Video Games: Now with a Chance to Win a Complimentary Membership to Gambler's Anonymous

[RumHam]

Ok Chrono Cross is a good one, I dunno that that has been re-released. And I guess my only port of FFT is the PSP one and I'm not sure where my PSP is. Symphony of the Night I have on Xbox live arcade. I know Teras Kasi is terrible but it was the first game I ever rented from Blockbuster. I enjoyed it for the weekend at least. Never got into Bandicoot, or Spyro for that matter. 

[Rhom]

Tekken 3 is on there I saw.   

[RumHam]

Huh the article I read said the US list wasn't released yet and didn't list any games. 

[Slurktan]

There is 5 games confirmed already, FF7, Tekken 3, Ridge Racer 4, Wild Arms, and whatever Jumping Flash is.

[Werthead]

Rejoice! A graphics card which can run 4K reliably at over 60fps on Ultra Settings now exists. You shouldn't buy it unless you've won the lottery, it's a preposterous £1050 ($1150) just for the graphics card by itself, but it's nice to know this technology now exists, and should appear in the next console generation-after-the-next-one.

NVidia are bigging up its ray-tracing capabilities, which is nice except 1) it doesn't have true ray-tracing capabilities, which even Hollywood custom graphics stations costing tens of thousands of dollars are struggling with, this is a sort of emulation of the effect, and 2) no game currently exists which uses the technology (although Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy XV are getting patches next month to include it).

1 hour ago, Slurktan said:

There is 5 games confirmed already, FF7, Tekken 3, Ridge Racer 4, Wild Arms, and whatever Jumping Flash is.

Wipeout 2097 or no sale.

[The Anti-Targ]

4 hours ago, RumHam said:

They announced a Playstation classic but I'm having a hard time thinking of any PSX games I really loved that haven't already been remastered/re-released on other platforms. I think Squaresoft games, Metal Gear Solid and the Resident Evil series might have been all I really played on the original Playstation. 

I hear it's $100 for 20 games and no capacity to add / buy / download more. Not sure it's worth it, since for most people only maybe 4 or 5 out of the 20 games will be nostalgic favourites.

I feel like for $100 it might have been possible to add a small flash drive and capacity to buy PS1 games from the PSN store. PS1 games are what, 500-700MB, with a few being up to 1.5Gig (2 CDs)? How much is a 32GB memory card? $10 retail? That's a helluva lot more games people might buy at $5-$10 a pop to help cover the cost of adding game download and storage capacity to the unit.

[Rhom]

1 hour ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I hear it's $100 for 20 games and no capacity to add / buy / download more. Not sure it's worth it, since for most people only maybe 4 or 5 out of the 20 games will be nostalgic favourites.

I feel like for $100 it might have been possible to add a small flash drive and capacity to buy PS1 games from the PSN store. PS1 games are what, 500-700MB, with a few being up to 1.5Gig (2 CDs)? How much is a 32GB memory card? $10 retail? That's a helluva lot more games people might buy at $5-$10 a pop to help cover the cost of adding game download and storage capacity to the unit.

Sure, but that’s not the business model Nintendo proved would with with the NES and SNES Classic.

[The Anti-Targ]

1 hour ago, Rhom said:

Sure, but that’s not the business model Nintendo proved would with with the NES and SNES Classic.

That's Nintendo. When it comes to nostalgia they're different. Sony should do one better, not just copy Nintendo with a library of games that might be less nostalgically beloved.

Personally, I find it really hard to get into retro games. I got the og FFIX on PS3 when it came out several years ago. I was liking it, but ultimately I stopped playing it because I wanted to play the newer shinier games. So I'm likely to sit this PnP box out.

I also can't be arsed reading a bunch of text and so many retro games had all text dialogue and once voice acting for dialogue became commonplace, text based dialogue became tiresome for me. I even dropped a modern Yakuza game because it is so heavily text based for dialogue, which might be fine for franchise fans who dig that as a tradition of a franchise, but it's off putting to someone like me who could be drawn in to the franchise, but old-skool type elements aren't so attractive. Oddly for something like Yakuza I would be fine with all Japanese voice acting with English subtitles. I guess I need the intonation and emotion of the voice acting, more than I need to not be reading the dialogue.

