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Cake day: Mar 18, 2024

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I was talking about this with some friends. Anecdotally, almost everyone we know who plays games has a Switch, but very few of them seem to care about a Switch 2, for one reason or another. What will undoubtedly still move units are their marquis franchises, not the least of which is expected to be a new 3D Super Mario game. Mario Kart does extremely well for them, but I’ll bet some amount of its success is tied to very cheap console hardware, which the Switch 2 will not be out of the gate, so that parents can buy each of their kids a handheld to play with each other in the car, at the laundromat, at their siblings’ soccer practice, etc., and as the hardware gets cheaper, that probably contributes to its “long tail” of sales.

But yeah, for people who live and breathe video games, consoles have lost their luster. Games take longer to make now, which means there are fewer first party titles, which means we have fewer reasons to buy another machine that plays the same games as some other piece of hardware we already own. That will be especially true for the Switch 2, since they don’t have a Wii U library to plunder for titles that they can port cheaply for people who’ve never played them.

All that to say, my expectations as an armchair analyst whose word isn’t worth anything on the matter and whose predictions may as well be a dice roll are that the Switch 2 will do very well, but I’d be surprised if it did better than the first Switch, and I don’t know that we’ll ever see a console do as well as the Switch, or the PS2 for that matter, ever again.


It’s the successor to one of the most successful consoles ever, and word is Nintendo’s had a lot of games that were done for some time now, but they’ve been holding them back to better position this launch. An hour-long Direct is about twice the usual length, and basically the entire industry is basing its plans around the Switch 2 and GTA6 right now.


I haven’t found a source for this number when I looked for it. The best I got was a finance blog saying “experts say” without saying that they were progenitors of the reporting or not. Valhalla had a budget about half of this, so it would surprise me if Shadows was that much more expensive.


The industry is full of dead studios that made good games. Marketing does work and is necessary, but I’m not sure much you can say this marketing campaign was successful given the heavy lifting Assassin’s Creed as a brand was already doing.


I’ve been playing another lap through the old Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and just got my party kitted out with +1/+2 weapons and better armor, so this ought to be the point where the rest of the game gets way easier.

I’m coming up on the end of the base game of Borderlands 2, as I try to make my way through the series before the fourth game launches this fall. There’s a lot of Borderlands 2 DLC to get through after this, but it’s scratching an itch that the FPS genre hasn’t really been doing for me with new releases in years.

And I’ve also been making my way through the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance (this one on GOG). It’s sort of flip flopping on how important the simulation aspects of the game are to its whole deal. I too found them frustrating, but I know from Red Dead Redemption II that, when done right, they’re there to make you make choices that that character would make in that setting. However, sometimes the game hops over them in the interest of time, and other times it makes you go through them to the point of tedium. It’s still early going in the grand scheme of things, and the political intrigue has surely grabbed me if nothing else.

With a name like Perfect Dark, what are your expectations for the new one? The demo they showed was vague enough that it could be just about anything, and I get the sense that it won’t launch with split screen multiplayer or even a deathmatch mode, because no one does those anymore.


I’m not sure, but years ago, at least. Likely to save on server hosting fees. If you go to download the installer now, you only see the latest version, but you used to see every version.


The best you’ll get is Heroic Games Launcher. It’s got most of the features I’d want at this point.


https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/releases/tag/v2.13.0

We also started a partnership with GOG and now every game you buy from the GOG store inside Heroic will give us a commission, so it is another way of supporting the project. :)

The link is also available at https://heroicgameslauncher.com/donate if you prefer to purchase games in your web browser.


The previous versions of a game thing is something they took away, IIRC. They only keep the latest version and a patch to get up to it available for download, and you can only roll back to previous versions that you had already installed over time, or something like that. This is them seeing if you want to pay money to get a feature back that they used to offer, which is kinda lousy.


I would also support paying for online servers for games that have multiplayer components. That takes money to maintain.

