I think adherence to calcified ‘best practices’ are a large part of why AAA games are so dire. Those practices build up into sets of genre/mechanical assumptions that strangle games before they can develop any sort of ludic personality of their own, developers (especially those embedded in the AAA space) seem unwilling to scrutinize those boilerplate decisions
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every odd decision needs the investment of a half-dozen people to build it and believe in it;
every stuck nail will bump on a dozen other systems that will have to give way and be double- and triple-checked against it;
the iron law of playtesting focused on moments of frustration or unhappiness within an hourlong window;
the impossibility of thought without shelter, of communication without an audience
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yeah by the time you’ve finally implemented the system or mechanic fully everyone else has been waiting long enough for it that they don’t care that it does nothing to distinguish itself from the dozens of other games that have implemented the same thing
then it becomes just another checkbox for your leadership to yell about to stakeholders
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why don’t any jRPGs have a job’s wife system
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Is there a fun/easy/beginner chiptunes iOS music maker?
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Nanoloop?
did that dreamcast emulator on ps vita ever get an update?
No more heroes question: should I play the first one, or go straight to the third?
play one
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I played all three recently and they build nicely on each other.
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I’ve personally never played a NMH but there’s also a strong strain of opinion that the first game is actually the most/only worthwhile one.
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first game also has the best-looking toilet paper in the series.
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Does Alan Wake have any champions among us?
I assumed it was uninspired Stephen King pastiche for years but my partner and I played it this year and found it incredible on narrative and sincerely hilarious at times. e.g. Alan’s does an internal monologue throughout the game, sometimes so loudly that you cannot hear NPCs talking to him because he is so self-absorbed. It is not the “where’s my wife” story it presents.
The third-person shooter part is a linear vehicle for Remedy to work their magic on those points but not bad by any means. It’s obviously a chopped-up open world game reworked into linear levels with the occasional driving section but it’s better for it in hindsight. Very lean.
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The writing is good lke Doolittle says, and it has a really great visual presentation and ambiance at all times. American Nightmare is also really fun. I think it is vastly superior to Control in story, but especially gameplay because the combat in AW is not great but it is dramatic, weighty, and not very frustrating while Control is never any of these things.
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19 posts were merged into an existing topic: Max Payne / Alan Wake / Quantum Break / Control
Very promising yous twos! Much appreciated.
has anyone tried to make a psp eboot from a bin cue? i’ve been trying to make one of magical hoppers but I can’t get it to work
Does anyone play gachas and feel good about it? I got really into DQDai on iOS for a week and now I’m just like… Sad
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Yeah I think every time I get sucked into a gacha or something similar I really enjoy it for the moment but if I ever lose momentum I get basically the gaming equivalent of post-nut-clarity and feel some kind of shame
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