Glide

@Glide@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are Nintendo's $80 online game prices a result of tariffs or is Nintendo just using them as an excuse to price gouge as corporations do?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, this just isn’t true, though. You’re not wrong in pointing out that the scope of sales has changed, but so has the scope of development, as well as consumer expectation. I suspect if you compare the number of man hours spent on a title today vs an NES game, it’s not even a comparable discussion. And then there’s the matter of post-release support.

  To be clear, I don’t think a $30 price hike for physical copies is at all sensible, but the arguments being presented both for and against it are incredibly poorly thought out. Everyone presents a single facet of videogame development today compared to years ago and then acts like it’s a “gotcha” that proves their point. The entire ecosystem of game development and consumption has changed so drastically, that any discussion comparing the adjusted for inflation price of games then vs now is just pointless. Art and entertainment are art and entertainment, and it’s impossible to create a de-facto value statement for them, because consumer subjectivity, bias, and valuation is too wide to make objective statements about.

  Imo, the real criticism of the matter is that +50% cost during a time of economic upheaval, when the buying power of the middle class is approaching the weakest it’s been in a long time, is going to be received poorly, and probably result in a loss of Western sales. It’s a massive leap, in a single generation, at the worst possible time, regardless of what inflation adjustments tell us.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Note: before tariffs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  While I am not okay with the game price hike, you’re comparing genuine dog shit to actual good games. It’s like asking why anyone would ever order a steak when they can just go to McDonald’s. Sure they’re both food, but they’re not really comprable.

  That said, I am not trying to justify Nintendo’s pricing. They’re asking for too much of a leap (+50%!!!) in too short of a time frame. But this meme is a bad argument.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Monster Hunter Wilds: First Impressions After the Long-Awaited Release⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Genuinely couldn’t stand how on-rails it is. Why advertise this wide open world and then constantly restrict and limit my options to interact with it?

  There’s lots of positive things to say about it. The combat is, yes, perhaps more satisfying than ever. They really nailed the Monster/weapons/armor designs this time around. I feel like there’s value in gathering again, something that recent titles have lost.

  But it’s all stained by the low-rank experience. Spending 10-12 hours behind hand-held through a series of walk and talks where I am constantly prompted to stare at the beautiful landscape piece, or the way small monsters interact, as though the game is afraid I’ll miss it if I am left to my own devices, was both boring and insulting. There was a lot of decisions made to put cinematography ahead of gameplay experience here, and these decisions have genuinely made Wilds my least favorite release Monster Hunter title to date.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You finally figure that mysterious voice commanding you is not the devil⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  “No, you don’t understand, if you just don’t think about the consequences of the things you say or do, this is really funny!”

  You should genuinely be embarrassed to post this kind of stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You finally figure that mysterious voice commanding you is not the devil⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah yes, nothing like a little chauvinism to start my day. Women should be seen, not heard, amirite guys?

  /s just in case.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your all-time favorite game? Let's discuss the best options!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Based list. Outer Wilds in particular chef’s kiss.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your all-time favorite game? Let's discuss the best options!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a teacher, and as soon as students figure out I play games, they inevitably ask me this question, but I largely think it’s an unfair question to ask someone who games as a genuine hobby rather than just a kill time.

  I like to tell them that’s a really impossible question to answer and instead offer them my favorite franchise of games: Monster Hunter. I feel like I can more reliably say that I am a massive fan of the franchise, with it reliably being my favorite videogame franchise, without that seeming weirdly inaccurate considering the wide variety of genres and sub-genres that make up video game interests.

  To say that Monster Hunter Rise is my favorite game would be a massive disservice to the captivating, genre-breaking storytelling power of Hades, my deeply rooted love of the flight mechanics in Elite Dangerous, my history as a brief world record holder for a Mario title, the thousands of hours of Team Fortress 2 I’ve shared with friends, or my experiences grinding World of Warcraft arenas to the top 0.5% of players. And I’ve somehow listed 5 formative titles from the top of my head without even representing my deep passion for rhythm games, with Hi-Fi Rush being a genuine contender for that “favorite game” slot that I am arguing doesn’t exist. So I don’t answer with any of these games, because not only would my answer be fundamentally untrue, but it’s not really the question my student means to ask, either. They want to know what I am into, and giving them a standout franchise that automatically gets my money when a title is released gives them a much better answer than any one title could ever do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are a lot of genuine answers to this, but the simplest one is perhaps the best: because who decides which authority is correct?

