Keyrock

Many many years ago when I was just a wee lad we visited a friend out in Cali for a few days and on one day my folks took me out for a drive out into the desert. Driving down a perfectly straight road with barely anything on the horizon and nothing on either side for miles and miles was one of the most surreal things I've ever experienced. You could barely tell you were moving and there was really nothing to gauge your own speed. There was just this vast nothingness with only a cactus here or there and a store or gas station every 30 miles or so. There's nothing comparable, to the best of my knowledge, on the east coast.

I find a certain beauty to the Mojave Desert, probably because it's just so alien and different compared to the forests, plains, rivers, and scattered ponds and small lakes of the areas I've lived in for most of my life.

I wanted to get into it, but it's super grindy. Very little turns me off like grinding. For me Sunless Sea didn't really get grindy until after 15 hours or so, at which point I was constantly visiting the same places again and again and seeing the same encounters again and again. The first 10 hours of the game, though, were amazing, as I was constantly discovering new places and getting new encounters, all while cutting it really close with my money and fuel, sweating bullets on the way back to London. The setting and writing is what carried the game for me. The writing is just so damn great and the setting so bizarre that reading the bajillion lines text was a real pleasure. The game lost me when it became apparent that it would take insane amounts of grinding to get the necessary vessel and goodies to get to the end game stuff, at which point I gave up on it and never returned. Still, I don't regret buying or playing the game one bit. The money and time I spend was completely worth it for the first 10 hours of wonder.

If you just want to pledge 20 or 50 bucks and (potentially) get the game ang a hat or something, it's essentially the same as Kickstarter. The investment thing is a bit suspect, though, if you read the fine print. It's set up in a way where Fig absolves iyself of the vast majority of responsibilities and removes much of the legal recourse available to the investor should the project go sour. Also, the project would need to be wildly succesful for the investor to make any sort of significant profit. In short, it's an extremely risky investment with only a small chance of significant returns, the kind of thing no seasoned investor would ever seriously entertain.

Masochistic?

W3 prototype images:

I quite enjoyed Wasteland 2 and am looking forward to playing W3. That said, I'm done with crowdfunding, so Fargo & Co ain't getting no money in advance from me.

It's a bit clunky but it was a fun 2D Deus Ex. Payed €18 or something for it and was fairly happy with that. 2D Deus Ex, eh? Color me interested. Can you ghost it? I haven't played very much of it, but it's kind of like SNES Shadowrun mixed with a beat 'em up. I'm not using the stealth approach, though. Mostly been using the 'punch anything that moves' approach. But you can stealth at least some of it? You don't have to kill everyone?

It's a bit clunky but it was a fun 2D Deus Ex. Payed €18 or something for it and was fairly happy with that. 2D Deus Ex, eh? Color me interested. Can you ghost it?

The first batch of games had nothing I was interested in, but they updated with new games and I see Dex for 67% off. Has anyone played that? Is it worth a five-er?

I feel like Michel Ancel is just trolling us and has been the whole time. Go **** yourself, Michel, I'm not falling for your **** again.

Loved Starflight 1 & 2. There was a fan game SF3 project some years ago. I'm not sure if it was ever finished.

I friend-zoned Triss in my Witcher games, mind you I don't have 3 yet. Shani is the woman for me. These sorceresses are a bit too crazy for my liking.

Freedom Planet is really good. If you'd like to revisit the glory days of side-scrolling games on the Genesis, and not just a game that looks like a Genesis game but also understands proper level design, this is a game you should play.

I highly recommend it. Outside of the Gir-Tab fight, I've enjoyed pretty much every minute of the game so far (even wandering aimlessly for an hour, that's part of the metroidvania process). It's the best Metroid fix you can get outside of a Nintendo platform and, given that Samus Aran has quite possibly been retired to solely doing Smash Bros appearances going forward, it's likely the best Metroid fix you can get on any platform going forward. Also, the soundtrack is really good.

Exciting times for me in Axiom Verge. Not too long ago I was pretty stuck in the game and couldn't figure out where to go or how to get back to earlier areas of the game and spent a good hour or more just wandering aimlessly. Eventually I figured it out, then I got stuck on a crappy boss fight, got past that with the help of a cheese tactic I found online, then finally acquired the grapple which allowed me to reach a host of places I couldn't before (and to go back to earlier areas). Now I have so many new places to visit it's almost overwhelming, which is great because I love exploring in this game. I also got a new gun, but I've yet to see the value in it.

Things I a tired of in video games: Open world Procedural generation Crafting

There are several problems with a hybrid handheld/home console design. It is extremely difficult to fit hardware powerful enough to even come close to current gen home consoles into a handheld, and even if you could fit hardware that powerful into a unit that small it would be prohibitively expensive. So then you have the multi processor concept where the handheld unit has its own set of processors that can achieve decent visuals on a little screen and another set of processors in the dock that can be added to the overall processing power to create home console level visuals on a bigger screen. While having multiple CPUs and multiple GPUs working in tandem is far from impossible, it's much easier to achieve when the sets of CPUs and the sets of GPUs are identical, which they obviously wouldn't be in this case. Having different types or power levels of CPUs and GPUs working together is feasible, but it does add an extra level of complexity to everyone involved in the process, including game developers. Then the developer has to design 2 sets of configurations, one for the handheld on its own and one for the full power dock + handheld combo. Again, doable, but that's extra work and complexity. What I'm trying to say is, remember all the problems the Wii U had with 3rd party support? This wouldn't help matters.

But if you want good quality graphics on the handheld you need to carry another brick with you in addition to the handheld itself.

That sounds... terrible.

The fact that a game would actually be able to install a rootkit and grant kernel-level privileges speaks volumes about Windows' security. Edit: Okay, I read that it at least asks you to grant the game superuser-level privileges on start, so at least it wasn't able to do this on its own. When a game asks for superuser-level privileges, something is wrong, terribly wrong. Games should only ever exist in user space. Under no circumstance should a game be ever allowed to mess with the operating system itself.

Maybe the rest of the world is following in Japan's footsteps, where the home console market is effectively dead (or at least on life support) and gaming on the go is king? Homestly, the AAA gaming market is due for a crash. The current model is unsustainable with costs continuing to skyrocket and game prices remaining the same. A price hike in game prices would also likely backfire and shrink the market even faster, hence why publishers are instead going down the DLC and microtransaction shenanigans route.

There has been a significant delay on pretty much every die shrink that I can remember. I'll be shocked if we see 7nm by 2020, much less before then.

Normally I'd be against banning a developer or publisher from a sales platform, even though Valve is within their rights to allow or block anyone they want. That said, Digital Homicide are straight up scammers and thugs and to hell with them.

I think you are confusing subjective with objective, Drowsy. Sone people feel 4 > 3. Also, a game can be worse than its predecessor and still be 9/10. I'll go back to Devil Survivor 2 as a 9/10 example of a game I find inferior to its predecessor. Also, FF and Chrono Trigger do not own exclusive rights to the all time jRPG greats club, despite what some people would like to believe.