A little lesson about technical projects: You will quickly reach 95% completion and have something amazing to show off. Then, 95% of the work is completing that last 5% in order to make the prototype usable.

AI is good at making itself look ready. It is nowhere near ready.

I think this is why a certain scrolling shooter at the endgame of a certain game closely located to a tomato didn’t emotionally work for me. I can do the math - it can’t just throw that many other players at the problem to get me through the enemy ships, and the game needed to be playable off the internet since little else of it was online.

The above poster is likely to become a racist terrorist, given their history of comments getting downvoted.

/logic

FUNKYHEART: In which the people who wrote that bunny-hopping script for Half-Life 2 speedrunning made a video game, in which they’re also strange cyber demon lesbians.

For some of the cases where enemies are getting multiple turns in a row, using an S-Break (RT+D-pad) can be a good way to get yourself back on positive ground. If you get a turn, it also helps to give defensive buffs to the VIP before the enemy attacks them.

That said, I have heard that while Nightmare difficulty poses a great challenge to some masochists and optimizers, it’s not a difficulty level the developers really balanced around.

Just tried it out. I’m unfamiliar with the extraction shooter genre, but it was interesting, I’m not necessarily opposed to tactical complexity for its own sake. I died to a minefield, and then on the next go didn’t have a weapon; so some of the mechanics come across a little bit unclear.

I’m glad it has a demo because I know a lot of people don’t enjoy characters like that; there’s some great heartfelt conversations once you get to know the characters, but you have to be able to stand 20+ narmy and overly polite banter sequences to get to the moments where each of them surprises you. If you get that far, you usually get invested.

I REALLY like what they’ve done with the combat in this one. Even on normal, I was losing early boss fights for playing without consideration and using nothing but the enemy’s elemental weakness. I just finished Chapter 1, and I especially liked having moments where half the party was dead, and attacking was actually a good option to give my team a moment to revive each other, thanks to the stun/delay systems.

I wonder how much they’re paying Rockstar to delay The Only New Release of that generation; which will doubtless be available on PS5/XSX anyway.

There was still back and forth between PlayStation and Xbox. For the PS3, Sony went bonkers on architecture, and as a result Xbox won a lot of players. With the Xbox One, they made stupid plays on TV access and always-online, and Sony succeeded against their foot-shooting. Then, with the Series S|X, Xbox still lost but won back some consumers by introducing service-based game rental, which Sony followed suit on later.

The two have bettered each other by serving as competition to capitalize on the other’s anti-consumer actions, and by at least competing on pricing and ideas. Imagine if people called out the Xbox One’s always online, but PlayStation didn’t exist.

“lol, too bad gamers”

Here’s a question. For ages back, the console market had three contenders. Who do you think would compete in the trifecta between Nintendo and Sony?

Normally, PC markets stay aside from that conversation, but it might be Valve and the Steam Deck. I’m just not sure if Valve is the type to be interested in running big promotions at Wal-Mart by Mountain Dew displays.

If you want something a bit closer to Starfox, rather than an all-range flight arena, try Rogue Flight. It definitely evokes the power fantasy feeling, living up the classic arcade trope of “one ship being readied on a mission to save humanity”. There’s some very big-name voice actor work in it, as well.

Another good game for the “power fantasy” trope, though it’s a bit more outside the target, is Ace Combat 7. Or, perhaps any games in the series, but this one is pretty accessible. The combat is close to what you’d get in X-Wing/Tie-Fighter, but with fighter planes. It breaks from realism a little bit where needed to make the stunts fun. And, the story very much orients around the silent player character being “scary tough” in a fight, to the point enemy fighters are retreating just from seeing your wing markings.

Estelle, from Trails in the Sky.

She’s introduced as a bit of a cocky moron who constantly has to be wrangled by her more mature brother. But, there’s a slow development of competency where she starts to become decently sufficient at all the things her brother is good at, while he meanwhile lays bare some heavy emotional flaws - many of which Estelle excels at processing (call it a feminine trope, but it works).

