Today's game is some more Assassin's Creed Shadows. I was originally going to play some more Far Cry 3, but this game has somehow managed to get me completely hooked in just 2 days. What i meant to be a few hours, turned into me spending my entire day off playing the thing.

I think the gameplay needed a little bit to grow on me, because now that i'm used to it, it has to be one of my favorite stealth mechanics yet. The biggest factor that probably helped me was that i discovered i could crawl under floors. Like, crawl under the building and burst out of the floor from a hatch,

Once i got used to the controls, Naoe became a whole lot easier to control in my opinion. I stormed multiple castles today and they all reminded me of taking warehouses in black flag. I was sneaking around and air assassinating enemies.

I ended up swapping out Naoe's outfit for the one seen on all the covers. There doesn't seem to be any "cannon" outfit for her which is a bit disappointing (for example, there's no armor just called "Naoe's robes"), but this one is the one i see used in all the promotional media i think. I'm really hoping we get some legacy outfits too. Bonus points if both characters can wear them, but i think it'd be awesome to see Naoe in Edward or Connors robes.

Moving on from Naoe, the world in this game is gorgeous. The above screenshot i took while i was on my way to Kyoto. The forest was really pretty and looked amazing. It kind of reminds me of the forests near where i grew up.

There was also this river i crossed during sunset. This brings me to my usual water rating bit, which i'm proud to give this game a 9/10 on the water. It looks really good. The beaches have awesome waves too. If Bazzite's clip function worked, i would have gotten a screenshot of it to show everyone, because they look awesome.

Ubisoft Entertainment SA will carve out a unit including Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Sixinto a subsidiary with an enterprise value of about €4 billion ($4.3 billion).

Tencent Holdings Ltd. will invest €1.16 billion to acquire a 25% stake in the new entity, which will have licenses for the intellectual property of the games in exchange for a royalty, the French video game company said in a statement on Thursday.

Ubisoft, which was founded by France’s Guillemot family, has been working to bring new investors into its video game properties, Bloomberg News has reported. The valuation of the new unit surpasses Ubisoft’s current enterprise value.

Ubisoft’s US-listed depositary receipts jumped as much as 12.5% on the news.

The text of the article, for those who don't want to sign in:

The first game conference I ever attended was at MIT in the late 90s. It’s where I met people who actually worked in the game industry for the first time. Some were my heroes. Some I’d never heard of. I was just a student, with dreams of someday doing what they did, and I remember the conversations vividly.

This was the early days of 3D gaming, after the CD storage boom had made cutscenes a big part of video games. There was a sense that the industry was experimenting, trying to “crack the code” of video game storytelling, and a lot of the talks, panels, and just general chatter were about this in one sense or another. What was the “right” way to tell a game story, so that it wasn’t “just a movie”? All these people seemed to hate cutscenes, or even just general cinematic presentation, as well as the games famous for them.

I remember talking to one of these developers about Final Fantasy VII and how it compared to Xenogears, which Squaresoft had just published. These games felt almost identical to me in terms of how interactive they were. If anything FF7 felt more interactive, since Xenogears was infamous for just becoming a barrage of cutscenes in its latter half. But this guy adamantly felt Xenogears was more “interactive” than FF7.

“Why?” I asked, bewildered.

“Because you can move the camera,” he replied. “That’s a kind of interactivity, isn’t it?”

It boggled my mind that someone could think that a game where you can’t date anyone, can’t perform CPR, can’t snowboard, can’t order a drink, and can’t do a host of other eccentric little things FF7 let you do was somehow “more interactive” just because you can swing the camera left and right while walking around, but this speaks a lot to the mindset of Western–or maybe particularly North American–game developers at the time. While there were plenty of deep, richly interactive games being made, where you did have tons of such choices—from Baldur’s Gate to Fallout to Ultima to System Shock to many others—there was also this obsession with “eliminating cutscenes”, to the point that any new technique that eschewed traditional cinematic language was seen as inherently a step in the right direction, towards games “being free of the shackles of cinema”, regardless of what that materially in terms of choices available to the player. A scientist presents the enviro suit in the original half life

For an industry with these obsessions, the release of Half-Life was an instant revelation, like it was the Bell X-1 and Gabe Newell was gaming’s Chuck Yeager, the duo that broke the sound barrier. Valve had “cracked the code”, had finally shown that a game could tell a story without a single cutscene, without ever “taking control away from the player”. This is when Half-Life’s legendary status was solidified, when its list of design choices commonly cited as groundbreaking—the “cutscene-less” narrative design, the coherent sense of spatial exploration, the use of “realistic” locations, the lack of inventory management to slow you down, the crisp strategy offered by its nail-biting close-quarters combat—was first articulated. It was a towering achievement.

It also fucked everything up.

