They sound quite smug now, let’s see when it inevitably triggers on someone’s legitimate hardware.

Original F-Zero (and GBA Maximum Velocity to some extent) is kind of an acquired taste, it was kind of a SNES tech demo (from launch, even) and it’s a bit abstract.

Like there were already 30 racers but only 4 are playable and the rest are identical brown machines, and there are rules just for the 4 main characters (you have to place at least 8th before lap 2, then 4th before lap 3 or you’re eliminated, or something like that).

The 3D episodes X and GX are awesome, incredibly fluid and with great zero gravity tracks in absurd shapes. X managed that on the N64 by looking rather rough, but speed and chaos from the 30 contestants make up for it IMO. They’re also very fucking hard, especially unlocking everything in GX. Which includes a lot of tracks, new characters and machine parts for the gimmicky but fun custom machine editor. Technically a lot of that extra content are the characters and tracks from AX, GX’s counterpart game on arcade machines.

3D F-Zero looks a bit like weaponless WipeOut (but still quite aggressive, because you are encouraged to take down your opponents with physical attacks. Especially your current rival on the scoreboard who the UI helpfully highlights).

Oh sure, a genre that got on the radar with a 1987 MSX game, one that became what it is partly because of hardware limitations, is impossible to do nowadays because “now we can do realism”.

Talk about creating problems for yourself.

Super Circuit has a lot (all?) of the old Super Mario Kart maps too. They are quite a bit smaller than the new ones, so they added laps on them. I played a lot of MKSC on my original GBA back then.

Also F-Zero GP Legend. Not the first GBA one (Maximum Velocity, that was very clunky and SNES-like), the one based on the awful American localization of the not that good to begin with F-Zero anime. That shit is almost lost media, except the infamous mega-falcon punch clip from the ending that’s been a meme.

The story mode of the game was complete shit, but mechanically, the core game was very good, quite fast and feeling more like a flat X/GX than SNES.

There’s a third GBA F-Zero (Climax) that’s supposedly better, but it only released in Japan and last time I tried it was still kinda hard to emulate.

Indeed not really Stop Killing Games territory. You can’t really force a company to keep selling a game they don’t want to sell (or even contractually can’t sell) anymore.

It’s about preventing them from rendering sold copies inoperable.

It is still a tiny niche, clearly, and devs would have to carefully evaluate the benefits/costs of developing for it.

But I consider Zuckerberg abandoning the metaverse only an evidence of nobody giving a fuck about his metaverse. Including most people who got a quest.

What are you talking about, we have high intelligence artificial humans

Have you seen the Nexus-6 replicants from Tyrell Corp? They’re models from 2019.

Everything that was not American had worldwide recognition, but there was a question on a random US football team’s facility.

I know I would. Got 4 too, but there’s 2 more I had guessed and didn’t know the English term for. However one name was autocorrected to the American spelling, and was counted as correct, so, nice.

And of course, one of them was about some kind of US sportsball thing.

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.

EDIT : they finally sent it. Even their comm around this feels like an afterthought.

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.

Konami’s only redeeming factor today is that they occasionally find people who give some fuck about their IPs and let them handle those.

On the very console that owes a huge deal of its initial success to the comparison with the intended XBOne bullshit.

Fucking hell.

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.

I have a 2 now, but yeah, they don’t build them as they used too.

I changed my switch 1’s fan twice, and its backplate. No battery problem for now at least. But I also replaced way too many joy-con sticks and rails.

Depends. Megachurch Dark Souls would have monster trucks, tanks and huge mechanical props.

Seriously, Concord? Have some of these people been traumatized by its whole two weeks of existence?

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).

I didn’t even know there was a DSi version of it.

I never had a DSi, but I checked its catalog a bit later on 3DS, lots of shovelware in there if you didn’t know what to look for. I basically just got a few wayforward games and the exclusive X sequel.

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).

The developers are suing. Their crowdfunding gathered 340k for them, but the crowdfunding platform has only sent half of it.

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.

MIB was weird. It tried to be everything, including a point and click, action game and platformer, all with fixed camera and clunky tank controls.

It sucks at everything. There’s a hint of a mediocre point and click in there, maybe if they’d remove everything else. With the action it’s unbearable.

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.

That’s close to how I see it too. I think Eurojank makes sense for 80s/early 90s when a lot of those weirdly clunky, rather experimental and/or make-your-fun games tended to come from UK/France/Germany.

But after that it’s not hard to find examples of stuff like that everywhere.

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.

That’s what he said originally, and he recently announced it would be a three-parter. By the time he gets there maybe it’ll become a decalogy or something.

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.

They’re right, the geometry is just lying under an opaque layer of shit.

Also everyone is technically naked 100% of the time, you just can’t see it under the clothes they’re wearing.

“In a way” because to me the game’s focus is different enough that, even if they do have a lot of mechanics in common, it doesn’t feel like “Builders 3” to me.

Like, you know, The Wonderful 101 is not Okami 2.

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.

Current-generation consoles? You know you can’t put copilot on switch 2, Microsoft?

“Paid random items”.

I’ve played many RPGs. I don’t remember one making me pay for every random battle. No, using a random number gemerator in a game isn’t the same as lootboxes.

FMV advisors best advisors.

Especially culture dude. Those anarchy councils were hilarious.

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.