[Gorn]

Recently started Torment: Tides of Numenera, and here are my thoughts after the first several hours:

- Conversations and writing are amazing, and I've really enjoyed it so far. However, so far I haven't seen anything that reaches the heights of Planescape Torment, and I feel that the Last Castoff and the city of Sagus Cliffs are simply inherently less interesting than the Nameless One and Sigil.

- There is a surprising number of bugs, together with clumsy user interface and general lack of polish. So far, I've had one quest which cannot be finished because I did follow the intended sequence, one crash to desktop, and NPCs discussing another NPC as if she was dead, well before she actually died.

- In spite of all this, I would still give the game 9/10 based on what I've seen so far, because when it works, it gives you an experience you can get out of very few other RPGs. I was sorry to hear that the game was a commercial failure and that the developer does not plan to make any more similar games. With Tyranny being another commercial failure, and Pillars of Eternity 2 not being a shiny success either, I'm afraid this short-lived comeback of isometric RPGs with complex narratives has come to an end.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Gorn said:

Recently started Torment: Tides of Numenera, and here are my thoughts after the first several hours:

- Conversations and writing are amazing, and I've really enjoyed it so far. However, so far I haven't seen anything that reaches the heights of Planescape Torment, and I feel that the Last Castoff and the city of Sagus Cliffs are simply inherently less interesting than the Nameless One and Sigil.

- There is a surprising number of bugs, together with clumsy user interface and general lack of polish. So far, I've had one quest which cannot be finished because I did follow the intended sequence, one crash to desktop, and NPCs discussing another NPC as if she was dead, well before she actually died.

- In spite of all this, I would still give the game 9/10 based on what I've seen so far, because when it works, it gives you an experience you can get out of very few other RPGs. I was sorry to hear that the game was a commercial failure and that the developer does not plan to make any more similar games. With Tyranny being another commercial failure, and Pillars of Eternity 2 not being a shiny success either, I'm afraid this short-lived comeback of isometric RPGs with complex narratives has come to an end.

Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 did very well, the Shadowrun RPGs did superbly and Wasteland 2 sold excellently (although the narrative wasn't as complex in those games), enough that Wasteland 3 was greenlit off the back of it. Torment also apparently did quite well in terms of profit but it made all its money off the Kickstarter, and the live sales were seriously below par. I also think a very big problem was that it wasn't great, it wasn't terrible, it was just fairly mediocre and after a long development time for such relatively simple game, that wasn't good enough.

The biggest problem with this rush of isometric RPGs is that so far exactly none of them have been as good as, let alone exceeded, Baldur's Gate II or Planescape: Torment. Given those games still exist and have even been upgraded and made shinier and more accessible (and are pretty cheap now), that's a bit of a problem.

We have another one fairly imminently, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and I'll be interested to see how well that does. Sadly, it sounds like Bard's Tale IV is poor as well.

[Fez]

On 9/20/2018 at 9:05 AM, Werthead said:

Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 did very well, the Shadowrun RPGs did superbly and Wasteland 2 sold excellently (although the narrative wasn't as complex in those games), enough that Wasteland 3 was greenlit off the back of it. Torment also apparently did quite well in terms of profit but it made all its money off the Kickstarter, and the live sales were seriously below par. I also think a very big problem was that it wasn't great, it wasn't terrible, it was just fairly mediocre and after a long development time for such relatively simple game, that wasn't good enough.

The biggest problem with this rush of isometric RPGs is that so far exactly none of them have been as good as, let alone exceeded, Baldur's Gate II or Planescape: Torment. Given those games still exist and have even been upgraded and made shinier and more accessible (and are pretty cheap now), that's a bit of a problem.

I thought the D:OS games were excellent, especially the second one. But crucially, they tried to innovate on the old cRPG formula than just rehash it.

The Shadowrun Games were much close to the old formula, though with a few nice twists (like the cyberspace hacking); but their big selling point was that they were truly well-written games (at least the second and third were, though personally I also feel like the first one was too).

All the rest though, Wasteland, Torment, Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity I & 2, etc. all of them are just trying to rehash tired, old systems, and, more importantly, were not well-written. The D:OS games are also not well written (unless you like memes) but they are just so damn fun to play.

 

In other news, Telltale Games is shutting down. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/09/21/telltale-games-reports-shutting-down/ Leaving just a skeleton crew of 25 to finish out the final season of The Walking Dead. All other projects are cancelled. I'm surprised the studio was in such bad shape, and I hope the hundreds of folks now out of a job find new ones soon.

