One "mystery" game from GMG for $0.20, or 10 for $4.00. Hmm. Maybe you're paying for the privilege of not being given the same shovelware ten times.

I bought a ten pack during a previous sale and a single game this time. Everything I received was either a ~$5 game with mixed reviews or a ~$1 game with anything from poor to glowing reviews, but I'd never heard of any of them before. I got a couple of hours' entertainment out of the couple I tried, so I still don't consider it a bad deal.

rudra wrote on May 15, 2016, 13:08:

We don't want this to be a superhero film, we want it to be a film that embraces what it is to be human. All our jumps and all our parkouring, it has to feel as though you're watching it and thinking, on a good day I could do this. Otherwise I think it goes into a fantasy, which I don't think the game is about.

well then obviously you havent played it or know anything at all about the background story... which is maybe important when you are the director of the film?

I don't know - most of the fans I know are blinkered to the ridiculousness of the plot and praise the attention to historical detail. The essential plot of the games paint a popular sort of dystopian future and alternate history that might translate well into a more gritty, realistic film, and the cinematographer for True Detective would be a good asset for that.

The gameplay, and really the spirit of the games, seems to be more about ridiculous parkour, jumping from heights that would kill a normal person before they hit the ground, and the general superhero vibe of a single character capable of killing a million men without getting caught. I don't think there's much that you could borrow from that part of the game except for maybe the panoramic vistas.

When publishers release old games on new platforms, EA COO Peter Moore told IGN, “It feels like pushing stuff out because you’ve run out of ideas.”

But... there are 19 NBA Live games and 23 FIFA games, and they re-imagined Medal of Honor and Need for Speed just in the past couple of years. Don't even get me started on the Sims.

That doesn't seem too bad.

Their definition of Abusive specifically calls out repeated abuse and that's possibly even more forgiving than many other EULAs for multiplayer games.

The action taken against cheaters seems pretty severe: the fact that they talk about revoking all access to the game seems more extreme than most other games which would just ban them from multiplayer. It looks like this game has virtually no single player experience, though, so maybe it's not such a big deal in this case.

Anyone remember Splot from the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle back in 2011?

A beta was released very quietly for the PC last October for anyone who bought into the bundle. It's quite obviously been re-engineered for iOS, so controls feel quite weird on a PC and it's been given a very Angry Birds style makeover, but at least it wasn't vaporware.

The Magician wrote on Mar 24, 2015, 23:50:
And I wish to god people would stop using "8-bit" or "16-bit" to describe a graphical style. The number of bits doesn't determine your art.

The register size of the "8-bit" and "16-bit" console generations had a massive impact on what could technically be done with sprites and game mechanics.

To me, "8-bit" is perfectly valid shorthand for "graphics which you'd have found acceptable 30 years ago but are now nearly unplayable."

loomy wrote on Mar 22, 2015, 21:49:
what's the correct answer? you're all wrong. it's 26,996,473,856 bytes when installed. FUCK YOUS

You clearly have the bloatware version, mine clocks in 4MB lower at 26,992,255,208 bytes (25.1GB).

That's after a fresh install, hours of downloading the updates (~1-2MB/sec), then briefly firing up the game to change video settings and admire how bad the hangar frame rate is on a 7850.

So the title is "Video Games Are Better Without Characters," but the author's conclusion is really, "it's sad that sandbox games are dying."

I find it ironic the author cites The Walking Dead as an example of what's killing off the simulation market. That game's genre was declared dead in the late 1990's while games like SimCity and the Sims were at their peak.

I've seen it before, and I'll see it again.

Cyanotetyphas wrote on Feb 27, 2015, 15:10:
Re: Australia’s piracy crackdown will hurt everyone.

What is it about ISPs that makes them so eager to attack their own costumers?

They're not, and there have been high profile cases demonstrating this.

From 2008 through 2012 one Australian ISP (iiNet) successfully defended a case against Roadshow where the ISP was being held accountable for the actions of their customers and for not taking action against infringement notices. It's presently defending a case where it's being asked to turn over details of people who downloaded Dallas Buyer's Club.

However, the government recently issued an ultimatum to Australian ISPs, insisting that they come up with a graduated response plan. If they fail to do so, the government indicated that they would create it for them.

The ISPs have been coerced, and the Australian government has even more in store for them.

The suggestion that Australian ISPs want to punish their customers, as suggested by the article, is outright wrong.

Fion wrote on Feb 12, 2015, 17:56:
Interesting project but "based on 5th edition Dungeons & dragons' makes me a little leary that this will be yet another RPG that is D&D in name only.