If the developers were interested in allowing people to keep the servers running, they’d just give us the server code like they used to. If I was in charge of a GOG that was a little more flush with capital, I might fund an easy drop-in replacement library for Steam’s multiplayer APIs so that developers can easily port their games to GOG and be playable, in multiplayer, offline.


They do that already. They’re partnered with Heroic. If you buy GOG games through Heroic, Heroic gets a cut of that sale using a referral code program like you’d see in other stores. It gives Heroic some cash, and it gives GOG a line of sight into exactly how much revenue they’re missing out on by not building the Linux launcher themselves. This is what got me to start buying from GOG again.


They might have to grease some wheels somehow then. Some kind of incentive structure to make sure they do it.


Yes, that’s what I use when I need it for GOG saves. But typically, every game puts their save file in a different spot, so you do need to do a one-time setup for each individual game.


Do you not have to update that script every time you play a new game? Cloud saves are pretty automatic, and regardless of platform, they’ve been pretty reliable too. It also fits that use case that you go to a friend’s place and want to show them something in your save file on a whim.


I got the same survey. The ones that they definitely do not want to do, if they value their reputation, are things like “increased cloud save storage (that’s still probably less than what Steam offers)” and things that they took away, like 1.0 installers. But some of the other options look to be more squarely aimed at the enthusiasts of the preservation program that this subscription is designed to financially support, as well as one or two actually good features like legal account sharing. Hopefully they go down that route instead.


The article didn’t speculate, but that may have been the point. “We’re miserable only making games out of WB movie properties, so you’ll let this next one through, or we’re gone, and someone else will surely have us instead.”


It’s a long video, so I guess you’re sitting down with a book. For the record, the visual aides contributed quite a bit, and a lot of it is him contextualizing something that’s already a book: Playing at the World by Jon Peterson.


According to Jason Schreier, most did go on to form a new studio at EA.


Reports were they took 8 years because they spent almost 3 of them making a game in a new IP, knowing that WB wouldn’t be happy about it, but it’s what they wanted to make. When that got shut down and forcibly changed into Wonder Woman, most of the talent that had been there the longest decided to just leave.


WB Interactive was always such a missed opportunity. Monolith shut down because the studio lost its best talent when they weren’t allowed to work on a new IP, where their creativity took them. Even back during the MOBA fad era (Remember that one? It was after MMOs and before hero shooters and battle royales.), during the development and promotional period for DC’s Infinite Crisis, I spoke to one of the developers from Turbine, asking what the pitch process was under WB. Even back then, this guy told me, “Well, it’s WB, so whatever your idea is, they’ll say, ‘Cool, now make it Batman,’ or ‘Cool, now make it Lord of the Rings.’”

If it doesn’t naturally fit with that IP, that’s all backwards. Even in the most capitalistic view I can take on it, the best way forward sounds a lot like keeping an eye on a budding new idea and steering it toward a direction where it can become a good movie or an HBO show, in the event that the game is successful. Because what was obviously always going to happen when WB tried to sell its Interactive component is that their video game division is worthless when their games are all tied to WB intellectual property. It would be like Disney buying Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm so that they could only make Mickey Mouse comics and Pirates of the Caribbean sequels.



I’ve got my issues with RDR2, but definitely not with the writing and performances.


10 characters, in my experience, is about as small as a roster can be in a fighting game before it feels like you’re seeing the same matchups over and over again. That might be a bit worse in a 2v2 game, but there are other reasons, like Vanguard, that I’d argue are more compelling reasons to avoid 2XKO.


