ampersandrew

@ampersandrew@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What open-world games on Steam have satisfying movement, like Arkham Knight or Spider-Man?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe it has a direct lineage from a game based on The Hulk called Ultimate Destruction, and you can feel that. You’re super jumping, gliding, and sort of like Venom, consuming people to pose as them. There are missions with a stealth element, but other times you’re throwing tanks at helicopters. Holding the run button will have you effortlessly doing cartwheels off the tops of cars and wall running straight up skyscrapers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What open-world games on Steam have satisfying movement, like Arkham Knight or Spider-Man?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t played the PC version, but I expect it’s the same as the console version: Prototype (from Activision in 2009; there’s another game listed with the same title). The story is utter garbage, but everything about the moment to moment gameplay is great, and it definitely checks the boxes you’re looking for. I never played the sequel, because it re-used the same map, and that’s a lot like playing a Mario game with all of the same levels as the one before it, but this first game rules.

  If you have access to something that can play Xbox 360 games, I’d also highly recommend the first Crackdown.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨First-party Switch 2 games—including re-releases—all run either $70 or $80⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I hear very good things about Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed, and there’s a new one coming.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Switch 2 Launches on June 5th Worldwide; 1080p Screen With 120 FPS and HDR Support, Docked Mode 4K Resolution Support Confirmed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d encourage you to utilize those limited funds legally by buying games on deep discounts, if you were implying piracy, but even legitimately, being able to sideload all the old PC games you have is a massive plus. GOG and Epic give away great games for free on the regular, and an Amazon Prime subscription has recently been filled with some bangers that you get to keep via both of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Switch 2 Launches on June 5th Worldwide; 1080p Screen With 120 FPS and HDR Support, Docked Mode 4K Resolution Support Confirmed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  You can sideload a program called Heroic Games Launcher that lets you easily manage your GOG games, as well as Amazon and Epic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Switch 2 Launches on June 5th Worldwide; 1080p Screen With 120 FPS and HDR Support, Docked Mode 4K Resolution Support Confirmed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  For $50 less, you get a similarly capable machine in terms of specs but more comfortable to hold, with an immensely larger library, and an operating system far more respectful of your authority to do what you want with the machine you bought.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Switch 2 Launches on June 5th Worldwide; 1080p Screen With 120 FPS and HDR Support, Docked Mode 4K Resolution Support Confirmed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  $449, $499 with Mario Kart digital.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mario Kart World - Announce Trailer [Nintendo Switch 2]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  For $80, apparently?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Deck / Gaming News #8⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m definitely keeping an eye on Selaco, but I’ll wait until it leaves early access.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG seems to be considering paid membership option⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Consoles won’t go away, but they’re in the process of transforming. Peak spending on consoles was all the way back in 2009 and has dropped ever since. There are perhaps dozens of reasons for the change, but one of them might be that the average consumer picked up on the air quotes around the ways consoles are cheaper. As for non-DRM, as long as piracy remains better than the official option, there’s money being left on the table, and I have confidence that a lot of that will change too, though it will be far slower than I’d like.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG seems to be considering paid membership option⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree, but it’ll be the only way they get my money. Everyone can see that PC line going up and that console line going down, so we’ll see how long they hold their ground; probably one generation longer than Sony does.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG seems to be considering paid membership option⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There is, if the money is there. Nintendo’s also under new management these days, and if the old strategies don’t work, they could pivot, just like Microsoft and Sony have.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG seems to be considering paid membership option⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You know, I just checked the ones I was confident on, and it turns out they each had an obscure Windows port back in the day that I never heard of. Still, the other popular trend going on right now for porting old console games like Tomba and Mega Man is to run them through tools that emulate the game and then output native code, and I wouldn’t consider it a waste of time to show where the demand is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Switch 2 Nintendo Direct Will Be 60 Minutes Long, Nintendo Confirms⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that’s the name of Nintendo’s legal department.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG seems to be considering paid membership option⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  With regards to the Dreamlist, this is so that they have ammunition to bring to rights holders. They just started bringing previously console exclusive games to GOG as well, so that barrier has been broken down. If there’s money in it, any game could be done.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Switch 2 Nintendo Direct Will Be 60 Minutes Long, Nintendo Confirms⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I was talking about this with some friends. Anecdotally, almost everyone we know who plays games has a Switch, but very few of them seem to care about a Switch 2, for one reason or another. What will undoubtedly still move units are their marquis franchises, not the least of which is expected to be a new 3D Super Mario game. Mario Kart does extremely well for them, but I’ll bet some amount of its success is tied to very cheap console hardware, which the Switch 2 will not be out of the gate, so that parents can buy each of their kids a handheld to play with each other in the car, at the laundromat, at their siblings’ soccer practice, etc., and as the hardware gets cheaper, that probably contributes to its “long tail” of sales.

