Carighan

Carighan, 3 days ago

Lynxes are such majestic animals. 😍

Carighan, 3 days ago

Costs 16.99 here. Which locale is this in?

Carighan, 4 days ago

Oooh, finally a sale on the Shadow Gambit DLC. Time to get both, I heard a lot that while Yuki is of course the “cooler” DLC since well, it’s Yuki, the other one is mechanically smarter as the new unit is overpowered but also quite different.

On that note, cannot recommend Shadow Gambit enough. It’s the perfection of the Commandos / Shadow Tactics / Desperados formula.

Carighan, 5 days ago

Quite odd that this is supposed to come to Switch just about when the next console will probably release. I wonder whether this will be the switchover (ha!) title akin to Twilight Princess or Breath of the Wild.

Carighan, 5 days ago

It’s great just to see it exist. And not every game needs to reinvent the wheel, especially when the series hasn’t had a game in 15 years.

Plus it’s a MetroidVania. Well, kinda the MetroidVania, or half of it. Trying too much with it would feel weird IMO because I’d want the two grandfathers to focus more on the central tenets, not some inventive genre-spinoffs.

Carighan, 5 days ago

Finally got around to playing Oxenfree II after finishing Dave The Diver. Slow progress as I’m getting distracted left and right and center by other games, but I like how they kept the semi-creepy atmosphere from Oxenfree. Really neat presentation, and I love the voice actress for Riley, she did great work.

Just wish the game had more characters than me and my sidekick, atl east so far.

Carighan, 5 days ago

This recycles the graphics from the Link’s Awakening remake, for which it was already divisive, yeah.

OTOH, it’s a great way to make it look teensy-tiny, especially with the built-in tilt-shift.

Carighan, 6 days ago

Yeah that’s the point of the video.

He’s not wrong, Valve does have a lot of power over the PC gaming market. Worryingly so. But Hi-Rez of all possible asshole companies with an asshole boss should be very very quiet about such subjects.

Carighan, 6 days ago

Yeah but that game is either (depending on how you view early access) woefully unfinished and shat out in such an incomplete state, or not released yet and possibly years away from release.

Carighan, 7 days ago

I mean considering that single skins cost 20 in Overwatch or Dead by Daylight, 7 for an actual mission is almost generous.

Fuck gaming is fucked…

Carighan, 8 days ago

Certainly not the players, given current costs - where Steam is virtually always cheaper than elsewhere.

Carighan, 8 days ago

Of course it is.

All those large online action/claim sites are commercial in underlying nature. When you saw all the small farmers protest in Germany it was primarily driven as an action by about 5 large farming conglomerates because they are the ones getting ~85% of the grant money that was being cut. The whole point of the cut was to not funnel money that was supposed to go to small farmers to large megacorps after all. Who in turn instrumentalized the small farmers to protest it.

Probably what’s going on here, too. You can bet somewhere deep deep down, this is something Tim Sweeney cooked up.

Carighan, 8 days ago

Even if you believe that all privately owned capital is intrinsicly evil, you still ought to go after companies from most to least problematic within a specific category, no?

That is, for digital storefronts, start with the likes of Epic or in a broader digital gaming space in general, Microsoft or Ubisoft. Go after Steam when you’ve cleaned up the rapists, backroom dealers and collusionists.

Carighan, 10 days ago

Oh that’s awesome! It took a long time, but they’ve been asked for a universal menu and they actually did it. Nice! 👍

Carighan, 11 days ago

Wow, an actual new Mana game. Looks quite rough from the trailer but going to keep an eye on it. If the dress-spheres, sorry, class-changes, work mid-fight I could see myself enjoy that combat system.

Carighan, 11 days ago

I genuinely did, either. Not actually making fun of it. Everyone hated X-2, and there I was seemingly having a better time with it than with X!

Carighan, 12 days ago

All types of blisters, whether this box type or the one that needs firefighter grade pneumatic cutters to open, ought to be banned entirely. Even medical applications no longer use them!

Carighan, 12 days ago

Ha, 460k to create a modern huge scope game. Uh huh. Very trustworthy KS this is.

Carighan, 12 days ago

Yeah, Daggerfall was cool. I can’t really tell nowadays whether it impressed me more than Arena did or not because obviously the first one got me when I was younger and it was my first experience of an open adventure game, constrained as it was.

Carighan, 13 days ago

“Fun” doesn’t pay C-suite bonuses or shareholder payouts. Ain’t nobody got a reason to work on that!

Carighan, 12 days ago

I did!

It’s … actually damn good. I know, I know.

Okay so caveat first: It is just Far Cry wearing a Pandora mask. That’s it. I’d say it’s even slightly less than that because they had to thin some mechanics to make space to fit the theme a bit more.

But, that theme? It… it makes it work! Even the mechanics being watered down works, because making it fit the theme just ends up being more important. Yeah, you play this for playing on Pandora. But fuck does the game sell this well! Incredibly well. I found myself just stalking the jungle (or plains, or forest, of which the plains are the weakest but still incredibly beautiful) half the time, genuinely doing the grindathon entirely willingly, just because of the lush atmosphere the game presents and how it feels to be roaming in this alien nature.

Plus, I played Horizon Forbidden West right after this, and while I give HFW that it has much higher fidelity overall and is really pretty, the actual jungle and forest in particular are leaps and bounds above it in Avatar. You can notice the artists focused their entire effort on that, and even at daytime it looks amazing. Nighttime and they did the bioluminsensce we know from the movies incredibly well.

So erm… recommended? In a weird way? It’s really just Far Cry: Pandora, but it turns out that despite not expecting to, that’s kinda what I wanted? 😅

(Caveat though: I don’t think it’s worth €70. However given how much I liked it, €50 or so seems perfectly adequate.)

