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?

Now we just need that LHX reboot and we're set!

Watch_Dogs is a nice addition. It is not very innovative but if you haven't played an Ubisoft Open World Game (tm) then its quite passable. The graphics, of course, never quite matched the teasers of course (which caused quite an uproar at the time) and the "hacking" was disappointingly one-note, but it was an decent enough game within the limitations of the UOWG framework.

But The Stanley Parable; now there is a game worth playing. It is one of the funniest games I have ever played, and its inventiveness and ability to surprise were amazingly impressive. The humor is a bit dry, so if that isn't your thing then you probably won't find it as enjoyable but if you like British comedy, then you'll probably love this game too. Its one major flaw is that - once you've seen all this game has to offer - it severely lacks in replayability; the jokes are far less funny when you know the punchline. Still, the game has so many endings that it will take you a good long time to work your way through the games before you stop finding something new.

The cynical part of me immediately suspects this decision was not made out of any real support for Nvidia or even a liking of game streaming, but instead as a ploy to lessen Steam's dominance on PC gaming. Although GeForce Now can play games from Steam, it launches from its own client. If people get used to not using Steam, they'll consider it less essential, and that will lessen its importance.

Is this really the goal? I haven't the foggiest idea, but I've little reason to trust Sweeney or Epic's motives in this area.

Avus wrote on Mar 7, 2020, 15:16:
it is fxxking ridiculous that game developers think they should get a share from a service renting virtual machine to people who put their (PAID) games into it. Game developers really think their customers should double paid for that??

Yeah, but that's a battle long since past winning. Courts have decades of precedence saying that you cannot use display copyrighted works for commercial purpose without permission of the copyright holder. It doesn't matter if it is to one person or many, or if that person already owns a copy of the game. Just as a bar cannot play a movie to its customers or a store use music without getting license, neither can Nvidia stream games. They aren't streaming YOUR game-files onto their virtual machines, after all; they are using a (presumably legally purchased, although at this point I wouldn't even be too sure of even that) copy of the game down to its customers. The fact that Nvidia only allows you to stream games you already own is not a shield.

Why the fxxk these developers not pull their games for the last 2 years?

At least in some cases, Nvidia came to an agreement with the publishers that they could stream the games during the beta phase of GeForce Now. The problem was that NVidia pushed their product out of beta and into public release without making sure all their partners were okay with that. As we've seen, many (most?) of them are not.

Copyright is, I think we can all agree, well out of whack in this country, but in this case it isn't the game publishers being greedy f**cks. They aren't asking for more than the law allows or even pushing the boundaries. Nvidia is the one who screwed up here. I think the fact that so many publishers are unilaterally pulling all their games also indicates that Nvidia isn't being very compromising on their end either.

Arguably, the game publishers could make more money if they stayed with Nvidia, that people with low-end PCs might buy games they otherwise might not just so they can play them on GeForce now. It may very well be that these publishers are being penny-wise and pound-foolish. But morally and legally they are well within their rights to yank their games.