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Black Myth: Wukong has sold 10 million copies within a few days:
https://x.com/BlackMythGame/status/1826985302592049599
I am looking forward to seeing the sales figures of Condord. They may not be quite as good.
Lol at Concord. This is great news for Black Myth. This studio might go on to do incredible things in the gaming department! Such a much needed white pill for gamers.
I also have to admit that even though I turned my nose up at Monke before the game released, watching the opening cinematic of Black Myth made him look pretty fucking cool. Something about his movements and animations just had a certain type of “I’m a badass who isn’t afraid of anything” swagger.
I also had a chance to see Stellar Blade (PS5) on a high end monitor recently. I didn’t feel the urge to play much of it because I really wanted to co-op some games (Pocky and Rocky, Super Hydorah), but one thing that really struck me was the dynamic soundtrack. It was even more seamless than Doom Eternal. Really nice.
According to leaks that Ubisoft heavily suppressed online, the next “operator” in Rainbow Six: Siege was supposedly wheelchair-bound. The official press release was published earlier today, and it is worse than expected. Not only is this elite soldier in a wheelchair, this character is also non-binary. Despite looking like a dude, the mandated pronouns are she/her. These people really live in a bubble.
https://archive.ph/sGdw4
This is good news, I think. Just keep going down this path until every ridiculously woke developer gets shuttered.
I really have no idea why nobody wants to play Dustborn:
https://x.com/LavenderGhast/status/1826675834801041539
The delusion of this game studio is quite remarkable. Here is an interview they did with the BBC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V28A97GcuDY
It seems that this game was funded by the EU taxpayer. Well, at least nobody can say that their taxes are going to waste. What’s a new bridge, road, or school compared to a game that is likely to win this year’s Kalergi award?
This is like the video game equivalent of that movie The Room—unintentionally hilarious.
Dustborn allegedly stole assets from GTA: Online.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWvV2dTU9c4
Let’s hope that Rockstar sues them into bankruptcy. Then again, Rockstar is really woke, so I wonder if they will just let it slide.
As of now, there are about 20 people on Steam playing this game. Not even the people in this studio and their supposed friends want to support their game. Just starting it and letting it sit idle is too much for them.
Konami just released Castlevania: Dominus Collection, which contains the three Nintendo DS games as well as a remake of Haunted Castle, the poorly regarded arcade game. It looks pretty good:
That looks rad
Which CV version had the rotating castle ? SNES one I think.
That was the coolest such good level design
Super Castlevania IV on the SNES used rotation effects but perhaps you are referring to Symphony of the Night for PlayStation, which turns the castle upside down at some point.
Someone in the comments of the trailer for this game lamented having every Castlevania available for modern consoles, except SotN! However, my shmup buddy is having a great time replaying these DS classics right now. He told me that apparently M2 was actually responsible for the Haunted Castle Revisited portion of this collection.
I was not aware that M2 developed Haunted Castle Revisited. I think they are the best studio for arcade-style games. I recall reading that they even hired some of the key figures from the 1980s/1990s. In the West, we have WayForward. Their games are well-liked among critics (lol) but enthusiast gamers are not quite as excited.
I looked up Way Forward’s games list and I haven’t heard of maybe 90% of ‘em. I recognize Clock Tower, Contra : Operation Galuga and Advance Wars. I remember Mark_MSX was very critical of C:OG. I’m hopeful they are able to sufficiently adapt Clock Tower for a “modern audience”. I’ve wanted to play it for close to ten years now.
Forgot to post the link to the games list: https://wayforward.com/gameography
This gave me some actual LOLs
Love the idea and graphics .
I regularly felt this way in my old office life..
https://youtu.be/Z5r7MUT4tRw?si=LiQ6uBU20Fe2wmU8
Guys, it is a bizarre schizo conspiracy theory that the US government is funding video games with the purpose of brainwashing the population:
https://archive.ph/gfEJn
Not really doing a good job at that
What are the odds ? Quite possible.
