Video Game Chat Thread - Pre-Alpha Experimental Version

[LifeAlert]

I've been on a bit of a Virtual Boy kick lately. Beetle VB emulates it very well and the controls translate nicely with a dual analog controller. Jack Bros. and Wario Land are definitely the two best games on the system. I wasn't impressed by Red Alert or Mario Clash. Teleroboxer had neat graphics but it was a little too complicated for my taste compared to Punch Out. Waterworld was boring but there are many, many worse games.

It's honestly a real shame it died so soon, a lot of interesting projects like Wizardry Gaiden, Donkey Kong Country 2, Mario Kart, and Worms got canned. On the other hand, GoldenEye for VB was going to be a shitty driving game so I'm glad that one never came out.

 

[LifeAlert]

>PS vita game getting ported to PC
>same devs as Macross PSP games which were PVP flying games, and top tier
>"oh cool, maybe after this game releases, those will get ported with dual analog controls instead of that shitty nub and D-pad-wait what's that?"
>unreal engine logo
>mfw

 

[EmpGulcasa]

View attachment 6986346
>PS vita game getting ported to PC
>same devs as Macross PSP games which were PVP flying games, and top tier
>"oh cool, maybe after this game releases, those will get ported with dual analog controls instead of that shitty nub and D-pad-wait what's that?"
>unreal engine logo
>mfw
View attachment 6986341

Meh, more Gundam games is always good. There's a lot that I'd love to see ported over if this does well. Agreed on the Macross PSP games though, they were fantastic.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

It's honestly a real shame it died so soon, a lot of interesting projects like Wizardry Gaiden, Donkey Kong Country 2, Mario Kart, and Worms got canned. On the other hand, GoldenEye for VB was going to be a shitty driving game so I'm glad that one never came out.

Do you have any information on these games?

Meh, more Gundam games is always good. There's a lot that I'd love to see ported over if this does well. Agreed on the Macross PSP games though, they were fantastic.

Goy-schlop-ramen.

 

[LifeAlert]

Do you have any information on these games?

Sure do:

Spoiler: wall

Wizardry Gaiden VB:




An ex-ASCII developer posted the design documents for this on his blog. Because of the visual strain that the VB caused, instead of a typical full-length Wizardry game it was going to have 50 shorter-length scenarios that could be completed in 30 minutes each. He also claims Nintendo pressured developers to take on VB projects or they wouldn't allow them to have N64 dev kits.

https://note.com/hpnm/n/nd577e2c061ab

https://archive.ph/zncaQ

DKC2:
Steven Hurst (DKC sprite artist) and an unnamed programmer created a title screen and some scrolling screens using sprites from DKL. It got canned after that. It was mentioned in one of Rare's fan letters and by Hurst himself on Digital Foundry.

Transcript:

Around the same time though, another very small team within Rare started experimenting on another piece of a Nintendo hardware.

Hurst: “I was kind of drafted on to help a programmer just look and see what was possible on the Virtual Boy, so I had taken some of the sprites that had been done for the Game Boy version and put them into the Virtual Boy.”

If you couldn’t guess this was a very early project that never really made much progress, thus there’s not really any official media available for it.

Hurst: “It would have taken a lot of work to get the game running and also because the Virtual Boy was proven not to be the success that Nintendo maybe had hoped. It was an interesting project, but I don’t think it ever really got off the ground beyond a few scrolling screens of graphics.”

Hurst: “It was essentially a 3D, black-and-white (while red-and-black) version of DKC. I suppose you could compare it to the Game Boy version, it would be similar to the Game Boy but with full 3D. The effect that we had was very very good, we managed to get a very solid looking game. But the techniques that we needed to do it were very laborious because normally when you do an image or a sprite you just do it from front on and as we would have to render out two different things from either side to get the 3D effect. So, instead of just rendering out one image, you render out two, from different eyes, if you like.”

With the Virtual Boy off the table the rest of Rare including the DKC3 team moved on to other projects centered primarily around Nintendo’s next generation Nintendo 64.

Mario Kart:
Mentioned in Germany's Big N magazine, then never heard from again. Supposedly it was in the planning stages in 1995.


