Couch competitive multiplayer? Because it’s not a fighting game, and I’d say it has more in common with Speedrunners than it does Smash Bros. And Samurai Gunn is a good one of those.

This studio in particular has a hell of a history of making some all-time greats, so it sucks to see it squandered.

I’ll probably pick up Kena: Bridge of Spirits, and depending on launch discounts and reviews, I might pick up Screamer as well, if the sale is still running by the 26th. There’s no point in picking up anything else if I don’t think I’ll get around to it by the next Steam sale.

Skullgirls. You won’t find a deeper fighting game.

Uh, didn’t know Earthsea, Game of Thrones, Wheel of Time were Tolkien clones.

That’s on you.

This entire medium is built on iteration. Basically every fantasy thing you ever played was basically a palette swap of Tolkien or someone who copied Tolkien before them. Original D&D had “hobbits” until they were changed into halflings. Palworld is also parody, which thrives on the similarity as it calls pals bastards for breaking out of their capture, or arms them with modern weaponry. Not only that, but “survival game with a riff on Pokemon” is creating something original.

What brought the game to court compared to the other monster collectors is that this one made a shit-ton of money, and the other ones didn’t, so Nintendo and The Pokemon Company were, for the first time, threatened.

If memory serves, the plagiarism allegations were doctored. Nintendo tried to find whatever they could sue them for, and it wasn’t plagiarizing monster designs; it was for things like “riding a captured creature” and “catching creatures by throwing a ball at them”. Some aspect of Japanese law allowed for them to make new patents after Palworld came out and then sue them for it retroactively.

You can find full playthroughs of most games with no commentary on the YouTube channel MKIceAndFire.

Yup. The only game to really stress test it was Borderlands 4, but…that’s because the performance in that game sucks across the board. Even then, they put out a performance patch that helped a ton, and I can still run it on high settings with some frame gen, or a few settings turned down to medium without it.

This one is interesting. On its face, I definitely agree with the idea that asset reuse is essential. Ubisoft and Far Cry Primal are standout exceptions though. Ubisoft in general has reused so many of not just their assets but also their gameplay systems, such that despite having a half dozen different concurrent franchises, it can often feel like they’re all the same game, and that’s what hurt the likes of Star Wars Outlaws; we’ve played that game so many times already, even if it looks like Star Wars this time.

And as for Far Cry Primal: reusing a reload animation is one thing. Reusing your open world map is something else entirely, speaking from experience. The game often is discovering that map, so if I’ve seen it before, the game can become very boring very quickly. If a sequel to a 2D platformer was the exact same levels but your character had a few new tricks up their sleeve, you probably wouldn’t be happy about that either. Likewise, I’m not interested in Crackdown 2, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, or any other open world that reuses the same map. The map is important to be different each time. Spider-Man needs to be in New York, but in order to make that interesting, you’re going to need to lean heavily on instanced indoor missions between the open world stuff; Insomniac’s games are well-done, but I can’t say I’m dying to play Spider-Man 2 after the first game and Miles Morales. I’ve only played two Yakuza games, so I don’t know yet how I’ll feel about that map re-use, but they do seem to rely a lot on instanced interiors to mix things up.

The time loop mechanic is definitely something you come up with when you need to do a lot with a little, and while it super worked for plenty of people, it really was the reason I’d say it was far worse than Ocarina.

The meme was because it was clearly expensive and also so obviously going to flop, much like Concord. The difference in the money wasted between the two was probably an order of magnitude more for Concord though.

RX6800 XT. It did cost me an arm and a leg when I bought it, due to the shortage at the time, but it’s lasted a long, long time.

I’ve been rocking the same graphics card since 2021, and it still plays every new game on high settings. There are very few games that can even afford the production budget that would push a card like that or even a PS5 to its limits anyway. My most-played game is a 2D game from 2012 that can run on a cheap laptop, and the market at large is most focused on games that are so low spec that they can run on phones too.

Steam reviews are one data point in your pocket. And I’ve found they average out to be pretty useful.

The engine is Godot, which he chose specifically because it was open enough that he could rip out the existing rendering code and replace it.

It’s an automated tool for pulling the latest fixes to get a game running as well as it possibly can with as little fuss as possible. Basically a bunch of scripts to automatically pull mods and configuration options and such, especially for Linux compatibility.

