10,000 Bulletins: No One Can Stop the Presses! (Part 1)

[ellaguro]

i think the whole indie model of the late 00’s/early 2010’s of hoping for a freak success is more or less dead. but nothing has fully come to replace that. now it’s sort of about finding a dedicated community of people who have a consistent investment or interest in the game. but that works a lot better for some games than others. and the whole Indie Game: The Movie thing still defines what that space is to a lot of people.

also as someone who has been involved with judging for it for many years, an increasingly small number of people seem to follow or care about what happens with the IGF at all. (maybe because the IGF covers an increasingly smaller part of the ‘indie games’ landscape at this point). in general there are a lot of good critiques to have of the IGF. it is pretty gatekeepery and the remains of certain in-crowds who have certain ideas about what “indie” is or should be… that are already very outdated in my mind… do dominate. but if the only thing that occupies any kind of cultural space that people care about in the way of official awards or recognition for games is… The Game Awards… then that’s pretty dark.

back when that site “Offworld” was relaunched i remember the people who ran it sort of eventually just gave up about writing about smaller games because they said that no one would read them. around that time it felt like a lot of people just gave up on doing anything but just feeding the beast. i don’t think it’s just because people are AAA-poisoned though. the model of how online media works automatically just favors focusing everything on the big stuff and AAA has the money to push to get a return on its investment.

i think it’s also just hard to maintain continuity between all the games that are coming out esp as Steam opened up and itch.io came about. how do you contextualize random new things as a journalist/critic/youtuber/streamer/whatever in a way that might be interesting to enough people who don’t know about it? how can you make things that fill some hole or void for people that AAA games don’t and never will (not even just commercially but also like… spiritually i guess)? some have figured out how to do this better than others, but it’s something that will continue to be a big question in the future. too few people are trying to really explore any of this stuff right now also. but i have some glimmers of hope that the ‘alternative’ space, for lack of a better word, will grow and shift to meet the output of stuff pouring out right now.

also re: the “too many games” issue, see this piece i wrote a few years ago: https://deorbital.media/there-are-not-too-many-games-482dd77a85de

here’s a quote from Paolo Pedercini:

“We all know that not all culture is meant to be profitable. Culture has been produced industrially only in the last century. And even in the modern era, many works we consider masterpieces were not commercially successful. More importantly, an excess of culture is never a waste, like an excess of cars. So perhaps the best solution doesn’t lie in the relationship between demand and offer. But in liberating games and all culture from the tyranny of the market.”

[LWJoestar]

there are too many clothes, how do they expect me to wear ALL of them

[BustedAstromech]

And that cultural discussion space for games trying to deal with specific, small topics collapsed right when everyone realized it wasn’t going to change the world. Realizing small games aren’t sustainable as a producer should cause cultural gardeners to treasure them more but we can see this unending wave of young people making something new and precious and then burning out and it seems to exhaust us from even enjoying it.

[ellaguro]

i think it’s just part of the mindset that stuff is only relevant socially or culturally if it’s supported substantially by the market. that’s why very few people (if any) cared to ever enter things like modding communities into the discussion, and stuff about free games always had a very limited space for anyone to care about for them (and mostly only because they were treated as launching pads for visibility for commercial projects). it was kind of just lucky circumstance that a lot of people around that time pretended to care about free games for as long as they did. and once enough of the bigger names were able to turn that into some sort of commercial success, it was basically over.

[BustedAstromech]

Right! But all the mainstream commentators covered indie stuff under as though they were taking a break from stultifyingly commercial larger games. Under our shared narrative, we were doing it for self-improvement, to be cultured, to see something new. Under that narrative, they shouldn’t care about the business model; heck, the futility of it should enhance its beauty and value.

Even free commentary when rigged up to impact metrics finds itself responsive to audience interest and increasingly captured in hype cycles.

[ellaguro]

i mean there’s only so long you can performatively sob in front of people in some sterile conference room about how Rod Humble’s The Marriage or Jason Rohrer’s Passage or thatgamecompany’s Flower changed your life before i guess it gets boring. also the weirdos and queers would take over that space, and they were too mean about the game industry as a whole to be salvageable.

[villain]

definitely using the FF7 soundfont for this

[Felix]

you can finally do playstation remote play from linux or switch if that interests anybody:

https://git.sr.ht/~thestr4ng3r/chiaki

my favourite iOS remote play client maintainer gave up the ghost when they changed the APIs in ps4 firmware 8.00 around the ps5 launch but this sort of makes up for it

[km]

What makes the process of building and deploying a custom ios remote play app worth it over just using the official one?