Half-Life (and its also-groundbreaking sequel) are both excellent, and the praise constantly heaped on them for their design virtues is more or less deserved. However that doesn’t mean the impact of those virtues—or, more specifically, the design cult surrounding them—has been a net positive for games as a storytelling medium. On the contrary, a lot of the techniques pioneered and popularized by Half-Life basically stalled video game storytelling innovation for about a decade, and while this isn’t Valve’s fault, this refusal by the Anglophone gaming establishment to take Half-Life off its pedestal and look at its narrative design a bit more critically has been a contributing factor to this stagnation and therefore long overdue. The Cosmetic Agency of Half-Life

The biggest design trope worth picking apart here, that by far has cast the longest shadow on the industry, is this “cutscene-less” approach to storytelling. Half-Life, and later Half-Life 2, were famous for taking story events normally relegated to non-interactive cutscenes and dropping them right into gameplay. Instead of that helicopter crashing in a cutscene, it would crash right in front of you during gameplay. Instead of the game halting and having a character speak to the camera in a cutscene, the character would face the player and speak when they got close. This, combined with Half-Life’s commitment to having zero loading screens, ensured that players felt part of a single, unbroken story from beginning to end, giving both games a sense of immersion and immediacy few others had, or so the thinking goes.

The issue here, of course, is that whether something feels immersive or immediate is utterly separate from whether it offers the player genuine agency, and Half-Life notoriously offered the former at the expense of the latter. Put bluntly: Half-Life’s approach to “eliminating” cutscenes was to make the entire game one big cutscene—a single, unbroken string of scripted events players have no power to effect beyond simply triggering them, essentially a movie where you press ‘play’ by walking forward, where the only “choice” you have in this movie is deciding where to point a camera named Gordon Freeman. This only “solves” the cutscene problem if your understanding of agency is entirely cosmetic, prioritizing the feeling of being more involved in a story via smoke and mirrors without actually giving players any choices at all. Soldiers rappel out of an Osprey while the player fires a rocket at its right engine. An iconic Half-Life moment recreated in Black Mesa.

One reason people don't remember Half-Life as being so airless and choreographed is because Valve's games have always had excellent mechanics and encounter design that make players feel good when their strings are pulled. The Special Forces soldiers who show up at Black Mesa blitz players with flank attacks, grenades, and chatter that makes it feel like you're in the firefight of your life, and the genuine combat improvisation possible with the Gravity Gun still hasn’t been matched in terms of its liquid elegance and endless variation. But it is precisely this exceptional craft that obfuscates Half-Life’s limitations. It’s easy to remain so high on this dopamine rush that you never quite notice the game is basically a theme park ride, where every carefully choreographed set-piece that happens around you has to happen—exactly the same way, every time—for the next plot point to unfold.

Half-Life wasn’t the first game to use invisible lines to trigger narrative events, but its single-minded, all-encompassing insistence on using this and only this method gives its world a curious weightlessness. Dropping players into a reality where nothing lives, nothing moves, nothing happens without their intervention, without walking over an invisible line—which is the ONLY point when the world springs to life and demonstrates any behavior at all–is Half-Life’s singular strategy for storytelling from the moment the game begins to the moment it ends. If a tree falls in City 17 and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound? Fuck no… because no tree falls in Half-Life unless Gordon Freeman walks near it. Literally NOTHING happens unless Gorden Freeman walks near it. The entire world of Half-Life is frozen until the player brings it to life with their presence, like some massively elaborate surprise birthday party. To move through its world is to imagine at all times that enemies, that NPCs, that monsters, that whatever is waiting around the next corner is whispering “Okay! Quiet everyone! Gordon’s coming! Get ready!” It’s a world of perpetual, transparent, utterly deterministic stagecraft.

Of course all games involve some level of artifice, some suspension of disbelief. No game can be a perfect simulation where everything is possible, and we wouldn’t want them to be. Focusing on one aspect of experience and excluding others is not only what makes a game a game, it’s what makes art art, in any medium. It’s why as players we embrace those literal exclamation marks that appear above surprised soldiers’ heads in Metal Gear, or don’t mind recovering from wounds that should be fatal in The Last of Us, or are relieved when we find complex aircraft simple to fly in GTA. So why was Half-Life’s artifice a stumbling block for games, an albatross around its neck, as more and more games embraced its approach over the course of the 2000s? Dawn of the FPS Age

It’s hard to overstate what a wild time the 90s were for narrative experimentation in video games. Storytelling conventions that had slowly coalesced and stabilized over the course of the 70s and 80s were almost overnight tossed aside in favor of square-one experiments involving Full-Motion Video and 3D graphics, with results more often cringe-inducing than ground-breaking. For every Doom or Mario64 or Deus Ex there were seemingly countless more Night Traps or Phantasmagorias, under-designed games drunk on the possibilities of cinematic language and over-sold to an increasingly skeptical public as the “future” of game storytelling.