I’m playing through the first one right now, in the early hours, and for anyone who’s played this sequel, did they add any quality of life improvements? In theory, I like a lot of what the game’s doing, but when it tells me I need to find a way out of a castle, and it doesn’t let me jump over a short chain barrier, it can be frustrating. I talked to one NPC who I accidentally quickly buttoned through a dialogue with without clicking on the option that clearly would have given me a hint on what to do next, and without reloading a save, I couldn’t get that dialogue option back. There was also another NPC that I found the first time, before reloading a save, who gave me similar advice for how to progress, but due to the schedule system and the lack of any sort of notation built in to the map, I couldn’t find her again, because she wasn’t in the same spot. Things like that are why Avowed was built to be “static”, as much as it got criticism for it, despite most RPGs being built that way to avoid exactly this problem I had with KC:D. (I have since made my way out of the castle, after looking up a walkthrough and save scumming a chest that I had to lockpick, because the tutorial was very bad at teaching me how lockpicking actually worked.)


These are some strange criticisms. Yes, there was a focus on games being “cinematic”. Yes, there was also a counter-culture to that, because there’s a counter-culture for every popular culture. No, Half-Life didn’t invent it; it iterated on existing ideas. Yes, others copied it, because iteration is far easier and more likely to be financially sustainable than outright invention. Likewise, others in the counter-culture didn’t copy it. There are pros and cons to that sort of design. If my friends and I both play through a game like that, we can reminisce and “hell yeah” and high five over our favorite moments. A more immersive sim “lite” design like Indiana Jones can easily lead to me getting the intended experience where Indy has to improvise his way out of a blunder by punching Nazis and my friend ending up in what he perceived to be automatic fail states (true story). The “detour” through Half-Life inspired games came coupled with those same years being littered with games that didn’t stick to its ethos.

The one thing I’ll agree with the author on is that we’re definitely currently living through the stark aftermath of this peak FPS era. It’s so rare now that a new FPS is made for me anymore. Maybe it’ll be Mouse: P.I. for Hire, but it won’t come with a split-screen deathmatch like the good old days.


Ubisoft is largely run by one family, the Guillemots. What seems to be important to them, above and beyond everything else, is running a company called “Ubisoft”. Their company has a lot more value if someone else can run it, but they won’t budge on that, so their stock has tanked over the past number of years, as they keep making bad decisions. They tried to partner with Tencent to take Ubisoft private, which basically means buying out all of their investors, but Tencent also wanted the Guillemots gone, which wasn’t happening. So instead, they made this new company that Tencent can have more control over, which gets the best parts of Ubisoft’s portfolio as well as a lot of the debts, but Tencent has enough sway to flip off the Guillemots and make decisions they think are better. Meanwhile, the Guillemots still get to run a company called Ubisoft into the ground, but they get to start fresh with less (or zero?) debt, so they don’t have to dig themselves out of a hole first.


I think you missed the sarcasm in the rhetorical question, but yes. It’s one of at least three or four movies I’ve seen utilizing the Dances With Wolves trope, though I’ve never seen Dances With Wolves itself, and that’s okay. It was entertaining.


Are you telling me The Last Samurai wasn’t skillfully made or imaginative? Nah, it was no masterpiece, but I liked it just fine. Having some westerners in Japan training their military on modern weaponry as the samurai are fading from relevance passes my threshold for “remotely historical”, and it’s definitely not a requirement for me that Tom Cruise’s character needs to have an American historical analog to meet that criteria. Any historical fiction will inherently have to change things about what actually happened in that era, after all.


Hey, I’m sure it solves a problem for people, but the easier solution is still just the absence of DRM, as much as Nintendo would not like to do it, and it introduces exactly the kind of complexity that Sony mocked 12 years ago.


You have to authenticate online on both ends, and it maxes out at two weeks, so no.



Good thing I was expecting historical fiction then and not a documentary or even a dramatization of true events.


Yes, they do. I plan on playing some Persona games at some point.


I’ve been playing Borderlands 2 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance, both in preparation for their sequels this year. What I played tonight of the latter was a bit obtuse, and I’m hoping it picks up.


Last we saw Silksong, it was part of an Xbox marketing deal; that’s all I’m basing my hunch on. I doubt that deal is easily broken, and Silksong can write its own ticket with any marketing partner.


