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I was finally able to take the plunge and got invested into Dark Souls. I’m doing a sorcerer build, and apparently it can be one of the easier ways of playing. I kind of feel like the lack of a pause menu is a little much. I do feel like it’s appropriate to have your armor/weapons customization and healing done in real-time to prevent cheesing the game (Zelda), however, maybe the select button could have been used for an options menu while also serving as a pause mechanic. Some times I just have real shit to do and need to pause the game. To be fair, there are plenty of locations you can just park your character and walk off for a bit, but that’s not always feasible.
Does your version of the Steam Deck have a suspend feature? That would be a good workaround. These days I find it very difficult to devote an hour or more to game in one sitting. Thus, I have been regressing towards 1990s arcade and console games, basically Capcom fighters and SNES classics.
Yes, but I’ve yet to attempt it during offline mode. There are benefits to playing the game online, yet if you suspend the game you will lose your connection, and upon starting the Deck back up the game will prompt you and back out to the title screen.
Dragon Quest 3 remake has received a censorship makeover. Some examples include:
-Women are much less exposed
-Clerics, instead of wearing the symbol of the cross, now have pitchforks symbols
-Trolls had lips altered, supposedly to look less like black people
Thankfully, this game will come out for PC as well, so modders should be able to quickly rectify this. I also recall reading that instead of male/female your choice is between “body type A” and “body type B”, which seems quite ubiquitous nowadays.
Speaking of gaming, after playing quite a bit of the arcade version of Street Fighter II and its variants over the last couple of months, I fired up the SNES version of SF II earlier today. It has been years since I last played it. While this version looks pretty bad in comparison to the original, I am really impressed by what Capcom managed to pull off. They really went the extra mile, going as far as to add new content such as a different mini game or new scenes in endings. Overall, SF II for SNES is a really impressive port and still great fun. There is a good reason why this game was Capcom’s biggest seller for about two decades. I also wonder how well the SNES would have fared without SF II, if you look at its list of best-selling games:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Super_Nintendo_Entertainment_System_video_games
Back then, kids were begging their parents for this console because of Street Fighter II.
If only you could upload anonymous gameplay of your fighting play throughs! Btw, I’ve noticed a pattern of people promoting their music via shorts alongside their game clips, or just memes in general.
You can bet we had a copy of SF II (Turbo) for our SNES. I think MK might have had a bigger impact in the US (I can’t say for sure), maybe because of locality and shock value. However, I see now that true fighting fans would probably have been more likely to opt for SF. It’s crazy how many arcade versions of SF II there were. I don’t really remember a SF cab in my local arcade growing up, it was always MK.
I have never done any kind of video editing. On macOS, it is possible to record your desktop, or just part of it. If I find some time on the weekend, I will give it a go and at least record a few matches. Please don’t think that I am some kind of super player, though. My fighting style against the CPU basically boils down to being patient, punishing mistakes, and baiting the CPU into making bad moves. I am also not afraid of turtling and letting the clock run out.
Mortal Kombat on console was not that big in Europe, based on my perception. I think a big reason was that the Sega Genesis was not very widespread and that was the version that sold really well because it was uncensored. The SNES version, on the other hand, had neither blood nor fatalities and as the gameplay was not particularly good, it did not keep anyone’s interest for long.
“Please don’t think that I am some kind of super player, though.”
Might be more interesting to see some Tetris plays from you honestly.
I recall you posting some human movement documents published by Capcom, and your comments about MK just made me realize how stutter-y and low frame its animations were. I believe MK rectified the situation and introduced the gore and fatalities on SNES with the release of MK II onward. Like I said in a previous comment somewhere, the fatalities really do begin to feel gimmicky and a chore to sit through after a short while. MK seemed to have that going for it, though. Where it had all these shocking gimmicks that drew in Western players. Whereas the truly competitive types probably tended to gravitate more towards SF.
I found an recording of a pretty good game of Super Tetris 2 (SNES) I made a few years ago when I was playing around with the macOS screen-recording feature. There are a few mistakes, but the recovery is quick. Super Tetris 2 is my favorite of the “classic” Tetris games. It uses a randomizer without history so you can get some pretty bad droughts and unfortunate piece sequences.
If I come across a podcast or video I want to listen to on the weekend, I will record a session of T.A. Death and upload my best game from it.
