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Videogames 2023: Dreams of the Sandbox Kings


IlyaP
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26 minutes ago, Raja said:

How good does Hi-Fi Rush look? Woof

It's playable now

As good as the trailer is the game is even more fun. It's also kind of a blast to watch other people play. Amusing, beautiful, cool music and a lot of fun. 

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Someone ported Link To the Past to PC. 

https://github.com/snesrev/zelda3

You have to have the rom and compile it yourself for legal reasons but it's still pretty neat. 

So far I'm aware of this, the Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time Ports, and a Perfect Dark port that is supposedly being worked on since the game was decompiled late last year. If anyone knows of any more Nintendo to PC ports let me know. 

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On 1/31/2023 at 4:20 AM, Arakasi said:

So I’ve mostly just been playing slay the spire or civ 6 lately. If I was to jump into elden ring is it not as puzzle heavy as GoW? Also I see lots of different builds available and is it fun to play a magic user there?

Was my first souls game and it was a very steep learning curve picking up the muscle memory for the control system, but once I got to a basic level I had a blast with it and have been routinely going back to it for almost a year. I tried going an int caster first but found melee was better for learning the controls, then went back to the int caster for my first run then a faith caster after that. 

All my runs since then have ended up some variety of melee and faith casting hybrids but the int casting is still great as well.

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5 hours ago, Werthead said:

Death Stranding was a lot of game.

I mostly enjoyed it, but I can see why some might not.

This is one that's certainly eluded me, as someone who definitely falls into the latter camp. The game physics, the intense infodumps that could rival a Neal Stephenson novel, the jarring cameos from actors, it all just kept taking me out of the game world and left me thinking "I could be using my limited time on this Earth in far better ways". 

Like you said - it's not for everyone. 

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God of War Ragnarok also seems to be a buggy game on top of its annoying puzzle heaviness. We just got to a point on PS5 where we got stuck during the Surtr shrine part where we just can’t go under an arch to rejoin Thor. This game seems to be missing some polish at least for consoles.

On other games I picked up Wildermyth for my steam deck and am enjoying that. Nice mix of FFT and slay the spire.

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I really want to play Hogwarts Legacy, the game looks absurdly fun. Sadly this semester has been so busy lately that I probably should wait until summer.

I at least look forward to reading the thoughts of those who do end up playing it.

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2 hours ago, IFR said:

I really want to play Hogwarts Legacy, the game looks absurdly fun. Sadly this semester has been so busy lately that I probably should wait until summer.

It did look lovely from some gameplay I saw, and reviews have been very positive, but I just can't get over how silly the Potterverse is. It's constantly reminding you it was made for children in a way that I find too distractingly twee.

 

 

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Several reviews for the Hogwarts game seem to be variants of "this isn't very good, here's a list of all the problems, 9/10." Definitely "mediocre but the publishers have bought a shitload of advertising from us so we can't mark it down" vibes.

Meanwhile, a promising from-scratch remake of Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight in Unreal Engine 4. I gather int's been going on for ages but now you can play 2 full levels from the game. Only 19 more to go!

Apparently Red Dead Redemption 2's sales have surpassed 50 million, which is a staggering achievement and, at least from a storyline/characters and artistic direction, very well-deserved (the UI is still awful though). Also possibly still the best-looking video game around, a least pre-ray tracing revolution.

 

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Lots of reviews being collated here. Even smaller independents seem to love the game, for the most part. The worst review I've seen gave it 7 of 10 and said that it doesn't bring anything new to open RPGs and mostly rests on pushing nostalgia buttons for fans of the Wizarding World or whatever it's called. 

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I won't be buying Hogwarts. I'm not trying to achieve anything, boycotts never do, but the fact is that we live in a world with more entertainment than we can ever consume in our lifetimes, with dozens if not hundreds of high quality games, tv shows, and movies releasing every year - even if it's one of the best games of the year (unlikely) there are still going to be dozens of games of similar or higher quality with hundreds or thousands of cumulative hours of gameplay so it hardly seems like a difficult choice not to support a blatantly toxic franchise with its slavery, antisemitic stereotypes, and Rowling's frothing transphobia. I won't even notice that I'm not playing it. Maybe I'll play something nice and wholesome like Doom Eternal instead.

