Interesting! But yeah, the series is far more miss than hit at this stage. But it's been a while. Maybe they can make something good.

Remaking Settlers II wouldn't cut it, but it would make a good starting point.

The Colonists is my current hopeful heir to that throne. Lets see how it turns out.

DangerDog wrote on Aug 14, 2018, 20:02:
Depends on how detailed the simulator is, it's crazy the amount of detail DCS A10 has in just the startup procedure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4VuDetuPmA

It's not like there's never been a case where people in the tower have been able to walk people through the procedure of landing a plane with little experience.

At any rate I feel 100% qualified to fly X-Wings, Tie Fighters and a assortment of other spaceships.

Yeah, DCS is insane. After the last few weeks of practicing I feel like I could start up from cold, take off and land an F18 on a ground airstrip, and maybe make the carrier 1/8th of the time (I'm working on it). Of course military jets are defended by guys with guns and carriers have PDW's to stop people getting close.

If the commercial simulators have planes with an accurate virtual cockpit like DCS you could probably learn it pretty quickly, this guy didn't seem to pay too much attention as he didn't know the autopilot, oxygen controls or fuel by the sounds of things. I've worked ground crew and security isn't all that, if you want minimum wage workers to do all the work then you need to let them in, on, under and around aircraft that are worth up to hundreds of millions of dollars.

It's actually amazing that hundreds of thousands of groundcrew employees all over the world are dedicated to making sure your flight leaves on time instead of blowing up or having doors that were not closed properly pop off in flight or planes running off the edge of runways because the weight on the paperwork wasn't logged properly or the toilets emptying out. I mean, there are sensors that are meant to check all this stuff but they go out of service as well.

In an ideal world, yes, but the refund policy is mostly about meeting some jurisdiction's regulatory requirements for the game to be functional as opposed to "I played for 5 hours and decided I don't like it", something that should be clear within 2 hours.

If stores like Steam thought refunding products because their customer decided they just didn't enjoy it then a lot more of them would let you get refunds, or at least trade your keys, long after purchase. It seems to me that there would be a niche for such a store if publishers themselves thought such a policy was useful. DRM free is working out for GOG so maybe it's not so far fetched that such a policy might be considered in the future by someone.

I can see why they are going for the streaming thing. Lots of kids and people in poorer countries (or even people in rich countries suffering from under employment) would take blurry, laggy games over no games or watching them on twitch.

Will it affect us nerds who spend thousands to get the good stuff? Probably. Some designs might get compromised in order to run as a stream, like cross platform stuff today is made with consoles in mind. Might also help. If hundreds of millions more customers suddenly open up it becomes easier to justify insane expenditures like The Witcher 3, a game that would never have happened if it wasn't for console install base to help ameliorate the risk.

Hells yes. Seems like more of the same but refined, made more insane and with online play which is exactly what it needed. One of my favorite local co-op games of the last few years.

Wonder how that Steam decline stacks up against fortnite's popularity.

Could epic use it to launch their own store? Valve just needed Halflife 2 and Counterstrike. Gotta be someone there thinking how to leverage those numbers.

Cutter wrote on Jul 8, 2018, 11:38:

HoSpanky wrote on Jul 7, 2018, 13:06:
At least the article finally mentions ina short per that people who have jobs that are relevant are finding a booming economy, but they immediately turn away from that. Instead they focus on people who very much seem to think someone else needs to take care of them. It isn’t someone else’s job to make sure your skills are something that’s still relevant.

Actually it is. A plethora of broke, hungry, angry people are what cause bloody revolutions. There's more than enough to go around and at least keep the masses pacified with an UBI.

This seems like common sense but so many people seem religiously committed to turning the clock back to the times where we just let people die in the street, forgetting the causes of the revolutions that brought autocracy to many parts of the world that the New Deal and Western socialism evolved to prevent in our own countries.

