Game musings and news

[Brantly B.]

I want to play more Superhot but after Brontokon I find it impossible to do without people around to witness whenever I throw two ninja stars out to the sides and waste a couple of guys without looking.

And, uh, to pick me up off the ground when I mistake a virtual pool table for a real one and try to pull myself up on it.

[Yoji]

I want to play more Superhot but after Brontokon I find it impossible to do without people around to witness whenever I throw two ninja stars out to the sides and waste a couple of guys without looking.

It is great to not just sink a hole-in-one, but to do it with a witness.

And, uh, to pick me up off the ground when I mistake a virtual pool table for a real one and try to pull myself up on it.

It was my boy's birthday a couple weeks ago and we had a cool relative visiting, so we busted out the PSVR. Kiddo started playing the Last Guardian VR demo, which is really kind of amazing/alarming; Trico's something else entirely when he's life-sized and wants pets or food.

At one point Trico comes down to nuzzle you, and we both sort of put up our hands reflexively. Except this time I thought fast, grabbed a throw pillow, and put it in front of him so he could actually touch something soft. Same thing a few minutes later when there was a big door lever to pull; he put his hands to try and grab it, so I stuck my arm in front him and he grabbed on like he was actually working it.

[Brantly B.]

My dad would just laugh at me.

You're doing good, Yoji.

[mharr]

While it's more successful than the last round, this first generation of home VR does seem to be another lurching bunnyhop along the kerb. The engine will really start running when we can clip a thing to our spine that adds touch to these digital worlds.

We all know why.

[beatbandito]

Have fun explaining that you're stuck in that wheelchair for life because of a faulty Dominos™ flavor plugin for your Hatsune Miku virtual doll.

[Mongrel]

[beatbandito]

Does anyone think there's going to be an impact from RDR2 being a universally praised masterpiece that made the news for overworking staff while FO76 was developed on a very real design philosophy of "get it out there fast" and may well end in a class-action lawsuit? Or am I reading too far into this?

[mharr]

Does reinforcing the already established terrible norms count as impact? The only things that anger the majority audience are released products that don't live up to expectations for whatever reason, blatantly treating them as ambulatory wallets (with insufficiently gradual frog boiling), and stories that ask them to empathise with an out group. Why would anyone criticise Rockstar for not being lazy devstm?

I wonder what those 1980s Scottish schoolkids would have thought of their inevitable future as the soulless antagonist corporation from an airport cyberpunk thriller.

[Thad]

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.

I'm fucking loving it so far.

I've come to realize over time that a big part of what makes an open-world game enjoyable is how much fun the movement is. The acrobatics in Tomb Raider are an absolute delight; so are the rock climbing and gliding in BotW. Spider-Man may be the best of them all.

I love the map, too. I've never played an Assassin's Creed, so this is my first experience with an open-world game trying to duplicate a real city. I've only been to New York once (I saw Tim Curry in Spamalot and John Lithgow in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, so that should clue you in as to how long ago that was), and Midtown in this game isn't quite perfect but it's close enough to my memory that I'm goddamn impressed.

And there are a million other little touches that I'm just delighted by. The script is funny, and there are these wonderful little collisions of video game logic and comic-book suspension of disbelief -- I find out Spider-Man has abandoned 55 backpacks at various locations throughout New York over the past 8 years and my reaction is "Yeah, that makes sense." (And then there's a topper where he explains later that he won a lifetime supply of backpacks in a science contest.)

I'm loving just tooling around. I don't know that I'll 100% it, but I definitely get your point that it's more fun tooling around and looking for geegaws than Arkham Knight was.

So far it's the only game I've got on my PS4. I decided to pass on the DQ11 and Persona 5 sales (may as well finish DQ7 on my 2DS and Persona 4 on my PSTV), TA made a good point about not rewarding Rockstar for the RDR2 death march (though I still think I'll buy it used one of these days), and I've still got a fuckton of games I haven't finished or, in many cases, played.

I'm sure I'll get more PS4 games eventually. But for the moment, I'm perfectly happy with this one.

[Mongrel]

A friend of Starr and I from the MTG Seattle crowd works for Valve doing game architecture programming. He had mostly dropped out of our community close to a year ago, with maybe 1-2 comments all year. We just figured he'd grown disinterested and had moved on.

Turns out he was actually one of the main heavy-lifting programmers on the new Valve DCG game, Artifact, so yesterday he turned up all excited that he could finally talk about it, that'd he'd been not only programming a lot of the big back-end framework, but also got to learn game design from Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias. If you're curious as to exactly who he is, I'll just say that if you check the game credits, he's the one who's name is also a decent lunch.

But the neatest part was that he was the guy who actually got to launch the game:

I had the honor of launching the game by flipping these three switches while the company counted down, turning the key, pulling the knob up, and slamming the red button.

(The red button being wired to an Enter key)

At first he thought that was supposed to be secret, but a couple other Valve employees tweeted the image, so he figured the cat's already out of the bag. So now I can show you guys!

[Niku]

It's worth pointing out regarding Spider-man that the DLC is kinda very EH. It's more stuff to do, with the difficulty a bit cranked up (particularly in the second of the three so far), but the story is pretty significantly more shaggy and they don't really mix up the things you're doing from the main game in especially interesting ways. It's a lot of "doing combat challenges for a high score again .. but now you have to defeat enemies in specific areas of the arena as they light up!" type stuff. I'm still going through it all because a.) hey, I bought it and b.) it's still More Spider-Man and the game is still really fun to me beyond 100%, but I do think the DLC will kinda wipe the bloom off the rose a little bit for people who felt a little done already by the time the main game is over.

also c'mon valve, you can at least afford a steel battalion controller to repurpose

[Mongrel]

Actually the best part of the box is that it has an actual "3" on it. HEYOOOOO

[beatbandito]

That switch gets stuck half way.

[Mongrel]

One of my favourite jokes about that is that there's a Gabe voiceover for DOTA's T18 where he says things like "more than two but less than four kills" or "I'll ignore your email kills" rather than Triple Kill.

[Mongrel]

This is a direct shot at Valve. And some very welcome competition.

Though it's hilarious how many people are bitching that "But I don't want more game laauunnnnnnchers!"

[Mongrel]

It also seems Valve "coincidentally" decided to change the Valve store's take rate on the same day, though not half so generous and only for top-selling games:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/12/ ... e-revenue/

In an announcement posted late Friday, Valve said that it would lower its usual 30 percent take to 25 percent for any game's earnings beyond $10 million (including "game packages, DLC, in-game sales, and Community Marketplace game fees"). The platform fee reduces further to 20 percent for earnings that surpass $50 million.

[Smiler]

Steam is also currently fucking with how much traffic indie devs are getting, so that new rate probably won't effect anyone who isn't already making shitloads of money.

[zaratustra]

and now epic games has announced a steam-style storefront with only 12% cut

[Thad]

and now epic games has announced a steam-style storefront with only 12% cut

Tweet embeds aren't working for you either, huh?

[zaratustra]

nah i just can't be arsed