Fantastic game, glad it’s finally getting updated and getting the cliffhanger ending resolved.

That said, the original XBX still looks extremely good (at least when emulated at modern resolutions). For an HD remaster I haven’t actually noticed any real visual improvements other than the character models being better.

This is the one I always hear these days.

Awesome, thanks!

This is a pretty good writeup, would you consider cross-posting it to !steamdeck@sopuli.xyz?

Agreed, the industry has lots of tricks for doing authentic looking lighting and reflection, that can be done at a fraction of the performance impact. One day we’ll be at a point where hardware raytracing makes sense, but I don’t think we’re there yet.

most of the time turning on the AI upscaling makes things run worse and I don’t even understand that

My understanding is that DLSS/FSR are usually converting GPU load into a lesser CPU load. But if you’re already bottlenecked by your CPU, using the upscalers will hurt your performance instead.

Yeah, I really like DLSS/FSR/etc for letting newer games run on old systems. But I don’t feel like it should ever be necessary for modern hardware to run it well.

Ray tracing in general is a big culprit in this, it has such a high performance hit. That was fine back when Ray tracing was optional, but we’re increasingly seeing games with mandatory ray tracing now. Indiana Jones and the upcoming Doom The Dark Ages requiring it for lighting is a mistake imo, not something that computer hardware in general is really ready to be a default.

A lot of newer games have “story mode” or other accessibility options for an easy playthrough.

But yeah I really miss cheat codes, especially the wackier ones.

Can’t have a UE5 game without spending a lot of time discussing performance.

My PC is pretty decent, but whenever I hear a game runs on UE5 I just figure I’ll pick it up on sale in 5-10 years when I have newer hardware.

In Japan, the patents they filed for were “extensions” of existing older patents. The new patents “updated” the old patents and could be used as if they filed when the original patent was. So they were able to file patents after Palworld came out, and then sue as if the patents existed before Palworld. Seems like bullshit to me, but I’m not a lawyer.

I don’t know if a similar mechanic can be used in the US patent system or not.

Tim only complains about monopolies when they hurt his bottom line. If he actually cared about monopolies he wouldn’t be so hostile to Linux users.

I was reading about Tetris in a PDF 4 days ago, and wondered if Doom would be possible.

Definitely earned it, we’re already seeing a wave of indie games trying to capitalize on it’s success.

Some games have a major impact on the game market by creating or popularizing a subgenre. Some previous examples are Slay the Spire, Stardew Valley, and Vampire Survivors. I think Balatro will be the same, and we’ll see a huge number of games over the upcoming years trying to follow in it’s footsteps.

Twitter is by far the larger platform, and small independent creators have to work to promote their game on every platform they can, if they want to succeed. The moral high ground of not using undesirable social media sites is nice, but isn’t fair to people who are partially dependent on those platforms to make a living.

I’m not used to hearing good things about EA, but good for them.

It’s an absolutely massive game, and has been in development for 17 years. They also were pretty upfront with the fact that there would be a price increase at launch. I’ll also mention it’s one of the rarer games where the devs opted out of any Steam DRM, so you can copy the game files and run them on any machine without needing Steam installed. I keep the game on a thumbdrive for playing on my work PC when I have downtime.

All in all I think the price is well deserved, and I hope they do really well.

These cards sound good, but I’m generally soured on Intel as a company. It’ll be years before I feel comfortable buying hardware from them.

30% as industry standard

That’s the same as app stores/etc, and is still a common cut to take. I’m not convinced the cuts that Epic is taking are actually sustainable for offering downloads/updates/etc for a game indefinitely, but it’s hard to tell since the Epic store is already bleeding money.

I’ll also mention that Audible (which has a monopoly in the audiobook space) reportably takes a 60-75% cut of audiobooks sold on their platform (they take only 60% if you agree to sell exclusively on audible, but they take the full 75% if you want to sell the book somewhere else as well). Monopolies abusing their position is really common, but I haven’t seen anything similar from Steam that makes me think they’re abusing their position. I suspect PC gaming would be in a far worse state if another company controlled the popular storefront.

Being a small game dev has a lot of uncertainty and risk. I wouldn’t blame any small dev for taking a guaranteed paycheck from Epic. Larger studios with safe prospects should be blamed though imo. Gearbox with Borderlands 3 for example.

Except they’re trying to strongarm people into using it by using huge amounts of money to buy exclusivity rights.

