That’s pretty much what the Xbox has been since the beginning. The original runs fucking directX and runs so similarly to PCs of the era under the hood that porting shit to it is famously easy. It’s why the homebrew scene for it was so mind bogglingly huge.
Numerous times at E3 when they had demo units of new consoles people saw that the debug menus meant for staff were some mangled form of the current (at the time) Windows OS.
Most modern game consoles don’t use much specialty hardware anymore. The OG Switch uses the nvidea shield CPU just downclocked, and can run android easily. Some emulators literally run better on the Switch through Android than as homebrew “native” apps.
God that makes me feel old. Yeah, Garry’s Mod is literally named that because it’s his mod. He started making it as a teen, released it for free for a long time, and then leveraged it into a job and company (FacePunch, they also made Rust a lot later).
I think Garry’s Mod 10 was the first paid release, and he and his team have just been updating the paid version since.
The game’s official site used to just be his blog, and I believe he still posts semi-regularly about game development, running a company, and life stuff. Always seemed to be a real stand up guy.
Or fan game developer. Or data miner. Or gaming youtuber. Or game tournament staff. Or the former actors of their various official “news” video segments. Or former American contractors for them (lots of “fun” stories from the 90’s and 00’s).
And how can we forget? Their 11th hour backstabbing of Sony on the planned CD addon for the SNES, choosing instead to go with Phillips to make the CD-i, is the whole reason Sony even entered the console wars. Out of fucking spite. The Playstation was originally planned to be a SNES addon like the Sega CD.
Please come back after you’ve worked in any customer service position interacting with the general populace. Plenty of smart folks out there, but just as many people that absolutely are not.
It’s a known fact that Wii U sales suffered to a significant degree because people thought it was an addon to the Wii, not a new thing. There are a lot of other issues with it, but that is a knowm factor found by market research.
This is my first Nintendo system since the NES. I’ve never been a big fan of their first-party properties when I’ve played on others’ consoles, although I am interested in the Switch Zelda games....
Wow, that’s certainly a take. How are they worse than Sony or fucking Microsoft? Microsoft was under IRS investigation at one point. They dragged thing out resulting in multiple millions of taxpayer money being wasted, ruined the professional careers of the lead names on the investigation, bribed politicians to cut so much funding from the IRS that another investigation of that scale is simply not possible, and bribed other politicians to sway laws in their favor to help make what they were investigated for much harder to pursue charges on.
Do you have any substantive shit that the other big names aren’t guilty of as well? I’d love to hear it!
Oof. Yeah, if you’ve only played Phantom “go back to the same temple for the tenth time” Hourglass and Breath Of The Wild with it’s almost non-existent story, I can absolutely understand the disappointment.
Phantom Hourglass was pretty disliked even by fans at the time. The touchscreen control focus and the damn ocean temple re-runs were quite contreversial.
Breath of the Wild was the series’s first attempt at open world, non-linear gameplay and is incredibly different from other games in the series. Very light on story and characters. Unfortunately they’ve confirmed open world is the planned standard going forward.
The real “core” 3D games are Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess. For 2D, A Link To The Past and Link’s Awakening.
Twilight Princess is probably the most accessible for someone not super familiar with the franchise, and the least burdened by old school design decisions. It’s what I would consider the pinnacle of classic 3D Zelda. Took all the good stuff from the two N64 games (what most people seem to think are the best) and polished the hell out of it.
What got me was the Triforce hunt. Nearly no guidance/signposting, constant trips back to tingle, then back to a warp point, then sail around, rinse repeat. Ugh.
Which they walked back and hacen’t tried again since. Their latest console is also still backwards compatible with games from the first xbox.
I’m legitimately hopeful. Won’t ever stop the best option from being piracy and open source emulators on PC, but Microsoft’s track record for backwards compat is sparkling.
Sure, it’s not true hardware based backwards compat. It works by using the disc as a key to download and run a full copy of the original game + an emulation layer customized for the specific game, so if you don’t have internet or they pull the plug on their store servers you can’t just use the disk alone. If you lose the disc or it breaks, you have to buy the game again from their online store. Also, I’ve encountered some crashes and minor emulation issues with some titles. Poor, poor Kotor.
It’s sad, but that’s still leagues better than their competitors in the console market.