  But yeah, for people who live and breathe video games, consoles have lost their luster. Games take longer to make now, which means there are fewer first party titles, which means we have fewer reasons to buy another machine that plays the same games as some other piece of hardware we already own. That will be especially true for the Switch 2, since they don’t have a Wii U library to plunder for titles that they can port cheaply for people who’ve never played them.

  All that to say, my expectations as an armchair analyst whose word isn’t worth anything on the matter and whose predictions may as well be a dice roll are that the Switch 2 will do very well, but I’d be surprised if it did better than the first Switch, and I don’t know that we’ll ever see a console do as well as the Switch, or the PS2 for that matter, ever again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Switch 2 Nintendo Direct Will Be 60 Minutes Long, Nintendo Confirms⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s the successor to one of the most successful consoles ever, and word is Nintendo’s had a lot of games that were done for some time now, but they’ve been holding them back to better position this launch. An hour-long Direct is about twice the usual length, and basically the entire industry is basing its plans around the Switch 2 and GTA6 right now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Ubisoft spent $2.1M on influencers to secure the launch of Assassin's Creed Shadows⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t found a source for this number when I looked for it. The best I got was a finance blog saying “experts say” without saying that they were progenitors of the reporting or not. Valhalla had a budget about half of this, so it would surprise me if Shadows was that much more expensive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Ubisoft spent $2.1M on influencers to secure the launch of Assassin's Creed Shadows⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The industry is full of dead studios that made good games. Marketing does work and is necessary, but I’m not sure much you can say this marketing campaign was successful given the heavy lifting Assassin’s Creed as a brand was already doing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Deck / Gaming News #8⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been playing another lap through the old Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and just got my party kitted out with +1/+2 weapons and better armor, so this ought to be the point where the rest of the game gets way easier.

  I’m coming up on the end of the base game of Borderlands 2, as I try to make my way through the series before the fourth game launches this fall. There’s a lot of Borderlands 2 DLC to get through after this, but it’s scratching an itch that the FPS genre hasn’t really been doing for me with new releases in years.

  And I’ve also been making my way through the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance (this one on GOG). It’s sort of flip flopping on how important the simulation aspects of the game are to its whole deal. I too found them frustrating, but I know from Red Dead Redemption II that, when done right, they’re there to make you make choices that that character would make in that setting. However, sometimes the game hops over them in the interest of time, and other times it makes you go through them to the point of tedium. It’s still early going in the grand scheme of things, and the political intrigue has surely grabbed me if nothing else.

  With a name like Perfect Dark, what are your expectations for the new one? The demo they showed was vague enough that it could be just about anything, and I get the sense that it won’t launch with split screen multiplayer or even a deathmatch mode, because no one does those anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG seems to be considering paid membership option⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure, but years ago, at least. Likely to save on server hosting fees. If you go to download the installer now, you only see the latest version, but you used to see every version.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG seems to be considering paid membership option⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The best you’ll get is Heroic Games Launcher. It’s got most of the features I’d want at this point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG seems to be considering paid membership option⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The previous versions of a game thing is something they took away, IIRC. They only keep the latest version and a patch to get up to it available for download, and you can only roll back to previous versions that you had already installed over time, or something like that. This is them seeing if you want to pay money to get a feature back that they used to offer, which is kinda lousy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG seems to be considering paid membership option⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I would also support paying for online servers for games that have multiplayer components. That takes money to maintain.

  If the developers were interested in allowing people to keep the servers running, they’d just give us the server code like they used to. If was in charge of a GOG that was a little more flush with capital, I might fund an easy drop-in replacement library for Steam’s multiplayer APIs so that developers can easily port their games to GOG and be playable, in multiplayer, offline.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG seems to be considering paid membership option⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They might have to grease some wheels somehow then. Some kind of incentive structure to make sure they do it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG seems to be considering paid membership option⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, that’s what I use when I need it for GOG saves. But typically, every game puts their save file in a different spot, so you do need to do a one-time setup for each individual game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG seems to be considering paid membership option⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you not have to update that script every time you play a new game? Cloud saves are pretty automatic, and regardless of platform, they’ve been pretty reliable too. It also fits that use case that you go to a friend’s place and want to show them something in your save file on a whim.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG seems to be considering paid membership option⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I got the same survey. The ones that they definitely do not want to do, if they value their reputation, are things like “increased cloud save storage (that’s still probably less than what Steam offers)” and things that they took away, like 1.0 installers. But some of the other options look to be more squarely aimed at the enthusiasts of the preservation program that this subscription is designed to financially support, as well as one or two actually good features like legal account sharing. Hopefully they go down that route instead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Video Game Industry Failed Monolith Productions.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The article didn’t speculate, but that may have been the point. “We’re miserable only making games out of WB movie properties, so you’ll let this next one through, or we’re gone, and someone else will surely have us instead.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kriegsspiel! How Napoleon Accidentally Invented Strategy Games [Super Bunnyhop]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a long video, so I guess you’re sitting down with a book. For the record, the visual aides contributed quite a bit, and a lot of it is him contextualizing something that’s already a book: Playing at the World by Jon Peterson.