pory

pory, miesiąc temu (edited miesiąc temu)

Native 4k output instead of a crappy upscaler or a RetroTink which costs more alone than this Analogue product. N64’s native composite is laggy and hideous on a flatscreen TV, you need something like this or a retrotink or a CRT to make the games look good. Even if the Analogue couldn’t play ROMs off an SD card (it can, if Analogue’s previous products are any indication), you could just stick a Summercart in it.

I personally am a ride-or-die CRT player for my retro consoles, but big CRTs are getting rarer and living rooms less accommodating. And N64’s library has a ton of absolutely killer party games that are best experienced on a big TV with your friends, not a dark retro cave on a 20" CRT the way SNES RPGs are. If someone I knew wanted to go a “step past” emulation, I’d absolutely recommended this thing as the second shopping list priority. In order (imo):

Real N64, Real CRT, Summercart/ED64X7 (most authentic, and also cheapest if and only if you can source a CRT that fits your needs)

Analogue 3D, HDTV they already have

Real N64, RetroTink, Summercart/ED64X7 (more expensive than option 2 even if they already have the console and summercart lol)

Real N64, RetroTink or CRT, buying real copies of games at jacked-up collector prices

pory, miesiąc temu

Balatro Mobile Maker works because the game’s engine (LOVE 2D) is designed from the ground up to be multiplatform. It’s trivial to “port” compared to other engines.

pory, 2 miesiące temu

Work required for ROA1 level of “workshop characters” is exponentially higher in the new art style and engine. When/if this game gets Steam Workshop, it’ll probably end up with more “tweaked/cloned” characters than totally new wacky MUGEN stuff like ROA1.

pory, 6 miesięcy temu

Reminds me of Heretic’s Fork.

pory, 7 miesięcy temu

Yeah, waiting on Hades 1’s full release was easy since it was EGS exclusive for the entire early access phase. This one’s gonna be harder to dodge until it’s done.

pory, 7 miesięcy temu

Or the EGS phase was just glorified beta access like Hades.

pory, 9 miesięcy temu

FighterZ is an actually good fighting game in the style of MvC or Street Fighter though, not the same 3d drivel with copy paste movesets and terrible game balance usually associated with anime tie-ins.

pory, 9 miesięcy temu

List’s not exhaustive yet. There’s absolutely room for 1-3 pre Z gokus. There’s also no way it won’t have GT Goku, Super Saiyan 4, and all the various Vegito/Gogetas.

pory, 11 miesięcy temu

Pirate it. There’s no DRM. Buy it if you like it.

pory, rok temu

Wasn’t last year’s TGA the one where having the tab open in the background entered you into a drawing for a Steam Deck?

pory, rok temu

Most “retro” games have been backed up but the definition of retro shifts all the time. You don’t even need to go that far forward: the PS3 and X360 have a ton of missing stuff - games yes but especially DLCs and update versions.

The pre-online era was “easier” - find each revision of a Donkey Kong Country cart and your job’s done. Now, every game has 12 versions and casual pirates that “just want to play the game” only bother sharing the oldest and newest ones. There’s content locked behind promotions and account bonuses. There’s patches that alter or remove content (or patch important speedrun tech out of games). And the presence of online in otherwise single-player games is always going to be something inherently opposing preservation of the original experience - you’re not going to ever get the same experience playing Wind Waker HD with Tingle bottles that I did because either the feature is dead or it’s been reimplemented through something like Pretendo. And with a reimplementation, the source for the community posts is no longer casual fans taking selfies with bosses but instead comprised exclusively of tech savvy users who bothered to install a fake Miiverse on their hacked Wii U / emulator. You can emulate Demon’s Souls (PS3), but you’re not going to get the messages or phantasms from the original.

pory, rok temu

It’s a maker game, so there’s no reason to believe you can’t make easy levels.

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So use a tool like this for call of duty multiplayer lobbies, not globally. Who cares if people “cheat” in single player games?

pory, rok temu

Early Access games should never have a battle pass or cash item shop.

pory, rok temu

Personally I’m hoping 1030 isn’t even a Deck. Putting the Deck internals in a set-top box with better cooling and lots of I/O would make an amazing competitor to PS5/XSX and a straight upgrade to XSS, and they could price it a lot cheaper than the Deck because they wouldn’t need to put a screen or battery in (and they could make it even cheaper by selling it without a controller since it works with Xbox/PS/Nintendo ones already).

Steam Machines failed the first time, but now that the Deck has gotten a lot of people comfortable with (a vastly improved) SteamOS there’s no reason to think they’d fail again, especially if Valve themselves were putting out the flagship “standard” unit that companies like ASUS could iterate on.

pory, rok temu

Their plan for when Fortnite stopped pulling in money was for their Epic Games Store (that they propped up by paying devs lump sums just to not launch their games on Steam) to actually make Steam levels of money because surely exclusives and freebies will make people spend money on their store. Turns out there’s a lot of people that will never spend a dime on EGS, either because they won’t install it or only use it for the free games.

