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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.
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.
Looks like the first two games are mostly playable, with their efforts focused on getting Jak 3 working now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hey, I think you forgot the link. Sounds fun!