I’m honestly surprised anyone bothers making mods for GTA any more. T2 are actively hostile towards modders - stop wasting your time creating a community around their products.

It’s pretty funny how much the tone shifts if you play with the co-op mode they added in a later patch. Suddenly, sci-fi horror turns into Benny Hill in space.

I’m guessing that’s one feature they won’t include in the remaster, haha

It’s almost like there’s a limit to how many times you can return to the same creative well until you hit diminishing returns and run out of steam.

Having a successful series is one thing, but AAA studios don’t seem to know when it’s time to stop - they drive franchises into the ground because they’re too scared to try something new.

I wonder what this means for TT games? When was the last time they even made a game that wasn’t Lego?

I grew up on Double Dash, but MK8D offers so much choice and variety that nothing else comes close - at least for pick-up-and-play casual games.

I think the Atari XEGS probably wins the battle for ‘ugliest grey box’

Similar to how the NES was made to look like a VCR, the PlayStation was made to look right at home as part of a fancy 90s home hi-fi setup. Functional/industrial grey was the aesthetic du jour, and gave it a look that said this isn’t just a toy; it’s the future of home entertainment.

Besides Tunic, there are still several good to great games in the first dozen (and no doubt a bunch more if you’re willing to dig into the smaller indies):

• Cook, Serve, Delicious - Overwhelmingly Positive (95% of 3,631) all time
• Hoa - Very Positive (89% of 2,098) all time
• Tangle Tower - Overwhelmingly Positive (95% of 4,760) all time
• Octodad: Dadliest Catch - Very Positive (93% of 8,480) all time
• Whispering Willows - Very Positive (81% of 1,166) all time
• Hidden Folks - Overwhelmingly Positive (97% of 7,333) all time
• Eldritch - Very Positive (88% of 1,673) all time
• They Bleed Pixels - Very Positive (84% of 2,014) all time

Oh goodie, another online-only f2p hero/extraction shooter with daily quests and lootboxes Ultimate Maintenance Boxes.

That’s why HLTB splits playtime into play style categories, depending on if you just want to see credits, if you’re gunning for 100%, or something in between.

Recently did a solo playthrough of Halo 2 on heroic and it was a slog. Can’t even imagine trying to do it on legendary.

I knew going in that it has a reputation as the hardest game in the series, but it’s wild just how disproportionately unfair it feels at times.

This date was already announced in the original reveal trailer though?

Not sure about the minority now, but you will be in a few years if not already. Prebuilt PCs haven’t included optical drives as standard for years now, and good luck buying a new laptop that has one.

Optical media isn’t dead but it’s on life support and will become functionally obsolete in the next decade, same as what happened to magnetic media.

I’m honestly surprised that Slack doesn’t have some kind of steganographic watermarking so that leaked screenshots can be traced back to the original user, given how many big companies use it for all their internal comms.

Probably something to do with the fact that Take-Two fired everyone and shut the studio down last year.

Two times zero is still zero

Gamers: stop building in plans for extra content and just release a game that’s done at launch

Also gamers: no dlc = lazy devs, dead game

If that’s the case you wouldn’t be able to charge them, though? I don’t think you can charge them without connecting to a console (or a third party charging dock I guess)

People said similar things about the all-white Wii after the GameCube - it’s just the natural ebb and flow of product design

When has that ever been the case?

The age-old tradeoff has always been that consoles are restrictive and un-upgradable, but generally cheaper than building a PC due to fixed parts costs and loss-leader strategies.

If anything I’d say Heaven’s Vault is the better of the two!

Sure, it’s way less polished and can be janky, but the language and the translation mechanics are so much deeper and more well-developed than anything in Chants of Sennaar.

The languages in Chants are tightly defined and very specific to what the game needed, so they’re not really usable outside of that context. But the language in HV is rich and complex, and you can actually learn to write new things in it.

As always, the headline should be qualified with ‘… in the USA.’

