Game musings and news

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Thad
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Thad » Wed Oct 17, 2018 12:22 am

Analogue is making a Genesis clone; 8bitdo is making wireless controllers for it.

Sounds like they've got the audio figured out and everything.

Also sounds like it's just going to be cartridge-based, with no official support for playing ROMs off an SD card. On the one hand, that's kind of expected given that was already the case on the NES and SNES clones. On the other, the notable difference between Sega and Nintendo is that Sega sells Genesis ROMs. You can buy Gunstar Heroes and Phantasy Star IV for a buck a pop on Steam. I like buying cartridges (and anyway I've got an EverDrive, so I can already play Genesis games off a microSD card, on a regular old Genesis), but I feel like Analogue has a good reason to support downloaded ROMs on the Sg even though it doesn't on the Nt/Super Nt.

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Thad
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Thad » Sat Oct 27, 2018 11:56 am

Boy, RDR2 sure is one of those games that makes me think about buying a console.

I don't think I'm gonna. I've got too many games already. Hell, if I really wanna play a new RDR game, I could head up to the used game store and pick up Undead Nightmare; I've never played that.

But I suppose if a couple years go by, this console generation winds down, and it never gets a PC release? Yeah, I guess I'll probably pick up something I can play it on. (Probably a PS4, because Spider-Man looks pretty great too.)

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Mongrel
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Mongrel » Sat Oct 27, 2018 1:28 pm

Man, I kept reading that as R2D2 and was very confused for a while.
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Niku
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Niku » Sat Oct 27, 2018 10:59 pm

Spider-man feels like something you'd really like, Thad. Well, I don't know gameplay wise -- it gets a little long in the tooth when it comes to doing allllll the side content, but the combat system feels like "snappier, bouncier" Arkham in a lot of ways. I found it much more fun to 100% complete than Arkham Knight, at least. Storywise though, I think you'd appreciate all the clever things it both does and doesn't do with the Spider-man mythos to remix it into their own kind of thing. I didn't love every choice it made, but I loved that they were making it something very much apart from basically every other iteration of the character.

Also I just finished loading RDR2 on the PS4 (it's a present for the lady; I never really got into the first one and most likely won't end up playing this one, though maybe I'll get the bug watching her). Taking two hours to install off of the data disc and then the play disc while also downloading the day one updates and punching in the DLC codes really makes me remember how much I love the seamless simplicity of console games over PC games.
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Blossom
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Blossom » Sat Oct 27, 2018 11:01 pm



With the 100 hour work weeks thing, followed by the outpouring of Approved Developer Statements that swore that wasn't the case, plus what the results seem to be ... I dunno. Seems bad.
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mharr
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby mharr » Sat Oct 27, 2018 11:19 pm

I'm thinking I only buy from small dev teams where the workers are the shareholders until the games industry sorts its shit out. Publicly traded companies cannot be trusted to maintain even a pretence of humanity.

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Mongrel
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Mongrel » Sat Oct 27, 2018 11:23 pm

It's for filthy console peasants only and looks to be so for the foreseeable future, so it's a moot point in my case anyway.
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Bal
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Bal » Sun Oct 28, 2018 4:06 am

It's something you can do to any bounty you have on your horse. The "Hit them to shut them up" button, which is circle, is available at all times.

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IGNORE ME
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby IGNORE ME » Sun Oct 28, 2018 1:07 pm

Sir I know I gladly buy most of your products on the well-advertised concept of being able to sexually assault and murder disadvantaged women but sir when a morally ambiguous cowboy does it that's just out of line.

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Bal
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Bal » Tue Oct 30, 2018 2:40 pm

An interesting look at Star Control 2


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mharr
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby mharr » Tue Oct 30, 2018 3:02 pm

War*Stories is looking like it'll be a great series all round. Richard Garriott discovering that no gm survives contact with the players, Looking Glass inventing the Stealth genre almost by accident, but then leaning so hard into the idea they almost broke it.

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Re: Game musings and news

Postby WingSounds » Tue Oct 30, 2018 6:20 pm

Bal wrote:STAR CONTROL II


The amount of time I wasted with these... All aliens are friends, of course, but my special favourites were the Mycon, plot stuff aside (or... even because of?!) and, of course, everyone's favourite resiliently plucky sprouts:



I do not think there's a chance in hell we get the cash to help them reclaim the rights, though. At the moment, all my spare funds are going towards medical and political budgeting. Still. To dream...

