Please do not perceive me.
Yeah. Their proper remake of SS1 was excellent and I was looking forward to something similar for SS2. Especially a balancing pass on the skills to make some of them not completely useless.
Even remaking SS2 on the engine they used for 1 would have been welcome news, but it’s not clear that they’re doing that either.
In case you weren’t aware (it sounds like you’re not) :
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Cataclysm
This isn’t going to teach you how to play but it’s an excellent reference wiki
Personally, I don’t really go out socially. Like ever.
So once a week or so when my friends go out to the bars and spend $50 on food and beers, I might spend a $20 on a game that’s on sale and get the same or better return on my time and money for it. If I buy a game for $20 and spend five hours on it and never touch it again, that’s about equivalent to a night out with the boys, both in dollars spent and in hours enjoyed.
I’ve built up a collection of indie games on this mindset and I don’t see any of it as wasted. If I get a lower return than $5 per hour enjoyed then I’ll refund the game or not recommend it for others. But I have a ton of games that have kept me well entertained for 3-6 days for the price of a beer and a kebab. I consider that good value.
I’ve never once had to wait more than 5 seconds to start loading in to a match no matter what time of day or night it is. Literally no other game has ever done this. They’re prioritizing their time-to-game over having actual players in your match, and this definitely means filling slots with bots. How egregious it is will depend on the time and day and current online player count. But when I’m instantly loading a full game of 10 people at 3am on a Tuesday I know something’s fucky.
Other people have done actual research into the matter but I had my suspicions, just from playing the game, by the third day or so after release.
Fusion has always been my favorite. I “want” to not like how linear it is compared to the rest of the series, but when I get started playing it again that never seems to matter to me anymore. And because of that game structure, the game is very well broken up into chunks of 20-30 minutes of gameplay at a time which makes it excellent for playing on a portable console. I played it on a borrowed GBA-SP for the first time back in the day, a few more times after that emulated, and most recently I’ve been playing it again on my Steam Deck within the past week, I’m like 2/3 of the way back through it again, just took down Yakuza for the Space Jump last night before bed.
Fusion is also a huge story point for the series as a whole. It introduces the X and by doing so gives context to the existence of the metroids. And seeing that referenced again later in Dread was maybe one of the coolest moments I’ve experienced in the Metroid series.
Speaking of Dread, that one is a very close follow up though. I was super hype for Dread when it released and it is one of few games in recent memory that completely lived up to that hype. I was a big fan.
Because Rockstar is going to do it and sell a gorillion copies, so it’s basically a guarantee that everyone else will jump on the opportunity. And once every game is $100, what are people going to do, stop buying video games? I find that unlikely anymore. They’ll bitch and complain about it and sales might drop a little on average but studios will survive. And now we have a new price floor set forever.
How does one get into that?
People have been telling me that I have “a voice for radio” ever since I was a teenager, but I’ve never really been into show biz, I’ve been fixing computers and cars my whole life. I’ve been considering just recording a long portfolio of a bunch of different voices and start sending it off to random companies but I can’t help feeling like that’s not my best move.
Hulshult is an Old God of the gaming industry at this point and I expect he will never perform work that is unsatisfactory.
But the whole situation with Mick Gordon still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I’d have liked if they reconciled and brought him back, but that may not be possible for any number of reasons, not least of which is Mick himself telling them he’s lost trust.
But lacking Gordon, Hulshult is still an excellent choice.
Debit card is tied directly to your bank account with no rollbacks. If somebody gets that info and decides to clean out your bank account, that money is gone, period, and you’ll never see it again.
With a credit card, you have a degree of separation and the ability to contest or roll back charges. Debit cards don’t do that.
In fact, there are particular reasons behind this that are influenced by Japanese culture and history.
I primarily play on PC and don’t have a problem with screen size. When I’ve played on the Deck I’ve found myself peering a bit at the smaller text, toolbars and item descriptions and so on, but it was all readable and my vision isn’t exactly stellar. If the Retroid has a smaller screen than the Deck though, it’s possible you could run into trouble there. I think the dev team has accounted for that with some UI size multipliers in the settings menu but I might be misremembering that. I’ll check that tonight when I’m off work and I’ll update here if I remember to.
I will start this off by saying, I don’t know jack all about the Retroids, looking it up when you asked me about it here is the first I’ve ever heard of them. But looking at the specs I think it would probably run fine. I’ve played Qud on some absolute potatoes of desktop PCs before. I feel confident it would run on the processing power of an Android phone and the Retroid 5 has a snapdragon 865 in it. It’s a good bet. Late game might lag a bit but it’s turn based so who cares.
I fucking love this game with a burning fervor that is not matched anywhere else. Qud could have been made for me personally and it wouldn’t be any more perfect than it is. I’ve been playing this game damn near ten years and I still come back to it for every single major update. I’m stoked to see the 1.0 finally release and I hope it gets the attention it deserves.
Exanima does this.
Its a little bit half baked right now but it’s been under construction for the better part of a decade. I think the plan now is to use Exanima as a proof of concept and then pivot that technology into a “real” game. But I find it very fun in its current state and does exactly what you’re asking for.
The slow burn lowering prices over time also maintains a bit of long term income for a maintenance team to patch and improve the game. This game is 2 years old and is getting slammed down to $5, that says to me they’re just trying to cash out on whoever is left that wants to buy it but hasn’t, and then I’d bet this game never sees an update ever again afterward.
You know what, now that you mention it, you’re actually completely right. It’s the disc drive making that noise. The fans are loud, but tolerable, the disc drive is the loud one. Hot damn. I never actually put 2 and 2 together there, I just went and checked it after what you said, and yeah it’s the drive.
So, actually, I was totally wrong, and I highly doubt Sony is going to try to make the PS5P run discs, so that’s an interesting turn of events.
My PS5 already spins its fans up loud enough to drown out the TV from clear across the room, so if they expect to create a device that runs PS5 games at comparable quality and also make it handheld, I don’t foresee this device actually being usable. The fans will be louder than any speakers they’ll want to fit in there and the thing will be the size and shape of a cinderblock.
I could be wrong, and I have been before, but if I am this time I’ll be pretty surprised.
Man, I managed to completely forget about that. My dad was really, really into that game. Like, that’s about all he did for most of 4 years and ended up leaving my mom for someone he met in game.
I guess SL wasn’t really any worse about that than any other game, plenty of people meet and get married in MMOs, but I think the raging custom-content sex parties in SL probably didn’t help matters at the time.
Wonder how that game is doing these days. Cursory web search says it’s still alive. I probably would have found it to be pretty interesting if I wasn’t so turned away from it by my family experience.
I stay defending the weird genius of Yoko Taro’s art to my brother and I stay being vindicated about this