- 0 Posts
- 246 Comments
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.
They have been “working” on Half Life 3 for over a decade, with many promising leads found through datamining things left in other source games over that time. There is almost always absurd levels of speculation over the smallest crumbs of datamined material.
For example, there’s been an unfinished NPC worked on for Episode 3 left in Half Life 2 that was first shown in a tech demo in 2006, literally prefixed with “Ep3_” in the code. It’s been around for 18 years and the most that was used from it was graphics for the gels in Portal 2, vs all of the speculated things about it.
The recent documentary they released had what was effectively a post-mortem section where they talked about why Episode 3/Half Life 3 never came out.
I can see why you might think that their new controller and headset might be enough of a game changer that they feel like making 3 is worth it again, but the overall feeling I’ve gotten from them from following all of this closely since the pre-Orange Box days is that: 3 isn’t happening due to the immense pressure and expectations that have built up over the many years people have been waiting. Maybe we get Alyx 2 or some other spin off, but the only thing they’d accomplish with 3 at this point is disappointing a wide variety of people with countless conflicting expectations.
At the very least you also have to contend with “Valve Time”. What would take a normal studio a year takes them four due to their obsession with polishing everything. Team Fortress 2 started development in 1998 and didn’t release for 9 years.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to see where they go next, and I hope this means more than a voice actor sending a fun new years message. But you need to understand that “definitive evidence” of 3 coming based off datamined material has been floating around for 15+ years now.
Seconding this. Far faster than copying from the phone mounted the default way through MTP over USB.
If you’re used to rsync, there’s a Python wrapper that makes syncing through ADB work like rsync: https://github.com/jb2170/better-adb-sync
If you’re on Windows, I found a simple GUI for browsing the phone through adb and pushing/pulling files, useful for a one time manual backup like I just did in prep for replacing my phone: https://github.com/Alex4SSB/ADB-Explorer
Probably less of a desire and more apathy. Money’s already spent, and some bean counter mathed out that it would be cheaper to delist them than to keep paying people to manage the accounting and any payout to the devs.
Same thing happened earlier this year with all the Adult Swim published games, and some of the devs impacted (and I think some of the people on Adult Swim’s side too) were semi-open about it once any of them knew what was going on.
A good example of what can be possible, from the Super Mario 64 PC port: https://youtu.be/Lav8wgQP9rc
Looks like the old magazine ads for the game brought to life. That’s a combination of the Render96 3D models project and the ray tracing mod for lighting.
Ocarina of Time’s port (by the same team as this one for Star Fox 64) doesn’t have anything quite as impressive yet graphically, but there are high quality texture replacements and an import of all the enhanced 3DS models. You can also replace most of the character and enemy models with the ones used in Twilight Princess if you want. And there are a ton of great quality of life changes like letting the iron boots be mapped to the D-Pad like a normal item. Water temple isn’t anywhere as tedious anymore.
The .bat is for extracting the game data from the rom. As the readme unclearly says: you need to run the .bat to make the data files (the .OTR) you need to run the game, then you run the .exe to play.
Can’t speak to proton compatibility, but I would be surprised if they don’t release a Linux native version as well. Just give them some time, this just released and they are apparently still missing the .sh file for extracting the .otr on Mac.
These ports don’t tend to be one and done releases, they get updates/bug fixes/upgrades/additional features over time.
The term Ante in the game is used instead of “round” or “level”. It’s a measure of how far you’ve gotten. Each “ante” is made up of three “stakes”, point totals you need to beat in a set number of hands played and cards discarded.
There’s no aspect of choosing how much you risk, of “ante-ing up”, or how much you stake. You either beat the points goal (called “chips”) or you lose. There’s no playing of your hand against other hands, bluffing about how good your hand may be to convince others to fold, etc. It’s just you against the score goal. If you beat it faster than the amount of hands you’re given to work with you get extra rewards.
The game has no elements where you stake chips for rewards or anything like that. It borrows basic elements of scoring mechanics from poker, and uses a lot of poker terms for other purposes, but the closest part to gambling is the ability to buy random card packs between rounds (to customize your deck instead of just having the standard 52 card deck).
In between rounds you have access to buy various things to add further modifiers to your scoring, and to adjust the composition of your deck in order to make getting specific combinations more likely.
You can learn most of this in about 5 minutes with the demo, or by taking some time to watch someone else play on youtube.
I’ve noticed that no one has mentioned Decay yet. It’s a two player coop expansion campaign also made by Gearbox for the Half Life 1 release for PS2. There’s a PC port with a singleplayer mode.
Agreed. I’m not sure how exactly it would work, but I feel like the analog sticks and touchpads should be switched somehow.
I really wish brick and mortar stores would have displays of controllers to try out like they do with laptops and phones, but I’m not sure the money is there. Most people just go with whatever the standard xbox or playstation controller is and call it good enough.
Unless the “game aware” functionality just hijacks Discord Rich Presence functionality, I expect that to be abandoned in a year or two. I also really doubt this has much utility to anyone not gaming on a laptop.
Plus, with everyone having a phone they can search from… I’m really not sure who this is for.
Seems like a waste of development effort.
In the comment I initially responded to, you made a specific point of calling out
I just write off the forums for any game that features a black or female main character, let alone LGBT representation.
As if it was only shit in those cases. There’s no need to call that out specifically if you’re trying to make the point that they’re all shit on Steam (which we’re in agreement on).
Usually a statement like that implies the inverse, in this case that you don’t write off the discussion forums for games that don’t fit that criteria. Hence my confusion and my call out that the Steam discussion forums have always been shit.
