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Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Thu Mar 07, 2019 9:09 am
by True Perception

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Mon Mar 11, 2019 9:28 pm
by Delthazar
To The Moon / Finding Paradise devs Freebird have a new murder mystery thing called Imposter Factory coming... "one day" aka 2020 by RPS' reckoning

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/0 ... y-murders/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JRrRMUlJEA

On kinda the opposite end of the spectrum, Netflix is doing a Dragon's Dogma anime, of all things.

https://www.pcgamer.com/dragons-dogma-i ... lix-anime/

I probably absorbed a Steam key for Dragon's Dogma via Humble years ago and totally forgot about it. I'd play it, but I say something along the lines of "I should play this" about all kinds of stuff these days and then fall asleep instead, like a Canadian Brad Shoemaker, so this ain't gonna be any different.

At least a couple of y'all played DD (D's D?) so how was it?

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2019 11:40 am
by Falcon Critical
It's pretty fun, the classes and combat mechanics are great, the story is kind of forgettable beyond "design yourself, now design your slave minion". I feel like it's a game where some classes really shine and make you feel awesome, but I felt my power dipping midgame and I guess some other game came along. Arcane Archers are super hot though I hear.

Seems a decent enough world to set an anime in.

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2019 2:21 pm
by Thunderhead
Dragon's Dogma is basically Japanese Skyrim. The world is smaller and more static, but the gameplay is greatly improved.

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Wed Mar 13, 2019 11:11 am
by Delthazar
Dwarf Fortress of all things is getting a Steam version. This thing has been around in some form or another for about as long as I can remember. Kinda wild to see it pull a left turn like this for the first time in... a decade? Decades?

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/0 ... m-version/

It'll be paid though. But that buy-in will get you, uh, graphics!

And the Hyper Light Drifter folks have announced their new project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywJHZie8oQM

https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/13/18264 ... rt-machine

Hyper Light Drifter was one of the best games of 2016 and definitely one of the best games I never finished. Sorta like Bastion was to me for Supergiant and Night in the Woods for Infinite Fall, HLD hit hard enough to make sure I'm signed up for whatever their creators wanna do next.

Uh... I guess Borderlands 3 is a strong rumour? Hmm. And Google has some kinda major announcement on the 19th? Double hmm. Wouldn't be surprised at all if that gamepad patent/mockup is related, but I doubt very much they're putting a console out or anything on that crazy scale. Probably a streaming thing with their version of a Steam controller on the side. That's my bet.

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Wed Mar 13, 2019 12:23 pm
by Falcon Critical
Some details on that Google announcement, it does look like a streaming service so meeeehhhhh.

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/03/googl ... next-week/

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Tue Mar 19, 2019 12:29 pm
by Delthazar
Yep. It is indeed an advanced take on a OnLive/Gakai/PSNow streamy thing (and kinda preemptively competing with whatever Microsoft is working on for the next Xbox), with a (optional) controller, pretty much as we expected.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/03/ ... g-service/

The name is Google Stadia, because I guess we needed another tech thing that sounds like a sexually-transmitted disease, an OTC medication to treat a sexually-transmitted disease, a "Tales of" subtitle, or a defunct European car manufacturer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjJPd576bMk

basically,

- anything that runs Chrome can run games in Stadia assuming yer internet connection can handle it. so that'll obviously include yer phones, yer PCs, yer tablets, yer Smart TVs, Chromecast-like things, probably any Raspberry Pi box ever made, etc. Like a Spotify or whatever, gameplay can transfer from device to device and retain progress.

- supposedly runs at 1080p/60fps just fine (and lower, if yer bandwidth and latency require lower?) and up to 4k/60 currently, with 8k support in development

- partnerships already in place with Ubisoft and id Software, plus they've rolled their own first-party studio headed by Jade Raymond

- a whooooole lotta tech/dev-side stuff that might not matter to y'all, go watch the event or read the articles if you wanna (Unreal and Unity already there, all the middleware you've ever heard of, a Linux base, big raw stat numbers, crazy machine learning stuff, etc.)

- available later in 2019 for the US, Canada, UK, and "most of Europe"

- no pricing info yet for the service or the controller, nor any details about bandwidth/latency requirements/recommendations, exact launch software, etc. but maybe they'll have more at E3

Image

The Stadia controller has a bunch of unique features plugging into YouTube, I guess kinda like the Share button on the Dual Shock 4. So it'll be set up for one-button streaming and weirder features like jumping to YouTube for gameplay hints or jumping into gameplay from other people's videos and streams. It also connects to yer wifi and controls games that way, rather than bluetoothing to a device and then passing inputs through that device's connection.