  Authoritarianism is bad because it gives justification to our bias’.

  The “good” authorities you think of when you ask this question are authorities not because they are authorities, but because they have the knowledge/training/practice/experiences that give them a greater expertise on a given subject. Authoritarianism supposes that, those things aside, there’s something inherently good about someone in a position of authority. This is factually incorrect.

  We (are supposed to) grant authority to those that earn it, and use it responsibility. Likewise we (are supposed to) strip it away from those that abuse it, or failing to maintain strong standards of ethics and practice. Authoritarianism, as a school of thought, discards that process, instead suggesting that the authority is the authority because people need that in their lives. Fuck that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the point of the Nicole spam?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s just meat based ddos.

  What a fascinating sentence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please tell me I'm not going nuts⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My friend, I respect your desire to believe that the world is a better place than it is, but this is pure cope.

  We have no evidence of any of this being a possibility, and you catch a murderer by finding evidence of intent, not waiting for someone to get hurt.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Poor guy⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Of course he is. His entire wealth is rooted in arapatheid. The irony of him claiming to be a victim of racism is so dissonant from reality that I genuinely struggle to find good words to describe it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Itch.io California Fire Relief Bundle - 422 items for $10⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If someone already owns Tunic and is considering this, I would say to just directly donate the money.

  Or just like… Donate through the bundle and consider trying out some minor projects created by people who are trying to make something cool? Why turn down access to these games out of some form of perceived superiority? This notion that since you’ve never heard of these other titles they can’t possible offer anything of value to you is kind of a spit in the face of struggling artists of all types.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Astro Boy: Omega Factor Artist Tomoharu Saito Lost A Leg Due To Working On The Game | Time Extension⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, this might be the most egregious case of burying the lead, what the hell.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Eurogamer: we can't recommend the PC version of Monster Hunter Wilds⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Please reread. I had to make the game look mediocre (low, not lowest) to have an enjoyable experience on a $750 hand-held PC.

  I was getting 60-80 fps on high settings in the beta on my 3070ti, when frame generation was broken. I have not tested on my home PC yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Eurogamer: we can't recommend the PC version of Monster Hunter Wilds⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The experiences people are reporting with this game are so strange to me.

  I loaded the game today during a 1hr break at work on my Legion Go. It took ~10 minutes to do the shader compilation, I opted to turn frame generation on, and the game defaulted the settings to high, which felt awful. After turning the settings to low, turning the up scaling quality from “Max Performance” to just “Performance,” adjusting the sharpness up to .6 from .5, and then tweaking some other settings I don’t care about (cloud textures? I barely look up) or outright hate (why games continue to push aggressive motion blurring is beyond me - it looks horrible), I started playing.

  I experienced a stutter whenever I step into a new space, or load a new cutscene, but it smoothed out in a fraction of a second. While the graphics don’t look the best, the game plays smooth. I did the opening sequence with no stutters, got to the not-tetsucabra fight, and maintained 45+ fps throughout the entire fight, with no stutters or issues. At points, the monster ran into a cave, which aided my hand-held PC and kept the game running at a smooth 60fps for those sections. This is directly in-line with my experiences running the benchmark on this machine, which averaged ~45 fps on nearly identical settings.

  I haven’t yet run the benchmark or played the released game on my home PC, but the demo, which was less optimized and frame generation did not work during, played “fine.” I was unimpressed with the performance relative to the graphical fidelity in that play (though I am of the opinion that the more gritty, realistic aesthetic is ugly relative to the vibrant worlds of Generations, or Rise and in apologetically think they look better than even World), but I can’t say I had problems or felt that performance or visual quality would impede my enjoyment of the game.

  This article notes specific studdering and runs the frame-health tests to demonstrate it. I suspect they’re onto something that I am not experiencing for some reason or another. That said, I ultimately think the 4k, 144+ fps gamers running expensive GPUs are offended that they can’t play this one on the highest settings, and are review bombing the hell out of this title. I’m not sure what the deal with all the “ThAt’S nOt HoW fRaMe GeNeRaTiOn WoRkS!” screaming relevant to low end systems is about, as I am experiencing notable improvements through it.

