dustyData

dustyData, 9 miesięcy temu

It’s interesting that across the board, games released this year barely account for 9% of what people typically played.

dustyData, 10 miesięcy temu

Brothers: A tale of two sons.

The game has a pretty unique mechanic. It makes you control two characters at the same time. It’s not a coop game, with optional solo. It’s strictly a single player game, where you use one controller to move two characters, the titular two sons, one on each control stick. Throughout the game you use movement and interactions with the environment to solve simple puzzles to remove obstacles in your way and travel to your destination. Usually, by having you do different things with each character simultaneously. After a while, it becomes second nature to control both brothers in a synchronous and flowing manner when you get used to the challenge of moving and paying attention to two different things at the same time.

spoilerNear the end of game though, one of the brothers dies. Now, you are left with two control sets, but only one character. Puzzles similar to ones that you already solved, now you have to figure out how to solve them, on your own. This on its own is gutwrenching as you developed a familiarity and affection to both characters and their dynamic, as they grow from mutually annoyed siblings, to a well coordinated team of brothers who care and protect each other. But through the game, you’re also taught that the younger brother can’t swim, he doesn’t know how to. So whenever you had to cross a body of water, the elder brother had to carry the younger brother on his back. He is deadly afraid of being in the water since their mother apparently drowned herself and he saw her die. At the climax of the game, alone in the middle of the ocean, you have to swim to shore. The emotional kicker is as you discover that using the dead brother’s stick on your controller, which you haven’t touched in at least half an hour since the other brother died because it doesn’t do anything anymore, calls however upon the memory of the older brother when you swim. You have to use both controller’s sticks to swim effectively and survive, and you can hear him cheering and supporting the younger brother to find his strength and swim on his own, back home, to carry on and save their father’s life. It’s such an empowering and emotional moment.

The ending of that game still makes me tear up after all this years as it makes me think of my own family. Even writing this comment I’m getting emotional. And it does it all without a single line of dialogue, text or voice acting. All by animation and vocalizations along with game mechanics. It’s one of the most effective uses of gameplay I have ever seen in a video game and forever has made me think of this as one of my favorite games of all time.

Other video games, and things people call emotional are usually about story elements, plot lines, events on a character’s arc. Things that have books upon books of analysis and history. Not that they’re any less valuable or deserving of praise, but using gameplay this effectively to convey emotion is, however, kind of unique and rather harder to pull off effectively.

dustyData, 10 miesięcy temu

I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.

This thing is a scam, and you’re all being taken for chumps. The only worse fraud than SC is buying Fatalities on Mortal Kombat.

dustyData, 10 miesięcy temu

It’s now a season bundle. But it was $10 per fatality x 3. One for Halloween, one for Thanksgiving, and one for Christmas. That was a total of $30 for a whole minute of cut-scenes. They successfully Overton it, apologized and now it’s $10 for the three scenes. But yeah, now buying Fatalities is a thing, look forward for your Easter Fatality edition and an extra Bunny skin version for only $4.99.

dustyData, 10 miesięcy temu

I play mostly smaller games, and am very patient with my gaming habits. Haven’t bought a AAA game in a very long while. Still follow these kind of news because they trend set the whole industry and encroach everywhere with bad practice as big publishers represent the majority of the industry releases and also the grossest revenue.

dustyData, 10 miesięcy temu

I once saw a comment on a SC update video from a guy who claimed to have backed up SC as a teenager, went to college, entered the industry, was part of a team from start to shipping a video game. twice, and still SC is in pre-alpha. He said that now as a veteran of the industry he realizes that SC is a scam. Like, 99% of the stuff they hyped as their envelope breaking new tech for video games, has already been done by dozens of games at a fraction of the cost.

dustyData, 10 miesięcy temu

If you don’t know what you want except a nebulous dream, you can’t tell that you’re dissatisfied with what you actually have, and don’t realize that what you’re doing isn’t actually getting you anything. This applies to both the devs and the fans.

dustyData, 10 miesięcy temu

In Spanish we say “música paga no suena”. Or “Paid music (service) won’t play”. As in, if you actually want the DJ, Mariachis, or band to stay the whole party, withhold payment until the end. If you pay upfront they will arrive late and leave early. They already have the money on the bag, and no legally binding responsibility to actually deliver any product. Even with this new round of crowdfunding, tomorrow they could just claim they already delivered what could be done with the money and disappear into a fiscal paradise. And not a single chump who backed up this decade long fraud would have any single recourse to fight back.

dustyData, 10 miesięcy temu

Dude, it was a random comment on a YT video about 8 months ago. I have zero chance of finding it again. It’s just an anecdote. So, as much as I hate to say it, just…trust me bro.

dustyData, 10 miesięcy temu

Listen, I would pay good money for an off the shelf console first computer that runs SteamOS, has as primary input a controller and an ARM architecture or any other small form factor x86, that fits under the TV. Freaking SteamMachines were a top notch idea, and Gabe should go for it again.

dustyData, 10 miesięcy temu

That’s the Kojima seal of authenticity. When the opening cut-scene is longer than the average TV mini-series.

dustyData, 10 miesięcy temu

Dude, maybe you do work on patents and know your shit. But boy are you clueless about the video game industry.

dustyData, 10 miesięcy temu

You think that patent abuse is right, and that’s why everyone in this thread hates your comments. You think the system is fine. The fact that you are inside but can’t understand how corporations abuse the system and think others are wrong or misinformed when they oppose this abuse, is troubling. You think we are ignorant or misinformed, but no, we do know how intellectual property works. We disagree and find it disgusting for moral reasons that it works that way. That’s very different.

dustyData, 10 miesięcy temu

You can try, but WB will troll you in court for years and drown you out on legal fees to prove it isn’t a violation of a patent. So, most consider it not worth it.

dustyData, 10 miesięcy temu

Patents genuinely are wonderful. The rockstar devs are going to be rewarded for their innovation. They will hire out licenses so that other games can use the tech they developed.