Worms:
Was supposed to be developed by Team17 in conjunction with Ocean Software, but never began development. They basically refused because they knew the Virtual Boy would fail. They had a VB dev kit and kept it for years until they gave it to a museum at Nintendo Germany. Personally, I'm seething about this one because Worms is the shit and it would have been really neat

Statement from Team17 Studio Director Martyn Brown in 2008:

“Sorry to disappoint you, but work never really started on Worms for the Virtual Boy. We basically declined to develop it after we had a mess around and look at the machine which we felt was doomed to failure (and were largely proved correct). Our publisher on the project, Ocean Software never pursued interest after the initial idea. We kept the kit for about 10 years until it was recently returned to a ‘museum’ over at Nintendo Germany.”

Martyn Brown
Studio Director,
Team17 Software Ltd.

https://www.virtual-boy.com/games/worms/

https://archive.ph/kiB8c

As a bonus, this is what a Virtual Boy devkit looks like:

https://www.projectvb.com/vb/debugger.html

https://archive.ph/GBWLE

GoldenEye VB:
Rare wasn't going to develop this one. It was shown on a promotional Virtual Boy brochure. It's the one near the middle right.

https://www.virtual-boy.com/hardware/virtual-boy/images/956127/

Close up:


Mark Edmonds and Duncan Botwood talked about it in an interview with MundoRare:

MR: What can you tell us about the famous unfinished Virtual Boy version of the game? The few images on the net show the Aston Martin DB5, was it ever considered to be on the Nintendo 64 version?

DB: I have no knowledge of any Virtual Boy project, unfortunately. We never really considered the Aston Martin for the game, since it plays only a tiny part in the movie.

ME: I really don’t know much about the Virtual Boy version as I think it was developed by Nintendo themselves and was nothing to do with us. I’m not sure we ever discussed having an Aston Martin in the game, but I do remember lots of talk about a motorbike for some reason, and being able to ride it through any level.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080104144351/http://www.mundorare.com/features/the-men-who-knew-too-much/2

https://archive.ph/DaS7m

 

[Caddo Cobgang]

it annoys me to no end how most Developers for PvP games still do not understand the general population of a game doesnt want to play against sweaty kids and streamers, Bungie released their big Trials rework for Destiny 2 yesterday and the modes matchmaking is still god-awful despite changing how getting trials rep works, these streamers are pathetic losers who contribute nothing to video games other than informing the devs how unfun they want a game to be (also they contribute nothing to society in general but thats a discussion for another time)

 

[Safir]

Serious question:
sometimes, people ("""people""") on Steam whine on a game's forum, "puhleeeeaze, what's the hidden achievement, puuhleaze tell me" etc.

Meanwhile, the hidden achievement is in the list of achievements, it's "spoilerblocked" by default but I can click on it and it displays the name of the achievement, the icon, and the condition (as the dev stated it). In the cases I noticed,
- the achievements and their descriptions did not recently change
- the whiny post is recent
- the condition is completely straightforward, unambiguous (e.g. "kill 5 dragons in a single match"), and correct (I did that and got it).

What's wrong with these people? Is there a setting they've mistakenly enabled that hides "spoilers" forever? Are they just retarded?

 

[WULULULULU]

What's wrong with these people? Is there a setting they've mistakenly enabled that hides "spoilers" forever? Are they just retarded?

Modern gamers post 2010s are just genuinely retarded. Even the most basic shit in a game will expose the actual gamers to the niggercattle in a matter of seconds.

 

[EmpGulcasa]

Serious question:
sometimes, people ("""people""") on Steam whine on a game's forum, "puhleeeeaze, what's the hidden achievement, puuhleaze tell me" etc.

Meanwhile, the hidden achievement is in the list of achievements, it's "spoilerblocked" by default but I can click on it and it displays the name of the achievement, the icon, and the condition (as the dev stated it). In the cases I noticed,
- the achievements and their descriptions did not recently change
- the whiny post is recent
- the condition is completely straightforward, unambiguous (e.g. "kill 5 dragons in a single match"), and correct (I did that and got it).

What's wrong with these people? Is there a setting they've mistakenly enabled that hides "spoilers" forever? Are they just retarded?

I'm pretty sure the clickable spoiler thing on Steam is a newish addition, and it used to just be completely hidden. It's possible the people asking this shit don't know about the change. I only found out about it recently myself.

 

[X Prime]

By The Game Kitchen (of Blasphemous, The Last Door, and the upcoming Ninja Gaiden). I loved Blasphemous as it was on release and hated the woke eatpraylove Gwyneth Paltrow's fecal goop they turned it into.

Oh thank God, I thought I was the only one who noticed Blasphemous turned to shit with the DLCs. But yeah I wouldn't trust Stone of Madness as a result.

