Even more obscure, since it never got shipped to NA, but a South American friend suggested it to me saying it has Shadow of the Colossus vibes. Which is good, haha.

I like that your daily games lately have been (very random) nostalgia, haha. That said, I say this as I boot up yet another underrated Wii game nobody heard of but is weirdly good (Arc Rise Fantasia).

Spread the retro joy!

Given trends, probably open world online craziness.

Third parties promise not to store your duplicate information and never use it to implant memories and desires into your subconsciousness. They promise!

I’d be more interested in a fan sequel built on these. TP Link has more story in him, I’m quite certain (no spoilers, though).

“I like FF7 but I wish instead of a JRPG, it was a generic ARPG” said an SE exec at some point, apparently.

There’s something rich about this coming from Nippon Ichi’s former head, the company that brought us the artistic masterpieces known as the Disgaea series. Truly visionaries, lol.

(PS I like the games and tbf, they’re… unique).

It’s kind of wild but Fortnite makes (or made?) way more money than UE royalties, like magnitudes more. UE is a boon to the industry to be sure, but somehow 5% of games’ revenue simply isn’t the same as insane people spending money on stupid skins and dances.

Now is UE was used for 20 games as big as Fortnite, they’d be fine but most AAA companies won’t use UE if they expect a huge haul, with a few exceptions of course.

I feel like they’re just covering their asses because the c-suite wants their AI summaries in emails and shit, but the devs know using it for anything is creative suicide. That, and maybe localization still wants their AI tools, which predate LLMs but probably get lumped in anyway.

I’ve seen it in reverse; people who saw the initial yassification of characters were impressed by the “rendering” but after a few days, have realized that perhaps it isn’t the creative intent to make everyone look like AI slop.

Plus even if the tech ends up being good, the demonstration (and subsequent response) is very much not. Shadows getting washed out, people’s arms disappearing, and other things, people looking it over realize it’s not even doing what it wants to do.

Maybe it’ll work out when the creators have control over it and can prevent it from undoing important stuff, like a character’s plot related scars or lighting effects used to show players where to go, but that’s all suspect until proven otherwise.

I looked at some of the demo images and if it reads old lady, it decides to quintuple the wrinkles and go full witch. But otherwise, yeah, whore gun.

So, if I’m understanding right, the computer said there’s a great chance at $1 million in the mystery box if I’m the type to pick it and only it, which I am.

But I pick it for this bad reason: friends and I like to make fun of my troll luck. I’d take it, and somehow get $0 despite several more people after me will get $1 million after me, including two boxers. We’d laugh at “can you believe this shit?” and know it just wasn’t in the stars, just like that time I broke my ankle and all the automated walkways at the airport were broken. It’s that kind of thing (and yes that happened). My infamous troll luck strikes again!

Or it’s all superstition and I get a million bucks, since I’m pretty sure my infamous luck is just confirmation bias. Either way, fun had by all.

I saw one other person mention RetroAchevements and I second their love for adding it to older games-- in these cases, though, they’re a passion projects by fans and while they maintain a leaderboard, the main thing to be is it legitimizes some retro gaming by disabling save states and cheats while still having sets for modded games. I think it sets a good standard for what the industry should be doing.

For instance, it checks those boxes; it’s opt-in by default and there are privacy options, although hardcore mode requires rich presence for enforcement of the rules. There’s still the softcore option though. The sets have rules about what you can make, leaving grindy and multiplayer stuff as subsets. And again, modded/hacked roms get support, since all it takes is a user wanting to develop it (except Pokemon Clover, that’s banned for pretty good reasons lol)

At this point, it feels more legit than Steam, Xbox or PlayStation achievements. If the industry adopted a similar model, most of your concerns would be addressed although it’s likely impossible since developers often have to write achievement code that fits all platforms.

(Oh, and if you can’t tell, my answers to the questions, mod use makes it irrelevant on PC and permanence does matter to me, although not for any good reason: RA badges are nice to look at. Lol)

$5.19 at the cheapest near me in Los Angeles, 3/8. Just a week ago it was around $4.29, but of course I procrastinated filling up my hybrid since I still had a quarter of a tank left… Sigh.

Yeah, it’s my first time with it. Even as a check list it’s an insane amount of content. I’ll need a detox with something smaller afterwards!

Also, I like the hard stuff but subsets help keep that sorted so it doesn’t scare people away. White 2 has a challenge mode that was bugged at release but the RA patch fixes it. It’s not too hard and it’s kinda fun being challenged in Pokemon for once since I used to play competitively and actually know some strategy, haha.

Nice, totally with you on using RA as a checklist for these games (especially after multiset). It feels a bit more guided, especially as they add more and more gimmicks over the years. In post game, it’s practically essential.

White 2 is still kicking my butt because it’s just so, so much stuff. Emerald at least is probably a bit more tame. I’ve still got to beat battle subways, star in movies, beat the Elite 4 with every type, and do every post game tournament including battles with all previous games gym leaders… Plus a 400+ Pokemon capture/evolve/breed list which is just the White 2 only dex entries.

The article is bunk, but oddly enough the all time high by Steamdb suggests it’s around tied with DST, Megabonk, Hades II, and a few others at 115k-ish.

Nightreign, as AAA go, 313k at peak, lol.

You can still tell the article is bunk for comparing it to Stray as a cat game. Oh yeah, sure, while we’re at it let’s compare to Hello Kitty Island players, eh? AI logic. Lol

The article is talking about concurrent play, which generally peaks near release for all genres, with a few exceptions (like Hollow Knights sleeper numbers). Isaac came out when there was relatively fewer players and it’s a slow growth, so the original probably didn’t have a very high concurrent count.

The remake is around 70k peak, although it’s oddly high at 20k right now, perhaps because if Mewgenics.

Typo, or likely auto correct for FFXVI. Yup, was autocorrect, as it just did it again just now lol. I’ll correct it.

To be fair I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s already a vendor for that. They already kinda do that with Chromebooks at schools, and work computers are sometimes lent out to workers including those with beefy hardware. Doing it strictly for gaming wouldn’t be that much of a stretch lol