Tintin the brave cub reporter — and his dog, Snowy — will enter the public domain in the U.S. well before they will in the European Union, where they are copyrighted until 2054. That’s because EU copyright terms extend 70 years past creators’ deaths, and Belgian cartoonist Hergé died in 1983.

Bad/misleading title. The article (actually just a regurgitation of a podcast interview) is about the design & layout differences between two specific cities: New Atlantis in Starfield and Diamond City in Fallout 4.

Basically just this one designer saying he didn’t like the design of New Atlantis compared to his own work.

It’s more of an anthology series, so most of the games are unconnected. This is the first direct sequel to the original LiS featuring the original main character.

There are also two different studios involved: Dontnod created the original game, Life is Strange 2 (2018), and the spinoff The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, but the other three games in the series were made by Deck Nine.

Because it has a library of interesting and innovative exclusives, making use of an unusual control input. Whether that makes it worth it or not is personal preference, but you can’t disagree that it offers something unique.

The only reason AW2 happened at all is because Epic paid for its development. Hate on the Epic store all you want (it deserves a lot of it), but it’s one of the few instances where it actually makes perfect sense that it’s an exclusive.

Because improving visuals is an easily quantifiable task, but improving gameplay requires creativity and risk-taking, neither of which are compatible with the AAA business model.

I’ve restricted the repository to prior contributors, and if they have any concerns, they are more than welcome to do so here. If this turns into harassment, then I’ll just shut the whole thing down, because I’m way too busy with my actual job to be dealing with unsubstantiated drama from a hobby that is supposed to be fun.

This is how projects die. Duckstation had a good run at the top, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it dethroned if it becomes a dramafest with bizarre restrictions on forks and distribution.

Such a shame NOLF is so deeply mired in rights disputes that we’ll probably never even get a digital rerelease, let alone a sequel.

It’s called a branching narrative. Most common related Steam tag for finding similar games would probably be ‘choices matter’.

Yes, but they were already on Steam - this release is new

You can manually restart in OW - it’s an ability you can learn from one of the characters you meet.

In my experience, if people are going to bounce off the game it’ll come down to one (or more) of three reasons:

• They hate the flight controls
• They hate the feeling of being on a constant timer
• They hate the lack of explicit direction in what to do next

It’s one of my favourite games of all time, and it has good reasons for all of the above, but it’s definitely not for everyone!

And for anyone wondering, my counterpoints to the above would be:

• Learn to use the autopilot but don’t trust it; learning to manoeuvre precisely will come over time
• Don’t overthink the timer element; pick just one thing to investigate and focus on that, anything else is a bonus
• Use the ship’s computer and follow the unknowns; avoid walkthroughs unless you’re absolutely 100% stumped on what to do next

The DC had upscaled art so the old game looked good enough on 1080p screens, plus a few new bits like character portraits.

This is a complete repainting & reanimating of the assets to 4K quality. Very different! Just compare screenshots and you’ll see.

Not to mention native console ports with crossplay multiplayer

There are prebuilt solutions in some common engines, and companies like Multiplay that will help with development and hosting, but ultimately it depends on the specific needs of each game.

What works well for one project might be overkill for another, so studios have to spend a lot of time figuring out their needs and building something bespoke for it.

Turn-based all the way for me. I need time to think about my moves!

I want to love RTS games, but I just don’t have the executive function skills needed to prioritise tasks and make decisions fast enough to do well. Single player against CPU is sometimes doable if there’s an easy mode or cheats, but online multiplayer is just impossible.

As a kid I thought they were shouting ’Uncle Fester!’ and wondered what the Addams Family had to do with WW2

Newer, cheaper competitors like the FPGBC are finally muscling in on the Analogue Pocket’s market, so I guess they’ve decided to double down on being the ‘premium option’.

Not just the engine, no.

the company is planning to make its proprietary Carbon Development Platform – which encompasses the studio’s Carbon Engine and other technology – an open source property