What’s the purpose tho ..Brainwashing what way can u elaborate in a nutshell I couldn’t decipher
So these games have a narrative to counter the disinformation being spread on twitter/X/social media? For sure likely the govt are collecting data from gaming (and everywhere they can) for analysis. Not sure how they would get this narrative into a video game tho ?
Look up the game Dustborn, for instance, which heavily pushes the woke agenda. There are a lot of games that went all in on wokeness, often with disastrous economic results. Yet, if you live off the taxpayers’ largess, profitability seems quite irrelevant. After all, these people got paid, and they will get paid via the next government-backed project. NGOs (what a misnomer!) work in exactly the same way.
The anime MMO Blue Protocol will end service early next year:
https://archive.ph/Xa85O
This is a bummer as this was, for once, a modern game I was looking forward to. Player feedback was not great, so it was probably for the better. I hope that Bandai Namco will work on another game with the same or a similar visual style.
Maybe you would enjoy the Persona series?
I like the art direction of Persona. The main reason why I have not played Persona 5 yet — I used to own a copy for PS3 — is that the time investment of 100 hours or so is a bit excessive. With an anime MMO, my thinking was that there would not be much of a story so it would be easy to play it in short bursts.
Persona seems to be quite beloved, otherwise I would have never considered it. However, I too am quite put off by long play times and, assumedly, fluff material that such games offer. Something like Zelda at least offers 95% (approximately) gameplay, but The Witcher 3, for example, was quite dialogue and fetch quest heavy.
Peak Pajeet!!!
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1f44hca/turkish_woman_visits_india_and_instantly_regrets/
We got an Arjune, a Kunmar, and weight for it, blogger advocatus diaboli!!!
This is pure anti-pajeetism. The Indians I work with keep telling me that India is the best country in the world and the next superpower. Just imagine the entire world looking like India! Reddit also tells me that India is absolutely not the worst country on earth. They must know.
Capcom loses 30 year game developing veteran and director, Hideaki Itsuno, known for games such as (from wiki):
Street Fighter Alpha
Rival Schools
Power Stone
Capcom vs. SNK
Devil May Cry
Dragon’s Dogma
https://youtu.be/Di0iboahy6o?si=boE7SbXiR7iQgVwR
I am not too concerned about this. Devil May Cry 5 was a very good game but Capcom does not seem overly invested in this IP. Dragon’s Dogma 2, on the other hand, had a fairly lukewarm response. Also, I think that directors at game studios depend a lot on the quality of their team. There are not many examples of supposed big shots leaving and not being able to reach anywhere near the level of success they used to enjoy. As I wrote in some other comment, Hideo Kojima is quite an exception in that regard. For some reason, this guy often gets ridiculed for being a Hollywood wannabe and a bit of a hack. Yet, he seems to have some qualities many of his peers lack. Look at Shinji Mikami who built arguably one of the most impressive track records in the industry while he was at Capcom. He left after Resident Evil 4, which came out almost twenty years ago. Since then, he has not had a single big hit. Arguably, the same can be said of his former colleague Hideki Kamiya.
How exactly is Kojima an exception? Death Stranding is a significant step down from MGS in terms of gameplay and story from what I’ve observed.
Meanwhile, Mikami has went on from Capcom to found the successful Platinum Games studio, was involved with the development of at least a couple cult classics such as God Hand and Vanquish, Evil Dead was successful enough for a sequel, and his other studio Tango Works had such a fostering enviroment as to result in the development of Hi-Fi Rush, which has almost perfect scores.
Current day Kojima comes off as kind of pretentious and more concerned with buddying up with Hollywood actors, while Mikami, much more honorably, seems to be preoccupied with furthering game design. Also, it’s completely plausible that journalists share a major bias for Kojima for various reasons.
I am not particularly interested in playing Death Stranding. I got it for free via the Epic Games store quite a while ago but it really does not tempt me. That being said, it was a big commercial success, and a big-budget game. The first The Evil Within game also sold a few million, though, and it was surely made on a much smaller budget. As a director (and business man), Kojima therefore seems quite competent. Nonetheless, in terms of the quality of his output, I put him below Mikami.