Comment by you, about 5 hours ago.

they are trying to out Marxist each other

Fuck off corpo.

dustyData, 10 miesięcy temu

Lol, you’re so petty. Trying to ride your magical high horse.

dustyData, 10 miesięcy temu

Now you’re all riled up and acting stupid. You are the oh so claimed expert who works at patents offices. No, you tell me what does your majestic and awesome field of expertise do to prevent corporate abuse and patent trolling? Tell me, evangelize to me, convince me that the patent system has safeguards to prevent theft of intellectual work, how does patent enforcing works? what do you do, that you work there, to make it a more ethical field? what are the practices and procedures in place to avoid a corporation from using patents to monopolize, bully industries and stifle creativity and innovation?

dustyData, 11 miesięcy temu

Musk already chose someone to throw off that glass cliff.

dustyData, 11 miesięcy temu

Nacon demanded AAA performance from a $16M budget game. This was a massive leadership failure. It’s a miracle it launched at all.

dustyData, 11 miesięcy temu

Not surprising since corridor digital is owned by money grubbing techbros.

dustyData, rok temu

Suppose you are an European citizen and you live in Egypt. Valve used to block you from purchasing a game available in Europe. Despite the fact that you are European and your store settings were set to Europe. That’s geogblocking. Now valve is not allowed to do that according to EU law. They still deny access and discriminate based on geography with plenty of excuses. But they can’t use the IP geolocation anymore. Mind you, they still claimed not guilty despite the fact they were caught red handed and dragged the whole thing up to appeals. Despite the fact they still pretty much still do it for certain games from time to time.

dustyData, rok temu (edited rok temu)

I used Egypt just as an example, the countries actually involved are Latvia and other EU countries. This is a really old case, it used to be the case that the steam store wouldn’t even open if your were not from the US. There’s a complex web of financial trade agreements and red tape behind making a global digital store with regional pricing available. There’s also a lot of shenanigans that go on to avoid abuse of regional pricing. Steam limits changing your store region to once every 6 months, for example. Which makes it impossible to exploit the regional pricing model. This case is precisely because Steam and the 5 stooges (Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax) didn’t want to let EU citizens from one country buy a cheaper version of the same game in another EU country. I think the most egregious thing is that Valve claimed not guilty, not by saying they didn’t do it, but that they did it and they were in their right to do so. The EU said, it’s not abusing the store, EU citizens are in their right to use whatever store from any other EU country under the single digital market law.

Unlike the EU, the rest of the world is still geoblocked, and discriminated by Steam. For instance, I can’t buy Elden Ring, I can’t even see their store webpage at all. Regional pricing is a good thing to make games affordable for different markets with different purchase and income levels (fuck Epic store), but it should be based on currency and payment method, not geographical location. This along with Nintendo’s regional blocking and the bullshit that Hollywood does wolrdwide are just anti-consumer manipulation.

Source.

dustyData, rok temu

You’re correct, I expanded with real details and a source in another comment.

dustyData, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Looks interesting. Shame the editor doesn’t run on Linux and the engine doesn’t target Linux at all. Valve is pushing Linux gaming hard and people are hating Windows 11 every day more and more. Anything exclusively C# will always have a Microsoft shackles issue.

dustyData, rok temu

The only comment is a marketing text that claims “experimental support” for Linux. There’s no mention of Linux at all in any of the tutorials. And on the manual it looks very finicky, they only support an old LTS version of Ubuntu and reading the GitHub issues, it looks not only experimental but very rough. As barely working, lot of workarounds, rough. On Godot at least, Linux is a first class citizen, not an afterthought to qualify for grants.

dustyData, rok temu

I have a PC where I could (and regularly) play almost every single game ever made, from Pong to Elden Rings. If I bought a PS5 today, I could only play games exclusively made for PS5 (not many, mind you), this also means a lot of PS1, through PS4, games that have never been ported are unplayable on a PS5. On my PC however, I can comfortably play almost every single game from every single generation of PlayStation up to PS4. I can also play every single AAA game ever released in history. Something that the PS5 cannot do, it only plays PS5 games.

dustyData, rok temu

It’s really hard for humans to imagine things at that scale, but Microsoft is so many orders of magnitude larger than Nintendo that whatever Microsoft (and other mega tech companies like Apple and Google) does the entire global international finance system feels it.

dustyData, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Steam is just a storefront, not a publisher. And traditionally Valve only publishes their own games. While Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony are more broad game publishers. Imagine Casio trying to charge the watch store for every time you look at the time in the watch you bought there. Complete bonkers.

dustyData, rok temu

You see, making games is so expensive nowadays. So, now the starting price will be $80 and there will be a convenience fee for every install. No, it doesn’t matter that the game doesn’t use Unity, we will charge it anyways, just in case.

dustyData, rok temu (edited rok temu)

It shines in 2D where Unity falters, yes. But it’s perfectly capable of doing 3D competently. It’s shaders and lightning pipelines that are a bit rough on the edges, but that can be overcome with time with more brainpower coming in to contribute. The scripting is also far more robust than the hodgepodge that Unity tries to pass off as C#. The great advantage is that Godot is a non-profit foundation with a transparent governance model. Not a predatory venture capitalist behemoth like Unity.

dustyData, rok temu

No, Todd Howard doesn’t make mistakes, you just have to buy a more expensive graphics card!

/s

dustyData, rok temu

How does it go?

I want smaller games, with lower quality graphics. Made by happier developers who are paid more to work less. And I’m not kidding!

dustyData, rok temu

Dreaming of riding an army of unicorns to battle.