Carighan, 13 days ago

And it’s a nothingburger even for a teaser. Peak Ubisoft.

Carighan, 14 days ago

Hrm, not sure what to make of this.

From a vibes-level, this is “We got Wolfenstein at home”, UK edition.

Carighan, 14 days ago

IMO, the ex-DLC developers Deck Nine (who are doing this) do a far better job with LiS True Colors evoking the feelings and moods of LiS1 than the actual devs did with LiS2 or Tell Me Why.

So to me, this is maximum hype.

Carighan, 14 days ago

This isn’t Dontnod doing this, but Deck Nine (Dontnod no longer owns the rights to the LiS name). So after how well True Colors worked, no, I don’t think it’s that. Was my first thought too though. 😅

Carighan, 14 days ago

Ah yeah I remember that. Did we ever hear whether it was actually one dev and they caught them and got rid of them, or whether that was the cover story?

Carighan, 14 days ago

Yeah sadly absolutely no clue so far.

Although, to be honest, that just means I’m neutral so far. Could also be awesome. The vibe is definitely there and unlike South of Midnight, they do their low-FPS motion well here by contrasting it against the super-smooth camera.

Carighan, 14 days ago (edited 14 days ago)

Yeah it seems like a remaster. Or more specifically via a re-implementation as a sort-of official mod for Age of Empires 3 (thanks for the correction) I imagine, and judging from the graphics.

Excited! This bodes really well for AoM2.

Carighan, 14 days ago

Oh, 3 even not 4. TY

Carighan, 14 days ago

This looks… fantastic. Especially from a small studio. Love the setting they’re going for, something quite fresh.

Carighan, 14 days ago

Probably done with the console version I’d assume.

Carighan, 14 days ago

Wow this looks bad.

Really, really, really bad.

I mean sure, maybe the game turns out fantastic, but after a trailer that was apparently done by the Forspoken team with some consulting by Marvel and Fortnite people, I have exactly 0 hope for this.

Carighan, 14 days ago

Yeah the jokes bring entirely unfunny of the one part that feels fitting.

Carighan, 14 days ago

This is explicitly meant to be an mtx vehicle so yeah, no way it won’t be ruined by them.

Carighan, 17 days ago

And the worst is, the C-suites get to fuck shit up, reap massive bonuses, and never suffer any con-S-quences when inevitable their way of running the company causes shit like this to happen.

Carighan, 18 days ago

It’s becaue they allow you to sync all save games to the cloud if you want to, and you can naturally end up with a lot of them.

Carighan, 18 days ago

On Steam it’s per-game configured by the devs, no? Crypt of the Necrodancer tells me it has nearly 100GB space left, while Deep Rock Galactic says it’s capped at ~85MB.

Carighan, 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

Geezus fucking hell, why did I watch the clip?

That’s disgusting. I would argue two things need to happen across the board:

• Companies need to collect IRL data if you want to have access to text/voice chat, verify them, and in situations such as these, hand them to the authorities. Yeah it’s a tricky data protection problem, but these would be legally actionable threats IRL, they should not be let off the hook just because it was done online.
• More importantly, companies themselves should be on the hook for failing to act. That is, if you want to provice text or voice chat or something, but also do not want to invest enough money to moderate these spaces, then you should be legally liable under the same logic as why the cases should be given to the police in the first place, you’re aiding and abetting such threats. I suspect we’ll very very quickly either see way stricter moderation (good) or the end of text/voice chat in many games (not ideal, but if they cannot be moderated, then so be it).

Carighan, 18 days ago

Did you click through to the actual clip?

It’s not that I entirely disagree, but it’s not a black-vs-white thing. Some ribbing is understandable, after all it’s a competitive environment. But the explicitly misogynist, hateful, threatening and illegal needs to be harshly dealt with, to make players understand that it’s an absolutely 0 tolerance police and you will fuck yourself up if you try.

No player should have to go through having to shrug off rape threats.

Learn how to block people and move on with your life.

That’s what we want the game makers to do, yes.

Carighan, 18 days ago

Again, did you click through and watch the actual clip? Rape threats are against the law in many/most jurisdictions.

Carighan, 18 days ago

If you can play from say the UK, and you pay money for the game or access to it’s Internet or components, they are doing business in the UK, and hence their business, business interactions and everything are subject to UK laws.

Seriously, we let companies get away with too much. If you provide public spaces, you are responsible for some degree of safety in/on them, and that includes certain personal safety, protection from libel, slander and threats. Likewise if you do business in a country and can make money from customers there, you are responsible for adhering to those countries laws. Want to do business in >200 countries? Yeah, you now have to adhere to >200 sets of laws.

Now you could say “But it’d suck if so many companies no longer release their products globally!”. Sure. OTOH, it sucks much more that companies shirk responsibilities constantly. Companies are supposed to be like persons. So like a person, require them to adhere to local laws and show at least some degree of decency.

And no, it’s ridiculous to assume someone should take steps to protect themselves. It’s a failure of society that we have to do that for something as deranged as online rape or death threats. Because we let both the aggressor and the conductor get away with it, exactly in the way you do, by immediately putting the onus onto the victim.

Carighan, 18 days ago

Yeah fair enough. Good point. Legal consequences for online activity are always a tricky subject because of privacy issues. Can’t trust the very companies I would like to be on the hook for not taking safety serious to in turn take safety of data serious.

(And of course too many people think “it’s like the high seas”, ignoring that those have more laws than many countries and hence why you need marine lawyers if you do shipping 😅)

Carighan, 19 days ago

They have 1300 people? To make mtx and killers for DbD?! What?

Carighan, 19 days ago

Definitely, each room and mission seems to be dedicated purpose-built puzzle rooms.

Carighan, 19 days ago

Oh thank you! I was thinking of that but absolutely could not recall the name when making the OP.