Ashtear
@Ashtear@lemm.ee
- Comment on Games where an emulated console version outclasses the PC port? 19 hours ago:
A number of Tactics Ogre fans will tell you that the PSP version, whether vanilla or with the One Vision mod, is superior to the recent Reborn PC release. Each version has its pluses and minuses, so it’s largely a matter of taste. The port itself was fine on release, despite the recent trend of SQEX PC ports that were messy on release but were fixed later (like Chrono Trigger and Cross).
- Comment on Active communities promotion thread 1 day ago:
Subscribed to Imaginary Witches, thanks!
- Comment on What’s Your Oldest System? 2 days ago:
I still play the Intellivision’s Treasure of Tarmin on my phone from time to time. People would probably call it a first-person roguelike or something today. Amazing how a little randomness can give even a 1983 game so much replay value.
For actual hardware, I doubt I’ll ever play anything especially retro/vintage now. I’m spoiled by today’s gamepad ergonomics (I’d never play much Treasure of Tarmin on an Intellivision pad, woof). However, I do sometimes think about setting up some sort of hardware to play on a CRT with a wireless gamepad.
- Comment on GBA-Style JRPG 'Tako no Himitsu' Has Golden Sun And Terranigma Staff Involved 2 days ago:
Oof, I can’t agree with this at all. Departure is one of my favorite tracks from the whole era, and the ending song was also excellent. I felt the soundtrack did a lot of heavy lifting to carry the game’s somber tone.
Notable though that Miyoko Kobayashi was on “Departure,” not Hikichi. Hikichi only had a few tracks on the game.
- Comment on If you've done the Final Fantasy marathon did you include FF XI? Was it worth it? 1 month ago:
I’ve played all of the mainline games over the years, but my only experience with FFXI was a couple of hours of the beta. Tried the marathon as a set of replays several years back and only made it to the start of IX. The load times and the glacial pace of the battles was too much by that point. I think I was planning on skipping XI.
You could also trying asking in !finalfantasy@lemmy.world and !jrpg@lemmy.zip.
- Comment on Hades II - Early Access Patch 1 Notes 1 month ago:
Ahh, the tool change is nice. Functionally, it probably doesn’t actually change the rate of resource collection, but it did feel bad seeing stuff you can’t harvest.
- Comment on Patient gamers, what are your favourite city builders? 1 month ago:
I think I need to check Nebuchadnezzar out.
Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom is still my favorite in this genre by a mile. Dripping with cultural flavor, and there was really something about monument building in all of the games in this series.
- Comment on Patient gamers, what are your favourite city builders? 1 month ago:
Last time I dipped into Oxygen Not Included, the rocket program was enough to get me to push past self-sustenance. Unfortunately in the end, getting the details of the program right just annoyed me. I don’t know if it’s me or if the game’s just not set up well to handle large-scale construction. Building fuel production ended up being more fun than actually building the rocket silos.
- Comment on Microsoft says it needs games like Hi-Fi Rush the day after killing its studio 1 month ago:
I see the contradiction. And I’m not saying the game was AAA-sized, although live service, multiplayer, or ongoing support are not requirements for the term. It’s a budget classification. Hi-Fi Rush had 1,400 people in its credits.
My comparison to Balatro was more in the line of “Cleopatra lived closer to present day than the era the Great Pyramid was built.” We’re talking about massive gaps in scale, and gaming communities tend to have trouble reconciling that. Balatro is not Hades, Hades is not Hi-Fi Rush, Hi-Fi Rush is not Starfield.
- Comment on What is the point of Xbox? 1 month ago:
Xbox buys talent, mismanages it in search of impossible scale, and cuts it loose - be that the 20-year experts of Fable, or the battle-scarred makers of Dishonored, or the invigorating new generation behind Hi-Fi Rush.
Talking up the demerits of capitalism in the massive gaming industry has been more common as of late (perhaps especially so on Lemmy), and I do think there is nuance in that conversation.
There’s no reasonable nuance here. Microsoft clearly wants insane return on investment from their studios, and I don’t see how that leaves room for the art of video game design.
- Comment on Microsoft says it needs games like Hi-Fi Rush the day after killing its studio 1 month ago:
There have been a lot of good responses to the studio closures and good articles written, but this is not one of them.
