FYI Doom The Dark Ages was available day 1 on game pass and they were boasting on social media that they had over 3 million players on the first week if I remember right.

It’s Microsoft’s fault the game didn’t sell. Most people (me included) opted to subscribe to game pass for a month instead.

Neat. The results aren’t surprising, it’s still pretty early for NVK to rival the official drivers, but I hope that it’s stable some day. It would be nice to run an Nvidia GPU without random bugs every now and then.

Seriously, timed blackouts and petitions are just being performative. If someone actually cares, sell your ps5/move to another platform. Nothing else matters. This is like how sports game fans complain every year that the game sucks but are still willing to drop 80 dollars on it.

The sequel is waaaaaaay better by the way, I would play that if you only had the time to try one.

Neat. I wonder how they’re doing this though, because I’m assuming it’s just an Xbox emulator adding the games on PC. Or are they proper PC ports?

Well… At least it’s going to be moddable I guess, so we’ll wait a year after launch for the community to fix the game’s issues.

I wish Capcom would embrace the fangames/ROM hacks more.

On one hand, I love that they’re silently letting the fans do what they want without getting involved. On the other hand, I totally agree that it’s surprising they don’t lean harder on the fanbase. SEGA hired fans to make Sonic Mania which turned out great. Capcom could straight up take Megaman Maker and sell it for $30 or something, it’s one of the best free games out there and I’m surprised they haven’t tried buying it from the devs.

Oh hey, finally! The devs talked about updating the game a few years ago. I wanted to play this game again so much but all the steam reviews about crashes and save corruptions kept me off. Might be time to finally give it another shot after 10+ years.

This game was kind of awesome, I guess it was maybe too early to blow up along with other indie roguelikes. The idea of making your own class with crazy modifiers every run was really neat.

Okay this is definitely AI spam lol

I like the idea of having as much info about a game as possible on one page. That said, I’m worried about how the data is being aggregated and how it won’t turn into a mess with more and more data being added. How are you going to stop bad info or duplicates from making it in? What happens when two sources report conflicting info?

At the end of a game page, it says “data aggregated from 5 sources”, but it should also list the 5 sources here.

Also, the page content doesn’t seem to be licensed. Most wikis and databases have a small blurb on how you can use the content. Terraria’s wiki for example says this at the bottom of every page:

Page content is under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License unless otherwise noted.

It would be nice if the page content can be explicitly licensed as creative commons.

Finally, this is just my opinion, but the website is a little to “what’s up fellow gamers” for me. The about page is kinda eye-rolling, it’d be nice to know what this website offers without all the “games for gamers, make your gaming identity now, gamer” talk.

This site doesn’t seem to be making a new database, it’s more like an aggregator that collects information from multiple databases and puts it all on one page. I can see the merit in that but yeah it’s not going to replace something like IGDB.

To everyone confused what his point is:

“But those two roads do not converge. Those two roads necessarily diverge, because to be a platform and to be a very well-supported, well-accepted, well-selling platform, you need exclusive content. Nintendo needs its Mario and its Zelda, and PlayStation needs Crash Bandicoot and Astro Bot, and Kratos and Horizon, all of that. But if you’re going to be the biggest publisher in the world, which is not a bad ambition - I’m sure there’s gold on them there hills - you have to bring your stuff on every platform. Multi-platform is almost a prerequisite.”

He’s arguing that Xbox has ambitions to buy massive studios and be the biggest publisher ever, but that doesn’t work with how they also want to start making games exclusive. This kinda fits with him saying that PlayStation should keep their games on PC

Basically, he’s saying that if you want to make big franchises that are in the public consciousness and get made into TV shows/movies etc, then they need to reach the biggest amount of people possible so that the average person cares about that franchise. If most people can’t play the games, most people will stop caring about the franchise entirely.

Colin Mcrae Rally 2 mentioned!

Great article, I was looking at some reviews for it earlier too. I’m not a vertical handheld type of person, but this one looks great if you wanted a bigger handheld. I can’t help but feel like the Brick Hammer is way better though. That one has the same specs, a much more premium looking metal body, and is small enough to fit in your pocket. I guess the only downside is that it doesn’t have sticks.

Then you have Solo Leveling, a franchise entirely about one guy grinding dungeons alone, making a multiplayer co-op game.

The jokes really do write themselves.

I don’t know why anyone would work at one of these studios. Obviously people are staying because the jobs are still lucrative but who is it that’s walking into these super unstable jobs under a company that’s been doing nothing but layoffs and shutdowns for the last few years?

It’s really cool, Box2D is still sort of the golden standard for 2D physics engines, and maybe Box3D can be that with enough support.

But since announcement I’m still wondering what it offers versus other open source 3D physics engines. How does it compare to something like Jolt or Rapier? I only saw one person saying that Box3D is faster than Rapier when compiled to WASM, but we definitely need good comparisons at some point to know if this is a big deal or not.

At this point I don’t know what Microsoft has been doing lately that isn’t about laying off thousands of people, but at least I’m very happy that all these companies have been spun out of Xbox. Double Fine might not be a 10/10 studio, but it’s great that they’re indie again and not part of a bipolar company that keeps threatening every company they own with layoffs due to management’s bad decisions.

In addition, Mojang and King will now report directly to me.

I appreciate how direct this post is compared to your average corpo-speak, but wow that sounds threatening as hell LOL.

Today, in some parts of the company, work passes through as many as 14 layers of management. […] We will reduce management layers to no more than 5, and where possible, 3.

14 layers of management is insane. Isn’t that like a month of going up and down the chain for simple decisions? No wonder they take forever making one game that turns out to be mediocre.

There’s a lot of talk about focusing on their bigger projects and being more hands-on with studios, which is worrying. Usually management messing with development makes the game worse.

Audio is another big one. If you want good quality music and your game is voice acted you would be surprised how much space all those audio files take. Add in tons of other gigabytes if you offer voice acting for other languages.

There will definitely be a niche market for physical games, but yeah I was thinking about the average person and their experience. Especially since PC has shifted very early, I think most people would prefer to download a game in half an hour than having to go to a store and buy a physical disk and have to constantly put it in/take it out every time you want to play something else.

For Nintendo, I have genuinely despised their game key card approach. From a preservationists perspective, it’s a waste of money. However, getting a code in a box is a massive joke. Sony actually succeeded in making the concept of a GCK looking like a solid alternative. I really don’t know how to feel about that lol.

That’s funny, I had the same exact thought when writing this. The game key card thing sounds so stupid that my first thought was “damn, I hope they don’t get away with this”. My second thought was “wait, this might be the better option on consoles now. Damn.”