People don’t want monopolies because companies can abuse their position to hurt consumers. But steam provides a very user friendly experience with lots of benefits and features like mod hosting, remote play together, etc. Epic provides a store that people hate using, and people only put up with because epic abused fortnite’s success to buy exclusivity deals*. Despite being the much smaller storefront, Epic already feels like the abusive monopoly in the PC gaming space.

*Many people also play on Epic because of free games, which is a valid and pro-consumer way to attract users. I’m 100% cool with this strategy, although giving away merchandise at a loss is also a common monopoly strategy.

There was a request to halt sales until the specific mechanics were removed, with the mechanics being throwing pokeball like items and riding monsters.

That lawsuit might take years, and the requested damages from Nintendo are only $66,000. Palworld isn’t going to be shut down anytime soon, even if they lose the case.

Great game, it and the original Pixel Dungeon were my most played phone games for years.

Another high quality mobile experience I can’t recommend enough is Slice & Dice. Gameplay is quite different from Pixel Dungeon, but it’s basically replaced all other phone games for me. Been playing it almost continuously now for the past 3 years.

“A man chooses! A slave obeys.” - Andrew Ryan, BioShock

In general a lot of Andrew Ryan quotes are captivating, but that one transcends thanks to both the events happening, and the realization of the plot reveal.

I wish Sony would just back off. It’s clear that they’re willing to drag their studios through mud to push PSN and other stupid requirements, and I hope any new studios they try to acquire will be paying attention to that.

Yeah, I’ve gotten sucked into HSR as well (first f2p gacha game that’s ever hooked me), and I can’t imagine having time for another game like it. The daily content isn’t really any trouble to do, but having to do that for multiple games would get old fast. And the monthly content drops can be really substantial and take a long time to experience all the content.

Probably just not big enough. Pokemon-like games are very common, palworld was just hugely successful and a lot of the media coverage for it was comparing it to Pokemon.

It seems cool. I know I don’t have the time to get into a moba (or moba-lite) right now, but I hope it catches on and does well.

As an adult gamer, I have a lot less time for games. Single player games are nice because I can make meaningful progress on a storyline/etc, and even do things like finish a game and move onto the next one.

Playing online pvp games can be fun, but it usually takes a huge time investment to be good. And in the time I have to play, there’s rarely a feeling of progress. Spending 1-2 hours on a single player game and I have progressed in a distinctive way. Spend that same time in League or some other multiplayer game and I have nothing to show for it except a few ranking points.

EDF World Brothers 2 (which is a spin off of the main EDF series) just came out and has fully optional Epic games integration. It doesn’t even download the Epic account software unless you opt into using it.

I’m glad to see they’ve gone back and changed the previously released game to make it optional too.

The gameplay of the EDF games is pretty fun honestly, it does feel different from many modern games, but it’s honestly kinda refreshing.

These scores are lower than expected, possibly due to issues with the console port.

I can vouch for the PC version being incredible though, I highly recommend it.

The missing context here (I think) is that California passed a law saying that digital storefronts (like steam and gog) can’t say things like “buy game” because you aren’t actually gaining ownership of the game, but instead just buying a license to access it. Some people were questioning if this law should apply to gog since their games are drm free and can be freely installed on any compatible devices once you download the installer.

That’s true. The drm-free steam games can usually have their install directories moved around freely between computers, but it’s true there isn’t an installer program provided outside of the steam client itself.

Probably not, sounds like it would apply to all digital store fronts. And a game from GOG could still become unavailable if it relies on game servers that are taken down.

If they did make an exception for stores like GOG, then some steam games would theoretically also be exempt because they don’t use steam drm. So you could have some guys labelled “buy” and others labelled “get”.

Part of what was weird is I tried paying with Google Play credit, and it wouldn’t take that either.

I’m not a lawyer: Many companies are updating their terms requiring that disputes are settled through arbitration, usually where a 3rd party selected by the company rules on the disagreement.

It’s meant to protect them from excessive lawsuit payments that can happen when you go to court.

Valve went the other way, and is saying that all legal disputes should go to court instead.

Huh, google play is refusing to sell it to me. Getting a [OR- FGEMF-20] error code regardless of payment method.

Edit: searching I came across a reddit thread, the post is older but all the comments are people complaining about this issue with trying to buy Balatro today.

Edit2: working now for me, about 4 hours after the game went live

From what I understand, it actually started concept development 10 years ago, with 8 years of active development.

8 years of development under multiple publishers will bleed a lot of money. They also hired on a lot of “experienced devs” from different game studios to head the different departments, and presumably paid them well enough to get them to leave their original companies.