By the time this fever broke late in the decade developers were understandably eager to move on, feeling hamstrung by marketing teams obsessed with chasing the coattails of Hollywood, and there was, at least in the North American industry, a distinct tendency to heap in any game that used cinematic language–even if done well–as part of this supposedly degenerative trend. Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid might be better produced than Night Trap, but they represented the same fundamentally wrong-headed approach to the medium, a medium screaming out to be released from its cinematic cage and—like a millennial prophecy—finally come into its own at the dawn of the 21st century. A pixelated video of a dark Jedi on the ground at the mercy of a green lightsaber blade held off camera. An FMV cutscene in Dark Forces 2

This was largely the industry atmosphere that late-90s immersion-focused experiments came out in, with Half-Life in particular seen by the North American gaming establishment as a hard push of the game storytelling pendulum away from cinematic language back towards first-person immersion. The fact that it didn’t bring much agency back with it tended to be downplayed, ignored, or simply not noticed, which had a lot to do with the fact that Half-Life was an FPS, and therefore tended to be compared to other 90s FPSs, games which typically weren’t even trying to do the sorts of things it did, and not to games which were.

Half-Life’s believable world populated by realistic environments felt revelatory compared it to the arcade-like, thinly-justified Mars colonies of Doom, but not compared to the meticulous, thoroughly thought-through spaces of System Shock, which came out three years earlier, or Thief, which came out the same year. Being able to look back where you came from to get that sense of a larger interconnected world felt amazing compared to Quake’s blocky, oatmeal-brown mazes, but not compared to the deeply satisfying traversal experience of Super Metroid, which came out four years earlier, or Symphony of the Night, which came out one year earlier. Looked at from one angle Half-Like felt like an FPS with a story, but looked at from another it felt like an Immersive Sim without any interaction, or a Metroidvania without any exploration. Such distinctions quickly became irrelevant, however, as games rapidly entered the era where the FPS was king.

When Microsoft muscled its way into the console war with the Xbox a few years later, it caused a massive shift away from cinematic experiments and towards First-Person Shooters. This genre that had been almost exclusively the domain of the English speaking world’s desk-bound computers in the 90s migrated to the couch in the 2000s, making a once-niche genre mainstream, not just for nerds anymore. LAN parties were for dorks. But landing headshots on your bros in a four-way split screen deathmatch, the whole room cheering and jeering the way they would at Monday Night Football, was cool, respectable even. Halo, Call of Duty, and a host of others pulled Anglophone gaming’s center of gravity toward this kind of experience in a big way, which is when a lot of experimentation of the early 3D era started to die off, its demise hastened by the rapid ascension of the FPS to a blockbuster game genre whose big-budget formula and big business success everyone now wanted to chase.

When we think of the type of narrative design that became synonymous with big-budget FPSs like Call of Duty—that increasingly, over the years, became famous for its spectacle set-pieces overwhelming interactivity more and more with each game, to the point there are some scripted set pieces where you can simply put down the controller and still finish them—that’s Half-Life’s storytelling legacy at work, the downside of its lessons and techniques being applied with ever-mounting capitalist excess. While there’s nothing wrong with enjoying this, or acknowledging it takes its own kind of craft to pull off well, there was a good long time when it tended to suck the air out of the room for other approaches that require more care, craft, and complexity at balancing interactivity with dramatic experience. Elizabeth in Bioshock stands over the perspective character brandishing a heavy tome in a library. Every trace of System Shock and most of Bioshock was bleached out Bioshock Infinite in favor of cinematic presentation.

Take how the Immersive Sim—the FPS-adjacent game genre that offered the clearest alternative to the surprise birthday party approach—basically disappeared for about a decade, how after System Shock 2 in 1999 and Deux Ex in 2000 there was a rapid decline in such games despite occupying a similarly mythic status as Half-Life, how the game designers most vocally interested in following their trajectory were either driven out of business or forced, like in the case of Bioshock (2007) or Far Cry 2 (2008), to limit their experimentation to what was possible through the lens of the Blockbuster FPS. It’s telling that the games which managed to carry the torch for Immersive Sim-like design at this time, during the era of peak-FPS saturation, were stealth-action series like Splinter Cell, Metal Gear, or Hitman—all of them third-person, and therefore not seen as being in design dialogue with these other games, but clearly, in retrospect, embodying nearly all their design virtues. Again, just like with Xenogears: where you put the camera seems to fundamentally alter how we perceive what a game is doing with agency. Such is the near-sightedness that comes with valuing cosmetic agency over everything else.

It wasn’t until Arkane’s Dishonored in 2012 that the Immersive Sim really made a serious comeback in the AAA space, and even that couldn’t get by without having a gun as a sub-weapon. For a good long time, and even now, it’s as if major commercial developers were simply not allowed to make a first-person game unless there was a gun sticking out of the lower right corner. This is arguably the only way Fallout—originally a 2D isometric RPG from the 90s—was able to reinvent itself as a blockbuster game with 2008’s Fallout 3, its clever marriage of RPG design and FPS presentation managing to resonate with the juggernaut audiences weaned on Halo.