The Konami code is written on the underside for no apparent raisin (for fuck's sake it's not a hint at Suikoden 6)

That said, any existing USB gamepad will also work with Stadia, at least if yer playing on a desktop PC or something else with USB input, though I assume you'll be sacrificing some features if you're on a 360 pad or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Tue Mar 19, 2019 12:43 pm
by John Layfield
It's a terrifying window in a dystopian future where no one owns anything and yet capitalism still crushes us all, that will also be canned in 18 months like Google Plus. How's all y'all's Google Glass doing?

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Tue Mar 19, 2019 1:05 pm
by Delthazar
So that's the infodump post. If I'm also editorializin', uhh, I guess I have mixed feelings about it?

Even in the US, modern internet infrastructure is still pretty bad in a whole lotta places, and that doesn't really get better elsewhere ( :can ) so in the short-term this feels like a service which will only really benefit folks who already have fancy-ass gigabit connections with crazy low latency and - most importantly - unlimited data plans.

Playing untold hours of games at 1080/60 or higher on top of all the Netflixing people are already doing will annihilate data caps. The state of net neutrality at the moment doesn't help either if the Comcasts of the world decide to rebel against all the extra bandwidth usage.

I also wonder about latency. Having never used PS Now and whatever other cloud gaming services exist, I can only imagine the mess if yer trying to play a shooter or a fighter on an unreliable connection or something, and for all the cash Google is sitting on it's not like they can just throw money at the laws of physics. Maybe there's some as-yet undisclosed magical Pied Piper -ass tech solution on their end which helps here, and using Doom Eternal of all things as a demonstration is encouraging... but there's still gotta be a lot of the same bottlenecks, right? If I still get weird inexplicable ping spikes in Overwatch now and then in the dead of night, what's Google got that's gonna keep that from happening as I stream Doom to my phone?

'course, all the usual dark tech future stuff of no one really owning anything anymore and preservation being kind of a moving target still applies here, but that ship sailed ages ago, so anyone pointing at their Steam libraries and saying "I own this" has worked themselves into a shoot. So while a successful Stadia might put a huge dent into Steam's future, platforms like itch.io might be just fine, assuming the dev-side boons with Stadia don't end up attracting all the indies.

Anyway. OnLive felt years too early when people were talking about it on E3 podcasts 10+ years ago. Gakai became PS Now which... exists, but not as a thing anyone seems to talk about. Stadia still feels too early, maybe not by years anymore, but at least a few minutes. But I dunno, if 5G onwards takes over everything and both Google and Microsoft are betting on a cloud gaming future... question marks?

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Tue Mar 19, 2019 1:09 pm
by Delthazar
John Layfield wrote:
Tue Mar 19, 2019 12:43 pm
It's a terrifying window in a dystopian future where no one owns anything and yet capitalism still crushes us all, that will also be canned in 18 months like Google Plus. How's all y'all's Google Glass doing?
Nothing about this strikes me as being a relatively minor venture on the level of a Google+ or a Glass. Who knows if it'll actually work out for them, but they're leaning into it way, way harder than either of those older projects.

Microsoft's own cloud ambitions also gives Google something to play against which Glass didn't really have and Facebook was already obviously insurmountable long before Google+ came along.

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Tue Mar 19, 2019 4:38 pm
by Delthazar
Oh yeah, I forgot this was a thing.

https://youtu.be/j--cFOyeT7E

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Tue Mar 19, 2019 5:01 pm
by cybersix
system shock 2 owns

fuckin sign me up for that shit

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2019 11:24 am
by True Perception
So, I decided to fiddle with my PS2 and Suikoden V. My console is pretty much borked, due to some internal parts not wanting to stay still. I can force it into the right position, in order to start up the game, and it seems like it'll remain working until at least shutdown/reboot. My Suikoden V disk, however, will not load past the Playstation 2 logo. So, the only things I could want to turn it on for are Suikoden Tactics, Makai Kingdom, Grandia, and Shinobi. Everything else, I have elsewhere. Still, I might want to fire up Tactics at some point.

Checked the PS3. I was pretty sure I remembered mine not running PS2 games, but it was worth a shot. It does not. It is MUCH easier to swap between the 3 and 4, though, so I might have to dip into some of those games I have on there, that I haven't touched in a while/at all. Suikoden III and La Pucelle sound like a start. Funny, it still jumped right online, even though I'm pretty sure we have a different password now. I'll have to finally grab another power strip, so I don't have to bounce back and forth between things. I'm already juggling my speakers with the charger I use for my phone and tablet.

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2019 1:39 pm
by Thunderhead
Seems there's a Valkyrie Profile gacha coming out soon.

