- 0 Posts
- 608 Comments
You’re missing the point. The important thing about AI is to cram it in every single part of everyone’s life without their consent, so you can tell your investors “see? number goes up, everybody uses AI”.
Who cares about making the experience better? It’s just about drowning people in it and pretend there is a need for it.
Castlevania DLC in Dead Cells, and if it’s anything like it, the new actual Castlevania game that is coming soon from the same developers. And it’s a new Castlevania game that is not a freaking pachinko machine. It’s been more than ten years since the last one… And that last one was also developed externally, by Mercury Steam.
Konami signed on a lot of crossovers lately (there’s some random Contra ones too). Probably the only things of value bearing their name since forever.
Shit. I was going to say, maybe I could not update (I haven’t in a while) and keep my console offline forever.
But then I remembered that thanks to the piss poor storage capacity of that console half my games must be unistalled right now.
First Sony console I ever bought. After that stunt, also last.
Wow, I actually didn’t. I thought Dig with the first one, had it on 3DS.
As I said the only “hidden gem” I know that stayed exclusive to DSi was X-Scape, known as X Returns in Japan and the very generic “3D Space Tank” in Europe (I almost thought it was not released in Europe, it was a surprise finding it under that name).
It’s a sequel to X (a.k.a let’s do a freaking 3D game on the original gameboy), also made by Dylan Cuthbert, who was also one of the main devs on Star Fox. It has that cool retro polygonal 3D style, but with good framerate (that was not really a thing for these games on the gameboy or SNES).
The movie is Besson-core, full of busted plot points and stupid ideas, kitsch as hell but at least made at a time when he still gave some fuck. So it was still entertaining, and I liked it back then. I mean, I got the game (on PC in my case) because of it.
I get why it is still somewhat pop-culture relevant. Unlike most of Luc Besson’s career as a producer and director since then. Most of it is seriously unwatchable. Aaand even though there were signs before, now we know he’s a creepy bastard, which doesn’t help enjoying his movies (but certainly explains how he treats some of his characters).
I don’t pay any subscription for games, I hate the idea of not being able to play what I want whenever I want. Even when it’s free (fuck you, No man’s sky expeditions FOMO).
But yeah, even though there are games that are not necessarily slop but with a structure that ensures I can enjoy them for hundreds of hours, it doesn’t feel fair that they’d dwarf the cool shorter ones I also play for revenues.
Some of the games I’ve completed in a dozen of hours still live rent-free in my head (most of them in a good way).
I had few licenced games, I realized they were mostly crap early (especially back in the 80s/90s when I began playing video games).
But I had the Fifth Element tie-in game. It may not be the worst licenced game (it’s certainly not good either) but it’s very weird.
They went all alternate scenario on it, with story points diverging a lot from the movie… But they still used actual clips from the movie to introduce each level. How you ask? By doing their own wild cut of the movie, taking half of the clips out of context and reordering them to fit the new plot.
This means for example that Leeloo keeps her lab resurrection “outfit” (three bandage rolls) for half the game, just because the iconic diving scene has been repurposed and happens very late, and she’s in that outfit in the movie scene. It makes sense in the movie, she’s supposed to be running from the lab just after being resurrected and normally she gets all Jean-Paul Gaultier’d very shortly after that.
Other deviations from the plot include Korben being involved from the beginning instead of meeting Leeloo by pure chance (the taxi diving is intentional in the game), or a bomb minigame in a spaceport where Korben has to defuse a dozen of phones rigged to explode based on a movie one-off scene where Zorg executes one person this way (and Korben isn’t even there to witness it).
Also a stupid chase for the four elements through the whole game. You know you need some dirt to “open” the Earth stone in the Egyptian temple at the end? Well, that’s why you need to collect a specific flower pot from a random apartment in NY a couple levels before. Instead of, you know, a pinch of sand from that very temple. LIKE THEY ACTUALLY DO IN THE MOVIE.
Even a cheap toy synthetizer can make something close enough to a tuba sound to get an idea of what it sounds like. Need something better? people make sound fonts for that.
But maybe it’s better to use generative AI to potentially have something close to the real thing, just so you can have huge datacenters consuming absurd amounts of power and water too.
If your placeholder doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb, it’s a bad placeholder. There is literally no workflow in which temporary assets shat by AI would be useful.
They just want to normalize AI use until people don’t care anymore. And with the waste of resources this shit represents, I just hope this never happens.
