I am genuinely curious how Steam puts games in its Top Seller list. It would seem that sometimes a game gets into the list that does not belong merely because it is new. I amnot saying that applies to this game, but I would like to see some metrics that show whether Steam alters anything for anything in the Top Seller list.
I did see it. It was the entire highlight of the trailer. I did not like it.
I do not have to play the game in order to give my opinion on what I have seen. If you take a crap on my dinner plate, I do not have to eat it to make sure it is crap first. I can see it, and I do not like it. It is an element that was completely unnecessary, and continues to make it very easy for me to avoid purchasing products that fund a vexatious litigant with a video game side business.
I dont know that it is too hard, but it definitely has a high difficulty spike compared to the original Hollow Knight.
I think the biggest descriptor I can say about Silksong is that the game is incredibly mean. There are a lot of traps, fights, etc, that you just will not see or know about until your second time going through that area. And that is not to mention the long run back when you die, it is very easy to see why people would be frustrated, especially in comparison to the original Hollow Knight.
I do sometimes in a third person game.
Also, this article states that Super Mario 64 used a free camera system, which is wrong. The game had a limited camera system which was locked to specific rotational angles that the player could cycle through. The game also had a limited first person view that allowed free angular movement, but it is not a free camera because it cannot move nor rotate beyond pre-specified angles.
I mean, a lot of the games on that spreadsheet (I would even guess more than 50%) contain licensed material, music, or other intellectual property that is not owned by Microsoft, ActiBlizz, or any of the subsidiary studios.
If someone was going to actually make a really list, those games should not be on the list that anyone would reasonably expect to come back, probably ever. It would require renegotiation of the licensed content with the license holder, if they are still easy to find, who would absolutely demand more money than originally agreed upon at the original game’s release (thereby making the effort immensely expensive), or it would require developers to alter the artistic vision and integrity of some of those games that they can, while others like “Bee Movie: The Game” would require so much reworking it would be better to make it an original game instead.
I mean, imagine if Square Enix decided to remaster Omikron: The Nomad Soul. They would have to either renegotiate the soundtrack license with David Bowie’s estate and the record label company that publisher the album, or they would have to destroy the legacy of the game by replacing the music with some other artist that would be guaranteed to be genuinely worse than David Bowie. Honestly, I am surprised but also overjoyed that Square Enix is still selling the game on Steam.
If you had asked a while ago I would have recommended Super Mecha Champions, an anime styled third-person Battle Royale game where you could call in a mech or fight on foot as a pilot. Sadly, the servers shutdown, so I can’t play it anymore. The game had gacha elements for cosmetics, but characters and mechs were earnable in game. The gameplay was fun too, I really miss it. Which feels crazy for me to say about a NetEase game that started on mobile. I guess they needed more server hardware and developers for Marvel Rivals.
You might try M.A.S.S. Builder, although it is more similar to Gundam than MechWarrior. It is also anime styled, but the anime characters aren’t really on screen for very long compared to your own mech. The mechs are more humanoid in appearance and are insanely customizable, down to the bare frame even. It has some multiplayer though it is primarily designed as a singleplayer game.
There is of course, MechWarrior 5, I think Clans is new, and MechWarrior Online has what, 16v16 or 8v8 matches?
Mecha Break might be one to look into. I haven’t looked into it took much myself but I have heard good things about the gameplay. I think its a 5v5 PvP game.
As greatly pained as I am to say it, mech games are a tiny niche. One that suffers from “the mech curse,” which is basically that a game gets popular for a month and then dies off hard.
I haven’t played the IJ game or seen any details about its DLC, but DLC can sometimes be accessed before the main game is completed.
It could potentially be like the Dark Souls 1 DLC, where you can enter the area at any time after a certain point in your playthrough. You can enter Oolacile after you defeat the Hyrda in the Basin and the Crystal Golem in the Duke’s Archives. This can be completed at various points in the game before you finish the game.
games with little to no internet
This is kinda vague and I dont exactly know what you mean by this. Do you mean games that you can play on a single screen? Or games with LAN or private server capability such as Minecraft?
For local co-op games:
I am curious to know how many went to scalpers and influencers/YouTubers. I am also interested in seeing how fast it drops off.
I don’t personally know anyone that has one, and I am not seeing them out in the wild like I saw the Switch 1 just 2 months after it launched. So either all of them went to people who dont live in my area (high population West USA county) or all the people that have them never take them outside. Which is strange since I see Switch 1 consoles fairly often. Mostly Switch Lites.
The Nintendo64 did run blazingly fast. Comparatively, even modern consoles are a step down in terms of power compared to Nintendo64 hardware for its time.
Had the draw distance been lowered in Ocarina of Time, its performance would have been at minimum a steady 30fps, as Ocarina of Time runs in a more optimized Mario 64 engine. Which, naturally, is less optimized than what Kaze has done to Mario 64’s engine, but Kaze also has like 20 years worth of more coding and computer knowledge learned, making comparison pretty unfair.
Framerate is also not the only metric in determining if a game’s performance is bad. Ocarina of Time runs at 20fps (unless you are in PAL region, then it runs at 17fps because of PAL standards, oof), but it never misses a frame. It is extremely consistent at 20fps. The frametime is perfect even on original hardware. The same cannot be said about most modern AAA games, even Nintendo games. Modern games might mostly run at 60 or 30 fps, but they very often dip below that and even more often have hitching and stuttering due to inconsistent frametime. Even though the fps may be high, the playability of the game is worse than Ocarina of Time.