But if you elect someone with the corrupt real estate acumen of Crassus and the pathetic need for public adoration of Pompey then maybe you want the republic to fail and arise anew as something more orderly and undemocratic. Not seeing how that makes things better myself.

This is one of those games that is obviously amazing, well supported and beloved by those that try it. I can't get into it. Tried 4 times on different platforms.

Everything they add seems like "Oh, that is what Destiny should add!" but when I play it I hate it. Maybe it's the UI overload, or the bleak post-human art style (That is looking a little more mainstream every time I look at it) or maybe the 3rd person shooting thing, though there are plenty of 3rd person games I love so probably not. Oh man I feel like I'm missing out. It's not like Fortnite where the very concept doesn't appeal to me even if I can see it's executed superbly.

Great, now I'm one of those assholes that post to a thread just to say I hate something. Good work Bluesnews, it only took a few decades but you got me!

Slick wrote on Jul 1, 2018, 19:54:
Nice to see FFXV on the list, maybe it's on sale?

I really liked that game, the first RPG I got the wife to ever play through with a controller on the console, and it was her first JRPG too.

She just started Nier: Automata, which got great reviews, I'm next in line to play And I'll say this, from someone who didn't grow up with games, and who's new to using a controller you'd think she'd have a hard time with the Platinum Games style of action, but I wanted to push her a bit, and she's really taken to it, we're on day 2 and she's about 7 hours in and not giving up the controller.

Apparently, it takes 20 hours to beat, but then there are 4 more endings you should play through, and the fifth one "route E" is supposed to me genuinely amazing in a mindfuckery kind of way. One major review outlet said something like: "The night I beat Nier: Automata, I slept well. The night I REALLY finished Nier: Automata I couldn't get a wink"

For the reference, time to beat average says 20 hours for first playthrough, 6-7 for each other one, but can go faster by skipping everything but main quests. 60 hours for a completionist run.

Man, really wanted to get on the Nier train as it sounds amazing but the game runs and looks like rubbish on my PC and I had multiple showstopper bugs (No crash, just mission triggers didn't hit or something). I was expecting PS3 era graphics but it feels somehow worse.

Dragons Dogma: Dark Arisen was a little rough but at least it was sharp and fluid. Maybe I'll get it on console when I see it cheap.

It's hard to be mad at them. I'm not smart enough to make these idiots/kids send me billions of dollars for digital art assets.

I prefer PUBG, my years with ARMA make the clunky but slightly less horrible PUBG movement seem amazing. Someone needs a game that does PUBG ranged combat with battlfield/cod close range stuff and BF1 graphics/detail at PUBG map sizes and then we are golden.

I play a lot of games with my 9yo, who is still deep in the Minecraft phase of drawing plans for buildings she will make when the weekend rolls around but she said Fortnite is what all the kids at school are playing. If it's a fad it's a massive one.

Suppa7 wrote on Jun 23, 2018, 10:04:
The reality is many of the dubbed anime from the past have been superpassed. Mobile Suit gundam 00 is probably one of the best mech animes ever made. The old Macross is stale, they really have had a hard time not fucking up macross, I wasn't a fan of frontier or macross delta.

I'd rate gundam seed / Gundam 00 greater than macross at this point in anime history.

There is so much anime now that old classics aren't talked about much anymore like Evangelion or Ghost in the shell.

It's too bad GITS got worse, the first version being the best gits. They took Ghost in the shell in odd directions after the first movie. Especially with stand alone complex.

I mean, yeah? I fell off the Anime train in the late 90's because a lot of the older series just went to shit (Like Macross, gundam seemed to shit the bed as well for a while there) and the newer stuff was mostly about Anime girl tits for some reason. Even if the new stuff is good (I wouldn't know) it doesn't detract from how fucking mind blowing that old 70's/80's stuff was compared to the domestic offerings at the time, and how lucky some of us were to get the heavily edited versions of them in the west snuck into state programing before and after school. I mean, they couldn't hide the fact the earth was all but wiped clean of life in half of them! (Whoever was responsible for those early cuts of Nausica should be arraigned for crimes against humanity in the Hague though).