Hi-Fi Rush was not a small project, and putting it in the same bucket as Balatro and Manor Lords is outright bizarre. It’s far closer to AAA budget scale than it would be solo/small indie projects.
- Comment on What's your favourite era for video games? 1 month ago:
Local multiplayer–especially couch co-op–is a lost art. I definitely miss it.
- Comment on What's your favourite era for video games? 1 month ago:
It’s not just that. 2023 was a very good year for gaming, right? A lot of the heavy hitters last year were from long-running series. Look and see how many of those series had either their genesis or consensus fan favorite entries in that time period.
Not only that, Steam, Unreal Engine, e-sports, the mainstreaming of game mods, and even AAA gaming itself all trace back to that point. Historically, it’s a massively important time period for video games.
- Comment on What's your favourite era for video games? 1 month ago:
It’s an overlap between the back end of the fourth gen (aka 16-bit) era for consoles and then a full pivot to PC gaming in the years after. I really didn’t like the move to early 3D on consoles with their abysmal framerates and load times. I felt then (and still think today) it was a generation too early.
Marking the starting point is easy: 1994. An insane year for the SNES, Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy VI, Mega Man X, and Super Metroid all came out in North America that year. That run continued on the SNES until Yoshi’s Island in 1996. I did pick up a PlayStation but I wasn’t thrilled with it. There are some personal favorites from this time, too, but they still had the sprite art I was desperately missing: games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Suikoden, Symphony of the Night, Xenogears.
I’d been a PC gamer for a while, but I started moving more towards the platform with Blizzard’s ascendancy with Warcraft II in 1995 and Diablo in 1996. I’d finally get a dedicated GPU in 1998, and what a year for it: Half-Life, Thief: The Dark Project, Unreal, Tribes, Freespace. The less-demanding games of the year were no slouches either: Starcraft, Baldur’s Gate, Fallout 2. With a similarly impressive console lineup, it’s no surprise many consider 1998 the best year ever for video games.
The endpoint is harder to pin down. Maybe the death of the space sim genre with Freespace 2 in late 1999, or Blizzard’s last landmark game before the MMO era, Diablo II in mid-2000. At the very latest, a new era for me definitely began with the release of the Game Boy Advance in 2001, where I shifted mostly to PC + handheld platforms, where I’m still at today.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
I wasn’t big on it at release, but a lot of people were. In hindsight, there was still too much of the earlier DNA in the game: a lot of people just talking at you, and otherwise mostly a focus on driving around and shooting things. It wasn’t engaging enough for someone like me that mostly played RPGs.
The move to 3D was impressive, though, and a necessary step for not just the series but a lot of games of the generation. Now that they had a big hit, they were able to take big swings by bringing in Ray Liotta and all the elements to make an amazing period piece with Vice City.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
I keep a gaming journal, but it’s only for thoughts afterward. I keep it much simpler than I used to, as there’s a point where writing at length becomes work, and gaming shouldn’t be work. That’s the same reason I don’t keep a backlog. In my longer posts here and elsewhere, it tends to just be stream-of-consciousness writing derived from those journals entries, just cleaned up a little bit.
As for note-taking, I will almost never take notes on opinion/criticism during a play. Pretty sure that again, it’d feel like work if I took notes. I also rarely write about games I don’t finish unless I’ve played most of them (I tend to bounce off a lot of games lately). Other than that, my journal has the occasional random thought on larger industry trends, or a quick sort, like a toplist or the latest tier-making meme I saw. It’s interesting to see how my tastes change over the years.
- Comment on Controversy and Censorship 1 month ago:
The first Witcher encapsulates Geralt’s (many) sexual conquests in collectible cards. And almost none of the encounters have any bearing on the plot. Having a hard time not calling that exploitative.
Much of what’s going on, especially lately, is simple xenophobia. There are arbitrary restrictions on what can be sexualized when Asian character designs are used.
- Comment on Reflections on Xenoblade Chronicles 1 month ago:
Well… I have my issues with Torna. If you’re someone that likes sidequesting, you’ll probably like it. I personally don’t (I think sidequest quality is a failing of JRPGs at large), so I was really frustrated with how many I was forced to do. However, I did enjoy the story and I wish I’d had more time with the characters.
And yeah, the settings for Xenoblade are phenomenal. It’s kind of a simple idea but it works out so well.