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2019 1:52 pm
by Delthazar
cybersix wrote:
Tue Mar 19, 2019 5:01 pm
system shock 2 owns

fuckin sign me up for that shit
I guess the original is also being remade which I also forgot about

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdiaIRkjpI0

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/0 ... new-video/

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2019 2:05 pm
by Falcon Critical
There were some interesting ideas in that Google keynote, though it's kind of funny the partnership with Ubisoft since I was playing some Watch Dogs 2 the other day and the core of that game is about how mass data collection and corporate exploitation are bad news. The data centres you hack into are very similar to the images of Google's data centre.

Part of what draws me to PC gaming is the availability of modding, this is swinging it further towards a console. Will be interesting to watch anyway.

Ah, VP gacha? That's mighty tempting :stare3

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2019 2:18 pm
by Delthazar
It's hilarious to me that just about every old inactive JRPG thing has a gacha now except the one with by far the most characters

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2019 3:21 pm
by Delthazar
A lotta pretty big things just became Epic exclusives, including Obsidian's The Outer Worlds and Remedy's Control. They're opening up to Humble for key sales, too. Kind of a big deal for folks already using Humble but wary about giving payment info to more new places like the Epic Store itself (not that it'll keep Steam loyalists from complaining about the effort of double-clicking a different desktop icon, I guess)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g77FPIdz678

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/0 ... er-worlds/

Additionally, Quantic Dream is vomiting a bunch of their WARRR CRRRIMEZ onto the PC via Epic, including Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls, and Detroit.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/0 ... ing-to-pc/

the Quantic section of that video literally opening with a black screen to JASONNNN! fucking killed me, very nearly spilled all this coffee on my keyboard

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2019 3:47 pm
by Delthazar
Nintendo also put out another Nindies showcase.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUnpK23g4FY

Overland and Neo Cab are two things I'd rather play on a Switch than tied to a PC monitor, so those are good gets. Red Lantern looks like a pretty amazing new Ashly Burch vehicle (or everyone's doing Burch impressions now, I dunno, getting hard to tell.) Double Fine's Rad could be rad assuming it's not just parts of Brutal Legend remixed. I'm constantly forgetting the Stranger Things game actually exists and isn't just a dumb joke from the Game Awards.

but the Crypt of the Necrodancer people doing a very Necrodancer game with Zelda stuff in Cadence of Hyrule is probably the biggest deal here for a bunch of raisins.

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Thu Mar 21, 2019 7:04 pm
by Delthazar
Yikes, Paradox is apparently doing a Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines sequel. That's kinda outta nowhere.

https://kotaku.com/vampire-the-masquera ... 1833479366

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYvWfDxhm_s

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2019 12:56 pm
by Delthazar
Sony is spinning up their own Nintendo Direct thing called State of Play, starting on March 25th, 2PM PST, via their YouTube and Twitch channels. Dunno how regular they'll be. If Nintendo Direct is the format, then maybe expect one or two per quarter.

https://blog.us.playstation.com/2019/03 ... ts-monday/

Feels like a natural move since they're skipping big E3 pressers this year along with a bunch of other folks.

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2019 1:46 pm
by Thunderhead
So I got a wild hair up my butt, and ordered Final Fantasy XIII offa E-Bay for .32. Wish me luck...

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2019 2:14 pm
by Bier_Engel
Have fun walking in a straight line.

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2019 2:29 pm
by Thunderhead
The straight line thing doesn't bother me. After all, FFX was also a straight line. The five or so boss fights I've had to auto through due to having no abilities? Yeah, that's a bit bothersome.

Re: [Game News] + General Gamesy Chatter

Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2019 3:39 pm
by Delthazar
I remember the straight line part bothering me when I played it at launch, but the last several years of games since then have kinda made me come around on it for a couple raisins. That style of linearity has sorta become the norm across tons of games and RPGs especially have refined it or hidden it so much we barely notice it anymore if the meta structure is even just a little different. So XIII these days might feel like an interesting prototype to something we've come to enjoy elsewhere.

But also, the proliferation of huge open worlds has made narrower, tightly focused experiences feel like they have more of a place just by contrast. So if I went back and played FFXIII again now, especially after a lengthy run through Horizon or something, it might work really well as a palate cleanser, kinda like the shorter narrative adventure games I already play.

I always saw FFXIII compared to Gears of War back in 2010; these days I feel like the better comparison is Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy: a whole lotta chapters moving along a fairly straight and very pretty path, pouring into a single large open world chapter in the back half, then narrowing once more towards the conclusion. No climbing. That's fine.

(my memory tells me that most of the cast still sucks and the story is kinda nonsense and the game takes far, far too long to finish tutorizing itself, so, uh, yeah)