Far Cry 2, Bioshock and to a greater degree Fallout 3 and Dishonored are all successful examples of working within FPS-dominated industry norms to push narrative design away from the surprise birthday party approach and towards more richly interactive narrative worlds, but they are certainly the exception, not the rule, and even they experienced diminishing returns in sequels, most notably Bioshock, which, over the long development of Bioshock Infinite, slowly chipped away at its Immersive Sim principles until—you guessed it—the whole thing became yet another surprise birthday party. And this again is not to accuse it of being a bad game, only to illustrate that the same capitalist forces acting on Call of Duty acted on Irrational Games in their attempts to deliver a once-in-a-lifetime narrative experience at the AAA budget level. Thanks to Half-Life, the surprise birthday—with its determinism, with its linearity, with its insurance that each player will experience the exact same things—is invariably seen as the most risk-averse way to achieve that. It will always be the most business-friendly kind of supposedly “immersive” narrative design, the utterly deterministic “movie” that isn’t a movie because apparently being able to walk around in it makes it not a movie, even though you have the same amount of choices in it you have in a movie: zero. Half-Life’s Warring Legacies

Today, with the vast proliferation of indie games (many of which made possible by Valve’s distribution platform), and the catastrophic budget escalation of AAA games, we are living in the stark aftermath of this peak FPS era. Few franchises can compete with Call of Duty’s Hollywood budget-level surprise birthday parties, and the mantle of the Immersive Sim, the Metroidvania, and all kinds of other experiments in reconciling storytelling with rich agency has been taken up mostly by the less risk averse indie space.

There does seem to be more of a sense now, as opposed to 20 years ago, that a diverse set of audiences want diverse types of content, that a first-person surprise birthday party where you go pew pew isn’t any sort of “code” that’s been cracked but merely one type of experience among many that includes dating, cooking, dancing, and almost anything else you can imagine. Even with the awful, stratified state the industry is in right now, even with everything else that’s wrong, this available diversity of experience is undeniably a good thing, and basically unimaginable from the perspective of 2005, when the last cardinal Half-Life game was released.

This all speaks to what feels like, from the perspective of today, two warring legacies. There is the perceived legacy of Half-Life and the actual Legacy of Half-Life, the legacy of Half-Life as a code-cracking, ground-breaking experiment in tightly controlled immersive choreography, and the legacy of Half-Life as the game that made scripted set-pieces a viable narrative tool among many. Joel in The Last of Us cupping his hands on the side of Ellie's head as fire burns around them.

It’s telling that, for all its purist bluster, all its rhetoric of progress toward the “right” (i.e. non-cinematic) way of architecting stories in games, the high-minded ambitions North American industry elites, with the premium they put on immersion over agency–their millennial prophecy–have really been shut down by audiences over the past 10 years. The Xbox/FPS era swung the pendulum so hard towards set-piece driven roller coaster rides that audiences were happy to have cutscenes back, provided developers knew how to use them well. There is no greater example of this than Naughty Dog, who basically took Half-Life’s whole approach to highly choreographed set-pieces and just… added cutscenes. And guess what? Uncharted and The Last of Us were massive, runaway successes, thanks to their expert fusion of these narrative approaches. Blessedly free of any immersive ideology, they were simply content to use the right tool for the job, whether it be a cutscene, a set-piece, a mechanic, or what have you.

It is almost as if audiences are highly literate in various storytelling forms, and are able to switch between them effortlessly, if skillfully presented by a team of storytelling professionals who instinctively understand that a pithy, well-written, well-acted cutscene might be the right choice for one part of a story, while a gameplay set-piece might be for another. It’s almost as if this—the sum total of these elements coming together in the player's mind—is what immersion actually is, and not just being able to look away or not when a helicopter crashes nearby.

It’s resisting this kind of faith in audiences that pushes us towards fundamentally narrow understandings of what agency and immersion are, towards some singular vision of progress in game narrative, as if it were a straight line leading from a collage-like past into a VR-like future and not simply an ever-expanding palette for artists wishing to use the right combination of tools to deliver a particular narrative experience to a particular audience. While Half-Life 1 and 2 remain great games, and superbly well-crafted examples of a particular kind of approach to game storytelling, they are not the only kind of approach, and we are still living in some of the wreckage of big game companies and marketing teams latching onto that approach as some absurd kind of endgame. Half-Life didn’t crack any sort of code. It just gave us another set of tools, tools that can be used skillfully or unskillfully, just like cutscenes.

It would have been great if we had been able to learn that without taking this long, hellish detour through ever-more expensive, more-bloated, more exhausting surprise birthday parties. It would have been great if we had been able to learn it without killing the Immersive Sim (a process you can watch unfold in slow motion by playing each Bioshock game back-to-back). And it would be great if we could all recognize that this is also part of Half-Life’s legacy, the dark side of the North American gaming establishment’s millennial prophecy, with Half-Life as its messiah, come to deliver us all from the tyranny of cutscenes, only to replace it with another tyranny we are still trying to recover from.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27458870

1.8 Update

• Adds Sunny as a partner
• New quest line featuring Sunny
• At least 3 new monsters
• Can change wing styles based on recorded monsters
• New cosmetic DLC for even more wing styles
• Available April 7th for PC/consoles

Cassette Beasts Mobile

• More updates and fixes + cloud saves coming soon

New Cassette Beasts Plushes

• Kuneko and Magikrab available now

Acoustic Sessions Album

• Collects acoustic/live versions of songs by Joel Baylis and Shelby Harvey
• Available April 3rd on Spotify/Bandcamp/Steam

Player Survey

• Opening a survey on April 3rd for fans to give feedback

This was way more confusing than it had to be.