Sony makes you buy the old games again on each platform. Standard “Virtual Console” type shit. Thankfully, they usually do this by making a general emulator that homebrew folks can later shove non-supported games into.
Nintendo. Nintendo. Are you shitting me? An ongoing subscription to keep access to the same 30 year old games you’ve been reselling since the Wii?
You can use homebrew to shove other games in, but you risk a ban from their online services. Also, if you’re already doing homebrew, the consoles they offer games for this way on the Switch are more than easily handled by Retroarch running as homebrew.
Mario 3D All Stars? Take all the time and money to get a half port half emulation solution working on the Switch for one Gamecube and and one Wii game, sell it as time limited, don’t include the direct sequel to the Wii game that was built on the same fucking game engine in the package… and then never use that tech again? Are you fucking kidding me?
That last one shouldn’t surprise me too bad though. They managed to emulate the N64 on the Gamecube, and only used it for Legend of Zelda. Once in a limited preorder bonus for Wind Waker, and also in a limited Nintendo Power magazine bonus disc for subscribing.
It’s also important to remember that being aware of the psychological effects of something does not make you immune to those effects, or even consistently lessen them in a measurable way.
I was going to say replaying but I feel like that limits the question to games like Prey or Fallout New Vegas that have endings and games like The Sims 2 or Cities Skylines where you can play indefinitely end up excluded....
Metal Gear Solid V (on PC with mods that greatly expand/enhance free roam, and add more side ops)
Tomba 1 and 2 (Tombi in the EU)
Chrono Trigger
Megaman Legends (love the sequel, but haven’t ever completed it, life keeps getting in the way)
Castlevania Syphony of the Night
Sonic Adventure (it’s trash, but fun trash, especially with mods)
Sonic Mania, Sonic 3 and Knuckles
Minecraft
Some that I haven’t come back to in a while, but I’m overdue:
Ape Escape
Crash Bandicoot (1-3)
Spyro (1-3)
Digimon World 3
Any of the GBA or DS Castlevanias
Actraiser
Rayman 2
Megaman Battle Network series(3 and 4 are my favorite entries)
Dissidia Duodecim
Zone of the Enders 2
God Hand
Wipeout Pulse/Pure
Pretty much any Kirby game
Most of these games I find just plain fun. Thanks for asking, I was starting to get burned out and not finding stuff as fun, but writing this out has me hankering to revisit some old favorites again.
The last one I know of is WobbleDogs, but I’m not sure how much of that is in depth virtual pet vs haha funni streamer bait.
Pretty sure there’s a fan made chao garden game that came out last year. Can’t speak to it’s depth or quality though.
A real mad genius move would be to make a linked desktop game and phone app, like how you could download chaos into the VMU from the Dreamcast Adventure titles and into the GBA Tiny Chao Garden from the GameCube remasters. Get the in depth experience on PC and the tamagotchi/digimon pedometer pet stuff on mobile.
Do all sorts of cross promotion with other indie games, like how Team Fortress 2 used to have special cosmetics unlock if you owned certain other games.
As far as “pocket” pets go, there’s a few Digimon “remakes” for Android. Digital Tamers: ReBorn was a good one. I think it’s free on itch.io
Lego Island was one of my first PC games, and I spent absolute ages in it. Still have my CD. As an adult I find it a little too zany and wacky for an in-depth revisit, but as a young imaginative ADHD boy it was an amazing little sandbox to run around in. So many different ways to interact with things, ways to customize your island through different characters changing stuff when you clicked on it, and just enough mysterious things to keep the imagination going.
I’m looking forward to the decomp that MattKC is working on for it.
Outside of that, I played a TON of the old flash and shockwave games on the Lego website. I felt so cool knowing extra lore around the mask of light movie because I had been playing the Bionicle flash game. They also had a lot of neat puzzle games.
The concept of the programmable Spybots, and the K’Nex programmable kit really jump started my interest in programming as a kid too.
For me it’s this plus the level of focus I feel like I need to not get my shit kicked in.
Maybe I’m just bad, but there’s a good number of encounters where a few bad moves can put you in a slow spiral to defeat. Plus there’s just a lot to consider at any given moment, it’s a deep combat system.
When my only time to play is after my kid is down for the night, a lot of the time I’m looking to relax and not think super hard.