Except for Smash Bros., yes, but they created a really shitty vicious cycle. I don’t care if it’s first or third party; I’m not giving Nintendo any more of my money.


They actively harm the emulation scene, despite themselves being responsible for making it necessary. They don’t want to make their old games available for sale where those potential customers are; they want you to buy their hardware and rent those old games from them in perpetuity. We’re also now at a point, at least temporarily, where their latest games often play better if you emulate them than play them in the only way Nintendo makes them available legally, so buying games and playing them “the right way” is worse. Then there’s the whole thing where they actively stand in the way of competitive Super Smash Bros.


Yes, I have. It was very good, but at times, it was too long for its own good. Keep in mind I haven’t played a Persona game before, but there’s the loop of the calendar system combined with going into a longer dungeon. I know that it being an endurance test and a stress on your resources is a key part of the design, but each of those sections of the game were probably about 10% too long, and then you get to the ending, where the game probably should have ended about 20 hours earlier than it did. There’s something to be said about leaving 'em wanting more, and at the end of the game, it felt like they had long stretched my tolerance for reaching the story’s proper climax, as they kept trying to escalate it in ways that didn’t feel earned.


The UI looked nice, but managing archetypes in particular was split up among three different screens that were very unintuitive. I’d rather they focus on function before form.




The link is a livestream, and it was just announced during the Arc World Tour finals. In case you aren't familiar, the stand-in for ranked mode in the game for the past four years has been this awful tower system that more or less everyone hated since we saw it in the beta, but ArcSys dug their heels in and said it's staying. It's now going to be replaced by (exist alongside, as a legacy feature) a proper ranked mode like any other competitive game. And if you don't know what frame data is in fighting games, it's the information that competitive players use to answer questions in training mode. This has existed as a mod for the PC version for some time, that frustratingly goes out of date every time a new patch for the game comes out, so it's great to finally have it in the game. Strive has been successful sort of despite these things.
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From Jez Corden. Further supporting the idea that the next Xbox is just a PC with a custom shell, which is about the only way a new Xbox makes sense anyway. EDIT: [Also from Jez Corden, Xbox handheld coming later this year.](https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/xbox/xbox-hardware-report-project-keenan-next-gen-xbox-2027)
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I'm not well versed in C&C, but it's always good to see more games open sourced.
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BREAKING: Warner Bros. Games is shutting down Monolith Productions, Player First Games, and WB San Diego, sources tell Bloomberg News.
Warner Bros. is also canceling the Wonder Woman game. This is maybe the biggest bloodbath we've seen in this industry? What a damn shame.
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#StopKillingGames A bit poetic for it to coincide with the next big Monster Hunter, as I liked it better than Monster Hunter.
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Interesting that in the title, stated in absolute terms in the text, and from the designers they interviewed, they cite getting lost as crucial for the genre. Personally, I disagree. Getting lost has tended to be why I didn't care for certain games in this genre, like Axiom Verge, and it soured my otherwise higher opinion of games like Hollow Knight and Symphony of the Night. Still, I think this is a good exploration of the genre and what makes it tick.
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We used to get so many games like this that we were sick of them. Then Grand Theft Auto V happened, and everyone else gave up. I'm really looking forward to this. Should come out sometime this summer.
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You can listen at 1.5x speed and not miss a thing, with the speed this guy speaks. Probably none of this is new information to many of us here, but I thought the way it was collated was good analysis.
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A NYTimes piece on Will Wright, as well as talking about some of the themes in the Sims that got overlooked or lost in its massive success.
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Both were live service; one at Bend, one at Bluepoint. Bluepoint was helping work on God of War: Ragnarok until 2022, at which point they were developing this now-cancelled God of War live service game.
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A Direct is announced for April 2nd to cover the games.
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Jeff Grubb confirming. It's a 2-step reveal. On the 16th will be almost 100% hardware with little to say about software. It's expected to launch by summer.