Agreed - Neverwinter (the MMO) was "based on" 4th Ed. and discarded everything except bits of lore and the names of abilities.

(Which is a shame - 4th Ed. almost felt like it was built to be licenced as a CRPG yet there's been nothing over the past few years to show for it.)

Claiming that this will offer a "first-of-its-kind" real-time DM experience raises my hackles, too, considering NWN offered that more than a decade ago.

Cutter wrote on Dec 30, 2014, 11:54:
Well stop fucking using social media than and problem solved. Honestly, the way people go on about this shit when there's an such an obvious solution. Or start a fucking competing service that respects people's privacy in that case. If it's such a big deal you should be a billionaire over night.

Or you might work on it for several years and end up either giving up or taking your own life.

Elf Shot The Food wrote on Dec 2, 2014, 20:54:
Strange how Activision gets accused of milking Call of Duty with one yearly release, and yet UbiSoft can release two Assassin's Creed games on the same day and hardly anyone seems to care.

CoD games get a lot of flak because the campaigns are quite short, and the constant barrage of games fragments the multiplayer player base and drives players to keep buying the latest releases.

It's hard to level the same kind of criticism against Assassin's Creed, which have extensive single player campaigns and don't really exert any pressure on the player to buy the latest game.

It would be fair to complain if they start churning out lower quality games as a result of the short release cycle - which may be exactly what's starting to happen - but it's a little early to call.

CJ_Parker wrote on Nov 30, 2014, 20:28:
...subsidize 5000 Aurora (= starter ship) sales at $20/pc. - Those sold out in seconds, too. They were meant for new players but it seems more likely they were picked up by "grey market" sellers and big orgs etc.

Wow. I guess, for some people, Star Citizen is already a complete game.

xXBatmanXx wrote on Nov 29, 2014, 10:28:

Kim Dotcom: “I’m officially broke” after transferring remaining assets. Poor people are just broke. With rich people it's an "official" technicality.

Guess it has nothing to do with this, this, or this....maybe not even this....

Given that all of his current assets are effectively poisoned due to all of the governments, industry associations and laywers he's tangled with, maybe it's a deliberate strategy.

eRe4s3r wrote on Nov 28, 2014, 13:52:
Not quite sure why I would want "native" mkv support in W10... does MS believe we use WMP for mkv media playback? ;P

There's still a lot of applications built straight off the Microsoft AV stack, notably image organisation tools like Photoshop Elements or Lightroom.

Any improvement in native container/codec support is welcome, because it reduces the number of things I'll need to install to get everything working. It also lowers the chance that a game I own will croak when Haali/LAV/K-lite/CCCP/whatever hijacks the video it's trying to play.

It'd be nice if one day I could send a video from our camera or smartphone to our parents without needing to walk them through half an hour of locating and installing codecs or video players. Antitrust and royalties probably mean that'll never happen, though.

NKD wrote on Nov 29, 2014, 05:12:
I have no respect for anyone who willingly throws reason out the window in favor of magical thinking.

Arguably, that's not very fair, because ultimately their decisions are determined by natural phenomena like their genetics, upbringing, life experiences, gut bacteria, and quantum particle interactions. Your notion of someone "willingly" throwing reason out of the window is really just your rationalisation of the outcome of their lifetime of survival instincts.

It might be fair to disrespect them if you believed that each person had some extrinsic ego, will, or ability to reason, but that's treading dangerously into the realm of magical thinking.

So they took the art resources from an existing game, shoehorned them into an SDK provided by a gambling software company, and dubbed it "pushing the envelope"?

It looks more like a desperate attempt to monetise.

Why Final Fantasy is Trying So Hard...

HuffPo is suggesting that the FF guys are spending so much time on hair because it makes the game look good and will therefore sell more... and then support this argument by talking about how much effort they put into hair for "The Spirits Within", which was a complete flop.

jdreyer wrote on Oct 29, 2014, 19:40:

Task wrote on Oct 29, 2014, 15:35:
Is this some sort of anti-establishment/corporatism game? Sounds right up my alley.

Yeah, shocking that EA would be offering it for free and tacitly encouraging people to play it.

EA have given their blessing to worse...

Sacrifice wrote on Oct 25, 2014, 07:47:
I'm going to keep an open mind. It reminds me of Micro Machines. They were a great series of racing games.

That'd be the "fondly remembered miniature racing titles" referred to in the press release. It's kind of depressing that lawyers are so sensitive that they skirt around mentioning it by name.

Edit: ... and ironic that they'd pander to lawyers by not mentioning Micro Machines, while using a title that couldn't be more obviously derivative.