Here is a recording of me playing T.A. Death in an open-source clone called Shiromino, which implements a subset of the modes of the Tetris The Grand Master (TGM) series. Shiromino automatically records all games, so creating a movie afterwards is quite straightforward. If it were not for an unfortunate mistake at lv. 396 this game may even have gone to lv. 500. T.A. Death is arguably the most difficult mode in the TGM trilogy. To get to lv. 500 normally takes about two years of practice and quite a few people never get there at all, presumably because the grind can be quite demotivating.
Hey! That’s certainly some impressive footage. I’m pretty confident that I’ve never met anyone that plays Tetris at that level. Though, I did know a guy who used to two-hand tap the original Tetris melody with the bass notes on the bass guitar. One thing that really demotivates me personally on grindy types of games (grindy in a skill-based sense), is I feel like I lose skill even if I take a week off. Like, with shmups, for example.
I’ve gotten quite far into Dark Souls. I’m about 25 hours in, but kind of hit a wall. I’m at a point where to progress I need to level up or get really good at a certain section, and it’s taking longer and longer to do the leveling up. I’ve basically put the game down for now. It also came at a time where I had my first week of work at this new contract. Let me just say…Mexicans galore! JBW is a real phenomenon, btw.
Shmups are a bit different as they require some memorization. Tetris, on the other hand, is a very condensed game with zero fluff. Thus, you really build up a particular skill set, which does not really go away. The gameplay of T.A. Death I posted I recorded after a months-long hiatus. It was the best game of a session that lasted about an hour, and it was among one of my better runs, probably somewhere in my top 20% or so. Of course, there is a ramp-up to get back to my previous peak. All the games I return to, even after years, are similar in that regard.
I have not played much of the Souls games but my impression was that leveling up is a bit of a red herring. The enemies are so strong that even an additional few levels probably do not lead to you suddenly winning. In contrast, if you know the patterns well, your character can be quite weak, yet still prevail. A friend of mine is pretty good at Souls games and showed me parts of it. As an experienced player, he knew a lot of patterns reasonably well, so he was able to position himself accordingly and strike at the correct time. He also told me that he spends hours perusing wikis and watching tutorials, so it almost seemed like a part-time job. (He finds my Tetris skills impressive but cannot fathom how I am able to sink countless hours into practicing TGM.)
Yes, JBW is real.
Of course Sony believes that they are going to sell more PlayStation consoles by putting a morbidly obese woman into an advertising video:
Makes about as much sense as when Nintendo features black females in their adverts playing first party games.
Heh, I’m surprised it’s an obese blonde white girl. Would have expected an obese black lesbian midget in a wheelchair at this point. 😀
Actually, I just figured why they are using a fat blond here, they are trying to appeal to their main customer base, the urban audience.
This made me laugh. You may be onto something, though. I recall people on PC-centric websites referring to the PlayStation as “urban gentleman”-Station but I believe they used a somewhat less politically correct term that unfortunately just slipped my mind. Similarly derogatory is it to refer to the game console demographic as “console bird-watchers”.
Aaron:
That’s American urban gentlemen for you. They always like to appropriate stuff from other cultures (if one were narrow-minded, one might say this is rather ironic since they are the ones who like to accuse others of cultural appropriation, but of course I am not so narrow-minded and respect the great contributions of urban gentlemen to civilized culture).
In Europe cognac is a drink consumed largely by the white upper and upper-middle class, yet in America it’s consumed mainly by urban gentlemen.
In Japan the Playstation is a popular console among middle class Japanese, in America… Well, you get the idea. 🙂
This all reminds me of white American liberals who loudly proclaim that whites have no culture of their own, and then come back from their trip to Europe rhapsodizing about how Europe is so “cultural.”
Your comment on cognac is timely as I very recently had a conversation about this topic with a white member of the European middle or upper-middle class. According to him, you can no longer order Hennessy at a bar, even the expensive variants. He was hinting at this being a faux pas, but it seems to also be true that some places have stopped serving Hennessy. This is a consequence of the negative brand value due to urban gentlemen promoting their preference for it. Amusingly, he said that those people are “so retarded that they probably do no even know what cognac is, so focused are they on their Hennessy, and let’s hope it stays this way”. I have to admit that I chuckled at the thought of an urban gentleman slowly sipping an exquisite cognac from a tulip glass.