I do think parents have plenty of responsibility here. I don’t think that absolves Valve. We put regulations on who can legally gamble because we know it’s addicting, and I think it’s a problem how little Valve have done to prevent it from being done by those who aren’t legally supposed to. I’m not advocating for government intrusion to collect more PII, nor am I convinced necessarily that that’s what NY state is asking for, but it’s certainly what Valve would like you to believe they’re fighting against. I would love to see things legally categorized as gambling that currently are not, and the space that Valve is operating in may be less of a gray area than their competitors operate in due to the resale market.

That was the same set of goal posts.

Even before you get to the reseller sites that Valve is definitely aware of, benefiting from, and doing nothing to stop, the way the system is intended to work is still using all of the tricks out of the slot machine playbook.

Far more sources than just a credit card. You can sell something from home during lunch period to another student for enough money to buy a Steam gift card, and their parents would never know.

“Well, they clothed, fed, and loved their child and sent them to school for an education, but they also gave them an iPad and bought them skins in Fortnite, so they’re lousy parents.”

I’m not a big fan of Valve’s use of loot boxes. But I’m also not happy about the proposed solution of “Just collect blood samples from all users”.

It also might not be exactly what NY is asking for, even if that’s how Valve would like to frame it. The actual ask might be to just stop profiting from gambling.

I’m not a parent, and it’s certainly a strange metric to judge one by whether or not they gave their kid V-Bucks for their birthday, because that’s nearly all of them these days.

And we’re all proud of you, but try explaining that to a child.

I’m not a lawyer, and even having perused the official filing, it’s still legalese that I can’t swear I fully understand. There are two possibilities of what NY state actually wants:

1. just stop selling loot boxes
2. you can sell loot boxes, but only if you’ve verified that your customers are of legal gambling age

And I don’t know for sure which is true. Of course it’s in Valve’s best interests to represent this to their customers as the government trying to violate your freedoms, because it gets the public on their side. Remember the Epic case against Apple, where Epic knowingly broke a contract with Apple allowing in-game purchases to cut Apple out, then they had a trailer parodying the 1984 Apple ad to garner public support with “Free Fortnite” ready to go.

You didn’t learn budgeting in one go. I learned it in part by not being able to afford every video game I wanted. Part of how this generation of kids will learn budgeting is by only having a finite amount of V-Bucks and not being able to get every skin that they want, but they’ll keep playing Fortnite, and they’ll keep seeing new skins they want.

I don’t really partake, so I’m always hesitant to have a really firm line in the sand, but we’ve seen a ton of harm come from the constant access to gambling that we’ve got now via sports betting that we didn’t have before deregulation in the wake of Draft Kings, so I’m inclined to lean toward it only being in designated locations. The problem here is similar in that you can access it everywhere and definitely exacerbated by not even doing the bare minimum amount of countermeasures against underage gambling, because they want to pretend that it isn’t gambling.

I’m not a psychologist or any sort of expert who can properly evaluate something as “gambling” or “not gambling”, but I’ve seen kids going through pack after pack of Magic cards at the shop and I’ve seen people going through scratch-off after scratch-off at the corner store, and to my eye, it’s the same picture.

You don’t need V-Bucks to play Fortnite, but kids aren’t also known for having fully-developed skills like budgeting and delayed gratification. Perhaps it holds today’s kids’ attention longer because it’s changing in a way that games didn’t when we were kids.

You can buy gift cards for Steam from the drug store or Walmart with cash, and there are many non-gambling ways to spend money on Steam.

You’re on a gaming forum. You didn’t play video games as a kid?

I’d highly recommend you check out People Make Games’ videos on Counter-Strike gambling, which include testimonials from child gambling addicts. And if you still need more convincing, there’s also some videos by Coffeezilla.

But I’d also like to see more companies held accountable for this than just Valve.

They’re kids. They don’t know anything yet, and they want to play what their friends are playing.

The children getting V-Bucks for birthdays and Christmas didn’t earn any money in the first place, but they ask for V-Bucks and Roblox money rather than full entire video games.

I’m sure inflation has eaten into their margins, including salaries (though they’ve done layoffs in the intervening years, so who knows), and I’m sure the game is not at the height of its popularity and spending anymore. That said, they’re raising prices because they’re confident they can get away with them, not because they’re in dire straits.

It’s still going strong. It remains one of the most profitable games on the planet.

It’s the project they’re currently working on. I don’t know why they announced it when they did, but at their current pace, I’d expect it to come out in the next two years and change.

I think I’d be okay if we never got another Fallout game. What we’ve got is satisfying, including the Wasteland and Outer Worlds games, and the Fallout show is great too. Maybe if Bethesda had a tendency to knock our socks off with something new every time they put out a game, then I’d be excited, but that’s not the Bethesda we know.