This is GREAT news. This means they can focus on making great original games and not be dragged into working on call of duty. Please just give me a new Spyro.
People forget, you never owned the games you bought, physical cartridge or not. The instruction booklets state that you bought a license. It’s the bullshit argument console manufacturers use/used to go after emulation developers.
Having a copy of the game that can’t be fucked with by errant updates to the game files or by updates to the device you use to run it is a wonderful thing, but don’t lie to yourselves about the legality of ownership. That’s been a busted clusterfuck for longer than most users on here have been alive.
Friendly tip: For singleplayer games, you can always disable the game’s built in AA solution and use reshade for AA instead. If you have extra GPU power you can also use reshade to add all sorts of other graphical effects if you’re willing to fiddle around with things to get it looking good.
If you have an NVidia card, sometimes PCGamingWiki has instructions for tweaks you can do in Profile Inspector to adjust how the driver applies AA to a game too.
Yeah, AAA for quite a while now has really only had any impact on graphics, and maybe on how playtested it was. That is one hell of a load bearing maybe. No correlation to quality on any other metrics.
It seems that a demo is indeed coming imminently. As spotted by Wario64 on X/Twitter, a trailer for a Final Fantasy VII Rebirth demo can currently be seen on the Explore tab on the US PSN. This trailer appears on the US PSN for now, but has not appeared in other territories at this time. This trailer appears on the US PSN for...
And that people will hopefully riot about paid mods again. The Skyrim framework flew under the radar because of clever timing. There’s no way it goes un-noticed on their newest flagship game.
Common in a good bunch of games. Happens when the game tries to use an animation that’s scaled for a larger 3D “skeleton”. It’s trying to use an animation here that’s sized for an adult Sim, so when the animation says “hands go here, elbows here, shoulders here, etc” it stretches to the adult proportions and makes this unholy mess.
See also: Smash Bros Brawl’s Longchu/Gannon-chu glitch/mod of Pikachu’s 3D model with Gannon’s moves and animations, Zelda Twilight Princess speed runs where you activate cutscenes for human form Link while in Wolf form so you get to watch what looks like a mangled twitching roadkill wolf propped up on top of a horse.
I’m starting to find that HUDs in games clutter the screen and take away from being fully immersed in the game. I like games that force you to pay attention to what’s going on in the game and not numbers/markers on the edges of the display. What are some of your favorite games to play with no HUD? Here are a few of mine:...
Even though each game is a player driven RPG, there’s a canon “through line” of major events from 1 to 2 to New Vegas. 3 and 4 are set far enough away or in a different enough period of time that the plot impact is more minor.
Personally though, I hope this is less of an adaptation and more of a “side stories in the setting”.
How can it have expenses at all if it’s just a bank account held by the guy’s brother? Why does it need to be a charity or exist at all if they’re just donating the money to another group, why be a middle man?
This whole thing reeks, imo.
Edit: Duh, stupid of me. The charity streams and website cost money. Still stinks. How does that add up to 11k expenses one year and 29k expenses another year. How does that make any sense?
Probably over a decade ago they did a cross promotion with TF2 when TF2 was doing that sort of thing for unlocking exclusive hats.
If I remember right… You got some extra starting gear for being a TF2 player, had to play up through a certain point in the starting quests or for a few hours, and then you got the default starter Spiral Knight helmet as a hat for TF2. I planned on just doing the minimum and getting back to PUTTIN A DISPENSER HERE, but I didn’t end up going back to TF2 that night. That said, I think I only played Spiral Knights once or twice more. Couldn’t even get my TF2 playing friends to join me on it just to get them the hat.
I hate to say it but it might be worth looking for a job outside the games industry. It’s openly known that most gaming companies get away with terrible working conditions and employee treatment. They get away with it because there’s a revolving door of people willing to put up with shit treatment so they can say they got a job in the industry.
It’s fine if that matters to you, but you have to decide how much it matters and stick to your line in the sand. Personally I’d rather work something less interesting and have better pay and reasonable work/life balance.
If you like it, check out the Warioland series, particularly Warioland 4. Pizza Tower is very much a love letter to that series, with tons of added movement tech geared towards speedrunner type shenanigans.
