BUTTxROCK
(crush40 plays)
2 Likes
wondering just what format that guy used to give a copy of undertale to the pope, i feel like that was before it had a physical release, thinking about like a burnt cd-r with maybe zsnes and some roms on there too for the sake of using up the disc space. throwing on secret of evermore or something. although when i looked it up it sounded like it was just a steam key which is arguably goofier.
13 Likes
Years ago, despite not ever having played it, I had a Counterstrike t-shirt because I guess Iām a Fake Gamer Girl or something. It was a cool shirt, or so I thought at the time. It had a picture of an AR and a pair of wire cutters on it, which I felt like was vague-yet-recognizable to likeminded people.
One day a dude in a bar approached me while I was wearing said shirt, and inquired in that Iām-just-making-conversation-unless-you-say-the-wrong-thing way: āWhat does your shirt mean?ā
I guess the proximity of the wire cutters to the trigger on the rifle in the design implied in his mind some kind of anti-military stance on my part, and he was looking to get offended that I wasnāt Supporting The Troops.
We then shared a few awkward moments as I explained the premise of Counterstrike and the standard equipment of players on the Counterterrorist team while his girlfriend looked on, hoping her man wasnāt going to cause a scene of some kind.
14 Likes
Thinking about the at-release special edition of Final Fantasy XIV that came with a mug that arrived with mold growing on it.
10 Likes
I think often about the only time I played co op videogames with this one boss, he made me install a ton of mods for Streets of Rogue and then played with a special character class from a mod he liked that let him be some kind of invisible vampire/ninja/superassassin thing and kill almost everything in 1 hit. I think it occurred to him midway through the game that heād set it up so I was totally irrelevant to our success haha and he started trying to think of useful things I could do on the run. I did not end up being useful
9 Likes
A podcast I enjoy just pointed out that all Castlevania games are the story of a guy who has a very intense visit to a Spirit Halloween and I cannot think of anything else now
11 Likes
The swamp is where youāll want to drop valuable objects to increase your score. The swamp is very accessible and can be reached from anywhere on the mainland by simply typing swamp over and over until you arrive. Once in the swamp, just drop (dr for short) any objects you want to convert to points and you should see your score go up. Players refer to dropping an item in the swamp as swamping the item. Be careful not to swamp something you might need later!
advice page for the first MUD.
something i find really compelling reading about old adventure games is how often they just went with like āwander around and grab the treasure to watch your score go upā as a structure.
i feel like inventory puzzles and experience upgrades and etc maybe just evolved as a way to camouflage and justify whatever strange pleasure there is in picking up imaginary objects and watching them disappear.
14 Likes
the atari 2600 and its games barely even feel lke videogames to me. theyāre more like part of a specific kind of americana that also includes 60s batman, plan 9 from outer space, and so on.
in my mind, they all come from an idealised mid-20th century california that only exists in imagination
13 Likes
10 Likes
Video game about an archaeological expedition digging up artifacts from the worldās first MUD perfectly preserved in digital peat
10 Likes
Itās feeling increasingly likely that I might wind up skipping the PS5/Xbox Serieses altogether. Maybe Iāve said that elsewhere on these forums before but itās on my mind again.
6 Likes
waiting for the ps6 to buy a ps4
6 Likes
iāve definitely said this before, but people used to joke about the ps3 having no games
now thereās the ps5 and it seems to literally have no games that arenāt enhanced versions of ps4 games
i donāt know of any, at least.
it feels like it was a mistake to release a new console generation so early. the ps4 and xbone would have been perfectly fine for several more years. like even though thereās more power, itās impractical for most companies to develop games that utilise it, and more than ever before, the most popular games arenāt the most strenuous.
online and in real life, i know more people who play, talk about, and spend money on anmal crossing, minecraft, stardew valley, etc. than on aaa games. (i mean, online, i know more people who play doujin games and arcade archives than most aaa releases, but i realise thatās not the normal scenario)
5 Likes
Yeah, playing Horizon: FW on PS4, the only thing itās missing from the PS5 version is higher FPS and a bigger small foliage draw distance (probably overdraw related). That might change when UE5 is shippable with its fancy open world GI and infinitely scaling hierarchical lods, but right now PS5 feels like it doesnāt get you that much for an extra how ever many hundred dollars
1 Like
thereās a very significant separation between people who have access to new hardware for professional purposes (and who have a vested interest in advancing technical progress for various economic reasons, not all of them bad), and regular consumers at the moment. a lot of industries these days are sort of high on their own supply rather than ārationalā āincentivesā ā everything is an identity, etc., ā but the relative unavailability of new tech is really stinging.
Iām going to (finally) upgrade my computer at some point but I have no real plans to get a PS5, and my PS4 has been happily used as a streaming box for my non-smart projector more than as a gaming machine for years now. the console value proposition has always been āitās cheaper, itās simplerā ā the Series S is probably the only good example of that at the moment ā and without that, you fall back on exclusives, which have gotten awfully stodgy lately.
if/when I get a PS5 itāll be, like, a grudging $500 license fee for all of two games, and even though Iāve shrugged and accepted that eventually in the past, it is looking uniquely unlikely at this point
8 Likes
that said, as we still havenāt really seen many new releases that canāt be made to run on an AMD CPU from 2012, I do think that there will start to be some belatedly impressive stuff by like 2024 when that assumption is finally jettisoned. but even so, I feel like I experienced an early burst of that via PC VR exclusives from like 2018-2020 which has since dried up again, so I donāt know if even the most theoretically obvious industry trends have a lot of juice left.
7 Likes
like when I think of even the most ~technically~ impressive games from that period it was like:
-
devotion, which was removed from sale after a week and mostly used a bunch of fancy shader tricks that do not require new hardware
-
the under presents, in which a bunch of hot shit LA narrative devs got facebook money for an exclusive they eventually half-ported
-
half life alyx, wherein valve set some cash on fire to prove they still could
1 Like
I think honestly thereās just not a lot more you can do with deferred rendering pipelines that youād need more hardware improvements for. The next things coming down the pipe are going to be drastic workflow/engine-structure changes or nobodyās going to care. Most people donāt care much about slightly improved shadows or marginally better AA, but accessible photogrammetry pipelines or just-works GI would change a lot for studios and consumers
5 Likes
Like the way UE5 lets you kitbash directly using high poly sculpts or photogrammetry assets to effectively infinite levels of detail is maybe the first thing Iāve seen in five years thatās dramatically changing the presentation of real time 3D, especially since itās pretty accessible for all budgets. The density goal of approximately one triangle per pixel is, in theory, an optimal limit and weāre just about there. But itās definitely looking like something thatāll take better advantage of improved hardware. Real time GI at scale is also going to quite dramatically affect the look of a lot of high budget showcase games while, again, also being accessible to smaller studios and individual creators
5 Likes
realistically there is maybe one more generation after PS5 in which hardware can still get more powerful while remaining the same price, although given how much MSRP and street prices have diverged in the past two years thatās still a fairly theoretical argument, and it does seem like weāll eventually reach a baseline where you have the option to spend more than four hundred or whatever dollars on hardware but the compute capacity that four hundred dollars buys you will probably stay the same.
again, the Series S looks like the only really smart play here but gamers like GPUs so, well, who knows
I will say that the burst of creativity we got during the PS4 generation, even for releases that werenāt necessarily on PS4, exceeded all my expectations for this hobby and if it is hard to imagine where we go from here that is at least in part an accomplishment.
3 Likes