i’ve been using unity for nearly 10 years and i still don’t feel like i know what makes it run poorly. 
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Finally finished Metaphor ReFantazio. That ending sure didn’t want to end.
Great game, although it’s attempt at politics felt more like Ni No Kuni 2 for the YA crowd.
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Rise of the Golden Idol is another great Obra Dinn-like! Probably the best of these though I love them all. It’s the kind of sequel that doesn’t reinvent the wheel but try to bring a much higher variety to each vignette. Identify each resident in an apartment building, identify models from their beauty marks, tatoos and height, find who won what at an auction etc
Case of the Golden Idol was amiga-like with its low use of color and strong dithering, worked well but the character designs were maybe a little crude. Rise feels like a good evolution, I think cubism (of all things) has had a large influence on the new design, and with the new 3D bizarre facial movements the game has a very very strong grotesque appeal.
One thing I’ve been thinking about about these games is how the puzzle mystery structure manages to really emphasize whatever point they’re making. Having to work for a revelation makes it all the more impactful. I vividly remember in the first game my reaction to discovering Gideon’s judgment. Each little aspect of the discovery process making the abject cruelty of the fascist regime more impactful.
The sequel Rise has, at the center of its story, a « Move Fast and Break Things » techie fail upwards continously, so it’s also similarly relevant to current events
I have to admire the series’ subtlety in its messaging too, because I only recognized them as leftist in the second game, when an evil landlord was killed, making everybody happy. They’re the opposite of the Activision diversity tool in which a character gets +3 diversity points if they’re disabled
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tbf, i think this stuff was heavily obscured 10 years ago already and i can only imagine what it’s like now
but i do know that there are two types of unity game, one that just somehow runs and looks great on my laptop (admittedly kinda rare), and the type that makes my fans go wild on launch despite having less polygons than a ps2 game on display
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is godot less likely to burn holes through computers? i think i’m grateful to unity for shitting the bed and alienating everyone if that’s the case
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idk if the same thing applies for game engines/games, but for normal applications you can add some boilerplate code to use hardware clocks to bench running time and give airmchair-guesstimates for worst-case execution-time for parts of the code.
That does, of course, only track one dimension - execution time, and not load (or rather, it causes more load on the CPU, since you add calls to functions that wouldn’t be there in the final code).
nice (the linux command has been outdated for a while now, so you’d probably have to check
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/sched.7.html
but better be ready to go down the rabbithole of scheduler-policies for threads and how that causes tradeoffs in complex execution environments.
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I’m done with Harold Halibut. Almost comically my one favourite character, the postman, dies. There’s a sweet thing after you attend his funeral where he leaves you all the undelivered mail to start a sidequest chain. RIP Buddy.
The first contact scenario leads to some interesting stuff with the aliens like the fact they have no concept of ownership and have the key to a free energy source which the humans immediately begin exploiting. But no real conflict comes from this and nobody thinks about or discusses the consequences of any of these things happening. It just feels like the game is uninterested in itself. Your little alien buddy hangs out with you quite a long period before they almost just decide to go and hangout somewhere else and it’s back to you by yourself doing oddjobs. I found myself checking my phone while playing and that was it for the game.
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they sure were interested in meticulously designing those environments and characters in painstaking detail though! it’s like playing with some guy’s model train set.
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Yeah it feels weird to put down because of how much craft went into it. There is some really good mise-en-scene stuff going on in the little sets. They do a cool thing where they open up the camera angles to mirror you getting out of your daily routine and into the outside world and it becomes less side-scrolly and more open. I just wish the plot didn’t have so many pacekillers.
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yeah it is genuinely impressive - tho i was saying that more out of sarcasm and confusion than trying to defend the game at all. it really baffles me that you would spend so much time and technical effort making something like that when a lot about the game in other ways is just so baffling or half-considered. it kinda encapsulates the world we live in when people just blow ahead on one thing in hyper detail while missing obvious dunks outside of that. sorry mom - but God is calling me!
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Shoulda just crowdfunded a miniseries imo
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Will probably Ffwd through a Let’s Play of that game one night
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You do see a lot of animators get into games 'cause that’s where the money currently lives without first having a great grasp on the “game” part.
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pirate yakuza is extremely good… feels simultaneously like a slipshod cash-in on reused assets and also the best thing they’ve done since Yakuza 7 (I made it less than an hour into and refunded every other Yakuza game I tried since that one before this, anyway)
I think my personal canon of actually good Yakzua games is like… OG, 5, 0, 6, Kiwami 2, 7, Pirates
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I played the Pirate Yakuza demo and it does seem a really good fit for the new almost musou-y toolkit. I think I’m still too gorged on Yakuza to play it right now but if it’s like Gaiden I expect good things.
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also it’s cool that they apparently only just patched AV1/HDR streaming into the steam link app that runs on Android TV like 6 months ago because I did not have a use for it or a modern smart TV to stream to at all until around the same time last year and it’s like oh yeah this would be worse otherwise
love to late adopt on the right schedule
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Trying Asatsugutori, a battle-royale visual novel set in what appears to be the world’s most depressing hotel
I was hoping it might be action-packed but then it did this to me:
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that’s a good lookin hotel
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since i’ve been talking about how i find videogames like kind of arduous to play and how arcade games are kind of the exception bc of how theyre paced etc. etc. i decided to load random stuff up… last year i spent a bunch of time w irem and sega arcade projects at some point and this year i might get really into data east. they have so many weird interesting unique games. played both dark seal games today… these would probably be crazy fun w/ a co-op partner. they look completely great idk they just kind of rock lol.
also played a random one called DYNA GEAR which was totally frantic and kind of furry-adjacent i think, idk it was kind of awesome too
tell me these both dont just look like pure stupid fun… no commentary on either vid just Skilled Playing. replayburners in particular is one of my fav youtube pages…
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replay burners are so good at videogames their uploads are art
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