Edit:

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Meanwhile, a promising from-scratch remake of Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight in Unreal Engine 4. I gather int's been going on for ages but now you can play 2 full levels from the game. Only 19 more to go!

Just watched the video in the article you linked Wert and that's incredible. It looks just how those grainy pixelated textures were translated in my imagination back in the day.

Edited by Poobah
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9 hours ago, Ran said:

It did look lovely from some gameplay I saw, and reviews have been very positive, but I just can't get over how silly the Potterverse is. It's constantly reminding you it was made for children in a way that I find too distractingly twee.

 

 

:lol:

That's fair enough, and I will readily acknowledge that the Potterverse is a silly universe. Often that sort of silliness is off-putting to me. But sometimes it becomes charming and I embrace it. Such is the case for me with Harry Potter and Nicholas Cage. I love them. Everything I've seen and read of this game convinces me that despite my general aversion to video games, this one will be a splendid time.

3 hours ago, Poobah said:

but the fact is that we live in a world with more entertainment than we can ever consume in our lifetimes, with dozens if not hundreds of high quality games, tv shows, and movies releasing every year

Very true.

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The PC version is apparently total horseshit. Massive performance problems and the specs you require for even moderate performance are insane.

I have also seen some reporting that PC optimisation is apparently being de-prioritised, or even ignored, because people now think that DLSS can fix everything and optimisation is no longer an issue. That might also be behind the recent problems with shader compiling (i.e. it's an easy last-minute thing to avoid if you think high-performance graphics cards can just brute force past it).

Oh, and Denuvo, because of course it does. I'm surprised they didn't just borrow the 2K Launcher to maximise the number of things you can throw at a PC game to tank it technically.

Edited by Werthead
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1 hour ago, IlyaP said:

Looks like Midnight Suns has not been a financial success, despite good reviews: https://www.darkhorizons.com/marvels-midnight-suns-dubbed-a-flop/

A shame, because it was a really good game (once you got over the hump of the start being awful).

On the other hand, if this makes it more likely we'll get XCOM 3, fine.

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Nintendo direct tomorrow. Hopefully we'll get something on Zelda, though it's not impossible they'll just announce a dedicated Zelda direct and focus on other stuff. You'd imagine there'd be a trailer- with some actual detail- at least, though. 

You'd also hope they announce their usual summer game. There's been a Mario spinoff game announced in February and out in June every year since 2018 (except with Origami King, which was supposed to be a shadowdrop in June till someone leaked it). I suppose they might bump that date a month to not be too close to Zelda, but I'd imagine there'll be something. Mind, I've not actually played any of the previous June releases except Mario Maker 2. 

Also really want a Silksong release date, but I'm not holding my breath.

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I hope the disappointing sales for Midnight Suns doesn't impact Civ7. Its pretty likely the recent extra content for Civ6 is an attempt to get some attention back on the franchise after MS pulled development focus off Civ7 resulting in them not being ready to start marketing for it yet, the Civ series has been a constant for over half my life at this point.

Other than that I just find myself back in the lands between...again. Certainly never expected it would eat up so much time when I picked it up, the level of detail that's gone into the world building that can reveal layers by taking an archaeology style approach to analyzing it is really something.

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Managed to get Bridge Commander working, barely, and also managed to get some mods working on it to make it look nicer. But there's nothing to be done really about stability, it crashes at the drop of a hat and it has numerous bugs, like the planets frequently vanishing and it not being possible to invert mouselook (!).

A shame because the gameplay is reasonably fun, and it at least nods to not solving every mission with phasers and torpedoes (just most of them), but it's not really stable enough for a full playthrough.

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