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Robocraft was near and dear to me. It's also the reason I don't bother with live service games anymore. In 2017-2018-ish, Robocraft was one of my favorite games, ever. Then they were able to take that game away from me and replace it with something I liked far less. This is inevitable for any live service game; if not replacing the game you liked with something else, then its removal altogether so that no one can play it anymore in any form. It sucks. > It’s with a heavy heart that we have to tell you all that we’re ceasing production on Robocraft 2 and closing Freejam as a studio. With the current market conditions and the server costs required to keep a game like RC2 running, we’re simply unable to launch or sustain development. You know, if you let your customers run the servers themselves, we'd be able to keep playing the game and you wouldn't have to bear the burden of those costs!
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From Jason Schreier. "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'," but this is some analysis from Schreier seemingly rooted in many anecdotes. The long and short of it is that development on AAA games tend to routinely hit bottlenecks where entire portions of a team are waiting for some other team to unblock them so that they can continue to get work done.
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Seemingly confirming the theory that "Xbox" will just be Windows going forward, at least on handhelds.
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I don't know why Schreier hyphenates "video-game".
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There are a lot of reasons that this makes sense for them. But also, given the other things they've been promising, I think this is going to be an expensive piece of hardware that basically just hides Windows under the hood.
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Online servers remain on for now. Offline mode requires a new profile and can't be turned into an online mode profile. You'll be able to have one offline and one online profile per account. Somehow it's too difficult to add LAN, I guess.
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Austin Wintory's Journey LIVE, as profiled by Annie Aguiar at the New York Times
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Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Review Thread
Game Information -------------------- **Game Title**: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle **Platforms**: - Xbox Series X/S (Dec 5th, 2024 for the Premium Edition; Dec 8th, 2024 for standard) - PC (Dec 5th, 2024 for the Premium Edition; Dec 8th, 2024 for standard) **Trailers**: - [Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Official Release Date Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIHa9ncI21M) - [Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Official Launch Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkzeoNvYhSo) - [Gameplay Deep Dive - Indiana Jones and the Great Circle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vujiFT4cQm8) **Developer**: MachineGames **Review Aggregator**: **[OpenCritic - 87 average - 92% recommended - 62 reviews](https://opencritic.com/game/17732/indiana-jones-and-the-great-circle)** Critic Reviews ------------- **[Game Rant](https://opencritic.com/outlet/60/game-rant)** - [Anthony Taormina](https://opencritic.com/critic/262/anthony-taormina) - [8/10](https://gamerant.com/indiana-jones-and-the-great-circle-review/) >Indiana Jones and the Great Circle offers some of the best puzzling and tomb-raiding in a video game, matching Spielberg's films in many respects. ------------- **[PC Gamer](https://opencritic.com/outlet/162/pc-gamer)** - [Ted Litchfield](https://opencritic.com/critic/9234/ted-litchfield-) - [86 / 100](https://www.pcgamer.com/games/adventure/indiana-jones-and-the-great-circle-review/) >Like if an immersive sim got caught in a teleporter accident with Uncharted. Some aspects of The Great Circle are weaker than others, but it joins Batman Arkham and Goldeneye in the god tier of licensed games. ------------- **[Eurogamer](https://opencritic.com/outlet/114/eurogamer)** - [Katharine Castle](https://opencritic.com/critic/6241/katharine-castle) - [5 / 5](https://www.eurogamer.net/indiana-jones-and-the-great-circle-review) >Smart, fun and so very Indiana Jones, The Great Circle is a stealth action tour de force that marks a bold new era for MachineGames. ------------- **[IGN](https://opencritic.com/outlet/56/ign)** - [Luke Reilly](https://opencritic.com/critic/197/luke-reilly) - [9 / 10](https://www.ign.com/articles/indiana-jones-and-the-great-circle-review) >An irresistible and immersive global treasure hunt, and far and away the best Indy story this century, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle doesn’t belong in a museum; it belongs on your hard drive where you can play the heck out of it. ------------- **[TheGamer](https://opencritic.com/outlet/731/thegamer)** - [Eric Switzer](https://opencritic.com/critic/6736/eric-switzer) - [3.5 / 5](https://www.thegamer.com/indiana-jones-and-the-great-circle-review/) >It’s