[Felix]

it was in the app store actually! it’s not anymore though

https://www.iosremoteplay.com/

the advantages were that it let me map the touchpad / L3 / R3 to MFi controller (gamevice) chords which the official one didn’t, and it was very good about setting bitrates for out-of-LAN streaming

[Broco]

L3/R3 used to be a big issue with iPad remote play yeah, but iOS finally supports PS4 controllers now so I cheerfully dumped my MFi controller in the trash.

(iOS is still overly picky about what kind of controller it agrees to pair with, but PS4 controller is at least a passable option that it does support.)

[km]

I use it with my SN 30 pro+ which at this point is my favorite controller because it supports exactly the host devices I need it to and has the best dpad of any modern controller I’ve tried

[Broco]

Ah cool, I recently bought two of those for my Switch but I just assumed iOS wouldn’t support it since it’s not listed as supported in their marketing material on amazon and iOS didn’t even support my Elite 2 controller

That seems like a very universal controller if they managed to squeeze in iOS support somehow. I’m so tired of needing to buy new controllers that have the same button layout as 10 other controllers I already had…

[km]

Set the controller to apple mode (A+Start) and it shows up as a DS4 controller in the bluetooth pairing menu

I wrote the 4 pairing modes on the back of the battery cover so I wouldn’t have to remember them

[notbov]

Chiaki isn’t a new thing (it’s actually in maintenance mode now) and setting it up is a bit cumbersome since you need to pull your player ID from the PSN servers but it’s real good. it even supports gyro on Linux with the recent hid-playstation driver for the Dualsense

I like it because I got to play a PS4 game with a Steam controller and commit an unretractable sin

[Broco]

I try to avoid re-pairing a controller or headset with a different device when I can since that’s usually even more agonizing than pairing it in the first place. (The upside of ending up with so many redundant controllers is that I can do that)

[km]

The fantastic thing about the pro+ is that each mode has an independent pairing, so when it’s switch time I turn it on in switch mode and when it’s ipad time I turn it on in apple mode and I don’t need to re-pair

Takes it from being “yeah this works with that if I want to fuck with it every time” to “why would I ever need another controller”

[Tulpa]

that’s one of the cool things about the 8bitdo controllers: each mode maintains its own pairing, so you won’t lose your switch pairing if you start using a controller with the ipad

[villain]

Kenji Terada – 1988 Developer Interview - shmuplations.com

Kenji Terada (Scenario Writer, FF1): For Final Fantasy, the “final” part just means that the previous game’s story is fully concluded in that game. (laughs)

Masanobu Endou (Executive Producer, Wizardry): Hah, I see… hence “final”.

Terada: Yeah, that’s why FFII is a completely new game, a “Final Fantasy” in another world. I suppose the “II” may not really fit, for that reason. I think there was a lot of resistance at Square, as well, to making it a numbered sequel. People were asking me, why are we calling this FFII when it has no relation to the first game whatsoever…?

So I talked with the planners about this a bit, and they said that because people who saw the first game will likely buy this one too, we should try and carry over some of the popular elements from FFI in this game too. And I said, well, how about the crystals? Crystals are a general fantasy trope after all. I said having a keyword theme like that will be good for us down the road too, if this becomes a long-running series. For example, later games could build their drama around that keyword, or maybe one game could take that theme and subvert player’s expectations, and then a later game could return to the orthodox path… just lots of options. I thought this idea was really cool, and I suggested we build Final Fantasy as a series around that idea.

In the last game, the goal was to restore light to the crystals. This time, we’ve swapped it around, and they’re just a means to achieve your final goal… you can think of it that way.

Being a Final Fantasy game, you have certain things the players will want to see, such as the animations in the battles. We’ve largely overhauled the battle system for this game, though. For your weapons and armor, for instance, we’ve got the typical armor, helmet, and glove options, but we’re thinking about adding a distinction between left-hand and right-handedness. You could decide not to hold a shield in your right hand, for instance, and instead use two swords and get two attacks.

Endou: Wow. So this means characters will have a dominant right or left hand.

Terada: Yeah, I think so.

Endou: That sounds like it could be annoying!
[…]
Terada: I’ve got plenty of good stories kicking around in my head, but many of them can’t just be translated as-is into a video game. The other developers have to re-work the ideas a bit so they’ll fit. A good example would be in Dragon Quest III, where the Merchant character leaves the party.

Endou: Oh yeah, that part. I actually heard a rumor about that before starting the game, about someone who named their Merchant “Han” so that the town would get called “Hanburg”. I named my Merchant “Spiel”, for “Spielburg”. My friend came over one day, and he didn’t know anything about all this, so he was like… why the hell did you name your Merchant Spiel??? I laughed and said in a really foreboding tone, that it had a deep hidden significance. (laughs) The Momotaro Densetsu series is full of gags like this, too.

[teh_blend]

Sakaguchi would later go on to make people cry