[briantw]

26 minutes ago, Fez said:

In other news, Telltale Games is shutting down. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/09/21/telltale-games-reports-shutting-down/ Leaving just a skeleton crew of 25 to finish out the final season of The Walking Dead. All other projects are cancelled. I'm surprised the studio was in such bad shape, and I hope the hundreds of folks now out of a job find new ones soon.

That's a shame.  Always enjoyed their games.  

Sucks that Stranger Things game has been cancelled.  And Wolf Among Us 2.  The first Wolf was my favorite Telltale game.

I'd wager the main issue with their games is that they haven't made any meaningful improvements to their engine in like a decade, which has likely had diminishing returns in sales over time as their games have seemed increasingly behind the times from a technical standpoint.

[Werthead]

Apparently their sales had been terrible for a long time. Only the first season of The Walking Dead made huge profits and, crucially, the main designers of that game were so pissed off at the working conditions they quit immediately after it was done and went off to make the even better Firewatch instead. IIRC, the first season of The Wolf Among Us and Minecraft: The Adventure Game also did okay and that was it. Even Game of Thrones didn't do much for them and Batman was a major flop.

[Gorn]

I've quit the Walking Dead series after S2, when I realized that my choices were meaningless and that I was being railroaded in a single direction predetermined by the writers. I know that multiple paths cost more and require more development time, but that was the biggest reason why people were buying their games!

There was also an issue of market saturation. Their audience was limited to a specific niche, and much as I like narrative-focused games, I also want to play games from other developers and genres, and my gaming time is limited.

[Fez]

Seems that even them finishing The Walking Dead final season isn't confirmed actually. They might just not finish anything, or maybe just that Minecraft interactive movie thing they were working on for Netflix. Hard to say until there's an official statement. It has been stated though that none of the employees are getting severance pay, and considering the studio is based in San Francisco, this really sucks for them. I have been glad to see that there's at least a fairly well-organized effort to connect employees to other developers that may have openings.

[Red Tiger]

Eh, I never liked their games, so I don't give a shit, to be honest.

Sekiro and Devil May Cry are looking better and better. In the case of DMV im not a big fan of how Trish looks, but overall I think it looks great.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Red Tiger said:

Eh, I never liked their games, so I don't give a shit, to be honest.

I think it's possible to not like their games - I'm not a huge fan of their post WD S1 direction - but also acknowledge that 250 people have just been made jobless by crappy management. Apparently one developer who started work for them last week had just completed a move across the entire country.

[Luzifer's right hand]

Too bad about telltale. I just finished Batman on the switch and was hoping for more ports. 

On a sidenote after watching my gf play Fallout 4 I reinstalled the game again.

I'm trying a permadeath survival game this time. Might work well for me as I suffer from restartitis. I played about 400 hours since it came out and I have never even entered the institute.

[Red Tiger]

12 hours ago, Werthead said:

I think it's possible to not like their games - I'm not a huge fan of their post WD S1 direction - but also acknowledge that 250 people have just been made jobless by crappy management. Apparently one developer who started work for them last week had just completed a move across the entire country.

Sure, but I meant more the company in itself. I sympathize with the fired employees, but I never cared for the company itself.

[The Anti-Targ]

On 9/22/2018 at 9:30 AM, Fez said:

In other news, Telltale Games is shutting down. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/09/21/telltale-games-reports-shutting-down/ Leaving just a skeleton crew of 25 to finish out the final season of The Walking Dead. All other projects are cancelled. I'm surprised the studio was in such bad shape, and I hope the hundreds of folks now out of a job find new ones soon.

I thought most of their their games sold pretty well. Or did they suffer from having good reviews but poor sales?

I wonder if it was a case of bad management rather than bad sales.

Having said that, I played TWD S1 and 2, GoT S1, and Tales from the Borderlands. I liked them all quite a bit (though GoT wasn't great). But I've not bought or played any of the other TT games. I started Michonne and there was nothing wrong with it, but after 2 sessions I put it down and haven't picked it back up. I enjoy these games, but I'm not strongly motivated to play more of them. A bit like how I enjoyed Banner Saga, and I have BS2, but I just haven't been able to get into the second game for some reason. I just find myself preferring to dedicate gaming time to different games.