Tyler McVicker has such a good connection with Valve that years ago they made a post on their official twitter calling him out by name to state that he had no exclusive or insider information, labeling him just a “passionate gamer”.

His youtube name was fucking Valve News Network. He swore to never cover Valve games again, which lasted all of maybe three months.

Yeah, he was such a nuisance to Valve and their employees that Valve made a public statement on their twitter calling him out by name to “remind” the public that he had no exclusive insider information and was just a “passionate gamer”.

Tyler got so butthurt that he changed his entire branding away from Valve News Network, swore he’d never cover Valve games again (that didn’t last very long), and to this very day closes his videos with a signoff of “Tyler McVicker, passionate gamer”

I think there’s a turn based mode you can enable from the options menu. I know there was one for 15.

I’m waiting for the modding scene to become mature. Once the unofficial bugfix patch comes over and most of the top (non graphical) mods from the original.

I run and pray. The fulton trick sounds easier though.

With Cyberpunk 2077 “complete and fixed”, I’m finally checking it out. Been using the Welcome to Night City modpack. Act 1 and all the content in Watson (starting area) was amazing. Very immersive. Completed all of that, about halfway through Judy’s missions, and most of Panam’s missions. I think I’m around 40 hours in.

Quality starts dipping outside of the main story missions outside of Watson. Nothing so far has been anywhere close to bad, and there’s still some absolutely amazing things sprinkled here and there, but it’s frustrating how just good some of it is given how strong the start is.

It’s incredibly obvious that the game was meant to be much more. Like Watson district’s fixer (person who gives you missions) has 39 gigs, and she has Cyberpsycho fights across the whole map. I don’t think any other fixer has more than 15 gigs for their own area, and most don’t have any other “gimmick” missions like the Cyberpsycho missions.

I’m already planning to replay it with mods that add more gang activity and give the gangs “memory” so they hold grudges if you keep doing missions against them. Also, unscaling the stat checks. Stupid that I go from being able to comment on certain topics (the psuedomyth of Rache Bartmoss specifically) in conversations to not being able to because I got too high a level and the stat check jumped from 10 to 15.

I don’t know how to put it. The great stuff is some of the best gaming experience I’ve had in a long time, where I can’t wait to get back to it. Most of the game is good, but not “can’t wait to get back into it”. But there’s a big feeling of missing “what could have been”.

Like the Watson Fixer Regina has extra rewards for you capturing Cyberpsychos alive, but in any of the actual fixer gigs with Cyberpsychos it doesn’t matter if you kill them or incapacitate and Regina has no comments on it. There’s a lot of emphasis put on customizing your character for you to not see them outside of a few cutscenes (most are first person) and driving a motorcycle. Lots of NPC visual cyberware just isn’t available for the player character.

Maybe it’s just residuals from the collective overhyping of the game, but I feel it hard when stuff like that pulls me out of things.

If you like the open world free roam stuff, I cannot recommend the Infinite Heaven mod/mod framework enough.

The remake is being handled by a third party, and it’s unclear so far what they’ve been allowed to do besides replace the graphics rendering with Unreal Engine 5. It’s all reportedly still Creation Engine under the hood.

Considering that Bethesda refused to roll in the community bug fixes with their rereleases of Skyrim, it’s likely that it will have all the bugs of the original.

95%, as they’ve already done that for the last Skyrim rereleases and Fallout 4.

Unfortunate to see that they haven’t tested with xash3d or the like. I’d be especially interested in the ray tracing fork of xash being supported.

Improved lighting does wonders for old games, imo.

And that’s the only reason I’m even vaguely considering picking up a Switch 2 around launch.

That said, even with a gen 1 Switch, booting into the CFW is just enough of a pain that I don’t do it often. Gotta grab the shim for the rail, plug it into something that can deliver the payload… ugh.

I miss the days of Wii and PSP homebrew. No online shit to get banned from, no special booting techniques. 3DS cfw came pretty close in terms of ease of use.

That said, being able to pirate games directly from the 3DS and Switch was a big step up from having to transfer files over to the memory card (PSP) or effectively needing a dedicated external HDD/partition (Wii). Even if it was slow as hell and couldn’t use my full internet speed.

I know Nuts N Bolts wasn’t what anyone wanted from a Banjo Kazooie 3, but I think the rendition of Spiral Mountain in itwas beautiful. I’d love a remake of the first two in that style!

Yeah, I think they went a little too hard with Crash 4. I understand wanting to make sure there was a reason to play it instead of the remakes, but sometimes it’s okay to just give players more of what already worked.

Doing trade routes in solo mode is considerably less engaging, but is still a great zen thing for me while I listen to podcasts or half watch something.