- Comment on Escape From Tarkov studio boss says he "did not foresee" players would get mad about charging extra for PvE 1 month ago:
This was the news to me on this whole mess. I knew about Ark but hadn’t heard about this one. Shameless.
- Comment on Xbox Console Sales Are Tanking 2 months ago:
I didn’t see that coming, and it’s a welcome development. If it warps the general PC hardware market enough that devs start optimizing for a standard platform, it’ll result in less buggy products at launch. And maybe orienting development towards a relatively underpowered platform will make it easier for those of us
dumb enough tothat like to spend more on a desktop to hit those 60 FPS targets. - Comment on Reflections on Xenoblade Chronicles 2 months ago:
I finished a replay of Xenogears last year myself. Really surprised myself with how much more I liked the trimmed-down disc 2 this time around. That first scene in the chair is so touching. Love the romance in that game. And as much as I dislike early 3D, some of the scene composition is timeless.
I hear that a lot about Xenoblade’s combat. I think a lot of my enjoyment (or tolerance, in the second game’s case) of it comes from my MMO background.
- Comment on The wild successes of Helldivers 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 send a clear message: Let devs cook 2 months ago:
I can’t speak to Helldivers, but pinning Baldur’s Gate 3’s success on the recent growing popularity of the D&D franchise is beyond reductive. There’s no huge publisher for Baldur’s Gate 3; Larian’s a licensee and an independent studio to boot, and Hasbro’s not running massive marketing campaigns for them any more than Disney is for the typical licensed Star Wars game.
BG3 was the culmination of decades of iteration by Larian and was the studio’s first attempt with a AAA budget. The game has more in common with Divinity: Original Sin 2 than it does Baldur’s Gate 2, as the Baldur’s Gate die-hards would be happy to tell you.
Calling CRPGs a popular genre is also going to get some laughs. Sure, we might be able to look on this point now in a few years as when CRPGs went mainstream (or maybe not, as the insane amount of choice built into the game set the bar so high that it’s possible no one’s going to bother with that kind of risky content-making). But by the time Larian started development on BG3, the genre had just risen from the dead after some successful Kickstarter campaigns and was still very niche.
- Submitted 2 months ago to patientgamers@sh.itjust.works | 11 comments
- World of Warcraft boss says Microsoft is happy to 'let Blizzard be Blizzard,' but I'm not sure that's entirely truewww.pcgamer.com ↗Submitted 2 months ago to games@lemmy.world | 14 comments
- Comment on fucking beautiful. almost a year into the 'verse and its starting to become more functional than that R place... better than i imagined. 2 months ago:
We’re doing our best!
If you’re in a niche community, don’t be afraid to put some content out there. Niche communities are generally so happy to see any conversation. The amount of criticism/downvoting I’ve seen on topics in slow communities has been very low.
- Comment on Monthly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing? 2 months ago:
Picked up Midnight Suns. Having a blast with it, though this is the first Marvel property I’ve played/watched/etc. that mimics the MCU, so that’s a little weird. Mixed bag so far on that; whoever’s playing Iron Man is doing a solid RDJ impression while Erica Lindbeck as Captain Marvel (my favorite superhero) is going to be distracting. I’ll probably end up randomly hearing Misty or Futaba as I go.
I’m loving the writing so far, though. I actually stepped out to catch up on a couple of the movies but I’ll be jumping back in tonight.
- Comment on The Way Forward, an update from the team behind Cities: Skylines 2 months ago:
Ya, Nintendo was certainly one of the exceptions. Benefits of your game having an insanely long tail.
- Comment on The Way Forward, an update from the team behind Cities: Skylines 2 months ago:
Paradox is extremely healthy.
If we’re both going to be speculating here, I’m going with the more likely consideration for a publisher with record performance. In early August, they saw an early access game get its full release in an unfinished state to massive acclaim and sales (along with similar, larger trends) and decided to test their market with the same.
I don’t even have a dog in this fight; I’m not a city management sim fan. I’m just calling it like it is.
- Comment on The Way Forward, an update from the team behind Cities: Skylines 2 months ago:
Paradox and Colossal Order have said they literally ran out of cash?
- Comment on The Way Forward, an update from the team behind Cities: Skylines 2 months ago:
The base game having less content than its predecessor isn’t the greedy part. It’s the fact that taking advantage of that market inelasticity wasn’t enough for Paradox and judging it acceptable to release a product in this state on top of that.