- 1 Post
- 119 Comments
PS4 and PS5 games are much easier to port to PC since those consoles are essentially PC hardware.
Older games need to be rebuilt for completely different hardware, so it’s actually a lot more work. Not to say it wouldn’t be nice, but it’s not as easy and may not be worth the money, and there is less interest for a lot of that stuff.
For Metroid, start with 2, then Super is a big step up in terms of feel and gameplay. The first one doesn’t explain anything at all, and compared to modern standards feels quite clunky and tedious (you have to find multiple secret passages to finish the game normally, for example.) It’s worth playing if you’re in the mood for NES-era retro gaming, but it can be frustrating trying to figure it out on your own.
For lore, Fusion is next, followed by Dread. I didn’t like Fusion, felt too hand-holdy for me, I would skip it but many seem to like it. Dread is worth playing on its own though. It’s a much faster pace, more action-oriented gameplay. Fusion added a horror element to the game, but for the most part it’s more for vibe than gameplay reasons. Dread took that scary vibe and moved it into the gameplay.
The Prime series I think is a separate canon story. They can definitely be played independently. They follow a storyline and are direct sequels to each other, but gameplay-wise they don’t require playing other games before. You don’t unlock any important knowledge relevant to one game from playing the previous one.
I felt it was the other way around. 2016 was simple and effective. Eternal just kept throwing shit at you, especially at higher difficulties. I kept hoping the big battles would end so I could move on, but more monsters kept coming. And then they threw the Marauders at you which just didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the game because of how you have to fight them.
I’m willing to believe that some of the top players might do it, but how many of them brag to the public about how highly they’re ranked and how good they are at the game while barely knowing how to play it?
Let’s be real, who’s good enough at the game to be able to rank someone else’s account up to the top levels without themselves being at the top levels?
The goal is not to prevent you from agreeing to bad terms, it’s to prevent the companies from imposing those bad terms on people.
Would you rather buy a game that you know is going to die in a year, or the same game but that can be played for as long as you want?
Would you rather companies keep making games with a short expiration date, or games that people can keep playing if they so choose?
But they’ve been selling mid-range and budget GPUs all this time. They’re not adding to the existing competition there, because they already have a share of that market. What they’re doing is pulling out of a segment where there was (a bit of) competition, leaving a monopoly behind. If they do that, we can only hope that Intel puts out high-end GPUs to compete in that market, otherwise it’s Nvidia or nothing.
Nvidia already had the biggest share of the high-end market, but now they’re the only player.
From personal experience, I’d say the end result for framegen is hit or miss. In some cases, you get a much smoother framerate without any noticeable downsides, and in others, your frame times are all over the place and it makes the game look choppy. For example, I couldn’t play CP2077 with franegen at all. I had more frames, but in reality it felt like I actually had fewer. With Ark Survival Ascended, I’m not seeing any downside and it basically doubled my framerate.
Upscaling, I’m generally sold on. If you try to upscale from 1080p to 4K, it’s usually pretty obvious, but you can render at 80% of the resolution and upscale the last 20% and get a pretty big framerate bump while getting better visuals than rendering at 100% with reduced settings.
That said, I would rather have better actual performance than just perceived performance.
Actually AMD has said they’re ditching their high end options
Which means there’s no more competition in the high-end range. AMD was lagging behind Nvidia in terms of pure performance, but the price/performance ratio was better. Now they’ve given up a segment of the market, and consumers lose out in the process.
From another article:
"“We don’t really have a plan in terms of, oh we’re going to make more spin-offs or this is going to be a one-off time one-time thing,” Ishizaki told IGN. “This was purely sort of happenstance of me wanting to direct my own game and wanting to use Elden Ring and that battle design that I took part in as a base to this game, and my interest in online co-op games as well.”
I think it’s his first go at directing a game, but he’s worked on Bloodborne, DS and DS3, and Elden Ring previously. I don’t see this game having a long lifetime like Elden Ring, but it could still be interesting.
RGB on the back
Hall effect joysticks and should buttons are nice to have.
16GB RAM I don’t think is a big deal when you’re running a slimmed-down linux distro, but with Win11 it seems like a bad idea. Most people who buy this won’t be installing another OS on it.
The trackpads are one of the key features that makes a handheld’s interface so much more effective, and all the other Steam Deck competitors kept getting called out for omitting them. Nice to see here.
Now, can we fix flashlights in games such that we don’t get a well defined circle of lit area surrounded by completely a black environment?
Sure, we can do that, but we won’t because of the narrative and functional in-game purpose of the flashlight. It’s not meant to be realistic, it’s meant to make the game feel a specific way.
The devs were talking about releasing a private server. I don’t know if/when it’s actually going to happen, but when the game was released, it was getting a lot of attention on streams and the devs were out and about talking to all the streamers. Private servers/lobbies were the most common thing mentioned, and they said it’s something they were working on.
Maybe? It’s certainly a reasonable expectation. I mean I agree it’s probably not something that people actively seek out in general, but they have all kinds of sales based on themes that people don’t necessarily think to look for either. As a gamer from Quebec, I don’t actively search for games made in Quebec, but it’s nice to be able to look at a collection like this and know that they’re all made locally without having to make an active search for that. It’s a factor that’s generally not advertised very explicitly.