TL;DR: You can lend your digital games to friends & family for 14 days, but both consoles need to connect locally to enable this...(?)

You can't play digital games you've lent out during this time. I guess the point is making it similar to giving your friend a physical game cartridge.

Looks way more like Prime than the first gameplay trailer. No release date is weird though.

My Arms Are Longer Now (in development) Steam store page

Today's game is Assassin's Creed Shadows. I had Assassin's Creed Shadows gifted to me by a friend. I was hesitant to pick it up, and if i did, i was going to wait for the usual Ubisoft price cut when it goes on sale.

It's worth noting that the last game that i played was Valhalla, and even then that was years ago. Based on what i remember from it though, i personally feel like this game is personally more fun for me. It has some of the issues that i felt that the RPG titles held for me and i feel like the stealth has a few kinks to work out, but it's a step in the right direction.

Though, the parkour feels a lot closer too Unity then i felt Valhalla was. I do think it would have been better with a High Profile trigger instead of just tapping A or B to free run up or down.

Another complaint i have is that Ubisoft is still pulling the Micro transactions bullshit. It's all cosmetics still, but still, something about it rubs me the wrong way.

The game, honestly, feels like it has it's own identity though. There's one memory section you do where you fight a boss, and the entire time this really cool Alternative song is playing. It'd be kind of like if Assassin's Creed Unity played the same song that was in that famous reveal trailer in the middle of a Epic fight. It's the kind of identity, that honestly, i really love and hope to see more of.

You spend a large part of the opening playing as Naoe with a few parts as Yasuke, i have been avoiding spoilers though, and with the way the game is playing out i suspect he'll be important part of the game real soon.

Yasuke, from the brief time i played as him, almost reminds me of the Valhalla protagonist. He just storms entire forts by himself like a one man army. Honestly it's a lot of fun to control and really satisfying.

Meanwhile, Naoe seems to play far more like the traditional AC games, and honestly she's a lot of fun to play. She plays a lot more with stealth, and i spent most of my time playing her by jumping around on rooftops and assassinating the enemies like i was back in the Kenway days.

Speaking of the Kenway games, there's one section where you have to steal some silks back from some Portuguese pirates in order to get an outfit for a gathering. It had me climbing around on the rigging and mast and made me feel like i was Edward again. I had a lot of fun, and got this portrait of Naoe who looks like she wasn't having as much fun as i was (in case you couldn't tell i enjoy taking portraits):

Another fun thing i had fun doing was taking screenshots of Melee kills with the ink filter. They're a lot of fun to get and i think they look cool. I almost wanted to choose one of them for the main picture but it felt a bit cheap because it was taken with the photo mode and a filter. But anyways, i took a bunch of them:

Moving on from that, there's the hideout function, which i was expecting to be just another version of the Settlement from Valhalla or any of the other "Homes" in older AC games where you just buy the upgrades, but this one gives you almost full creative control over placement and stuff. It's honestly really sick and i love it. I got this Screenshot of the Main Area which i really liked:

Finally, i wanted to voice one last complaint, because the Animals in this game look absolutely dorky. I mean, look at this cat:

(It's still adorable though)

As is now a tradition (this is my 7th of these posts - after rejoining Lemmy just 28 days ago!) you'll know the drill.

I want to at least try give a personal look at the news I've spotted in gaming and the Steam Deck which has interested me most. This isn't anything refined, official (or possibly even 'good') - just me trying to bring that feeling back of old games sites, old games blogs. Before ads and begging for Patreon subs became a focus on a game site above the content.

Anyway, if you're interested, grab a cup of coffee or tea and sit down for a read:

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Denuvo

A couple of games have a notable Denuvo DRM announcement.

Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree drops Denuvo ahead of its launch. They wrote a rather detailed and clear post themselves, which they shared on Steam:

...the pessimist in me thinks maybe they realized that with the side-scroller coming to Switch any potential piracy on the title would be inevitable regardless. But...maybe they just do care what the community thinks, as they said in their announcement?

inZoi also was meant to ship with Denuvo, but made a similar announcement that they will in fact not be using it. The screenshots are from the announcement made by Kjun (Producer and Director):

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GOG News

Sudeki

You might have noticed that Sudeki which was removed from GOG has been relisted!

