I believe it has a direct lineage from a game based on The Hulk called Ultimate Destruction, and you can feel that. You’re super jumping, gliding, and sort of like Venom, consuming people to pose as them. There are missions with a stealth element, but other times you’re throwing tanks at helicopters. Holding the run button will have you effortlessly doing cartwheels off the tops of cars and wall running straight up skyscrapers.

I haven’t played the PC version, but I expect it’s the same as the console version: Prototype (from Activision in 2009; there’s another game listed with the same title). The story is utter garbage, but everything about the moment to moment gameplay is great, and it definitely checks the boxes you’re looking for. I never played the sequel, because it re-used the same map, and that’s a lot like playing a Mario game with all of the same levels as the one before it, but this first game rules.

If you have access to something that can play Xbox 360 games, I’d also highly recommend the first Crackdown.

I hear very good things about Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed, and there’s a new one coming.

I’d encourage you to utilize those limited funds legally by buying games on deep discounts, if you were implying piracy, but even legitimately, being able to sideload all the old PC games you have is a massive plus. GOG and Epic give away great games for free on the regular, and an Amazon Prime subscription has recently been filled with some bangers that you get to keep via both of them.

You can sideload a program called Heroic Games Launcher that lets you easily manage your GOG games, as well as Amazon and Epic.

For $50 less, you get a similarly capable machine in terms of specs but more comfortable to hold, with an immensely larger library, and an operating system far more respectful of your authority to do what you want with the machine you bought.

It’s also launching day 1 on Game Pass, so Microsoft paid a pretty penny for it.

My running theory has been that the official release date is tied up in Microsoft marketing deals still. So I’m guessing we’ll hear the date from Microsoft during summer game fest.

$449, $499 with Mario Kart digital.

For $80, apparently?

I’m definitely keeping an eye on Selaco, but I’ll wait until it leaves early access.

I think that’s the name of Nintendo’s legal department.

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.