Gaming

Granted, it's only out of 9 reviews, but it came out on Tuesday. Seems like many publications are sleeping on it.

Its predecessor Ender Lilies was probably my personal biggest surprise of 2024 (when I played it, not when it was released). I wrote up some thoughts in the Playstation community earlier. I'm excited to pick this up once I clear out some of current commitments.

Once more I dived into the web of Romhacking.net to find interesting Mods for the Super Nintendo / SNES. All kinds of user created mods, bug fixes, additional content, story rewrites, graphics updates and more. Have fun exploring.

1. Intro
2. Download the Collection
3. List of 117 Romhacks
4. How to play a Romhack?
5. What happened in 2024?
6. The End… ?

Resident Evil and Street Fighter series developer Capcom is experimenting with introducing new technology, including generative AI, to tackle the ballooning costs and man-hours required for game development. In a recent interview with Google Cloud Japan, Kazuki Abe, a technical director at Capcom, gave some specific examples of what this involves. Based on his explanation, it doesn't seem like Capcom is trying to use AI to generate anything directly related to gameplay, stories or character designs.

According to Abe, one of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive parts of game development is coming up with the "hundreds of thousands of unique ideas" needed to create the in-game environment. For example, if you want to put a TV inside of your game, you can't just use an existing product as is – you need to think of a fictional TV design from scratch, including the manufacturer's logo and everything else about the object.

Overview

Create: Protection Pixel is a popular Create addon with over half a million downloads. It is available on CurseForge and was formerly available on Modrinth; its page has now been taken down. It was made with MCreator.

Ever since version 1.1.2, the mod .jar bundles the Amplitude Java SDK under com.amplitude, and the org.json:json library (a dependency of Amplitude SDK) under org.json. Amplitude is a software analytics company. This is, obviously, unusual code to find in a Minecraft mod.

The mod also contains four classes placed under com.brightsdk: Device, Main, SessionTracker, and Storage.

The code under com.brightsdk does not appear to be correctly activated, but if it was correctly called, it would collect the following datapoints:

• your device vendor and platform,
• your operating system name and version,
• the total amount of RAM in your computer,
• the currently in-use amount of RAM,
• the current CPU usage,

and upload them (together with your IP address) to Amplitude's tracking URL at https://api2.amplitude.com/2/httpapi using the API key 7cce83b37fb5848cad6789d71a39b809. The code would send the data every minute at first, but gradually slow down to every 30 minutes.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/18143916

TL;DW: At 4K, the RTX 5090 hits 20-50% uplifts in raster as compared to the RTX 4090, and 27-35% uplifts in RT as compared to the RTX 4090. Power efficiency is roughly equivalent to the 4090. The new dual flowthrough cooler design seems to perform exactly as advertised, providing remarkable cooling for a card that is only two slots thick.

Official blog post: https://exok.com/posts/2025-01-22-earthblade-final-update/

Good statement from the team but damn does this hurt

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/21074916

I love this game so much. It has such an immense atmosphere, the mechanics are great and it's very fun to explore the world map!

I beat the game at level 11. Here's my setup for the final boss:

spoiler

Dylan: electrical (yellow) tower shield and holy potions

Orlok: poison (green) trident and a mist orb (this stuff helps reaching the boss without unnecessary fights)

Thyme: electrical lance (was too lazy to grind materials for a trident) and poison tower shield

Blocking with tower shields is soo efficient, I was losing under 100 health from the tentacles.

The ending is

spoiler

very mysterious of course, I really like too!

I see that the official Matt Leacock's Pandemic boardgame adaptation on Android was abandoned by Asmodee, allegedly due to various quality problems.

There are a few versions floating out there in various apk archives, and even something called "Pandemic" in the Google Play store by some outfit named Seadex that I have no idea whether is anything related to the original boardgame.

Does anyone have a favorite implementation of the Pandemic boardgame they can recommend?

Looks fun and funny. There's a demo and here's a trailer.

Game copy follows.

After a whole afternoon at home with your sibling, the kitchen’s a mess, your room’s in disarray, you haven't hung the laundry: a normal day. SUDDENLY... you see on that phone notification that your dad will be coming home early - you hear the garage screeching and opening and... RUN!! DAD'S COMING!!

Meet Bob, the goofy, clumsy brother who’s panicking thinking of the horrible things might happen to him if dad finds out they made a mess - like not playing video games for the rest of the night. Terrifying!