I’ve never really got into FF as a series. The only ones I actually completed were just the FF3 DS remake (I barely remember anything about it) and 9 on the Switch that I got because it was the one that looked the most “fantasy” to me. It was nice, had its moments.
The rest is mostly stuff I’ve abandoned. Started XIII, got bored in the long beginning corridor, stopped playing. Never could get through FF6 either, I just can’t care about its characters and disjointed storytelling.
Everything I get from the most “Nomura” episodes by pure cultural osmosis, especially everything around FF7, tells me I won’t enjoy it.
In France, I rarely see “real world” ads for video games. Except a couple huge releases from EA or Ubisoft occasionally plastered on train station walls, but doesn’t happen a lot and it’s just like release week and nothing beyond that.
On traditional TV channels, Nintendo is still the one buying the most screen time, by far. Mostly the very mainstream stuff, lots of Mario (platformers/kart/party), Pokémon and Animal Crossing (shit, if you’d told me before 2020 that Animal Crossing would be mainstream one day, I’d have a hard time believing that, but it sure became so).
I see occasional Sony TV ads, but nowhere near as many.
In a way, yes, but it’s significantly better at what it kept from builders 2. DQB2 slows down to a crawl about 50 builds in, and can’t manage a tenth of that active NPC amount in an area.
It’s also designed to give you a lot more freedom. Instead of most story objectives being imposed blueprints and a tiny active building site, you’re dropped into large areas with lots of broken architecture and empty wilderness spaces, and what you do with it is your decision.
I don’t know how that’ll fit in PEGI ratings, but, IMO, this is just a shady tactic to hide the same exploitation of gambling issues.
Then you just make it technically possible but completely impractical to get some stuff, and go hunt for whales while pretending it’s just about giving players choice. You know, for their convenience.
Just cosmetic is also not the defence game publishers want it to be.These are games. There is no vital need here, everything you do in these is to get some satisfaction from it. Including, yes, collecting cosmetic elements. They know this works, and they don!t want regulators to know that they know.
What’s wrong with just letting players know how much they!re spending and exactly what they are buying? Other than, you know, it would not be manipulative enough and thus probably makes less money.
I do have that between my 2 PCs. It works surprisingly well, definitely could be useful for stuff I can only get to run on the windows one.
Not too useful in that particular case though, since VR is already sort of streamed to the headset anyway, if I can do it from the windows server I don’t need the linux client in between. The thing that bothers me most is I’m still dependent on my meatier VR PC to stay on windows to keep using VR. For now, it’ll do, but with things going the way they are…
I also don’t have VD to experiment from my linux, but for now, it would just be nice to have.
Thank you, I think at some point I’ll end up getting the Frame, or at least a newer headset that’s guaranteed to be supported by their API, so I certainly hope it’ll work on Linux.
Sure, they’ve done a lot to make the transition to linux easier, and that’s great. Especially right now with Microsoft going to shit harder than ever. To me it sounded a bit overdramatic around Win8 when they went all “Microsoft gaming is over” but they were definitely right to start working on it.
But specifically for VR I tend to think they should be held somewhat accountable because, they sell VR games. I bought games there with the expectation they’d work, and they did, for a while. The fact they suddenly don’t without anything changing on my end is bad. Especially since one solution would be letting us go back to the version that worked.
Unfortunately for now the only good workaround I know is VD, which is Windows-only proprietary software.
For now I think the thing that I’ll miss the most will be Virtual Desktop. I haven’t tried my headset with this PC yet, I have a more recent one that’s still on Win11 for that, but I know SteamLink is completely broken for me and VD is what makes PCVR even possible for me.
I blame Valve for that need by the way. They had a version of SteamVR/SteamLink that worked well enough a couple versions back, they broke it in newer versions for my headset, and I can’t even go back to the one that worked because the only option is “previous” and we’re past that. Many reports later they still haven’t fixed it.
I am very much a beginner, and until now lutris was kind of my default answer for “how the hell do I get that windows exe installer to spit its entrails so I can run it through wine” (or even native engines like VCMI, Daggerfall Unity and Creatures Docking Station).
For everything that doesn’t come from Steam, obviously.
What is the more direct way? Does Bottles do that? I haven’t tried it yet.
I have never played platinum, but from what I gathered it is significantly improved compared to Pearl/Diamond. Those are really painful to play.
They’re really clunky and repetitve, but the worst part is mon distribution. There are barely any fire types in the games, to the point the Fire-Type elite 4 has only 2 in his 5 mon team. And one of them is the evolved fire starter. There is literally no other fire type obtainable at that point.