 

[Safir]

The former, it's similar to The Messenger.

Well excuse me here
The Messenger is much better. It's got moments of quirkiness, which are even sort of justified by the guilty characters being either retards or bored immortals stuck in an eternal wagie cage desk job. And it gets epic in the end.
But even at the start, when the demon king incinerates everyone in the village, the ninja master doesn't say, "eh I'd send literally anyone else but charred bones can't walk, shit sucks my nigga, guess it's got to be you, tbh I'd have done it myself but I have a show to catch", no, he blesses you and sends you off as a fated hero.

Also it's not only indie devs, no one can write. People incidentally shit out masterpieces from time to time, but more often they intentionally, knowingly write garbage.

In Fountains, which I generally liked, a knight who's mildly helpful early on gave me a quest to investigate the plant zombies they're fighting. I could've told him from the start OMG THEY USED TO BE HUMAN because they drop human skulls, but noooooo, I have to bring him a vaguely humanoid zombie hand. Upon getting the hand, he tells me to go to the palace of a different nation, I don't know why and neither does he, signposting area progression I guess. I go to the palace. General Head just murdered the queens, I kill him and get a key to the knights' temple after the battle (why was it there? no reason). I go to the temple, and my buddy knight accuses me of murdering the queens (how does he know they're dead?) and attacks me to protect his goddess. The hell? Meanwhile, his goddess is right behind the door, she's also a plant zombie.

Had it been the tragedy of a silent protagonist, it would've been only annoying. But the game has several scenes where the PC has conversations with NPCs and introduces new information to them. This is malice. There are some reddit-tier scenes, too. This one guy made a game about saving the world but deliberately made a world not worth saving, and not because he Had Something To Say but simply because he wanted to be an edgy fuck at the expense of his own game.

But yeah I wouldn't trust Stone of Madness as a result.

I'll probably get it on sale eventually, I love the premise, it's one of the two of my dream games (the second being an ActRaiser-like). At least they actually know Catholicism firsthand instead of getting it "gently used" from anime.

 

[BingBongDingDong]

Finally beat baldur's gate 3, game is a 7/10. I gave up playing it when it first came out around the end of act 1 because I was bored of it, but with nothing better to do I gave it another shot. I think the other half of me dropping it was that it can feel overwhelming till you realize how small the maps actually are, and there not actually being tons and tons of content. Act 3 was somewhat of a slog because of all the unfinished bull crap you run into and made it a pain to finish this time. The final boss was a huge let down, kethric was the best fight in the game and everything after that was pretty easy. I think my final conclusion is that I mostly hate all the characters you can party with except for minsc. I hated having to navigate conversations trying to not accidentally get locked into a fag romance, game asking me if I want to see a magic trick and then trying to queer out when I thought it was a bro moment was annoying. Also I have no idea how anybody could ever have astarion on their squad ever. On first meeting he tries to gut you and if you look past this he attempts to suck your blood in the middle of the night ghoul style, I staked his ass because fuck that what a hateable character. I'll probably play it again as an evil character at some point instead of a dickass rouge because the actual gameplay was pretty fun but I can't be bothered to try and have my character get along with the misfit cast of situationally dependent bisexuals.

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

Read through some /v/ anime soccer thread, apparently there's an anime series going on decades with everything from brazilian kids to literal aliens? Somewhere along the line someone posted this. Holy sovl..

It's quirky in a "OMG! Big chungus! Please laugh!" or in a Borderlands edgy way?

I ran blackwing descent in WoW earlier today and realized just how fucking borderlands the writing is. You know that super long "slayer of whatever bing bong wahoo incompetent minions"? I thought it was a one-off but that's literally how the whole raid is. Nefarian made into a comic book villain with quips and quirks.

I want borderlands 4 to be good. I like BL. I randomly sat through all of BL1 (and had to melee the last boss to death. God sirens suck) and would love to continue the run, for all its faults, but jesus fuck the new vault hunters look bad. I'd rather a white man-killing negroid goddess with BLM across her lower back than.. forgettable background characters.

 

[CIS White Droid]

I got the urge to give Ghost Recon Breakpoint another try due to earlier discussion in the thread. For context I played the game at release and dropped it after a few days due to the lack of AI teammates and inclusion of leveled gear. It's definitely in a better state than it was on release but is still worse than Wildlands in most ways. The story was laughably bad, the AI teammates are basically useless in an actual gunfight and the survival mechanics never really came up. The real breaking point (pun fully intended) for me was the fact that they cut out part of the story so they could sell it to you as DLC.