We're all to familiar with the sad state of delisting games, and it always makes me sad to see the postings by GOG staff letting gamers know a title is being removed (remember, this is never GOG's doing - it is entirely up to publishers)

But now we've got it back :)

As to why it was removed in the first place? No definitive answer exists, nor was any statement given explaining it back on removal. Though this page on delistedgames does at least in some way indicate some reasoning:

Sudeki was likely delisted after the expiration of Climax’s publishing deal with GOG.com. Climax Group does not appear to be dormant but their production has dropped significantly over the last few years. It’s possible that the terms of their agreement with GOG.com could be renewed and the game returned to sale in the future. However, it is also possible that Climax is winding down operations and the game could be delisted from Steam as well.

GOG Profit:

Seemingly, a bad year. You can read the full report here, if you have any inclination, but the most interesting numbers are the following:

GOG net profit in thousands PLN

• 2023: 10,255

• 2024: 1,134

Sales revenue:

• 2023: 234969

• 2024: 199,338

Quick GOG points of interest:

• The pre-order for System Shock 2's 25th anniversary remaster is still love on GOG's site, and the game is getting a lot of sim-fans very excited! Playable on June 26th this year!

• A fun thread is up on the GOG forum showing the idea of 'pizza for GOG's team':

This is my ethical pressing, on GOG's management to reward GOG's Team with pizza.*

Please order a game for yourself up to $2.99. This will symbolize a slice.*

• If you want to order the team a 'slice' then you can do so with this thread here on the forum. Personally I think this is a lovely idea, in what it symbolizes

• A bunch of titles from Handy Games were added to GOG, including Meganoid, Sir Questionnaire, Gunslugs, Gunslugs 2 and Snake Core. All with some hefty discounts, too.

• Stellaris: BioGenesis (the new expansion for Stellaris) is also up for a pre-order. This isn't me condoning pre-ordering - let's face it these days the very concept is playing with fire. But it's a good heads-up for what is coming. Of it they state:

In Stellaris: BioGenesis, step into the role of a master geneticist, sculpting the galaxy to your design with living ships, engineered ecosystems, and enhanced species. Forge new paths with unparalleled bioengineering tools to create a civilization that thrives on adaptability and evolution – or exploit these tools to dominate the stars.

More physical DVD covers:

My addiction is the fact that people create physical collections of their GOG games. To my knowledge (after lurking so many of these), most of the users do not include a backup of the install files in the case. This is purely for a display - to show their fav games on a shelf. And I love that.

I just adore how there's a dedicated community who design print and display their fav modern GOG titles in DVD covers. For no practical use other than to look pretty!

Here's a handful more I found :)

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FTL

A dedicated fan of the game FTL: Faster Than Light has released their own ergonomic community control layout. Considering how poor the controls are on the Steam Deck, it seems like FLT players are kinda head over heels with this idea, so I thought those few who might have missed it here might appreciate it, too.

Frictionless player experience for FTL Newbies and Veteran Space Captains alike. The "Steam Deck/Game Pad Layout"

Of it, the creator states:

"Being a long time fan of the game FTL, I was so excited to get it on my Deck. It was among the first few games I downloaded, and I fired it up not long after. I quickly discovered the countrol [let the record show this is not my spelling error, but the user's!!!] scheme was nearly unusable. At least, it sure didn't feel like a proper handheld hyperspace experience.

I've spent a few hours customizing my control layout for the Steam Deck. I've made a very user friendly and intuitive control scheme. Easy to start using but very practical. All the necessary actions are right where I feel they should be, with room to customize the controls to perfect your cockpit.

The layout is called: "Steam deck/Game Pad layout" by EPICMAN.

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Epic Games

Sale:

The Epic Games Spring Sale has begun on their site, coming a day-and-a-bit earlier than it was expected to launch. Deals end on April 9th, at 11 AM ET. Some highlights for deals include:

• Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered: -50% off

• Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut -33% off

• Alan Wake 2 Deluxe Ed. -50% off

• God of War -60% off

And so on and so forth. Worth a look, if you like deals.

Mobile:

Their mobile app (available on iOS and Android) now has a search bar! I mean...a low bar to celebrate (I'm also struggling to find a bar pun joke so I'll abandon the effort here), but...they now have one.

They are also giving away mobile games each week now. Before it was monthly, but now each week you'll be able to claim free games there - much like their PC games efforts.

You can currently claim Super Meat Boy Forever Mobile, and Eastern Exorcist, and in 16 hours or so you will be able to claim their next lot!

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Nintendo PlayStation

Well, if you don't know the old history behind the greatest split-before-it-took-off gaming duo: Nintendo and Sony, then you can check these out:

• An overview of what the Nintendo PlayStation was

• An IGN article going into more depth on it here

• Ben Heck's 'teardown' on the console via YouTube - this one is great, and in multiple parts!

...anyway. For the longest time, only one of these was known to exist, in people's hands anyway. It sold for around $350,000 and I wonder if the buyer now regrets that because there has been another pop up that (to me, at least) looks far prettier!

Another of the prototype consoles created in the early 1990s has come to light, this one belonging to the PlayStation co-creator - Ken Kutaragi. Who kept it in his closet the whole time (which actually helped - no yellowing of the plastic!)