Sony should include 9V batteries as well, silence the ceiling birds
Who’s the audience for this? If someone cares about frame rate and resolution they are on a PC, this is way too expensive and is essentially a locked down gimped PC. Can we have a simple console where you plug in the cartridge and it turns on and plays again?
Nintendo uses this approach for all its handhelds, including the Nintendo Switch. Of course, there is no example yet of a powerful device using cartridges. Let’s see what the successor of the Switch can do.
What the hottest and most graphics intensive popular game out at the moment? I’m out of touch it used to be ‘cyberpunk20XX’ or some such. What’s it now…
Also , I went to buy a gaming Laptop last year .. but had concerns about excessive fan noise and heat and all the cons of those LT’s.. size and weight also.
Then I read up on Nvidias new cloud gaming service and that I could run top games on even a low spec a ‘gaming chromebook ‘ or such! (Wow) just with a subscription and a fast net connection.
So does Nvidias new cloud gaming/ server farm type setup work well?? Anyone tried it? Sounds like the new solution for OTG gaming 👌
Arguably, Black Myth: Wukong has the best graphics on PC at this pint. The Western games media tries to pretend that this game does not exist, simply because the game studio behind it refused to make changes for imaginary modern audiences and push the DEI agenda. I have not tried cloud gaming. A big issue is latency. Keep in mind that Google could not make it work. They had a product called Stadia, which was one of the biggest corporate misjudgments in recent history.
Ada from RE4R’s DLC got buffed (click only if man of class and culture): https://youtu.be/D3ImDW6wC3s
This is a great mod. I was surprised by how well-made it is. The channel you linked to has a lot of footage of very cultured mods:
Ah, very cultured indeed. Ada’s get up in the mod I posted gave me Nier Automata vibes with the skirt physics. Very well done.
Square Enix company has like $2b in value since the release of FFXVI back in Feb: https://gamerant.com/final-fantasy-16-sales-numbers-square-enix-profits-down/
I looked into this a bit. Based on the information I have found, Square-Enix has a market capitalization of about $4.5bn, so their recent “flood of lackluster games”, which that article mentions, has cost them 1/3 of their market valuation. Thus, the drop of $2bn is really quite serious. They recently lost a lot of money on Blue Protocol, in addition to the various Final Fantasy games. I am cautious regarding Dragon Quest XII, which was announced years ago and of which we have not even seen a single screenshot.
I would be kind of sad in SE had to shut down. They still have hot waifus even if their games are quite bloated and not very narratively interesting (at least not to me anymore at this age). I feel like a big issue here is that development costs/times are just becoming ridiculous. Meanwhile, many modern gamers are sinking time and resources into free to play game. The market is quite saturated.
I don’t think they would need to shut down. If they become insolvent, Tencent or some other company will swoop in and at least put their waifus to good use. You are right that gaming is saturated. Not only are there more games being released, there are also a solid twenty to forty years worth of games to go back to, albeit younger gamers seem to have some difficulties going back further than the PS2 or PS3. In addition, games are bigger time sinks than ever before. Amazingly, there are people playing through huge single-player games like The Witcher 3 or Baldur’s Gate 3 multiple times and putting hundreds of hours into online games seems quite normal nowadays. (On a side note, I just noticed that both The Witcher 3 and Baldur’s Gate 3 use the Roman numeral III in their logo but the number 3 in their description on Steam. Perhaps this tells us something about our youth.)
I think they did some good work on this Legacy of Kain: Soul Reacer 1-2 remaster:
https://youtu.be/0wzzn4UAj5o?si=PdhzIOrGXO8a7x81
Also, you can find DLC trailer for Stellar Blade featuring a 2B skin.
I wonder how well the Legacy of Kain remaster will sell. These games were quite popular back in the days but that was twenty years ago and people do not seem to have a lot of nostalgia for them.
I saw the 2B DLC trailer for Stellar Blade. This is an excellent commercial move because a 2D mod would have popped up within days of the release of the PC version. It also confirms that the developers know what the audience wants, not that there were any doubts.
I wonder if they were able to use AI to improve a lot of the basic textures in-game, and then just remodeled the characters and enemies? If so, maybe it didn’t cost very much to remaster. Idk why, for example, Capcom doesn’t take a small team and remaster the original RE games, or even develop new ones in the same vein. Sure, they might not turnover sales like REmake 2&4, but they’d definitely make a profit at a fraction of the development time and costs.