnotFlickerman, 12 days ago

Damn, incredibly sad. Soul Reaver was a relatively unique game at the time and had interesting writing and ideas.

SnotFlickerman, 19 days ago

They ought to be doing it with Dreamcasts since pirating games for DC was way easier.

SnotFlickerman, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

To me, this is different choices in player autonomy/agency. No player is truly autonomous in a game world, but giving the player choices and having the choices have outcomes that actually impact the gameworld makes it feel like it’s your own agency making the choice.

For example, why would I eat the fish in Nier Automata? Doing so kills me. Why would they give me the option to have a game-ending early on in the game based on eating a fish? Because in giving you the choice to do so, they’ve given you a level of autonomy. They let you find out for yourself what the consequences are, and the consequences make sense in the context of the game world.

Rockstar is bad at respecting player agency, but you know what the worst was in my experience?

Hogwarts Legacy. (Note: I pirated this trash to not give Rowling any money)

Right off the bat, at the beginning of the game, you’re meant to follow your Professor through a dark seemingly endless empty space. If you leave the side of your Professor, nothing terrible happens, just big red scary words cover the screen saying you’ve failed because you lost track of the Professor.

In a game that actually respects player agency, you wouldn’t just be like “Hey, you’re doing THIS MISSION WRONG” (which is basically what the message said in nicer terms), you would give the player an actual event showing why it was dangerous.

What would be so hard about animating a shadowy horror coming out of the shadows and snatching you, instantly killing you? At least then you have learned why you shouldn’t venture alone. Because there are scary monsters in the dark and they could kill you! This respects the players agency by allowing them to explore but also giving them clear limits that fit the theme of the world in which they exist. There’s definitely scary horrors in Harry Potter, and a myriad of things that could kill a new student. We don’t see any of them, just big all caps “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!”

The game would pose further issues, like not being able to jump over obstacles that your character is clearly jumping higher than. Invisible walls is another thing which disrespects player agency and breaks world immersion.

It’s been a while since I played it, but the whole game was crammed to the gills with these kind of wag of the finger “we didn’t tell you to play that way so don’t” instead of using compelling story-based reasons to keep people from doing those things.

SnotFlickerman, 1 month ago

I also read that on release, Star Wars Outlaws that being seen during a stealth mission was an insta-fail.

Unlike, say, Alien Isolation where you get to see yourself swallowed up by the Xenomorph when you fail.

Apparently they sent an update to Outlaws that changed that, because people hated it obviously.

SnotFlickerman, 1 month ago

Shorter answer: games give us what real life refuses to give us anymore.

Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose.

They give us autonomy to complete things how we see fit in the frameworks given. They give us an opportunity to master a set of skills. Finally, the story gives us purpose and drive to continue the “work.”

SnotFlickerman, 1 month ago

Achievement Unlocked: Get a raise!

SnotFlickerman, 1 month ago

It would super help if there was any direction on what keys do what. I never figured out the second thing youre supposed to drop.

SnotFlickerman, 1 month ago

Thats not arrogant. I just didn’t scroll down. Thanks!

I stupidly assumed the controls would pop up in game. I appreciate you being polite about it.

SnotFlickerman, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Spore was such a disappointment.

EDIT:

Shout out to Sim Copter and Jacques Servin:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter#Easter_egg

The game gained controversy when it was discovered that the homosexual designer Jacques Servin inserted an Easter egg that generated shirtless men in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other and appear in great numbers on certain dates, such as Friday the 13th. The egg was caught shortly after release and removed from future copies of the game. He cited his actions as a response to the intolerable working conditions he allegedly suffered at Maxis, particularly working 60-hour weeks and being denied time off. He also reported that he added the “studs”, as he called them, after a heterosexual programmer programmed “bimbo” female characters into the game, and that he wanted to highlight the “implicit heterosexuality” of many games. Although he had initially planned for the characters to appear only occasionally, the random number generator he had created malfunctioned, leading them to appear frequently. Servin was fired as a result, with Maxis reporting that his dismissal was due only to his addition of unauthorized content. This caused a member of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a gay AIDS organization, to call for a boycott of all of Maxis’ products, a measure which Servin rejected. Some months later, a group named RTMark announced its existence and claimed responsibility for the Easter egg being inserted into the game, along with 16 other acts of “creative subversion.” Servin stated that he had received a money order of $5,000 from RTMark for the prank. It was revealed later on that Servin was a cofounder of RTMark.

Servin would go on to be one of the founders of The Yes Men.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yes_Men

SnotFlickerman, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Unpopular Opinion: The last few hardware generations have had diminishing returns while increasing the cost of being a PC gamer drematically. While the DOOM games are generally well-optimized, I just upgraded my whole ass system after 8 years just two years ago and I’m hitting minimum specs to play the new DOOM game at all. Same with Indiana Jones, same with STALKER 2, same with Alan Wake 2.