He’s comin’ out again with a good one. Place your bets now ladies and gentleman.

I’m fairly sure the update cadence is set by the game dev/publisher, not GoG.

I’d look more into your data connection first. WiFi and Cell Data. That seems to be the primary source of delayed notifications in my personal experience.

Which one of the four spiritual successors is this one now?

It may make you happy to know that ED has solo mode. Player fleet carriers are still around (as they act as psuedo stations out past the edge of developed space) and the markets are still effected by player actions, but you don’t have to worry about Cmdr Immersion Breaker screaming by in his hot pink jankmobile, or ganking you with it.

It’s also worth noting that compared to the size of the universe in ED, the amount of “crafted” environments is relatively small (but definitely there). The universe is so big that depending on where you are in it, you can also go long periods without encountering other players. It’s a simulation before any sort of RPG.

Hey, I think you forgot the link. Sounds fun!

It might be controversial, but I think Twisted Metal would be the perfect fit for a battle royale type game. I’d want it to have a strong single player and local/small scale multiplayer (like the previous ones), but a larger map with the chaos of 100 psychos driving around could be a lot of fun.

Outside of the car though? Maybe some bonus points for how long you can run around without getting popped like a party balloon.

Edit: but we all know this would have been just a shit live service game. So not much lost. Can’t believe no indie dev has come out with a good successor.

GOD HAND- the granddaddy of Platinum Games’s combo based “beat em ups”, made by Clover Studios before they went bankrupt and reopened as Platinum. So think Devil May Cry and Bayonetta but hand to hand 🎵"or fist to fist. Kick your nuts or twist your wrist. God power keeps my pimp hand strong so trust me or you won’t last very long."🎵 Yeah, it also has quite possibly the best theme song ever too.

Zone of the Enders the Second Runner drops you into the midpoint of a fairly generic mecha anime plot, but as overseen by Hideo Kojima. It has a lot of “Dynasty Warriors” style “tear through hundreds of fodder with ease” gameplay, but also a very fast paced “attack/dodge/parry” system for fights against beefier enemies that ends up as this fast paced sort of rock paper scissors as you have to adapt to use the right technique to counter the enemy. You fly and can manuever very fast, attacks can come from any angle, and it’s just flat out fun to control. There is a PC port/remaster of questionable quality (and no steam deck support), and a xbox 360 port of good quality, but it’s mostly just uprezzed graphics that you’ll get by emulation anyway.

It sounds like that’s what happened, but through the proper channels. They hired a known CnC community/modding site admin as the dev.

I’d imagine he pitched that this was an easy way to reduce maintenance costs while fostering massive good will and making the amount of long tail sales over time higher.

If you’ve tried the Crash Bandicoot N-Sane trilogy, there are a few sequels of differing quality on PS2. I don’t think any of them are particularly bad, but none are as good as the original PS1 trilogy (or the N-Sane remakes).

Somewhere in my comment history, back when Steam did their 2024 yearly awards I think, I called out someone who was trying to defend Balatro’s RNG by saying that players and modders had proven that only 1 in 5 RNG seeds resulted in a truly unwinnable game on the max difficulty.

I don’t know how true that is, but it definitely lines up with my anecdotal experience of the game.

That would mean that at best, playing 100% optimally (the RNG is deterministic, so the same actions on the same seed lead to the same RNG outcomes), with the ability to cheat by undoing your moves and by seeing the rng outcomes in advance… at absolute best you could only have an 80% win rate on the hardest difficulty.

I enjoyed Balatro, but that is cuckoo fucking bananas absurd.

The average player is not playing 100% optimally with full sight of RNG outcomes and an undo button… this is so beyond the realm of “just git gud scrub”.

This is thematically similar to an idea I brainstormed with a bunch of college friends ages ago.

Instead of an RPG with a fishing minigame, a full fledged fishing game with a semi-hidden JRPG side mode. Like one of those weirdly detailed Dreamcast fishing games, then halfway through you start fishing up vaguely Lovecraftian things. Things get weirder until someone dies in an accident during a tournament, and when that lake reopens you fish his undead body out and start some JRPG shit with Cthulhu and Atlantis. Complete that and it goes back to fishing game like nothing happened.

This was before the trend of “secretly a horror game” indie games, and the tone was more goofy than it sounds.

Anyway, I’ll have to check this out!

Good news! There’s a community open source project to port the engine used in Jak and Daxter to PC.

https://opengoal.dev/

Looks like the first two games are mostly playable, with their efforts focused on getting Jak 3 working now.

Much like Epic, they also did free games for people with Amazon Prime, but they undercut that by offering free games on other platforms as well.

Not that I’m complaining, but nothing to make themselves stand out.

