Video Game Chat Thread - Pre-Alpha Experimental Version

Are videogames for children?


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Xbox Live Marketplace for Xbox 360 is closing down today, meaning that after today it is officially a dead console.

There's a livestream going on right now exploring what's left before it goes down.

Seeing this, I'm having a lot of flashbacks of some good memories with the 360 back in 2009 and 2010. It was a good time to be a gamer back then.
 
I wonder if it's worth quickly setting up and downloading some stuff? Maybe see if there's anything in my download history not currently installed? Probably not.

Edit: Is the marketplaced archived anywhere?
 
Wizabeasts might be the lamest thing i've ever seen. It is the most bafflingly incompetent game I've seen trying to enter an already-incompetent and crowded genre in ages.

Its visuals are outright atrocious-- brightly-colored slop that doesn't even have consistent fucking linework mixed in with extremely high-res vector art that doesn't fit, as well as terrible scaling of sprites and constant style clash between the monsters, the humans, the world around them and the UI.
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I don't even need to comment on the monster designs or their names, the sprites are so low-res that it's impossible to make out what little design work there is. That's actually a benefit to this game, because the few monster designs I have been able to make out consist of such groundbreaking concepts as "blue fish", "standing lizard", and "dolphin".

The gameplay is literally just Pokémon, as all the worst attempts at this genre are, except it is also Fire Emblem and also not. The steam page shows gameplay identical to Fire Emblem as well as gameplay that looks vaguely like normal Pokémon. The latter looks like a separate battle system in screenshots, but in the trailer is shown to just be an animation that plays when you choose an attack. It barely matters as a difference because the remainder of the game consists of "beat leaders of a league to earn money" and "defeat an evil team to save the world".

Why are you beating leaders of a league to earn money? To pay off your student debt.

The funniest thing is that this game also advertises features from newer Pokémon games that most of these mon-likes explicitly avoid (due to mainline Pokémon getting flak for it making the games too easy) as selling points.
Shared party experience, excessive party healing, and gaining exp even while fainted are all shown off proudly on the store page as reasons to buy this game.
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I can't find anything on the developer. I'm tempted to chalk this up to a single guy making a dream indie game on his own, but I can't even say that in good faith because this reeks of a low-effort cash grab and I have a hard time believing it was made out of any kind of passion for the world or game design as a whole. I don't know, it just sucks. It embodies the absolute worst of this genre and I really hope the bar doesn't get any lower for monster tamers.
 
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Its visuals are outright atrocious-- brightly-colored slop that doesn't even have consistent fucking linework mixed in with extremely high-res vector art that doesn't fit.
This is the worst color pallet I have seen in a game hands down. The last image almost looks acceptable but I am assuming they commissioned someone to make the background. It's like someone upped the saturation way too high.
 
Dead To Rights for the PS2 is still a great game that I remember fondly from my childhood. If anything, I’m surprised I still remember some of the earlier missions of the game after all this time:


 
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Humble Games, who I think are the publishing arm of Humble Bundle, layed off everybody.

Given how their games look, it seems like nothing of value was lost?

They might "feel seen and respected", the same can't be said for their games.
The cope in her send-off message is hilarious:
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While corporate greed is obviously a very real thing, what she's saying is also horseshit if you are more financially literate than a two year old. You weren't culled because you weren't lining the pockets of your rich overlords pockets enough, you were culled because your company was operating at a net loss lol. Don't get me wrong I think CEO's and other assorted rich folks are bullshit too, but but there's more to the story than just "le greedy CEO and investors!111".

Companies don't get dissolved when they're making profit, even if the profit is only miniscule. They dissolve when they're losing money typically over a long time. We're talking multiple fiscal quarters of financial ruin, sometimes years. It should come as no surprise that games are a severely oversaturated market and it's extremely difficult gain a foothold in the industry, likely 10s of thousands of studios have tried and failed- either quickly or they bled out over time. This is especially true for indie games and their studios, Humble Games was no exception in this case.
 
So, I got to ask; with all of the constant DEI shit taking potshots at anything remotely right-wing in video games these days, does anyone know of any games that take potshots at DEI? Not even necessarily recent games, older stuff from the PS2/XBOX era for instance; anything out there that takes the piss out socialism and/or anarchy?
 
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Just watched a trailer for .45 Parabellum Bloodhound, i dig the PS1-style graphics, the setting looks cool and the combat system looks like a love letter to PE1, same for the BGM. I seriously dislike the character designs, though. Still gonna check it out when it releases.

Trailer in question:

Haven't played it yet but i was following it since its early access days, it looks really good. Saw that Space Prison finally released, played the demo that was up at one of the last couple of Nextfests and liked it a lot, i really need to play more vidya again.
Are those the VA-11 HALL-A guys?
You fucking woke venecos, where is N1RV Ann-A?
 
So, I got to ask; with all of the constant DEI shit taking potshots at anything remotely right-wing in video games these days, does anyone know of any games that take potshots at DEI? Not even necessarily recent games, older stuff from the PS2/XBOX era for instance; anything out there that takes the piss out socialism and/or anarchy?
Some of the Postal games had that with various leftie groups. Ditto GTA. But they mock everybody.

I want to say Duke Nukem, Fallout New Vegas, and Metal Gear Solid, but I can't think of anything specific. The Last Night did that but never got released. Maybe Cyberpunk, but I don't know how close 2077 follows the lore of 2020.
 
I dunno about that. Microsoft went full retard and axed Tango Gameworks.
Thats because the Blizzard acquistion cost too them too much. Grossly incompetent leadership is probably the leading companies start to lose money. I agree though, fuck Microsoft.

Just quoting this so future generations can see how retarded you are and laugh at you.
Username checks out.
 
Xbox Live Marketplace for Xbox 360 is closing down today, meaning that after today it is officially a dead console.

There's a livestream going on right now exploring what's left before it goes down.

Seeing this, I'm having a lot of flashbacks of some good memories with the 360 back in 2009 and 2010. It was a good time to be a gamer back then.
I'm convinced the 2005-2013 era of the 7th Gen was the best time to game. Not just because so many bangers were released, but creativity and new IPs were at an all time high.

Plus you could actually say whatever the hell you want online. Microsoft now will ban you for saying "shit" in game chat
 
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I'm convinced the 2005-2013 era of the 7th Gen was the best time to game. Not just because so many bangers were released, but creativity and new IPs were at an all time high.
piss filter shooters were a dime a dozen back then. dont let the nostalgia of certain titles undercut reality
 
So, I got to ask; with all of the constant DEI shit taking potshots at anything remotely right-wing in video games these days, does anyone know of any games that take potshots at DEI? Not even necessarily recent games, older stuff from the PS2/XBOX era for instance; anything out there that takes the piss out socialism and/or anarchy?
I can't remember his name or the games, but there's one guy that is doing translations for old Japanese games. I've never played them myself but apparently he does a very good job and he will localize some of the language, idioms and expressions in a special way... He hates communism/socialism.

But like I said, never played any of them and only knows about this because some people were seething because his translations are the only ones available for certain games.
 
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I gave Conscript a shot and I stopped playing after reaching the third level.

The game is top down PSX style survival horror set in WW1. I gave up mainly because it is just unbearably slow and added with fuckton of backtracking and boring map design (with arbitrary routing), the game became more of a chore to play than fun. Yeah I'm not expecting fast paced action but the horrors of the trench go away once you waste an hour looking around for the item to unlock more of the map.
 
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