 

[Burt Ryan]

I wrapped up my Mass Effect 2 re-playthrough a few days ago, and followed it up with Arrival. That DLC was as short as it was dog-awful, but atleast it tries to connect to ME3, emphasis on tries.

I started Mass Effect 3 and I don't remember a lot of this game, mostly related around certain characters, like James Vega and Samantha Traynor. And holy fuck they are awesome, they have a way better introduction than Miranda and Jacob from 2, and unlike Jacob, who's an irredeemable idiot with a cool loyalty mission in 2, James and Samantha are way more fleshed out as characters.

 

[EmpGulcasa]

I wrapped up my Mass Effect 2 re-playthrough a few days ago, and followed it up with Arrival. That DLC was as short as it was dog-awful, but atleast it tries to connect to ME3, emphasis on tries.

I started Mass Effect 3 and I don't remember a lot of this game, mostly related around certain characters, like James Vega and Samantha Traynor. And holy fuck they are awesome, they have a way better introduction than Miranda and Jacob from 2, and unlike Jacob, who's an irredeemable idiot with a cool loyalty mission in 2, James and Samantha are way more fleshed out as characters.

Did you do the other DLC for ME2? Overlord and Lair of the Shadow Broker were my gold standard for DLC before Witcher 3's came along and finally dethroned them.

 

[Burt Ryan]

Did you do the other DLC for ME2? Overlord and Lair of the Shadow Broker were my gold standard for DLC before Witcher 3's came along and finally dethroned them.

Of course. Overlord was unexpectedly good, and had some pretty good body horror scenes. Lair of the Shadow Broker I had played it before, years ago, and it's still the best DLC of ME2.

The yahg design is so awesome, Hagalaz is a fantastic planet and the Shadow Broker ship is great.

Fucking shame we won't get a new game that is even close to this. Even for all the flak you can give Mass Effect 3, it's atleast better than whatever slop Bioware has put out in the last 5 to 10 years.

 

[LifeAlert]

Oh wow, a fighting game that isn't unreal engine slop? This might have a chance! Let's see:
-terrible fucking roster with boring, generic characters
-mvc clone instead of 1v1 (it doesn't matter that the mvc3 devs are behind this, they should know 1v1 is better period)
-overreliance on cinematic special moves that perform themselves on hit, just like 100% of all fighting games nowadays
-season passes

Guess we have another loser

 

[Anonitolia]

tried my first game of Fortune Street today just for the heck of it. I have homefield advantage of course and swept the AI without batting an eye ('tis due to my heritage, clearly) but the game was stupid long. I think it took an hour just to get to 8k on the tutorial board or something, it was nuts. Lots of dialogue because including any elements of JRPGS dooms a game to have its script quadrupled, but I can tell this is going to be the absolute perfect game for sick days. Unfortunately, I don't know if I'll have enough time to play it otherwise lol. It's a real shame, the premise is so outlandish that the game entertains me solely by existing. Also, despite complaining about the dialogue like 5 seconds earlier, I have to admit that it's been very charming watching vaguely familiar fictional characters worry about stock prices and whether I'm going to buy out their tiny mom-and-pop shop next turn. Adds to the surreality. can't wait to play this shit when I get another fever dream.



Funnily enough this was on my bucket list since I couldn't find the game for sale as a kid and never managed to get a proper ROM of it either, but I finally found something on Myrient and I've been enjoying myself. All I need to do now is import some really stupid Miis into Dolphin somehow and I'll finally get to forcibly buy out Wario's many butcheries as a maid-wearing blobfish. my childhood dream, finally realized.

 

[EmpGulcasa]

Of course. Overlord was unexpectedly good, and had some pretty good body horror scenes. Lair of the Shadow Broker I had played it before, years ago, and it's still the best DLC of ME2.

The yahg design is so awesome, Hagalaz is a fantastic planet and the Shadow Broker ship is great.

Fucking shame we won't get a new game that is even close to this. Even for all the flak you can give Mass Effect 3, it's atleast better than whatever slop Bioware has put out in the last 5 to 10 years.

Yeah. ME3 is fine by todays standards, a good game brought lower because it had to live up to the amazing 2 and they spitefully scrapped their original ending because it got leaked and replaced it with the three colored lights. Andromeda was a joke, and I forced myself to 100% it so I'd never ever be tempted to play it again, same with Veilguard. I have such low expectations for ME4.