My only real counter to that is Project Zomboid. It’s a complete game. It’s in EA due to them wanting to add many more gameplay systems to the existing complete sandbox. They have a roadmap somewhere. They don’t release major updates without multiple ones being added.

Last major update (41, a few years ago) was drivable cars (and all the spawning systems, loot, and map changes to make them fully fleshed out) and multiplayer. I’m sure there was more, but those were the standout things.

The new major update (42, available through a public opt-in beta branch right now) is a complete overhaul to gunplay, liquid management/mixing, crafting systems, lighting engine, and the addition of NPC animals with a full husbandry system. And that’s only the highlights. It will stay in beta as they get better data for balancing the new features and the absurdly increased player count surfaces bugs they didn’t find through internal testing. Once it’s balanced and stable (maybe a year), they’ll push this update to the main branch where it will continue to get minor bug fixes as things crop up (usually bugs surfaced by the modding community by the time it hits stable).

Then they’ll keep crunching away on work on human NPCs and simulating story stuff with loot generation, which I believe will be the next major update in a few years.

Each intermediate release is a complete game, it just doesn’t have the full set of features on the roadmap. It still is the best zombie survival sim on the market as is.

But it is absolutely a unicorn of early access.

Everyone keeps labelling GabeN as the only one holding VALVe to standards, but by his own admission he’s more of the equivalent of a board member now, not deeply involved in the day to day anymore. I think the only ones that truly know his level of involvement would be people at VALVe.

What I’m getting at is that I have the same concerns about what will happen after he passes, but I don’t think he’s the only person standing in the way of VALVe going full corporate.

The examples I’ve seen are a year+ with no updates. Not definitive, but I highly doubt they’re doing this for the cases you’re talking about.

I’m sorry, but if they weren’t being paid for any further work they did, then they don’t owe you anything. Blame the publisher.

Something I love about this game is how there’s no hud, all the info is conveyed through lights on the backpack.

I know other games have done similar, like all the menus in Dead Space existing as projections from your suit in the game world and not stopping time. I’m a sucker for that little bit of extra diagetics (pretty sure that’s the right term).

Don’t forget the multiple modes and features that put the “physics” front and center. If I recall right from old reviews, the analog stick calibration and testing “feature” is two girls trying to balance on pool floats while you tip the floats around with the sticks, with the camera putting the jiggle front and center.

I felt like Shadow of Mordor was a decent spiritual successor, and while I haven’t played Shadow of War it seems like more of the same. Same combat style as the Arkham games.

The recent Insomniac/Sony Spider-Man games also had a similar combat style.

Does Ross/Accursed Farms, the person who started this movement, not count?

This has made the games news rounds, and the one thing I wish is that it had been done in the DOOM engine, or one of the sourceport engines like gzdoom.

Most of the features should be possible with basic engine features, and it all would definitely be possible with gzdoom’s expanded feature set.

Yeah, I get that the devs probably don’t want to rehash the same level editor mechanics ad-naseum so instead they made the far more complex/in-depth Dreams, but I think there’s still value in simpler creation tools. I’m sad they moved away from LBP.

Simpler tools lower the bar for entry and can make creating things easier. For LBP it also enforced a cohesive art style, and unless the creator was insane it enforced a specific set of game mechanics.

With Dreams you have no idea what you’re in for, and there’s countless people taking time poorly reinventing the wheel for basic gameplay functionality. You can’t just go and use a highly polished “platformer mechanics” pack created and tested by a professional team like you got with LBP or more recently (and far more restricted) with Mario Maker. Every “starter kit” is going to have differing levels of amatuer jank.

It’s a great “intro to game development” tool, but I personally think it’s lacking in the “play high quality user created content” realm because there’s less quality content as a result of the complexity.

I haven’t been watching Second Wind since all the drama that Frost unearthed when he left, so I don’t know if this is a trend with Yahtzee lately, but did this seem incredibly short to anyone else?

I could have sworn that he usually went into more detail in these year end best/worst/blandest videos. This one barely had a single throwaway joke for each entry.

Returned to Elite Dangerous after an almost two year break. Just casually space trucking to grind out some credits while watching youtube. Once I get enough to outfit one or two new ships, I plan to finally give exploration/exobiology a try, and check out the changes to the engineering grind.

When I last played, I was kind of at the end of what I’d consider “early game”, but there are a decent amount of learning cliffs. Should probably practice some of the other low level content again before moving on.

One of my cousins asked for the game for Christmas and I picked it up on sale for him, so I’m hoping we can play some together at some point.

Where have you guys been? Half Life 3 was confirmed December 13, 2007.

I’m sure it’s coming any day now.