  I encourage people to test on their own hardware, rather than taking reviews at face value, as I’ve begun to believe that whatever issue is occurring is deeper than “Capcom didn’t optimize!” Use the benchmark, and take advantage of Steam’s refund policy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hi-Rez Studios is laying off further employees and ending development on Smite, Paladins, and Rogue Company⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Hi-Rez is the king of creating a new game, pretending it’s their “big thing” and then enshittifying it while their good devs are moved to the next “big thing.” They are fad chasers who are constantly in a race to monetize a market and then move on.

  I’m glad it caught up with them. Couldn’t have happened to a better company. Apologies to the earnest designers and programmers that got caught in the crossfire.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I don't need no app⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Except now the app pushes ads to you through notifications.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam now warns about Early Access that have not been updated in months.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is what a company looks like when it’s not funded by venture capitalists that insist the line always go up exponentially.

  Good on Steam for taking the time an energy to create a feature that is strictly pro-consumer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Description of gamers and gaming from 1632.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It absolutely was. This is more of a meme than a genuine piece of history.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what was the last game you played in 2024?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s been Jackbox every year for the past 8+ years. A side-effect of hosting the New Years Eve party for a bunch of gamers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you want the murderer of the UnitHealthcare CEO prosecuted?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll never cheer for an act of murder. But I am not broken up about this one.

  Genuine answer? He should be tried. Murder is still murder. But I wouldn’t go out of my way to catch the guy, given the chance.

  Far greater acts of evil and murder happen every single day, but I’m supposed to be bother by this one because the guy who died played by the rules of our broken-ass system? Or am I supposed to still be so blinded by the myth of capitalism, that wealth inherently represents virtue, that I should believe this CEOs life is worth more than the suffering occurring in every other part of the world? Should I choose to believe that the people he neglected to help - in hischoosing to chase the Almighty Dollar - are worth less than his life, because someone pulled the trigger rather than just watching people suffer while holding back the means to help? What kind of fucked up trolley problem is this?

  I’ll never cheer for an act of murder. But I am not broken up about this one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you want the murderer of the UnitHealthcare CEO prosecuted?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t threaten me with a good time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games is officially cool with the Internet Archive preserving early Unreal games⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My experience with GOG is that it is a fringe option, at least in the combined North American (USA+Canada) culture. Plus, the unfortunate reality is that in many cases GOG’s principles preclude it from being a genuine competitor to Steam. Insisting on being DRM free means half of released games never go to the platform, so it will always be the secondary “better if” option.

  I worry about Steam’s functional monopoly on PC game access. It hasn’t been an issue so far, because it has remembered that it is, first and foremost, a service, providing consumer protects through a generous refund policy and supporting devs with easy access to simple matchmaking and anti-cheat systems. But without a healthy competitor, it would be easy for Steam to start milking it’s users and developers alike.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games is officially cool with the Internet Archive preserving early Unreal games⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  While I don’t approve of Epic’s stabs at exclusivity, Steam needs a competitor to keep it in check, and one that is making some efforts to support the preservation of art is a welcome choice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Warcraft Rumble, Blizzard's first new RTS in years, will finally shed its mobile shackles and come to PC in December⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Calling Warcraft Rumble an RTS is like putting a hamburger patty on a plate and calling it a steak. You’re technically correct, but you’ve also completely missed the point in what people want.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nostalgia and remake culture⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No satire here; I genuinely think it’s a great example of a remake done well.

  There are some major breaks from the original plot, which in itself would be neat, but they introduce an entire plot element that interacts with this derivation. The spirits I was talking about, “Whispers” (had to look up the official name, tbh), appear whenever the story attempts to break from the original story from the original release. In universe, this is explained as pre-determination, or destiny. Thanks to our meta knowledge, we know in reality that these spirits are attempting to maintain the timeline from the original release.

  As an early example, after the events at the first Mako reactor, Cloud decides to collect his pay and go his own way, which is not the original intended path of the game. To correct this, a group of Whispers attack the party, and ultimately injure Jessie, preventing her from going on the mission. Needing another body, Barrett is forced to rehire Cloud for Avalanche’s mission to the next reactor. Without spoiling specific details, the whispers slowly become a form of antagonist as the characters try harder to get away from the original plot of FFVII.