I went and looked up sales figures for post-Capcom Mikami games vs Death Stranding, and by that metric Kojima has been most successful. However, by that logic Neil Druckman is superior to both due to TLOU part 1 selling around 30 million units (6x that of Death Stranding and 3x that of MGSV). Not to mention TLOU got an HBO adaptation, which is much more than Kojima could ever hope for.
This is perhaps not an apt comparison. If Druckman went to another studio, starting from scratch, and delivering a hit game, we could see how successful he is compared to Kojima and others. On a related note, originally I only thought of Japanese developers leaving the companies at which they had their biggest successes, and failing to follow-up once they started their own studios. We see the same also with Western developers, like David Jaffe (God of War) or David Brevik (Diablo II).
The Last of Us is a very interesting game. I think it is crap but it might be the game that better than any other symbolizes the power of gaming journalism to shape mainstream opinion. TLoU neither tells a good story nor is the gameplay particularly exciting. Zombie games were also a dime a dozen back then. On the other hand, the woke feminist angle was new in a triple-A game. The collective gaming journo scum managed to turn it into a hit game. They were never as powerful again. They are still using the same playbook but it works less well each time. TLoU II sold poorly, and the latest batch of woke crap is so bad it leads to entire studios getting shuttered. People have stopped taking review scores of IGN, Gamespot, Kotaku, The Verge, and the other big gaming sites seriously. Perhaps TLoU was a Pyrrhic victory because too many people realized that this game is not actually as good as all its 10/10 review scores seemed to indicate, and thus became wary of the sequel, or any supposed 10/10 game. It is quite obvious that there has been a big gulf between critics and gamers for over a decade, which was not the case at all until easily the end of the 2000s or even the early 2010s.
Those are some very interesting observations about TLOU and its seemingly artificial success. However, just like its sequel and the sequel to The Evil Within, for example, I wouldn’t be surprised if Death Stranding 2 is a commercial failure. Should it end up selling more than Death Stranding (1) then I would be amazed. The thing is DS had a lot more momentum going for it. Fans were sympathetic to Kojima, for one, having just had a shaky departure from Konami. Then there was the fact that people were half expecting something along the lines of PT, and considering Guillermo Del Toro had tagged along. Not to mention the utter sham of DS related to Kojima’s marketing of the game, essentially describing it in such a way that it would become some groundbreaking new genre (lol at “stranding gameplay”).
I don’t think Death Stranding 2 will sell as well as the first game. A big part of Death Stranding’s marketing was the mystique about what this game was supposed to be. Surely, it could not be just a FedEx delivery guy sim! Also, it was graphically impressive. The tech was rock-solid, so some people probably bought it for that reason alone. However, in recent years, there has been more and more criticism towards Kojima whereas in the past he was beyond reproach. He supposedly is an “auteur”, a demigod among game directors. This image was largely propped up by the media, so let us see how well this will work for him the next few years.
Yeah, I grew up with MGS. Kojima was a rockstar, and I was probably convinced that he could do no wrong. If I hadn’t skipped the PS3/4 gen then I probably would have really enjoyed MGS4 when it first came out (the first 2 acts are pretty good actually). With that said, I got a lot of mileage out of TPP. Death Stranding has the worst cutscenes of any Kojima game, btw. I could probably enjoy the gameplay to a certain extent.
I’m starting to think these woke games are just devs grafting from the publishers, minimal effort to get maximum results by putting in whatever DEI is needed, so they get the money. Who cares if it sells.
The latest Ubisoft slop Star Wars: Outlaws is the new Cyberpunk 2077, except that the chicks are even uglier:
I had recently watched a video demonstrating the laughably implemented AI during combat when the hardest difficulty is selected. Open world Star Wars sounds enticing on paper, but this is hardly what anyone imagines. I believe the genre as a whole has massively reached the point of diminishing returns, but this is just sad. It’s like the definition of a half-hearted attempt at something.