I agree that it’s for the reason you called out here, that Steam just relies on the devs to moderate their own discussion forums. At the very least, they should default to not creating them unless the dev specifically opts in.
The whole OK symbol thing was literally a false flag by 4chan to clown on the news media’s fervor at the time to label things as racist dog whistles, specifically the whole Pepe shit that was going on.
The fucking thread that started it was (paraphrasing): “Hey guys, do you think the news media would be stupid enough to believe the OK hand sign is a white power dog whistle? [Image of WP poorly traced over the OK hand symbol]”
Obviously, if you get your kicks out of pretending to be a fool, you shouldn’t be surprised when you find yourself in the presence of actual fools. That also very much applies to the type of edgelords on 4chan that thought it would be funny to “pretend to be” racists, or at least to have discovered a racist hate symbol. Eventually enough people will take it seriously that the original “joke” (if you can even call it that) will be lost.
There’s a decent amount of evidence that they weren’t given the time they needed by Rockstar, that they intentionally shipped it out with a shit ton of behind the scenes files in an attempt to assist modders (at the very least it was shoved out the door so fast they didn’t have time to clean the files out of the release directory, holy shit), and members of the studio have repeatedly and consistently reported that they were not permitted by Rockstar to release many bug fixes after the remasters released.
Rockstar holds the biggest blame for this one.
If you’re a sucker for side content, there’s a ton of short stories and novellas (even a musical) that the fans have translated: I just got Ending E | The Ark Wiki
Kept the setting alive for just a little longer, and added some more context to the world and characters. Massive spoilers for anyone who hasn’t beat Automata though.
The only reason that’s any different than any other time Microsoft has released a new OS is that more people own computers now than ever before, improvements in hardware power have slowed significantly, and people are more outspoken online now.
It’s still not reasonable to expect them to support all hardware forever on an aging codebase.
I understand the frustration, but this isn’t some new thing for this new OS in particular.
Don’t you know that it’s entirely unreasonable to expect your users to have hardware that’s a standard feature on any machine made in the last ten years, that can be added to existing systems for around $30 and a free card slot? /s
I don’t think I’ll ever understand the insistence that a TPM module is a bridge too far.
You might be interested in Marc Laidlaw’s (the story author for Half-Life) Epistle 3, the rough outline of the story plan for Half-Life 3 that he turned into a letter from Gordon and released after he left Valve. He has since said that he regrets releasing it, as game stories are wildly impacted by the design and development of the game itself, so the end result would likely be far different. Especially with Alyx retconning some things. That said, it’s still an interesting look at what was planned at least at one point. Fans are working on a fangame based on the concept.
Likewise, there’s the book Half-Life: Raising the Bar, which documents a TON of stuff about the creation of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, with a bunch of info on concept art and cut ideas. The original plan for the game would have been even darker than what we got and didn’t feature Gordon at all! Unfortunately you’ll probably just need to download a pirate scan of it, as I don’t believe they’ve printed new copies in over a decade.
Together with everything the fans have figured out about the early leaked version of Half-Life 2 that matches up with the cut plot in Raising the Bar, you can build your own rich “fan canon” until Valve releases anything more.
I do think it was a missed opportunity to not have Laidlaw write some books set in the universe when they didn’t need him working on game plot though.
Small caveat:
The first switch emulator that was taken down (I think yuzu), was justified by Nintendo as copyright infringement because people (including moderators) were sharing copyrighted material openly on their public discord. BIOS files, links to games, and early leaks.
The more recent one (Ryujinx I think) was the one that did things right, so Nintendo didn’t have that copyright leg to stand on. So instead (according to the maintainer of the Mac fork) they sent goons to the house of the head dev in Brazil… to “talk” him into taking it down.
I highly doubt it. The custom ROM/OS projects have entire teams working on them, and they still can end up with bugs amd problems.
You’re overlooking the chance that you missed something critical, or aren’t aware of some weird driver interactions with your phone hardware that could end up bricking it (unlikely, but possible). At the very least I’d be kind of surprised if your “compile it yourself” works on the first try and doesn’t need some adjustments to actually run on your specific phone hardware.
Compiling your own fork of a program is one thing. Doing that with the OS is an entirely different ball game with an order of magnitude more potential complications to consider.
You should look into the Dreamcast conversion mod and the Lantern Engine (lighting engine tweaks) at the very least. Pretty much everything that comes with the “Better SADX” modloader is great.
In short, when they updated the Dreamcaast original to DX, they changed the textures entirely along with most of the player models and broke the lighting engine. Every time the game was ported after that, the textures have gotten more compressed and lower quality, and more bugs have been introduced.
For example, you know the spot in Emerald Coast where Sonic can clip through the wall really easily and drown? Never happens in the Dreamcast original, fixed by the conversion.
So mods that restore stuff tend to bring the quality up considerably and fix bugs. Personally I prefer the DX player models (the Dreamcast ones look barely better than PS1), but you can adjust the DC conversion mod to switch off whatever changes you don’t like.
Oh, and for replayability, the time trial ghosts mod is great. It displays a see through playback of all your movements from your fastest playthrough of the level, like racing games do. So you can race yourself.
Also, with the modloader you get real widescreen. No more inane borders on the side squishing things to 4:3.
I have a strong abiding loathing for Gearbox’s CEO, Randy Pritchford, but the team they have behind RoR2 now seem to really want to do a good job. They’ve been very up front, in a way I only sometimes see with small indie devs, about the process of fixing core game parts they managed to break when they released the core game patch that coincided with this DLC.
I’m still waiting a good long while before I touch RoR2 again, but I feel like it will be fixed eventually. Can’t say that for all of my games.
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.