Only a handful of photos, which are:

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Itty-Bitty-Gameboy-Committee

On the theme of console hardware, I'm kinda enamored by the littlest Gameboy that ever lived, which I stumbled over.

This console is available on Aliexpress, and there's apparently been a few YouTube videos on it like this one here, and yes...it's a tiny way to play!

But this user (MrRetroplayer) shared:

I made a custom case for the Game Boy Mini, reminiscent of the original Game Boy box. Thanks to David for helping me find a case and personalize these stickers. I love how it looks now!

And the photos are adorable, and actually kinda cool.

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Pi Tin:

P.S. I'm also kinda in love with how cute the Raspberry Pi project: the Pi Tin is.

*"𝘗𝘪 𝘛𝘪𝘯 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘯 𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘯 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘰 𝘨𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘥𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘢𝘴𝘱𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘺 𝘗𝘪 𝘡𝘦𝘳𝘰 𝟤 𝘞...

...t𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘪 𝘡𝘦𝘳𝘰 𝟤 𝘞 𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘦𝘮𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘚𝘕𝘌𝘚, 𝘎𝘉𝘈, 𝘗𝘚𝟣, 𝘎𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘴/𝘔𝘦𝘨𝘢𝘥𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘕𝟨𝟦 𝘨𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘴"*

Either 3DPrinting the enclosure, or using an Altoids tin of all things.

The link to the project is here

And some photos, of course:

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Burger?

Okay the last one, I shared this a few days ago and I can't stop myself from doing so again.

So for my (𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘨𝘳𝘰𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘨) list of quite odd consoles I've posted about, this one may take the cake (no lie)

A famicom/NES clone designed to have a burger's pattern on it was canceled for release made by McDonald's China themselves. It was cancelled and not 'released', but...obviously is still around to buy. Apparently for around $70 (I'd assume USD?):

This one reminds me of the recent Tetris made to look like a big chicken nugget:

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Genshin Impact Control:

For those who love Android gaming, and who love Genshin, you might be happy to know that they've added controller support for android. Finally.

To my understanding, they had some sort of "unspoken exclusivity deal" with Apple to only allow controllers on iOS devices (iPhone and iPad). Controllers have always worked on Genshin Impact with iOS.

The fact that they finally allowed Android to use controllers is probably a combination of many things. My guess is that it's because iPhones are massively more popular in Asia, Genshin's primary target audience; but Western fans (who are more likely to use Android than Asians are) essentially kept bugging them about it so much that they finally caved and gave us what we wanted.

Regardless, yay for Android!

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Nintendo Direct

Of the upcoming Nintendo Direct (3/27/25), Nintendo states:

"Tune in on March 27th, at 7 a.m. PT for a livestreamed Nintendo Direct, featuring around 30 minutes of upcoming games for Nintendo Switch. There will be no updates about Nintendo Switch 2 during this presentation.

Information about Nintendo Switch 2 will be shared on April 2nd at 6 a.m. PT in the Nintendo Direct: Nintendo Switch 2 – 4.2.2025 presentation"

A link to which is here, for future reference

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POE patch is live:

• honestly I still have no idea what POE is. Is it Pillars of Eternity? Path of Exile? Edgar Allan?

Turn based combat seems to be the focus of what is making those who play the mysterious POE most excited. Whatever it actually is, I'll leave this link for someone who might want to know

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Game Informer is back:

And the entire team has returned for its...return! Their 'lost' content has been reinstated: all reviews, interviews, videos, old crew and monthly magazines - all up and returned to the internet:

https://www.gameinformer.com/

There's not much I can prattle on about for this, but there is a nice link to a nice and heartfelt video they posted on YouTube:

The link is here, so check it out!

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EmuDeck:

4 days back we saw an update to EmuDeck. Version 2.4:

• Integration selection

• Auto add ESDE to Steam

• New Bios checker

• BYO Citron

• Azahar

• New wiki: manual.emudeck.com

• New Emulators for EmuDeck Windows : Model 2, Supermodel y BigPemu

A feature reel is here, on YouTube via this link

And if you're wondering if people had issues with the update, and if it broke some users set-ups? Yes. Yes it did. But of course, Y.M.M.V.

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Junk Store:

Speaking of updates, Junk Store (playing Epic Games titles and GOG games on the Steam Deck) has shown what is coming up (at least in part) for what's next for Junk Store.

I shared a dedicated post about that here on Lemmy early this morning, so you'll be able to see it here if you're inclined to read more details.

The long story short though? Junk Store is changing with a lot coming to how things work. I'd encourage you to check it out.

[SDHQ posted an article[(https://steamdeckhq.com/news/junk-store-is-coming-back-with-new-features/)

As did Gaming On Linux

...though neither add anything at all to the initial post. Just...read the post.

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FitGirl

If you know, then you know. But if you don't? FitGirl is a repacker of games - for games piracy. This isn't a piece on FitGirl, but instead I wanted to mention that someone donated 0.5 BTC Bitcoin her. That's rougly 42K USD.