Of course, we also went from 8gb of video RAM being more than enough to needing fucking like 16-24gb as a standard somehow.

Seriously, the rig I bought to play fucking Bioshock Infinite kept up for about 8 years. I know I didn’t go all-out in building my machine but I didn’t 10 years ago either when I put my old box together. Honestly current machine feels way more high-end than the one 10 years ago did.

Anyway, kind of feels like a rip-off by the industry to me, and this is the same industry that is pushing for GTA 6 to cost $80-100 because they’re not making enough money somehow.

Basically, even if you have a 4090, the stutters and poor fps still exist due to the way the game is designed.

In a way, it’s like being back in the NES days all over again. Sometimes the game itself would just push the hardware too much and it would slow down. This shouldn’t be happening at all in this environment, it’s a joke. It goes well beyond just positive reviews for this kind of stuff.

SnotFlickerman, 1 month ago

In all, it is a list put together by somebody young, that really loves Nintendo, l and with limited video game history knowledge

Half the games on this list are from the 90’s and were on Playstation??

They even correctly clocked that Ms. Pac-Man is actually a better game than Pac-Man.

Hell, there are only three Nintendo games in the to 10, as a reminder Tetris isn’t actually a strictly Nintendo property despite being #2 in the list.

There’s six fucking games in the top 10 that were all available on various generations of Playstations.

SnotFlickerman, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Someone has never read a Rolling Stones best of list before.

They were upsetting people over how they ranked music for decades before ChatGPT was available.

Here’s a thread where people are bitching about them in the same year ChatGPT was released. They’re talking about prior lists, so they’re not talking about AI generated ones. This has been an issue with Rolling Stone for literally decades. Everyone hates their best-of lists.

old.reddit.com/…/why_are_rolling_stone_lists_take…

I’m gonna get tired real quick of this “everything is AI and you shouldn’t engage with it” take. If you can’t handle it, get off the fucking internet and go touch grass.

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EDIT: Further, each section of the article, about 2-3 paragraphs per game has a human author listed.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/0d400843-5c0e-4155-9c31-0c4a82407768.webp

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/567363e9-7c2b-4164-ac33-cb117d63c0a8.webp

Let’s just keep pretending that nobody gets paid for this kind of thing and make sure that nobody gets paid by lying and saying it’s all AI anyway, leading it to all eventually become AI anyway because everyone stopped fucking reading.

SnotFlickerman, 1 month ago

Each game literally has two or three paragraphs dedicated to why it was chosen with the human authors name credited at the end of each game section.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/0d400843-5c0e-4155-9c31-0c4a82407768.webp

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

Anything to reduce salaries.

“Nope, we’re making less money than ever, more cuts are coming.”

It certainly feels like every business in the USA is on team “make weird business decisions and excuses as a way to shaft worker pay and rights.”

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

Oh yeah, there’s no doubt about that. It was over two years ago that economists were already crowing about how soon people would be running out of their “pandemic savings” and would have to buckle under pressure again. They never hide this stuff, if you pay attention to the right people, they’re right out there being super honest about what they’re doing and what they want.

They want to starve the citizens out, which is crazy when you consider the old statement “No society is more than three meals away from revolution.” They’d rather risk pushing us to revolution by turning the screws rather than give up any amount of power, control, or wealth.

www.nytimes.com/2021/12/…/pandemic-savings.html

As far back as 2021 they were talking about people running out of “pandemic savings.”

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

“Xbox” will just be Windows going forward, at least on handhelds.

We’ve come full circle, almost like a red ring of death.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

I’ma be real: It fucking kills me that Steam on Android has been mostly used for 2FA and the idea of it being an alternate game store for Android somehow just… doesn’t exist?

Especially, out of all companies to take the fight about that kind of stuff to Apple and Google, Valve has the punching power, and they’ve literally already had Epic forge a path for them in this regard.

Why is my Android copy of Balatro unable to use the same cloud save system as Steam? Why am I stuck in Google’s fucking lame gaming ecosystem? It just makes me heave and sigh because I’d way rather be purchasing games for Android via Steam on the Steam Android app. It just feels like such a missed opportunity.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

Dude off the top of my head Balatro (won many Game of the Year awards), Vampire Survivors, Terraria, and Minecraft all have Android ports.

I wonder if Valve plans to release an Arm version of SteamOS

The problem here is you’d be relying on a translation layer similar to Proton, but would probably have to be built off of something like Box64 for it to work. There just may not be enough horsepower on these small devices for that to do well.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

I wish, but it feels like Valve is still mostly trying to support x86/x64 type devices and ARM/RISC-V doesn’t seem on the roadmap as much.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

Because AAA games cost more to make than blockbuster movies, thus they need profit to match.