Kate, on the other hand, was born for this. She's had years of intensive training: putting everything away and pretending she's asleep as soon as she hears dad in the hallway on the way to her bedroom, never once being spotted! And this time it won't be different.

But be careful! Your adorable cat Jack won't stop knocking things over!

And many other challenges! Cooperate by throwing objects between floors!

Be careful not to break windows or fragile objects like grandma's urn - your dad won't be too happy if your grandma bites the dust twice!

Keep an eye on Jack, the siblings’ cat! He is always messing around and knocking things over.

Use the means in each house to be even quicker, such as service elevators!

Watch out for blackouts in blizzards! Sometimes you will have to reactivate the circuit breaker!

And much more!

It's tough to express how much of a bummer this whole mess has been. Veilguard is such an embarrassingly lazy, shallow experience.

Placing all of the blame on Busche isn't fair, as she was brought in at the end of the development process, but it was her leadership that prevented the game from getting the extra time it needed.

The creative and design aspects of the game's failure falls primarily on John Epler's lap.

BioWare was so special for such a long time. Watching them fumble the ball directly into the deepest part of the toilet three times in a row feels completely insane.

Fuck EA forever, man.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/28819332

So… this is news to me, because I don’t have a VR headset, but I can set my Viture Pro XR glasses into SBS (side by side) mode by pressing the small button longer. Some games, like EliteDangerous, can do this as well without fiddling around with Reshade. I didn’t really expect it but it just works. This way I even get 3D on foot, which is not supported for VR in Elite Dangerous Odyssey at all! Side by side Crosseye mode (right eye left, left eye right) though? Add some head tracking to the mix, which is totally possible, and I get a very nice VR-like experience even on foot in Elite Dangerous – and on Linux PC!

This is the SBS version that does REQUIRE VR/XR glasses and mebbe something like xr-video-player: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEtRijojBx8

This is the MONO version that does NOT require VR/XR glasses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYPTk1vygM4

The FOV is somewhat cramped. No idea if this can be tweaked any further but I’ll fiddle with the settings on my next test. Mebbe this can be tweaked (or I use #Breezy Desktop to zoom in somewhat).

Update: I got the aspect ratio somewhat under control. It’s not perfect but much better and an odd combination of window mode and resolution and upscaling, that somehow affects the HUD only but make no sense to me at all. At this point I think it’s simply a bug of Elite. It’s like the HUD doesn’t get the memo to scale up after the intro played. I’m also not sure if this is a side effect of gamescope but I can totally live with this result.

New footage with better aspect ratio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qdvfdpTy_k

New footage with better aspect ratio framepacked, which MAY just work with VR (or fall back to anaglyph) – the YT FAQ is very thin on 3D content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWYYJTqnpz8

Update2: Haha it works! https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/2o5j30/using_google_cardboard_or_equivalent_kit_as_a_vr/ had a lead: It suggests to double the vertical resolution to get a proper aspect ratio with SBS and shrink the resulting window again.

That’s easy with gamescope:

gamescope -h 2160 -w 3840 -H 1080 -W 3840 –scaler stretch

e voila, perfect aspect ratio. Wonder if my GPU manages to keep this up though. May have to throw FSR into the mix.

As a homeless dude I'm in desperate need of cash lol so if you've sold your account please let me know what platforms you've conducted this transaction at. Nearly got scammed by a Chinese dude offering crypto in escrow at a shady site.

An indie dev's response to NYT's "Games Can’t Afford To Look This Good" and the meme of "I want smaller games with less graphics and I'm not kidding".

Considering the Switch 2 (with those pretty joystick well covers to protect from drift, omg) and the Ryzen Z2 Go announcements, the low cost and availability of Steam Deck & parity level APU machines for purchase now, and the giant 1080p gaming install base represented by current gen consoles, it sure seems like low spec & 1080p gaming is going to have a pretty sunny future. I am hoping this gives small and medium sized development teams a chance to show up what is left of AAA gaming.

What are your favorite low spec gaming setups right now? I'm enjoying a 5700g APU system the most these days. Mainstream wise, I've been playing Elden Ring and Injustice 2 and Vampire Survivors. The last Indie I played is this beat-em-up / horde survival game An American Werewolf in LA which was pretty cool.

Curious to see what they do with the "mouse" function, as well as how well the new Joycon attachment system works (as well as if they have Hall Effect sensors...)