Most likely this hasn't anything to do with the game's theme; odds are it's a licensing issue.

Asmodee Games (the publishers of the computer game) probably had a license with Z-Man games (the publishers of the board game on which the computer incarnation is based) and the license ran out. Possibly Z-Man Games wanted more money than Asmodee Games was willing to pay, or perhaps Z-Man Games has entered into another deal with some other video-game publisher, or worried that the computer game sales were cannibalizing their board game sales, or whatever. But it's much more likely a business decision, and not because of anybody trying to 'cancel' games about a pandemic because of Covid-19.

The devs go on and on about how this is a brand new experience, but to my eyes it looks like a more like a reskinning of Starship Troopers: Terran Ascendancy.

Which isn't in and of itself a bad thing, since I rather enjoyed that game. It's just their tone that they're bringing forth some new marvel never before seen irked me.

"Listen, and understand. That Terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead." ;-)

Read: EA is losing its license to use the FIFA brand.

Whether this is because the license is expiring and EA doesn't want to pay for it again, or because FIFA is raising its fee or has another partner in mind, or even because FIFA (of all agencies) thinks their name is better off not associated with EA's brand anymore, who knows. But of course, EA can't out and out say that, so instead they'll try to spin it as some great advantage to players that they no longer can use the FIFA name anymore.

I know it's a completely different thing and therefore an unfair comparison, but I can't help but have flashbacks to the 2008 "Alone in the Dark" game, which had a separate control for blinking your eyes. Which you had to do. A lot.

Google obviously doesn't have the resources to pay for the programmers. Typhoon Studios has all that money from Epic, to keep supporting the game on EGS.

(There's sarcasm in the comment above, obviously. See if you can spot it!)

It's great that the Diablo II remaster will have built-in mod-support... but who will own those mods? One of the major issues with the Warcraft III remaster was that Activision/Blizzard essentially granted themselves unilateral control of any third-party mods made for the remaster (a response to their mission out on DotA / DotA2 profits), an underhanded move that spit in the face of the Warcraft 3 community. So the question is: are they going to repeat this decision with the Diablo 2 remaster or have they learned their lesson?

Frankly, the fact that no mention has been made of this issue leaves me deeply suspicious that they have not changed their tune. You'd think Activision/Blizzard would be crowing to the heavens about how this time they were respecting the fans if they were going a different way and not co-opting their hard work, but there's no such word. I'm withholding any excitement over this announcement until they ActiBlizz clarifies their stance on the issue.

I have to agree. I'm not a big fan of streaming services, but GeForce Now worked surprisingly well and let me play high-end games on very low-end hardware. It wasn't something I really *needed* though, so I never bothered to pay for a subscription, but there were a few times I was stuck with a slow laptop, and GeForce Now let me play something a bit more involved than Solitaire. It was also a neat way to quickly check out a game without first having to do a 50GB download and install.

But its continuing problems with publishers have greatly diminished the service's usefulness. Admittedly, some of these problems were self-inflicted (getting permission to use a game in a beta program, then jumping to a live service without updating those permissions was just STUPID) but its hard not to put some blame on the publishers themselves. I purchased the games already; why it should upset them if I want to play it over nVidia's service rather than on my own hardware - especially since the publishers aren't offering a competing alternative - is mystifying.

The scary thing is that nowadays I don't even consider a 1.44 GB patch all that big anymore...

Yeah, Delta Force 1, 2 & Blackhawk Down (and the various expansions) all used voxels. Those games were developed by Novalogic, which used the same technology in their simulations: Comanche 1, 2, 3, and 4, and Armored Fist 1, 2 and 3. It was sort of their thing.

Other classic games that used voxel technology include Amok, Command & Conquer 2 (and Red Alert 2), Outcast, and Hexplore. It has also been used as supplemental technology in numerous other games too, from Alpha Centauri, Crysis and even some of 3D-Realms Build-Engine games. While voxels allowed some interesting visuals, it tended to be more memory-intensive than polygon-rendered titles, couldn't be as easily accelerated by GPUs, and often lacked the sharpness that polygonal models allowed, so it never really caught on (all the more since consoles were so memory-strapped to begin with).

I'm not sure of those prices on the Terrabyte Update, at least for spinning-rust HDDs. At $45/TB, an 8TB drive should be going for ~$360, but you can find some for half that price ($150-$220 seems to be the usual range). 16TB drives can be had for about $400. So that $45/TB price seems rather high.