They take more art than a blockbuster movie, they take more script than a blockbuster movie, they take more motion capture than a blockbuster movie (except maybe the Avatar series which are basically all-CGI/motion capture), just everything is so much more than what you need in a film plus the need for compelling gameplay with a satisfying ludonarrative.

The massive amounts of capital needed to make one to begin with literally preclude studios that aim for this style of game from doing anything but submitting to large publishers who will finance them. Because the resources required to make that type of game are just that much.

It’s part of why Larian did Early Access for BG3 so they could make money during the development to help lengthen their runway and lower their burn rate. They still had to cut a huge amount and just release as-is. The Upper City got cut entirely as did the return to Avernus and with it Karlach’s actual happy ending, all of her current canon endings are technically fail-states for her storyline.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

I have a hard time even playing one but that’s depression.

It’s been a week or so since I last played a few hours of STALKER 2.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

AC really died with Desmond

Ouch, right in the nostalgia.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Because the wealthy need to remind us how much free time they really have because they don’t actually fucking work or contribute anything at all of value to the world.

The first thing I wanted to comment was “Was this written by Elon Musk’s ghostwritergamer?”

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Real answer: Because the games industry is bigger than the film industry, in terms of total valuation.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

A fun video I actually came across recently about Opposing Force/Blue Shift. It had been years since I had thought about it.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

https://i.chzbgr.com/full/6039747584/hE525CD30/papea-kills-off-developers

Seriously this sentiment is old as hell. This comic is old as hell.

The BioWare of today is not the one that made the original Baldur’s Gate. Shit, it’s not even the BioWare that made the original Dragon Age.

They’ve been a hollowed out shell chasing whatever “AAA” style sells the most for a long time now. If Baldur’s Gate 3 had come out before Witcher 3, you can bet your ass Veilguard would look and play a hell of a lot more like BG3, because it’s painfully clear they did everything they could to crib the speed of the combat in Witcher 3, which was the hot shit when they started development. Similar to how Inquisition was chasing the Open World fad. If Baldurs Gate 3 had been the hot shit when they began development? Veilguard would have played like that instead.

It is what it is, and this has been this way since at least Dragon Age 2/Mass Effect 2.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

I think this is an important and distinctive point to be made, and I think it needs some background.

Who else remembers when EA won The Consumerists “Worst Company in America” two years running?

Well, I remember, but I also remember that EA actually placed the blame for winning Worst Company on something else entirely, and we have to be honest with ourselves and question whether this sentiment was real and we ignored it to our detriment.

consumerist.com/2013/04/05/…/index.html

This is part of what EA CEO Peter Moore had to say when EA won “Worst Company” a second year in a row:

In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America.

I remember at the time thinking this was pure deflection. Now I’m not so sure.

I mean, they won the awards in 2012 and 2013 and then Gamergate happened in 2014/2015. Seems pretty tied together, to me.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

There are a number of theories why gamers have turned their backs on realism. One hypothesis is that players got tired of seeing the same artistic style in major releases.

Whoosh.

We learned all the way back in the Team Fortress 2 and Psychonauts days that hyper-realistic graphics will always age poorly, whereas stylized art always ages well. (Psychonauts aged so well that its 16-year-later sequel kept and refined the style, which went from limitations of hardware to straight up muppets)

There’s a reason Overwatch followed the stylized art path that TF2 had already tread, because the art style will age well as technology progresses.

Anyway, I thought this phenomena was well known. Working within the limitations of the technology you have available can be pushed towards brilliant design. It’s like when Twitter first appeared, I had comedy-writing friends who used the limitation of 140 characters as a tool for writing tighter comedy, forcing them to work within a 140 character limitation for a joke.

Working within your limitations can actually make your art better, which just complements the fact that stylized art lasts longer before it looks ugly.

Others speculate that cinematic graphics require so much time and money to develop that gameplay suffers, leaving customers with a hollow experience.

Also, as others have pointed out, it’s capitalism and the desire for endless shareholder value increase year after year.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a perfect example. A technical achievement that is stunningly beautiful where they had to cut tons of planned content (like wall-running) because they simply couldn’t get it working before investors were demanding that the game be put out. As people saw with the Phantom Liberty, given enough time, Cyberpunk 2077 could have been a masterpiece on release, but the investors simply didn’t give CD Project Red enough time before they cut the purse strings and said “we want our money back… now.” It’s a choice to release too early.

…but on the other hand it’s also a choice to release too late after languishing in development hell a la Duke Nukem Forever.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

Look, I’m gonna be real with you, the pool of writers who are exceptionally good at specifically writing for games is really damn small.

