Game musings and news

[MarsDragon]

Huh. I stopped visiting them when they got a little too clickbait for me, but that's still sad.

[Thad]

Yeah, and I'm sure the creeping clickbait was a mandate from higher up the chain; Parish alludes to "dizzying shifts in strategic direction from on high on what seemed like a monthly basis at times."

Hardly unique to USG, of course. I spent a decade watching AV Club slowly transition from unique voice to cookie-cutter clickbait hell before I finally stopped reading it entirely. One of the interesting things about reading Rabin's blog is seeing him occasionally pull back the curtain and acknowledge that the staff hated that shit as much as the readers did.

The last decade or so of pop culture websites puts me in mind of the Dark Knight line about how you either die a hero or live to see yourself become the villain.

[Destynova]

Mars, who is your avatar? He looks like he needs a nap.

[Caithness]

That's Braiking Boss from Casshan

[MarsDragon]

He is a powerful robot and therefore has no need of sleep.

[mharr]

My personal favourite part of CDPR's fall from (((grace))) is this detail:

Another developer asked whether CD Projekt’s directors felt it was hypocritical to make a game about corporate exploitation while expecting that their employees work overtime. The response was vague and noncommital.

https://outline.com/93CYw8

The whole thing is a beautiful gamedev morality play. Promoting your company as a champion of Gamer Kulture is free money until they decide you've betrayed them. Turns out the gator swamp is a fickle ally, who could ever have guessed.

[Thad]

Not an original observation, but an evergreen one. The old "make a 100-minute toy commercial about a bunch of scrappy underdogs fighting a villain named Lord Business" maneuver.

[zaratustra]

so if you like Deltarune and Yume Nikki and want another JRPG featuring stabby children you might want to look into OMORI

it's basically Deltarune if Chara wasn't a disconnected set of creepy mumblings but a - maybe not realistic but coherent understanding of what would make a kid into a creepy, stabby mute.

It's a bit of a heavy game though. you should definitely not play it if family tragedies are less than abstract to you.

[Newbie]

Thanks for the tip, Zara; I was curious, but I was getting ambivalent static from my usual sources for game impressions. I'd like to give it a try, time permitting.

[zaratustra]

Thanks for the tip, Zara; I was curious, but I was getting ambivalent static from my usual sources for game impressions. I'd like to give it a try, time permitting.

Time permitting might be an issue, because it's a slow game. The "main" path took me 17 hours to finish, and the "side" path adds a few hours of side content on top of that.

Plus, the combat never goes too deep. You just choose your best equipment and best skills, and pretty much any main battle never becomes a issue.

[Newbie]

Oh, that's good info! I've got a project I'm working on in my spare time that's due before the end of January, so this is gonna have to wait a bit. I really like what I've seen of Omori's art, though.

[nosimpleway]

It's a bit of a heavy game though. you should definitely not play it if family tragedies are less than abstract to you.

It`s weird, I read u` on Jimmy and the `ulsating Mass and watched L`s of games with similar overall themes of terrible things ha``ening to small children like someone with a sore tooth `rodding at it with my tongue

[zaratustra]

It's a bit of a heavy game though. you should definitely not play it if family tragedies are less than abstract to you.

It`s weird, I read u` on Jimmy and the `ulsating Mass and watched L`s of games with similar overall themes of terrible things ha``ening to small children like someone with a sore tooth `rodding at it with my tongue

Probably worse than Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass. Maybe not as bad as Hereditary.

[Thad]

Can anybody recommend another gaming news/review/analysis site that isn't awful?

I've started reading Critical Distance and so far it's struck me as a site for thoughtful, intersectional analysis of games and culture. It doesn't necessarily tick the news/review boxes, but it's got some interesting things to say in terms of analysis.

I also read Gaming On Linux, which obviously is specialized and not a general-purpose game site, but there's not really such a thing as a Linux-exclusive game, either; most every game they cover is also available for Windows, and a lot of them are available for consoles too. You could describe it as a site that primarily covers indie games and you wouldn't be wrong.

[Büge]

[Thad]

Ars: Super High-Fidelity Mario: The quest to find original gaming audio samples



I've mentioned the MSU-1 before -- a SNES add-on chip created by the emulation community that can add PCM audio -- and I've added that for the most part, the results have really not been my cup of tea.

But it seems like it would be great for something like this. If you're going to replace the music in a SNES game with PCM audio, I could get behind replacing it with recreations of the original audio using higher-quality versions of the same samples.

[Mongrel]

hahahaha

[KingRoyal]

I'm way excited for this one. Arkane has put out some of my favorite games of the 2010s and only seem to get better with each release, and with this one they seem to be pulling in elements from Dark Souls and Hitman, while also letting players have fun with all the cool powers.

[Thad]

From Dotemu. They also worked on Streets of Rage 4, so presumably they know something about making modern games in the arcade brawler style.

[Friday]

fun fact: even as a kid, I thought the "Donatello does machines" line was raunchy.

And also had a crush on Raph, but that's every girl.