Hard drive prices have dropped dramatically over these past few years. It used to be a petabyte seemed an unbelievably huge amount of data storage; it used to be suggested that all the world's information could be stored in just a few petabytes (whether that claim was accurate or not, I cannot say. It certainly isn't true anymore). Nowadays, I could - for just a few thousand dollars - have a petabyte of storage all to myself. While I have no desire to make such an investment today, I would not be surprised that in ten or fifteen years, I will have access to that much storage. I mean, if you took all the data storage I already have available to me - on my computers, network, and cloud storage - I'm probably nearing 10% of that number already.

Kxmode wrote:
I never thought I'd see the day where EA is the good guy and Bethesda is the bad guy.

Forget that, I never thought I'd see the day where EA is the good guy and BLIZZARD was the bad guy. I mean, EA isn't even - at least as far as we know - claiming they'll automatically own all mods made for the remaster. What sort of insane reality are we living in?

I hope that when they re-release/re-master the first Mafia game for this collection, they restore the original music, largely comprised of tracks by Django Reinhart. They were beautiful songs and fit the mood of the game perfectly. The replacement music was very generic.

I believe the original music was removed due to licensing issues, and it can be restored to the currently-available Steam versions with a third-party hack, but if they want me to pay for these games again, it sure as heck better have the original soundtrack.

maddog wrote on May 5, 2020, 14:17:
If I won the lottery I'd blow millions paying a team to update the graphics on F-117. No changes to gameplay...just graphics.

Maybe a little tweak to the gameplay?

I loved F-117 too - it was, in many ways, the first flight simulator I played seriously - but the physics of its flight engine was... imaginative to say the least. My favorite part was that you could invert your airplane, turn off the engines, and then glide hundreds of miles. Well, you'd have to dive every now and again to gain speed when you started to stall, but once you got things moving again, you could easily reach - or surpass - your original altitude. Something about being upside down really confused the game. It was a very useful trick when you were running low on fuel.

I still have F-117 installed on my PC, although these days I mostly just watch its awesomely low-key intro. Excellent game, despite its age.

These aren't bad games and I'm happy to see Telltale's library becoming available to gamers again, but "thrilling" is not quite the word I'd use for any of them (yeah, I know, it's GOG's choice of words, not Blue's).

I've found the source code of the AI:

IF Software_Dev=Microsoft
Bug=Found
ENDIF

Valve said "Fuck you Vivendi, we don't want to pay your outrageous cut of the profits, we deserve the right to self-publish", and they won, and everyone cheered. Now other companies have said: "Fuck you Valve, we don't want to pay your outrageous cut of the profits, we deserve the right to self-publish." And everybody booed.

Actually, the part most people boo'd at was when the Epic said, "You can sell on our store but you can't sell it on Steam. Even if you promised your customers that you would. Even if you already took money saying that you'd do that." That's the part that got most people angry.

It's not the selling on Epic that upsets people, it's the exclusivity. Take a game like Subnautica; available on Steam but also available on EGS. Nobody is upset about that. But if they'd made it exclusive to one platform, that deserves some disdain. Especially if the platform has a significantly smaller audience and offers less features. PC gamers don't like exclusives. This preference of PC gamers was made quite obvious when EA did with Origin, so it shouldn't have surprised Epic when they followed suit.

It is true that I don't like the Epic Game Store. But this is not because I'm a "Steam fanboy"; in fact, in the beginning I was supportive of Epic's move because I agree that to some degree Valve has become complacent and needs shaking up. But I - and many others - do not like the methods Epic has chosen, and to disregard this concerns as simply "fanboyism" seems a willful blindness at best.

The whole thing to me reads a lot like, "Hey, if you want a Half Life 3, better buy Alyx or we're not even gonna think about making it."

I've no interest in VR games, and honestly, at this point even Half Life has very little draw on me. Fifteen, ten, maybe even five years ago I might have excitedly been waiting for a sequel, but now? I'm pretty much over it. Alyx doesn't excite me and, unless it was truly a radical and awesome experience, even Half Life 3 would be a wait-until-the-sale purchase for me. The original game was breathtaking and innovative, the second game was okay, but its been nearly twenty years and I've moved on since then. I can't imagine I'm the only one. Heck, there's an entire generation that's grown up without any nostalgic value to the franchise.

Well, I'll give their interactive recommender this much: it figured out that I'm mostly interested in older games (slider all the way to the left) and average popularity (just a touch left of center). I think that's a fair assessment of my tastes.

Of course, it leaves out the most important criteria for my buying new games: price. They need a slider that lets me move it down to the less-than $5 range before I really start paying attention to any of its recommendations.

"Free prologue"... is that what we call a demo these days?