Squadron 42 is the single player campaign of Star Citizen, that is supposed to launch as a separate game. It's basically a small portion of Star Citizen, but with a story and ending. I'm still not confident; waited too long for that.
Sorry to bear the bad news, but Elite: Dangerous has abandoned developing any further VR functionality.
To my knowledge VR still works in ship cockpits and is still amazing there, but the last big expansion’s big draw added new on foot content that doesn’t support VR at all. In VR it displays in headset as a giant 2D screen in front of you, if it chooses to work with the headset at all.
A Starfield remake, of sorts, has been created in 48 hours, incorporating seamless travel between planets, something missing from the actual Bethesda RPG.
According to Hans-Kristian Arntzen, a prominent open-source developer working on Vkd3d, a DirectX 12 to Vulkan translation layer, Starfield is not interacting properly with graphics card drivers.
To be even more direct: there’s a huge overlap between the circles of “works in software dev” and “contributes to open source projects”.
I really try to do different things at home than work, but I’ve definitely contributed fixes to game mods (why do so many modders fail to do null checks before trying to interact with short lived shit like projectiles?) and open source software I’ve needed to do stuff.
This really isn’t a good take when the “random guy” has provided proof, open source code demonstrating, and a relatively easy way to verify his claims (using his code).
It’s all there out in the open if anyone has specific counter points, and this type of thing isn’t an unusual situation with Bethesda developed games, or games on this engine.
Half Life 2 doesn’t truly need the first one. It adds some context and there’s some callbacks, but you can totally start with 2.
Avoiding spoilers as much as possible, in HL1 something goes wrong at a research facility. Main character fights his way through then gets “knocked out” at the end. HL2 picks up ~20 years later after an entirely new big bad took advantage of the events in HL1 and conquered the world. MC “wakes up” and is dropped right in on a train into an occupied city.
There’s decent plot connections, but you aren’t missing out on anything gameplay wise or largely plot impacting, as the game world has changed so drastically.
All that said, if you want to play HL1 and aren’t interested in it in terms of it as a tech marvel of the time it was created, you can just play Black Mesa. It’s a fan remake that got the greenlight from the original creators to be sold, and by most accounts is a better experience for modern gamers.
For context, Bethesda provided minimal support to Obsidian and gave them an absolutely absurdly short development time frame to make the game in. I think it was only a year.
The bugginess isn’t all their fault. The game director even released a free mod or two after the game released to do some rebalancing and add a survival mode to it.
See linked posting. I’ve commented there with a link to a CLI tool in Python that allows downloading of IA collections. I’ve submitted a patch to enable specifying start and end points so that it’s easier to resume downloading a huge collection, or to allow multiple people to split up the work....
Larian has delayed the release of Baldur’s Gate 3, currently on pace to possibly be 2023’s Game of the Year, until they can figure out how to make split-screen work on Series S.
Xbox Console Sales Are Tanking (kotaku.com) angielski
Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers is a gorgeous free SNES-style arcade racer, built using Doom Legacy (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
You can get it here: www.kartkrew.org/index.html
Nintendo forces Garry's Mod to delete 20 years of content — Garry confirms Nintendo is behind Steam Workshop purge | Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
Nintendo is literally a depressing company right now…
Got a Switch today, need some recommendations.
This is my first Nintendo system since the NES. I’ve never been a big fan of their first-party properties when I’ve played on others’ consoles, although I am interested in the Switch Zelda games....
Legend of Zelda angielski
What is your favourite LOZ game? My fave is twilight princess as it was the first zelda game I played. Being it on the Wii....
EXCLUSIVE: Xbox President Sarah Bond has set up a new team dedicated to game preservation and forward compatibility (www.windowscentral.com) angielski
The New York Times Simulator - A free casual game about manufacturing consent (www.youtube.com) angielski
Fully playable in the browser here!
What are some games you find yourself frequently coming back to? angielski
I was going to say replaying but I feel like that limits the question to games like Prey or Fallout New Vegas that have endings and games like The Sims 2 or Cities Skylines where you can play indefinitely end up excluded....
Massive Pokémon Fan Game Site Taken Down Without Warning Via DMCA (kotaku.com) angielski
Peak pet simulator gameplay (sh.itjust.works) angielski
Bastard is truly immortal.
Let's discuss: LEGO Games (beehaw.org) angielski
The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!...