Edit'd! mharr, I should probably read more gaming press. Truth is, I mostly either read VN of questionable quality, or book-y-books these days. I love this stuff, it's just, finally getting back at my backlog... It's quite tempting.

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Bal
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Bal » Tue Oct 30, 2018 6:56 pm

Star Control 2 was the pet game of this community for a long time. I don't know if Sharkey's adventures in the game are still around, but we had huge threads, particularly devoted to the Ur'Quan Masters release of the game.

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WingSounds
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby WingSounds » Tue Oct 30, 2018 7:04 pm

I'll go looking for them!

To be honest, it was one of those games I played enough times to have come up with 'deep self-created lore' of the most pathetic kind. Since I rarely admitted liking games in public, it had to be all sub-rosa. But, oh, the voyages of cherished Fwiffo...
Unfortunately, I don't know if I could still be lethal in PVP. Maybe lethally depressing, but, that's an entirely different skillset...

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mharr
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby mharr » Tue Oct 30, 2018 7:21 pm

Beh. Origins could have had so much love if it just concentrated on being a user expandable engine for making fanfic cartoon space adventures. I can't look at Wardell now without thinking he's going to unzip and a Slitheen will clamber out.

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Mongrel
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Mongrel » Tue Oct 30, 2018 8:45 pm

There really are so few games which capture exactly what SCII does. Still one of my all-time top three and one of the few of my all-time favourites I can still replay.
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mharr
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby mharr » Tue Oct 30, 2018 9:13 pm

A big thing it got right with the Space War combat was having all ships visible at all times. Unless they were invisible, obv. Almost all later overhead spaceship games rapidly degenerate into targeting computer fights using weapons that reach way offscreen. All it needed was extra ships and smoother movement. Most everything else is a case of ain't broke.

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WingSounds
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby WingSounds » Wed Oct 31, 2018 10:32 am

For me, it's definitely the plot and characters, but it's a perfect example of how narrative enhances gameplay; not works against it. Ah, putting it this way, you always knew what sector you were in, learned to recognise ships when you saw them frequently, if there'd been multiple classis of ships, I feel the internal designs would've remained consistent...

mharr wrote:I can't look at Wardell now without thinking he's going to unzip and a Slitheen will clamber out.


It's such an awful, petty thing, too. But so is life - got to keep going, right?
Since we're waxing philosophical, another type of sci-fi game I'd love to see is something stabbing an attempt at being 'super-hard.'

Fleets that you position over a long period of time, targeting positions estimated to travel in years.
I can't imagine it making for an interesting game outside of a short, indie 'play-and-forget' though, but the idea is cool!..

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Mongrel
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Mongrel » Thu Nov 01, 2018 3:04 pm

A good friend of mine, Stan, whom I've known for nearly twenty years is having a game release today. This isn't some one man operation, in fact it's a Zynga game - wait wait come back - but Stan was the director and project lead. This is his game.

Stan is a deeply moral man (he's very religious, but in the good way) and an intelligent one too. Work having taken him to game dev hell, he proceeded to preach (and office politic) to the damned. He got to be very, very good at it.

Behind the scenes, Stan's been describing his struggles of the past two years, of truly changing the culture, trying to convince the senior executives to make the game fun and engaging, using best practices, instead of following the older, exploitative models (though, apparently Zynga were already backing away from their past notoriety with other recent releases, so they were already receptive to this). Of trying to work around big name egos who had similar directorial positions at the company, and who kept trying to push for the old ways, relying on their names or track records.

Stan's done incredible work to sideline those big egos coasting on past glories and get senior management on board, being the type who runs silent and deep, waiting for the perfect moment to strike (which in this case mostly meant strategically-timed presentations which blew everyone away). He did this not just with persuasive argument, but with metrics and hard data of all sorts, with a wealth of information which simply overwhelmed those big egos, hell he even converted some of them, if only because they can at least tell which way the wind is blowing. It worked at least in part because he framed things very scientifically, and never overtly "preached" or spoke of morals directly; it turns out people really prefer games which don't exploit them - gosh golly, who knew?

So, after hearing the blow by blow of his conversions and corporate monster-slaying for two years, I'm genuinely happy to say his game is being released today:



Of course it still has that hilariously garish Zynga look to it, but the underlying gameplay should be something pretty great, and quite the opposite of what you'd expect when you hear "Zynga game".
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Grath » Mon Nov 12, 2018 12:50 pm

So VR on PC is still pretty fiddly to get going right, but holy shit Superhot VR is nuts. My arms and legs are sore from an hour and a half going through the latter half of the game.

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