They decided to keep most of the diversity in the post game (lots of old species that get a new evolution mostly) so until you get there it feels like you’re meeting the same twenty different pokémon over and over again.
Bonus : Diamond has one dark-type easily accessible before psychic gym (which is already well into the game). Pearl doesn’t have any. Its only dark-type comes in very late game. It’s like nobody checked these games’ balance.
It was just me being very stubborn really.
Technically I went a bit further since I got full Sun/Moon dex next (though if I remember correctly not Ultra, I was missing one or two of the new Ultra Beasts).
It probably was just the right time really. The DS gens (4-5) are forever compatible because they just need local wifi to transfer. But 5 to 6 (and 6 to 7) need the pokémon bank and thus 3ds e-shop. I am not sure, but unless there is a third party way to do this, I believe that DS-3DS link would be broken today. And it’s probably too late to transfer them to Switch through… Pokémon Home? I think? Is that still a thing?
And I did that right on time for that mythical pokémon distribution, because even in the past games they were only distributed in time-limited events. So I’d have no other way to get most of these.
Except for Mew. Pokémon Ranch on the wii had a way to get a Mew if you had Diamond/Pearl and transferred ONE FREAKING THOUSAND POKÉMON from it. So, of course I did it, like an idiot.
Back on Gen 6 I organically filled a full dex (721 mons at the time) through a combination of Pearl, Black, X and Alpha Sapphire, with occasional exchanges with my sister who had the counterpart games. Also a few spin-off exports like Pokémon Ranger and Ranch.
At that time there was a distribution for the mythical pokémon too, so with all that I had everything.
After that I played through Gen 7 (Moon and Ultra Sun), and then completely lost interest when I learned the next gen wouldn’t even let you use mons that are not in its regional dex (and then the reports of terrible performance. 3DS was already barely tolerable).
Of all I played, I’d say the most fun were Gen 5 (Black) and Alpha Sapphire. Pearl felt like a chore.
My modlist is a mess, but I’ll try to list the ones I can think of right now.
The ones that really make VR worthwhile are VRIK (the body + holsters mod), HIGGS and PLANCK (body physics), Spell Wheel (gives you 2 hand-controlled radial menus, quick access to not just spells but really any power/item you want to put there). Weapon Throw VR is exactly what it sounds like and VR arsenal adds more stuff to yeet, very fun. Interactive Activators VR lets you manipulate levers/pull chains/etc physically too. In general everything made/maintained by Shizof is worth looking at.
Graphics mods are mostly a matter of preference, but for starters I use the Cathedral collection for plant replacers, and the static mesh improvement mod (SMIM).
For bodies I use oBody NG, that lets you configure different body frames depending on race and other stuff (with possible randomness on an NPC basis). Not sure I would recommend oBody though unless you want to spend a lot of time messing with stuff, because it requires Racemenu, and attempts to port it to VR still have a ton of issues. It can work, but it’s not easy.
I’ve tried several lighting mods, ended up on lux customised to be quite brighter, it’s a bit better than vanilla bit nothing I tried was a perfect fit. I suspect my headset doesn’t allow quite enough contrast for dark scenes to look good. I tried community shaders but never could get them to work. Broken shaders in VR tend to hurt the eyes a lot.
Lots of standard Skyrim SE mods work, but you’d better find some that are fully voiced, because though there is a VR version of Fuz Ro D-oh (the “subtitles on non-voiced dialogue” mod), it has the IMO major issue of forcing subtitles all the time, not just for missing voices. It’s very distracting in VR.
A mod like 3DNPC for example works very well.
Base Skyrim VR feels like another quick and dirty “it just works” job from Bethesda, and is not that amazing.
Modded Skyrim VR though is pretty great. With some mods, instead of just being a floating weapon, you get a body that can physically interact with stuff, you can take weapons from holsters, have other move-based real-time shortcuts that greatly reduce your need to go through menus, you can throw your weapons, etc.
And some level of graphical update definitely helps too, especially plant replacers IMO. The very basic Bethesda models look terrible when they’re literally in your face.
Regarding motion sickness, I personally don’t feel any even in smooth movement and after long sessions, but that might not be for everyone. Like many open VR games there is a teleport movement style where you can just skip to a target. Skyrim is kind of a slow game, though, so even smooth doesn’t feel terrible. Probably best keeping fixed-angle rotation though.
For some reason they didn’t even push the direct/announcement to EU switches. For a game that releases in less than 2 months.
That said, hard to be excited for another Star Fox 64 remake, no matter how many animated cutscenes we get.