Everyone is trained on novels and movies, and so many games try to hamfist in a three-act arc because they haven’t figured out that this is an entirely different medium and needs its own set of rules for how art plays out.

Traditional filmmaking ideas includes stuff like the direction a character is moving on the screen impacting what the scene “means.” Stuff like that is basically impossible to cultivate in, say, a first or third-person game where you can’t be sure what direction characters will be seen moving. Thus, games need their own narrative rules.

I think the first person to really crack those rules was Yoko Taro, that guy knows how to write for a game specifically.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

Probably is, but I get why the other fella was confused by this.

Until right this moment I was under the impression that Genshin was literally just a phone game. Looks like I was wrong.

store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/genshin-impact

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

Shout out to Borderlands 1, one of the last game to have some of the best comedy delivered by text, instead of audio.

I actually am in the minority of preferring 1 over 2 because 2 is just so fucking loud. Handsome Jack in my fucking ear for hours on end, refusing to shut the fuck up and let me play the game.

I much much much preferred the quiet reading of Borderlands 1.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

I’ve seen a lot of cool indie games pop up out of heavily modified classic idTech engines like the DOOM and Quake engines. They’re definitely not high fidelity, but a lot of them scratch an itch that slower paced modern games can’t seem to scratch.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

The worst thing is that some brilliant sound design is held back by some folks who will buy a top of the line video card but some cheap shitty headphones.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

Maybe it’s just me, but I like the style it’s presented in, and I have major adblockers in service so I’m not sure how it’s a drug fueled hellscape. It basically becomes a normal NYT article after a half-page of scrolling. Not all their readers are familiar with these games, so the NYT is doing its diligence by trying to show what they’re talking about, so their readers have a frame of reference. (Remember the NYT is actually aimed at an investor class who owns a second house in the Hamptons and may not be gamers at all. Go look at their Lifestyle section sometime.)

I think it’s fine but I guess I’m in the minority, but also maybe it’s less worse for me because of uBlock/Pihole/Bypass Paywalls Clean.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

The few times they’ve pursued more gritty realism (Twilight Princess, for example) are all the times that haven’t aged as well.

Twilight Princess came out after Wind Waker, but Wind Waker obviously aged far better.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

Neir Automata had pretty good graphics, but nothing groundbreaking.

The soundtrack is fucking phenomenal.

SnotFlickerman, 2 months ago

The Neverhood is deeply underrated. It got a spiritual sequel a few years back.

SnotFlickerman, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

If they don’t actually film it on the Olympic Peninsula they’re doing it wrong.

It’s just such a god damned beautiful area, and with how far apart the small towns are, great fodder for any post-apocalyptic stories.

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Further, there’s several large Reservations in the area, I think any post-apocalyptic story set in the area that doesn’t have Native American folklore becoming resurgent due to the local native population is missing a real opportunity for kickass storytelling. Quinalt, Quileute, Maka, Hoh, and Skokomish all surround the Olympic mountains. Ignoring the large local native populations would be foolish, imho.

SnotFlickerman, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Member when Grand Theft Auto was a massive danger to freedom because of the Hot Coffee mod?

Rockstar 'members.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/gtawiki/images/c/c1/StatueofHappiness-GTA4-statue.jpg

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Going further back, the media tried to pin the blame on DOOM, and the level the shooters designed to look like their school.

SnotFlickerman, 3 months ago

That’s some top tier Main Character Syndrome.

SnotFlickerman, 3 months ago

Will the netcode be as crappy as in the original GTA Online? Sources say yes.

SnotFlickerman, 3 months ago

This just in: Steam is actually a form of DRM.

SnotFlickerman, 3 months ago

Right, their DRM is minimally invasive, which is right in line with their argument that piracy is a service problem. If they offer a service where you can pay for games, have them licensed to a user account, and make the experience flow without interruption, people will accept it.

I was really mostly joking and what you’re saying is accurate.

SnotFlickerman, 3 months ago

Nintendo is a proper shout out.

A Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom aren’t the prettiest games but they have two very big deals about them.

1. Stylization. Games with a specific art style tend to age better than ones with ultra realistic art styles. Team Fortress 2 aged better than a lot of things because it leaned into the Pixar-cartoony style. ABotW and TotK both have their own unique style that will age incredibly well.
2. Instead of the focus being graphics, the gameplay is the core loop. Tears of the Kingdom especially deserves accolades for how well the entire system of combining weapons and items just works. Who cares about the graphics, the crazy shit you do in the game isn’t causing the game to crash or fall to pieces. The game expected this, it was built to handle this, and this is proof that it was way more important to the developers than the graphics.