  This is interesting in a few ways. First, we’ve introduced a new major conflict in the form of the characters fighting against a physical embodiment of destiny. They do not want the outcome of their struggles to be predetermined, particularly as that predetermination involved the death and suffering of some specific characters. This is, in my opinion, an interesting new plot element beyond being “the same game again.”

  Second, stepping back, and examining this with a wider lens, we can look at the Whispers for what they are to us, the players, rather than what they are to the characters. We know they are not maintaining “destiny,” but instead trying to reestablish the original story we loved. As a result, I see the Whispers as the collective voice of the “change nothing” remake ideology. When a community asks for new content of IPs they love, there will always be diehard essentialists who want their loved stories to remain untouched; the Whispers, then, are these people.

  So if the Whispers are a physical representation of the “change nothing” remake ideology, then what is there to make of the fact that they’re largely an antagonist? This seems to me that the writers were critical of this culture, so much so that they ask you to fight it to earn the different take on the story. Of course, it’s far from the only derivation from the original game, but that’s exactly my point: FFVII remake was so far divorced from the conceptual, soulless “let’s pump out the same game again” remake that they literally wrote that culture into a new antagonist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An Update from PlayStation Studios (Neon Koi and Firewalk Studios are closing)⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But isn’t it featured in the list of games being given a short film via Secret Level? I kind of assumed the goal was to promote it via that episode and re-release the game around the same time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nostalgia and remake culture⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like people are taking this commentary a little too literally. I don’t think it’s intended to suggest that all remakes are always bad and we should be ashamed of ourselves for enjoying them. Mankind has a habit of romanticising the past, and that’s led to something of a modern obsession with nostalgia. These are fair, and interesting, statements.

  That said, the choice of pairing the statement with an allusion to FF7 is probably not a great choice. The remake is fantastic, and isn’t at all symptomatic of the problem of quick-cash in nostalgia remakes. Hell, the first game specifically tackles themes of pre-determination, which functions as a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for nostalgia. And fascinatingly the meta-analysis of this is critical of exactly the same thing: there are literally spirits of sorts which attack the player and manipulate events to ensure the original story remains untouched, and they become a prominent antagonist of the game as the player works to tell a story that is different from the one told in the original. Perhaps there’s something counterproductive about attaching this message to a remake that’s critical of soullessly telling the same stories we’ve already heard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slay the Princess - The Pristine Cut is OUT NOW!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pre-empt: Everything I say is in regards to the original release. I have not played the pristine cut.

  It is definitely intended to be deeply uncomfortable. It has a very “cosmic horror” vibe to it, while playing on themes of relationships, love and romance.

  It’s good, but not great. The story is impactful and meaningful, and it does a great sort-of incidental meta commentary on literature. An opinion which I find most players don’t share with me: the ending was incredibly weak, to the point that I felt it really detracted from the experience. It has a bad case of “the only decision that matters is the last one,” which isn’t the way I like these seemingly heavily malluble visual novels to go, and none of the endings feel genuinely satisfying. Worse, my first ending set up for something of a second attempt towards a “golden ending” of sorts, only to pull the rug out from under me and just kind of… end, instead.

  The storytelling is great, the writing is engaging, the voice acting is fantastic, the art is gorgeous… There’s a lot to like about the game, so I don’t want to make it sound “bad,” because it’s quite good. It just sold itself to me as a kind of “choices matter” game, where I’d find myself digging for information and answers, so I can learn more and make better decisions on multiple, short playthroughs. I hoped to eventually either discover everything I want to discover, and ideally use growing knowledge to find the “right” ending, whether that’s a “golden” ending or an ending that I find satisfying and rewards me for my effort. But, for it’s variety choices, it’s not really that kind of game. It is, at its heart, a linear game, with some variation in the experiences you have between where you start and where you end up, with a couple choices in the last moment determining which page you flip to before the credits roll.

  Maybe I expected too much, and the problem is with me. I can’t deny that my opinion could be based on a failure of expectation. But, I restate, it’s good, but it’s not great.