So all that Fortnite money they used to pay devs to not release their games on Steam ended up being a failed investment, and they’ve had to change their incentives from “we’ll give you a huge lump sum that’s about equal to what you’d have made with a successful Steam launch” to “well we’ll give you a better revenue split if you launch exclusively on our store that guarantees you get 10% of sales volume compared to Steam”. Turns out 60% of 1m sales is better than 80% of 100k sales.

pory, rok temu

People would have to buy and refund this one to bomb it, versus overwatch which was f2p. It’ll probably settle at “mixed” or “mostly positive” until blizzard does something to try to squeeze more purchases out of the playerbase again.

pory, rok temu

🦀

pory, rok temu

It’s preserved the same way every other off-the-market game that isn’t entirely based on a server is preserved, by pirates.

pory, rok temu (edited rok temu)

The part that makes it confusing is that all of that also applies to a stiffer open-world western RPG like Fallout or Elder Scrolls. Nobody’s calling Skyrim (or more recently Starfield) an immersive sim. Half-Life often gets included and that game is completely linear and your three interaction choices for combat are “shoot with gun (including wacky woohoo gravity gun)”, “whack with crowbar”, or “sneak/run past”.

Is Elden Ring an immersive sim?

Honestly, the defining thing that modern “immersive sims” have that “rpg shooters” don’t is usually just “physics gun”. Gravity gun from HL, goo gun from prey, telekinesis in Dishonored. Sure it lets you “use the environment” instead of just shooting the zombie with a bullet, but you’re often just using the environment as a bullet.

pory, rok temu

Nintendo is at least publicly traded. Valve doesn’t need shareholders.

pory, rok temu

The S is a stellar emulation box that doesn’t need to be jailbroken. It’s a hell of a lot easier to configure than a custom Linux distro like RetroPie and the hardware packs a punch. I don’t own one, but I’d be more likely to buy a series S than a PS5 or series X.

pory, rok temu

Compete in terms of value, not price. The series S gets you Xbox’s current gen game library and a selection of 360 games, and if you’re willing to use dev mode a powerful emulation suite. Deck gets a huge percentage of Steam’s 20-year catalog as one-click installs, most other PC games that don’t use anticheat as slightly more involved installs, every PC game if you want to install windows, and also a powerful emulation suite. Plus it’s a dockable handheld instead of something that needs a monitor and controller.

The series S has better media apps and can be woken up from the couch, though.

pory, rok temu

That’s about using emulators in retail mode which nobody with half a brain thought was gonna stick around. You pay $20 to unlock developer mode and do all your emulation stuff in there. Retail is for playing actual xbox games.

pory, rok temu (edited rok temu)

It’s not an exclusive, it’s just not on Playstation or Switch. When did people decide PC releases didn’t count?

pory, rok temu

Linux runs Starfield with no problems. If it’s on a computer and doesn’t use restrictive DRM to control how and under which circumstances you run the software, it’s not an exclusive. Microsoft doesn’t have exclusives anymore, which is a giant pro-consumer move that doesn’t get enough applause in the gaming community. That doesn’t mean they need to develop stuff for one specific DRM box owned by their biggest competitor to be “anti-exclusive”.

pory, rok temu

Pokémon is an exclusive because you have to pirate it / break the console’s DRM to play it on PC. Also, Proton and Wine are explicitly not emulators - that’s actually what WINE stands for (Wine Is Not an Emulator). Starfield is natively available for more than one platform and not only does the Proton compatibility layer handle it but it’s being sold on Valve’s store and the top played game on the completely Windows-free Deck. Games that are released on one console and PC aren’t exclusives. God of War just isn’t on xbox and Starfield just isn’t on Playstation.

Do you need to buy a console to play it legally? If no, it’s not a game exclusive to that console. I have a PC. I can’t play exclusives like Demons Souls Remake without buying Sony’s $500 DRM machine. I can play non-exclusives like Starfield without buying Microsoft’s $300 DRM machine.

pory, rok temu

I said Pokémon is an exclusive because it’s not released on other platforms. Bloodborne would still be a PS4 exclusive if an emulator could run it.

pory, rok temu

There’s no such thing as a “Linux PC” though. A PC is a PC. Your PC can run Starfield with proton, or it can run it by installing windows, or it can run it by putting it in a windows VM.

Even if a game can only run on Windows and Xbox (say one of those GAAS shits that has invasive anti cheat), that’s not an exclusive either. It runs on more than one platform. There’s a developer endorsed way to buy the product on more than one platform. Exclusive means one platform - you can’t buy and play the game unless you own one specific device.

pory, rok temu

No way in hell they’re gonna still be supporting the Series S in five years.

pory, rok temu

Unity would like that though.

pory, rok temu

You did have to pay $100 to play this one on day 1. The plebs that bought the $70 version had to wait a week.

pory, rok temu (edited rok temu)

BG3 has plenty of bugs, some of them game breaking. Look at the litany of fixes they delivered in each patch. It’s not about that. It’s about releasing a game that isn’t a “service”, and just a purely high quality game - tactical combat that works well, characters with good writing, a solid plot hook, a distinct graphical style, phenomenal voice acting and mocap (which matter more for this genre than they would in, say, a third person shooter).

pory, rok temu (edited rok temu)

The standard argument here is that you’re not supposed to look in every container for loot. However yep everyone I’ve seen play this game including myself is an absolute loot goblin. What if this rotten fruit basket has a +2 greatsword or boots of elvenkind!