Silent Hill was never a Resident Evil clone. It always had a unique identity. Resident Evil, except the original game, has the identity of a Hollywood Action movie. The developers of the game have stated that is what they wanted from the series starting with RE2. Silent Hill, on the other hand, is like a much slower Alfred Hitchcock Suspense film. Slower paced, methodical, and plays on the viewer’s imagination. Where Resident Evil might explicitly say something in the lore, Silent Hill is more likely to only imply it.
And then we get to Silent Hill 2 Remake which basically is just a copy of Resident Evil 4 Remake, sadly.
I dont mind spin-offs. I avtually like Silent Hill The Arcade and I wanted to play Book of Memories until I saw its not supported in Vita3k still. I ain’t buying a Vita just for that one game.
I don’t understand IP fans that think spin-offs are mainline entries. Metroid Prime Pinball and Hyrule Warriors (the original one) are among the best of the best spin-offs. I can’t imagine why anyone would think they taint the series they are based on. They are supplemental material made to be fun, not to contribute to the mainline story.
Respectfully, as a Silent Hill fan, I have been “cutting Konami some slack” for 20 years. And I have been getting burned for 20 years. So please excuse me for being cynical.
I didnt even mention The Short Message or Ascension because I didn’t feel like I even needed to bring either of them up, but just mentioning them now should be enough to illustrate my point in mentioning them at all.
Silent Hill f was the project I was most interested in from Konami when they announced it. I am not disinterested in the game, and I will likely still play it. However, I have a lot of major reservations because of my history with Konami. I didn’t appreciate the changes made to SH2 Remake, so while the mainstream audience at it up, I didn’t even finish the game. I will see how it goes, but the more I keep seeing about the game, I keep seeing some stuff I don’t like.
Everytime a hit lands on an enemy in the trailers, the game stops for a few frames. This better be removed or an effect that is only in the trailers. If that’s in the game and I can’t turn that off then I probably won’t keep playing it. That might seem nitpicky, but I play Silent Hill for a specific experience. I don’t play Silent Hill to get an experience I can get from Resident Evil or some other game. I am totally fine with Konami “making the same game repeatedly,” so long as story elements, levels, items, etc are different, I would be glad to have games in a series have identical gameplay between each entry. Metroid Prime 1 and 2, for example, or Half-Life and Opposing Force. Although the story, weapons, and visual assets are different, the core gameplay is identical. You are still getting the same gameplay experience in the sequel as your did in the original.
IMO, hit stop in the combat. Also, the camera perspective puts too much emphasis on combat.
At its core, the peak way to play Silent Hill was to engage in combat as little as possible. This makes sense both in lore and for the player of the game:
In the game lore, protagonists in Silent Hill are “Everymen.” Just an average person. Average people do not generally have combat experience or training, and thus an average person put into a Silent Hill scenario, will more likely want to run away than engage in combat with a weapon they are not familiar with. They may be so unaccustomed to combat with a weapon they may injure themselves or waste all the bullets or break the weapon due to lack of training in combat.
For the player, combat felt bad, and generally posed more risk than reward (trade potentially losing a lot of health in a fight just to not have to walk around the enemy) as in Silent Hill, killing enemies doesn’t reward the player with anything other than having one less enemy to avoid. They don’t drop health or items.
Additionally, Silent Hill has generally focused on people with some sort of dark past, with the exception of the 1st, 3rd, and 4th game. The 3rd game’s original plot apparently did give the protagonist a dark past, but Konami felt it would have been too much and thus changed the plot significantly. Some elements of the original plot still remain, but are reworked into the new, different plot in the game currently.
SH2 remake, and in fact Homecoming and Downpour fall victim to this overemphasis on combat, and it is primarily the fault of the over the shoulder camera. The combat feels good and fun, and thus it makes the player want to do it more. This resulted in more sales because the mainstream audience seems to only like playing one kind of game. Unfortunately, it also resulted in the IP losing its identity.
The story looks fine, but calling it a Silent Hill game when it gives no indication of connecting to the town of Silent Hill is concerning. Every Silent Hill game previously connected to the actual town in some way. If f doesn’t do this, then nothing separates it from being a generic horror game with the Silent Hill name slapped on top.
To add to this, Team Silent members started leaving after SH3 came out primarily because when SH2 released, it wasn’t that well received compared to SH1 (this is mostly to do with the Japanese audience complaining online at the time that SH2 was not a sequel or continuation to SH1). As a result, Konami started forcing Team Silent to make changes to SH3 that Konami executives thought would make it sell and review better in Japan than SH2. In other words, Konami was taking away Team Silent’s autonomy within Konami to develop what they wanted.
Silent Hill 3 was the beginning of the downfall of the series because it was the first game in which the original developer’s vision for the game was edited by Konami executives. This would sadly become a recurring theme for every Silent Hill game released thereafter. Silent Hill 3 was never supposed to feature the cult from Silent Hill 1. Heather was not supposed to be Cheryl. The hospital was not supposed to be reused from SH2, and was only done so because the developers were running out of time.
What’s worse, except for Akira Yamaoka, the original series composer, Homecoming did not have any original Team Silent staff working on it because it was outsourced to an external, Western development studio. Not one member of Team Silent was credited in the game except for Akira Yamaoka, they weren’t even mentioned in the “Special Thanks” portion of Homecoming’s credits.
MCC is mostly okay, with minor bugs and differences from the original release now after they had years to update and fix the game.
But every release from 343 has been subpar compared to the experiences we got from Bungie. Unfortunately, Bungie decided to fire or bully people out of the company that were actually important to making such good experiences by the time Destiny released, so they have been going downhill ever since as well.
I mean, didnt they make a PS5 without any means to use physical media?