a fun story with some decent gameplay variety that’s authentically Indy. You won’t miss much by strictly sticking to the main quest, and in fact, your experience will be better for it. It’s a shame the rest of it falls so flat. ------------- **[GamesRadar+](https://opencritic.com/outlet/91/gamesradar-)** - [Josh West](https://opencritic.com/critic/6971/josh-west) - [5 / 5](https://www.gamesradar.com/games/adventure/indiana-jones-and-the-great-circle-review/) >Indiana Jones and the Great Circle shows that there's still plenty left for Lara Croft and Nathan Drake to learn about raiding tombs from the master ------------- **[GameSpot](https://opencritic.com/outlet/32/gamespot)** - [Richard Wakeling](https://opencritic.com/critic/1425/richard-wakeling) - [9 / 10](https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/indiana-jones-and-the-great-circle-review-im-making-this-up-as-i-go/1900-6418322/?ftag=CAD-01-10abi2f) >Indiana Jones and The Great Circle takes an unexpectedly stealthy and freeform approach, making for a faithful, rip-roaring adventure in which you truly embody the famous archeologist. ------------- I stole this format from @[email protected], so I hope I got it all right. This game looks awesome!
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Another one bites the dust. I'm sure I'd enjoy it if I could have bought a copy and hosted the servers myself.
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Ireland crossed its threshold, meaning the minimum of 7 countries in the EU have now done so. At approximately 395k total people signed, it is currently not on pace to reach 1M by July 31st without a signal boost from someone with a lot of followers.
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I decided to share this here because it's always nice to see a promising new RPG. I especially like this trend that I first saw in BG3 where we're animating the dice rolls on skill checks. I'll take an animated dice roll over a lockpicking minigame any day.
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Includes rollback netcode. Theoretically, this will be the best version of the game to date.
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The leak comes as the devices are prepared for mass production, so these are coming soon.
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That man is David Wise, but you probably knew that already.
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What Microsoft has been saying about Xbox lately strongly implies that this is a Windows handheld designed to solve software and user experience problems with using current Windows handhelds. And signs are pointing toward the next Xbox console coming sooner than the next PlayStation and essentially being a PC running a console version of Windows. Some speculation on my part, but I'm not the only one coming to those conclusions.
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I doubt anything comes of it, but here's hoping.
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From Crowbar Collective, the people behind Black Mesa, comes a single player and co-op roguelite blatantly channeling old Rainbow Six vibes, and I personally couldn't be happier, given the state of Rainbow Six now. Also, it's got LAN and split-screen. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1843840/Rogue_Point/ Early access next year.
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I hope more developers allow themselves to indulge in this feature. There are all sorts of use cases where the customer might want to play on an old version of the game. For instance, there have been some controversial patches lately to several Arc System Works fighting games, and players would very much love the ability to stay on the old version. I doubt it'll happen though, since the devs have an incentive to want as many players as possible to be on the new version.
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Kojima Productions now fully owns the intellectual property.
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I was hoping this would happen with this remake. For my money, hers was the best performance of 2004. I'm a bit surprised it was her, only because I didn't think someone deep in the voice acting world would opt for the pseudonym. So many family animated movie voice casts are populated with comedic actors known for raunchy R-rated material, after all.
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Not to continue beating a dead horse, this article is really about mainstream media's relationship with video games, or the lack thereof. For the first time in my life, I pay for a subscription to news, because the same problems that crop up from getting news from reddit happen just as easily here in the fediverse. There are actually really great pieces written about video games and their creators in the New York Times, but they've only got a couple of bylines between them, and a frequency that matches how many people they've got working on it. Meanwhile, they do have a section under Arts dedicated to Dance, which I somehow doubt has anywhere near as many readers interested in the subject.
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