iusearchbtw

iusearchbtw, 2 months ago

Unfortunate date to publish a proposal on…

iusearchbtw, 3 months ago

Source? According to Wikipedia they’re American.

iusearchbtw, 3 months ago

It lists several subsidiary offices, including Russian, Armenian, Swedish, British, Belorussian, and Portuguese branches. It’s still headquartered in the United States.

iusearchbtw, 4 months ago

Seconding vim as the universal Unix/Linux editor. It takes a while to become a real vim pro, but learning basic usage is very helpful. Escape to switch to normal mode (where letters trigger functions instead of just typing), i to switch to input mode, : in normal mode to enter commands, :wq to save and quit, :q! to exit without saving - that alone should be enough to cover a lot of basic use cases. If you ever want to learn more, there are plenty of tutorials online.

iusearchbtw, 4 months ago

JC’s story was finished, Jensen’s wasn’t.

iusearchbtw, 5 months ago

I’ve heard TLOU called many things, but shovelware is a new one.

iusearchbtw, 5 months ago

I don’t play AAA games (and haven’t played an ND game since Jak 3) so I don’t have a horse in the Naughty Dog race, but Druckmann’s take on “fun” was a valid one. A work of art can be engaging and emotionally impactful even if it isn’t “fun”, and sometimes evaluating a game based on whether testers are, in their own opinion, “having fun” is counterproductive. Is Papers, Please fun? Is Kentucky Route Zero? Is To The Moon? Hell, what would a tester say if you asked them if they were having fun after spending an hour with Disco Elysium?

Either way, you can hate the game and its plot, but to call TLOU2 shovelware is genuinely deranged. When’s the last time you played an actual shovelware release?

iusearchbtw, 8 months ago

I suppose I’d prefer if short games weren’t overly expensive, but I never liked the hours per dollar thing. I don’t like replaying games. I’d rather buy six two-hour indie games for ten dollars each and have each one be at least somewhat unique and engaging, than spend 60 on a sprawling hundred hour AAA game filled mostly with repetition and busywork. Life’s too short for that, you know?

iusearchbtw, 8 months ago

The article actually addresses this, but I feel “indie games bubble” is simply too broad a term. Is there a medium-high budget indie game bubble? Maybe. But can indie games in general even have a bubble? Fuckloads of indie games are passion projects, or made from crowdfunding money, or otherwise not based around the idea that they have to be the “product” of a sustainable business, making the whole idea of a “bubble” pointless. If the bubble pops, will itch indies stop making games? Will passionate solo devs languishing at double digit Steam review numbers stop releasing games? I don’t think they will.

iusearchbtw, 10 months ago

I feel like I’ve heard this “it’s different this time guys, we swear” spiel about every Ubisoft game in the past five years. Hard to believe or care at this point.

iusearchbtw, 10 months ago

Out of interest, what platformers are you referencing here? I can’t think of any that are that punishing.

iusearchbtw, 10 months ago

Hot take, but I actually love well implemented radial menus on PC. When games bother to reset your cursor to the centre of the circle you can just quickly flick the mouse in a certain direction to make your selection, which is faster than most other mouse menus and a lot more comfortable than trying to reach for the 9 key.

iusearchbtw, 10 months ago

I love when games use as few invisible walls as possible, and don’t stop you from exploring weird places or even out of bounds. There doesn’t even have to be a reward, just the feeling of getting somewhere where you’re not supposed to be is enough. Ultrakill and Anodyne 2 both do this really well.

I also love rich, responsive, low-restriction movement mechanics, which kinda ties in with the first point. I love when games let me chain all sorts of moves together for wild bullshit midair acrobatics, zipping and bouncing and flinging myself all over the place constantly. Good examples are Ultrakill, Pseudoregalia, Sally Can’t Sleep, and Cruelty Squad. On the flipside, Demon Turf is a game I hated and dropped quickly because of how artificially and pointlessly limited the movement felt.

iusearchbtw, 10 months ago

This might sound weird, but are you actually engaged with what you’re playing? Maybe you need to find some higher intensity games to keep your attention.

iusearchbtw, 11 months ago

I don’t really get the obsession with backlogs. Are you actually enjoying the games at that point? Are you playing this game because you want to play it, or because it’s on your backlog and you want to be able to check it off the list and move on to the next thing - presumably, since your backlog is so big it warrants a guide - as quickly as possible? Just pick out a game you want to play and play it. Why spoil your own fun?

iusearchbtw, 11 months ago

https://media.tenor.com/W3VDyi6qpHsAAAAS/eyeroll-the-rock.gif

iusearchbtw, 11 months ago

I agree that video game narratives are, on average, way worse than in other media, but… This post is like a script for a CinemaSins video on an entire medium. There’s a conversation to be had about the quality and originality of storytelling in video games and why gamers are so quick to praise mediocre narratives, but I dunno if glib one-paragraph summaries of “types” of video game stories (with no examples!) do much to advance that conversation.