0083 and earlier Gundams, most Captain Harlock films and older Macross and heaps of stuff I've forgotten were pretty phenomenal when I caught up with them in the mid 90's. I still watch the more recent dubs of the early Ghibli movies multiple times a year with my daughter and some are amazing, like Laputa, Lupin III and Nausica and so much more interesting and nuanced than the drek they think kids should be watching these days. A lot were well ahead of their time in having awesome, complex girl protagonists with agency, personality and flaws which I really appreciate and never realised how rare that was in media aimed at kids until I started to raise a kid myself.

Cutter wrote on Jun 23, 2018, 23:05:

Creston wrote on Jun 23, 2018, 22:56:
It sounds to me like you guys are just trying to scam people out of two million dollars.

That's probably it. Can't imagine the property is worth anything remotely close to that. Or ever would be even if they won it all and got a game made. And even if they raised the money and won how the hell could they afford to make a game anyway? Yeah, sounds pretty scammy all around.

It's personal though. This IP meant something to them, something they poured years of work into. Something others have attempted to emulate (Star Control 3) and failed at miserably.

It seems petty but SC2 is one of the earlier games where there is a real sense of authorship, with writing and humor that mostly nails the landings.

The Stardock project has a lot to prove, after their MOO came out and was competent yet missing that spark that makes those early 90's PC games still amazing experiences today. Not that Paul and Fred seemed likely to live up to the previous title either but I can appreciate how they may feel protective over their legacy. Their Activision projects made millions but I imagine Star Control was professionally more fulfilling and important to them than kids/toys to life games.

Mordecai Walfish wrote on Jun 22, 2018, 20:59:

Cutter wrote on Jun 22, 2018, 20:18:
I don't recall this Robotech cartoon but I did watch a lot of Battle of the Planets.

Robotech was pretty awesome. Not many cartoons willing to kill off the entire cast in an episode or two and then just continue on with their descendants and a new story/cast in the following episode.

It was amazing back then, but it's a butchered version of Macross whose transforming space fighter plane robots, whilst not retconned out of BATTLETECH, are effectively extinct in the lore and most BATTLETECH products to avoid legal issues with the licensing nightmare.

I think Astroboy has aged well but a lot of the early attempts to make early anime palatable to western audiences sucks. Still compared to what kids today get, Robotech (Macross), Star Blazers (Space Battleship Yamato), Battle of the Planets (Science Ninja Team Gatchaman) and Astroboy (Mighty Atom) are fucking amazing. The villian/ally of the week almost certainly died in every Astroboy episode. I pity the generation after mine that only knows episode length advertisements for toys that can never kill anyone because gotta sell those toys (Transformers, Pokemon).

In Australia all this shit was shown before and after school on State media. I assume it was psyops to try and raise a generation of sci-fi nerds who would then get into science. Which worked but then we defunded science and they all went to work in the US which sells technology back to us for massive profits. Or maybe it was to help us love Japanese culture and forget about all the great uncles that died fighting the empire in South East Asian jungles.

Surprised Cutter didn't know Robotech, I thought most this stuff was dubbed in Canada. I know a lot of it didn't make it to the US.

Oh, and fucking THIS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev1aBt-_Zs4

Prez wrote on Jun 18, 2018, 12:50:
No, PUBG is not an asset flip. It is a complete, skillfully designed game that happens to use Unreal assets. That said, fuck them right up their Blue Hole for being so arrogant as to sue people who made a vastly more unique-looking and visibly recognizable game than their generic-looking eye sore. Nothing in PUBG can remotely be called original in the least. It looks like any number of amatuer Arma mods.

I kind of like the generic quasi-realistic graphics and ARMA-esque movement of PUBG over Fortnite. Sure it appeals to kids (Mostly through being free) but sometimes less kids is a good thing.