Of note, all the rest of the Trails series have had male leads, and their pace of character development ground to a complete halt.

I wish it was easier to predict when the AI bubble is going to pop. There’s likely lots of money to be made shorting them, but it’s not something small investors can do easily - and there’s a real possibility some thousands of investors instead pull harder on the copiumand just lie to themselves for the next decade that “it’s almost there bro, we just need another lake for cooling our doubled power output”

I think it’s perhaps more necessary than you might think.

We have a lot of entries appearing in Steam, yes, but a huge percentage of them are investor-driven, research-founded money farms. They intelligently gather players, and they successfully evade boycotting measures, but they don’t make people happy. And, the studios that went into them used to make such games but have been bought out and squeezed out by private equity.

If somebody really wants to play an online shooter, they’ll still play COD even if they hate it, IF it’s the only good option. The more new options appear, the less valuable those entrenched games get and the more likely they collapse entirely.

We’re kind of complacent with having people like Valve around making Steam, but we kind of need more people in that space for people to turn to as every major console gets enshittified. Even Gabe Newell won’t live forever.

I realize when you search Steam there’s a lot of successful iterations of the classic Fire Emblem formula. Makes me wonder if any teams have done the same for HOMM3. I remember there was the fanmade expansion for it, it seems viable to invent a story/system from scratch.

EDIT: I should read other comments before commenting.

I really hope we can reach a point where we don’t give this guy headlines.

“Trump declares that anybody that’s EVER made fun of him is currently being targeted by every international police force which he has command over, and also that the sky is purple” is a statement totally disconnected from reality. We DO NOT NEED an “Um, actually!” to disprove him.

That is a conclusion made in hindsight, the easiest place to make predictions. Not every studio has the same forms of public popularity and good will they can bank on.

Also, selling millions of copies is not an indicator of a studio’s upper bounds. Publishers - even indie-oriented ones - need the lightning in bottle releases to pay for games that didn’t do well. We can’t do an experiment where KC:D2 releases on two planet Earths, one with a DRM-free release and one with DRM, and say for certain that the second wouldn’t let them additionally fund another studio’s pet project.

Basically, given how many failed releases happen that we never hear about, it can be misrepresentative to point to some good games and say “See? Studios are able to pay their mortgage.” Denuvo is able to sell to studios, costing those studios money, in part by showing raw data (that we might not ever see) explaining how it promotes early sales.

My general guess: The delay is tied to Denuvo. Smart devs will launch with Denuvo so that pudding-headed pirates (my label for a certain small demographic among pirates) drooling over marketing will see the trailers, try to pirate, fail, be told by crackers to wait like 2-3 weeks for them to unlock it; but instead become impatient and buy the game full price.

But the time period to capture pudding heads is not constant, and is not perfectly predictable before release. So, the developer may not want to commit to a certain release schedule where they will release on GOG, dropping Denuvo at that same time. They might even want to reserve the possibility the game will go years without dropping DRM, if it’s somehow staying constantly popular, and constantly desired by pirates, and/or they can see that the hacking communities have failed to unlock it.

The original Fatal Frame trilogy are some of the best horror games I’ve played. Not only are they genuinely scary without using a lot of blood, but they have difficulty that connects well with the scariness.

It occasionally feels “unfair” and makes you feel vulnerable, but is still relatively doable so that you don’t get overwhelmed. At times you’ll be retreading old ground just trying to solve a puzzle when another ghost will come at you out of nowhere.

Now I wish Valve would implement Bluesky’s idea of blocklists.

Basically, the community would pool together to make voluntary lists of “Anti-woke mobs” that just troll through forums with rage bait, and add them to that list. It would require a level of trust, and tools to confirm each addition (eg, highlight a worst-case post from that user) but could start to clean things up.

They could also let users choose to hide posts from users below a certain Steam score, making it hard to occupy space with brand new accounts.