I think there’s a mod that adds a button you can click to “loot the room” - characters make perception rolls and “find” anything of value and put the items into their inventories. Haven’t tried it but might be your jam.

pory, rok temu

Huh. I just looked up twitch drops for the game and I have those items. I never made or will make a larian account. Bizarre.

pory, rok temu (edited rok temu)

But when a game like BG3 comes out, with all the stuff no indie studio can afford to do and it has this level of passion without sticking its hand in your pocket, it absolutely reminds us that AAA doesn’t have to be like it is.

As good as indie RPGs are, Disco Elysium was only able to afford voice acting after being a giant commercial success. No small budget team is going to be able to have mocap work on the level of BG3. These things cost a lot of money and involve paying a lot of workers. BG3’s Kickstarter got to be carried by the name recognition of Baldur’s Gate and Dungeons & Dragons in general, following a huge popularity surge for the latter thanks to the rise of real-play podcasts and such.

Do games need hundreds of voice actors and incredible mocap to be good? No. But it’s something that only AAA studios have the ability to add, and it’s a shame that it’s all going into the next fifa/COD/whatever other money pit GAAS the industry is shitting out.

pory, rok temu

Yeah. BG3’s exceptional because it doesn’t need to sacrifice that stuff.

pory, rok temu (edited rok temu)

You’re arguing about visual fidelity with someone who uses their TV to “convert 24hz movies to 120fps”. It’s the equivalent of the guy who got into a heated debate over Italian food with a Redditor that also posted about drinking his own piss on /r/piss.

pory, rok temu

Amazon already tried, with a Twitch branded game launcher and included game licenses for that platform in Amazon Prime.

pory, rok temu

Any other character I’d agree with you, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Lae’zel is into that.

pory, rok temu

I’ve been watching a friend play and absolutely noticed that the romance stuff is a lot slower. everyone wanted to jump my wizard bones about 18 hours in, though it’s very easy to just not flirt with them. Meanwhile she’s 28 hours in and Shadowheart (who was trying to get me in bed with her in the first 10 hours of my play through) still hasn’t propositioned her.

pory, rok temu

The win comes later once gamepass gets netflix’d. It’ll only go on like this for so long before there’s UbiPass and EAccess and Sony Prime and so on and so forth. Then a few years after that, when the services finally get pushed back against and die, everyone who just kept buying games on steam/gog/itch/whatever (or pirating) just keeps on not paying sub fees. Like nothing ever happened.

pory, rok temu

Subscriptions and those that use them are a worse deal for indie devs, and it only becomes an even worse deal as big name publishers put their new AAA games in the subscription and demand a proportionate slice of the pie.

My opinion / analysis of the situation is that it’s only going to get worse for non-AAA and non-backed indies as “$180 a year gets me aaaaallll thiiiiiis, why would I spend a whole month’s of gamepass on your one game” becomes more and more common.

Furthermore, there was never a world where Netflix stayed as “$15/mo for everything”. Other corps want their own Netflixes. So they pull their content and put out another subscription. There’s no world where MS Gamepass stays the only subscription-based game service in town, and when users are paying for three gamepasses, they’re even less likely to buy a cool game that’s lacking AAA polish for $10.

However, unlike movies and TV, no game has really become exclusive to Gamepass (some tried with Stadia, which thankfully died). There are shows that were exclusive to HBO Max that cannot be legally acquired anymore. Players that want some degree of ownership of their games can buy them on Steam/Epic, or if they want full ownership of their games they can buy them DRM-Free like on GOG. Those guys can keep on doing that through the rise of the “wow it’s genuinely a good deal” gamepass, the “more corporations want their own gamepass” phase, the “prices go up and quality goes down now that we’ve got an audience” phase, and the “service is going away forever” phase.

It’s game buyers that’ll keep indie games alive. Subscription models are a poisoned treat that benefit indie games right now but are already shifting to be a huge blow to the indie game scene.

pory, rok temu

i say $180 a year because it sounds like less of a “good deal”. More people are willing to write off “$15 a month” than they are “$180 a year”.

pory, rok temu

You don’t need a switch (hacked or otherwise) to use yuzu. The “dump the keys from your own console” stuff is cover-your-ass doctrine, the keys are easily available online

pory, rok temu

If you pick up container items like satchels and backpacks, you can use them as nesting storage in your inventory (perfect for all the letters and notes you pick up for example). But you can’t name the container, it’s just “pouch”

pory, rok temu

www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/880

pory, rok temu

They did detailed, stylistic, expressive animations for ANIMAL BODY LANGUAGE. and yes, you can talk to random rats and squirrels.