That's a lot of games the donator could have just bought. Regardless, this is the biggest donation I know of to a piracy site.

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Emulation

Dolphin now boots every Wii game

"The Daring Game For Girls" was the final Wii game listed on the Dolphin wiki that would flat-out not even start under normal circumstances, hanging right after the initial Wii remote safety screen unless the CPU was underclocked to 6%. However, a game patch has now been included in Dolphin to allow the game to finally boot.

This was the last Wii game marked as broken. The only other things left in the category are Triforce games and the Wii U Menu redirect channel (yes, you can actually install it on an original Wii. It hangs in Dolphin while it restarts a real Wii).

Now, to be clear, there are games that still don't really get that much further - Active Life: Magical Carnival, Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football and Diatomic still cannot get in-game. Still, a notable milestone none the less.

Azahar 2120 - 3DS - (the first stable release!) has been released

This changelog treats the merge of PabloMK7's fork and Lime3DS as a base upon which all of the changes listed here are applied. The changes added in Lime3DS and PabloMK7's fork during 2024, alongside the changes introduced in Azahar, will be discussed in more detail as part of our first progress report.

• A link to the GitHub is here if you want a read

Azahar also recently posted a blog post, which I found to be interesting:

Citra: 1 Year On (One Final Look Back) - this is the link to it if you're curious

Cytrus (3DS emulator) v1.0.1 has been released by Sudachi dev

ytrus is a Nintendo 3DS emulator for Android, Linux, macOS and Windows written in C++

"Cytrus with the SDL3 migration (and Qt6 technically) is now available on GitHub GDrive for Windows and macOS. This is just a test right now. ︀︀ ︀︀Proceeding a successful test, this will be used in Folium. ︀︀Please test audio, input and video. All work on my system but who knows" - Sudachi dev

Downloads available for Windows and macOS: https://github.com/cytrus-emu/cytrus/releases/tag/v1.0.1 (GitHub errors out when uploading the file, Google Drive will be used for now)

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Some more 'old' Steam Deck ads

Last time I posted the first two of what a designer created: mock-ups of ads done in the style of early 2000's for the Steam Deck. To me, they're most similar to the aesthetic employed by the various advertising agencies Sony used to promote the PlayStation 2.

All done by RetroB0y, these are fantastic, and there's 4 more to share here for you:

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HP Omen Handheld

Well, don't get excited, this is just their reasoning why there isn't any such device. Yet anyway:

Unfortunately this came from an XDA page which is now showing a 404 so...that's gone

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One Last Thing

All apologies if this isn't the typical amount of things I find interesting, but...still its fun to share them here.

As always, any errors are mine, formatting might be awful (or maybe not?!) and I hope you've all been well.

...but that last thing? Share what you've been playing! I'd love to hear what games you've been enjoying recently: be they AAA, AA, indie or emulated retro (or even that new level - the AAAA!)

It's so fun to hear what people enjoy playing the most. Personally I've been enjoying:

• Half-Life 2 for only the second time. It's so damn good. Playing this on my Steam Deck!

• Mario Odyssey on my Switch. It's just so damn cute. Then I'll try the first Xenoblade - I've never played one of those before!

So what about you? What have you been playing?

And lastly, if you wanna find me, I'm on Mastodon more than anything:

<3

I'm thinking of working on a turn-based battle simulation game - a Pokemon VGC drop-in.

It will go all in on simulation, and will not have a story mode - think Pokemon Showdown.

Furthermore, the simulation tweaks will be significant - it could essentially be a different game depending on the tweaks. But the default will be as close to Pokemon VGC as possible.

In terms of roster, it will likely be small (32 creatures) and with a mathematically sound number of types (still have to do research for this).

My grand goal for rosters is to have people make their own, and choose the creatures they like most into their own sets. With the "official" set (run by me) having the initial 32 and adding customs all the way to 128.

The entire project will be open-source.

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I've been really contemplating this, because it will take a significant amount of time, and I do not know what the actual room temperature is.

I feel like people who play Pokemon Showdown will stay there, but I feel (with careful consideration and execution) some people may appreciate this project.

If you have anything you'd like to see in this type of game, please leave a comment. If you'd like to donate to help free up more time to work on this DM me.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/34924887

A Nintendo Direct presentation has been confirmed for Thursday, 27th March 2025 focused solely on Switch games.

Here's what time you'll need to tune in...

• North America: 7am PDT / 8am MDT / 9am CDT / 10am EDT
• UK/Ire: 2pm GMT
• Europe: 3pm CET / 4pm EET
• Asia/Oceania: 11pm JST / 10pm AWST / 1am (Fri) AEDT

The broadcast will feature over 30 announcements for games including Enshrouded, X4: Foundations, and Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core, and from publishers like tinyBuild, Playstack, and Hooded Horse. Announcements will include world premieres, gameplay reveals, release dates, demo launches, and more, all in a speedy 45 minutes with no ads or hosts. A post-show will feature deep dives with the developers.