Baldur's Gate 3 leads BAFTA Games Awards with 10 nominations (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Crash Bandicoot 4, Spyro Reignited Trilogy Dev Toys For Bob Is Splitting From Activision (www.gameinformer.com) angielski
This is GREAT news. This means they can focus on making great original games and not be dragged into working on call of duty. Please just give me a new Spyro.
There was beauty in the simplicity (lemmy.world) angielski
My condolences to anyone playing modern AAA titles in 1080p (lemmy.dbzer0.com) angielski
How did we get here?
EA flop Immortals of Aveum reportedly cost around $125 million, former dev says "a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Personally I would not call Immortals of Aveum an AAA game. 😅...
FF7 Rebirth demo likely releasing today (www.ign.com) angielski
It seems that a demo is indeed coming imminently. As spotted by Wario64 on X/Twitter, a trailer for a Final Fantasy VII Rebirth demo can currently be seen on the Explore tab on the US PSN. This trailer appears on the US PSN for now, but has not appeared in other territories at this time. This trailer appears on the US PSN for...
Bethesda confirms they are working on releasing new features you asked for, from city maps, to mod support, to all new ways of traveling next year for Starfield (www.reddit.com) angielski
The Sims can be a fever dream sometimes (startrek.website) angielski
Good gaming experiences with no HUD? angielski
I’m starting to find that HUDs in games clutter the screen and take away from being fully immersed in the game. I like games that force you to pay attention to what’s going on in the game and not numbers/markers on the edges of the display. What are some of your favorite games to play with no HUD? Here are a few of mine:...
GTA 6 is likely to skip PC again and only launching on current gen consoles (kotaku.com) angielski
I’m confused why Kotaku mentioning next gen in the title when Rockstar only commented on current generation PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
Fallout TV Show - Teaser Trailer (m.youtube.com) angielski
Star Citizen Just Had its Biggest Crowdfunding Day Ever With $3.5 Million in 24 Hours (techraptor.net) angielski
The Completionist's Charity Has Been Lying To You For Years (www.youtube.com) angielski
deleted_by_author
Unity is reviewing its product portfolio and says layoffs are "likely" (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Stop using Fandom (www.youtube.com) angielski
Pizza Tower - Halloween Update! (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Space sim Squadron 42 is "feature-complete" and gunning for Starfield's lunch with massive new video (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Squadron 42 is the single player campaign of Star Citizen, that is supposed to launch as a separate game. It's basically a small portion of Star Citizen, but with a story and ending. I'm still not confident; waited too long for that.
Princess Peach: Showtime! | Nintendo Direct 9.14.2023 (www.youtube.com) angielski
Unity adding a fee for devs for each time a game is installed, after certain thresholds (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
Starfield remake created in two days actually lets you fly seamlessly from space to the surface (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
A Starfield remake, of sorts, has been created in 48 hours, incorporating seamless travel between planets, something missing from the actual Bethesda RPG.
Open source community figures out problems with performance in Starfield (www.destructoid.com) angielski
According to Hans-Kristian Arntzen, a prominent open-source developer working on Vkd3d, a DirectX 12 to Vulkan translation layer, Starfield is not interacting properly with graphics card drivers.
What games have you played due to FOMO? angielski
FOMO stands for Fear Of Missing Out....
Fans won't hear anything about The Elder Scrolls 6 for years, Pete Hines says (www.techradar.com) angielski
Starfield is Bethesda's Least Buggiest Game to Date, Say Sources (insider-gaming.com)
Half-Life 2 RTX, An RTX Remix Project - Announce Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Help back up the Great 78 Collections before the Record Companies force The Internet Archive to take them down! (yiffit.net)
See linked posting. I’ve commented there with a link to a CLI tool in Python that allows downloading of IA collections. I’ve submitted a patch to enable specifying start and end points so that it’s easier to resume downloading a huge collection, or to allow multiple people to split up the work....
Fallout 4 has been released on GOG (www.gog.com) angielski
Microsoft’s Xbox Series S Parity Demands Are Now Handing Sony Free Wins (www.forbes.com) angielski
Larian has delayed the release of Baldur’s Gate 3, currently on pace to possibly be 2023’s Game of the Year, until they can figure out how to make split-screen work on Series S.