But the lawsuit is pretty stupid. They could have used an engine made by someone who doesn't make games if they were that worried about conflict of interest.

I think the cartoon look (And physics) the series was known and loved for just started to look too stupid as they got higher definition.

They should probably add a bouncy mode for old times sake, but I wouldn't call the new costumes unsexy, just less impossible to fight in. I mean, form fitting ninja outfits are pretty hot.

Cutter wrote on Jun 19, 2018, 21:40:
It's going P2W? How sad.

How is it PTW Cutter? I think the different vehicle meshes can affect the ball slightly differently but none of the existing ones are considered more powerful than any others. Just different. They have already have hundreds of different cosmetic things that unlock in the game, with more coming for free. This just gives people a way to get extra pretty shit by sending the devs money.

But I assume you misread the announcement because you are sad it is going P2W, which I imagine you wouldn't be if you hadn't played and liked it.

I'm not even sure how you would make rocket league P2W short of giving you slow mo or goals for dollars or cars that go faster or have more boost or fly better or something. I think it's only as popular as it is because everyone is always on an even footing with only lag, skill and platform performance/display tech the difference.

Verno wrote on Jun 15, 2018, 11:05:

VaranDragon wrote on Jun 15, 2018, 10:16:
Instead EA chose to make our female protagonist a british cyborg that wields a large barbed wire cricket bat.

Exactly. It's fucking stupid and breaks with the tone they established in previous games. That's why people didn't like the trailer, it was a silly mess.

Ahhh, the tone where you all stand on the wing of a plane and airdrop yourselves onto a capture point and headshot 12 people in a row. Vaginas totally ruin that!

Creston wrote on Jun 12, 2018, 09:57:

Launching October 5 on Xbox One, PS4, and PC*

* Note: An announcement for the delay of the PC version by three weeks for extra 'polishing' is forthcoming.


Also, I'm sorry, I'm supposed to get excited about open world naval combat set in this timeframe? The naval combat in Origins was garbage. Groups of archers is not the same as a row of freaking cannons.

It should be less about archers and more about ramming and boarding and having infantry battles at sea. But the engine dosn't support this at the scale it needs for those ships.

It half worked in Black Flag, but even then it was janky and only got a pass because of the cinematic feel.


Man, I got this wrong. I assumed it was set in the same time as Origins or close to it but I guess this is Assassin's Creed Pre-Origins?

Origins is amazing though so I am all in on this. Wife has just booked an Egypt trip and most my enthusiasm for it is because of that game.

Darks wrote on Jun 11, 2018, 10:20:
Microsoft is not going to win the hears ad minds of gamers with this Win 10 exclusive bullshit.

I like Gears and all, but their stupid ass Market for downloading shit is so painful.

I think Gears 4 was exactly the same. Plays great on PC. Few games let me play co-op with mates on the other side of the planet without the lag killing it.

But yeah, the marketplace, xbox app and download management all suck. I feel like the 360 was ahead of it's time and then they saw Apple get rich and decided they needed to make their shit as horribly ass backwards as theirs is for some reason.

TheBigVlad wrote on Jun 10, 2018, 13:10:
Nice to see Subnautica on the top 10. It's a flawed game but it's unlike anything else out there. Playing through it was a a treat. With all the low-effort dreck being cranked out nowadays, it really felt like a breath of fresh air. I think the devs said they're working on an expansion so I'm looking forward to that.

I played that this year, and it's one of the best games I've played in years. I think I started around release and there were not many bugs or major problems.

That feeling of parking your mothership sub in some scary abys with giant, football field sized monsters and giant crabs and power sucking leaches all around and then jumping into the minisub or exosuit to mine for minerals or explore for secrets is so awesome. Really feels like a dangerous, lonely, awesome expedition. It has a hand crafted vibe few games give these days.

It makes you earn everything you get, and the feeling of accomplishment is astounding. Almost every little upgrade to your vehicles or equipment feels super useful.

Expansion/sequel would be pretty amazing.