Oh OK! Yeah, local network is a whole different experience because you have a great degree of control.

Our internet infrastructure is probably in some ways better [*] than the US or Canada, based on my experiences living and travelling in North America, but it seems if you have WiFi involved anywhere in the chain, it’s difficult to get a good experience.

• In the sense of a near universal median experience, we don’t have the high end stuff, the Verizon telecom service in some rural areas is impressive, but I will speculate the majority of households can get gigabit fiber for $15/month and mobile access is universal, cheap and competitive (but we don’t have 5G).

I believe Games Workshop has a more open policy towards licensing.

I would imagine Star Wars game licensing would be more strictly controlled, both in terms of content and target market.

I tried that when I was in another city for a few months. It was all right, but I was on WiFi 5/AC and I live in a country where buildings have thick walls and sometimes there would be issues with streaming, even though I had gigabit on both sides and my desktop was/is on ethernet.

And I play strategy games, which from my understanding are a better fit for streaming than most single player genres.

I found myself playing older indie games that I missed (actually found a lot of cool stuff).

I spent my childhood with a desktop (mid 90s to mid 2000s) then I had gaming notebooks until 2018 or so, except for a 3 year period in beginning of the 2010s.

A gaming laptop (or even a mid-weight laptop with an eGPU) is always a compromise (in both directions).

A “gaming desktop” can generally do so much more than just gaming. I did video editing and encoding on my gaming laptop, you can make it work, it’s slow and the heat noise can get annoying (versus a desktop that’s possible to make quite even under load).

And with some ML video stuff like Topaz Video (*) even a powerful desktop can struggle, I can’t image using Topaz video on any laptop. Especially any tasks with 4K using complex algorithms beat my poor desktop to pulp (5800X, 3080, 64 GB, not the latest and greatest, but no slouch).

(*) I’ve successfully upscaled older video footage (586x320) from mid the 2000 by 4x along with X4 frame interpolation without it looking overly fake and being pretty decent quality. You can even do complex scenes like public events as long as you have source 720p footage. It’s like magic.

Also large storage is a pain with laptops. You really need a fast SSD with at least 2TB (it’s also good to have a secondary SSD) and another 10 TB+ HDD storage. This type of setup is difficult with a laptop.

For a second I thought this was Postal 2 Community Edition.

Steam shows ads for launches on startup and both platforms suffer from social media influence.

I haven’t seen the startup ads in what seems like a decade. I don’t see a big deal with content creators providing reviews (and commentary), the key is finding content creators who are independent and focus on the needs of their viewers/readers.

Doesn’t sound like the Disney-themed game is going well.

Their PR rep seems to confirm (surprised at the relative honesty) this:

"Liz Markman, the senior director of global communications at Epic, said Bloomberg’s reporting is “not reflective of the ambitions of the Disney collaboration. We are building a new games and entertainment universe of Disney experiences.”

I play indie games and in more niche genres, so I am somewhat outside of mainstream sensibilities, but is there much of a market for a Disney-themed extraction shooter?

Seems like a bad fit, but what do I know.

On one hand, I would prefer if this was done automatically, on the other hand I encountered a rather interesting error the first time I tried it.

I added this screenshot of a solar system colonization game:

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But this is not viable for every use case. If there is a major issue with my Bank account, I want to speak to person, period.

Specific actions have automated workflows is of a course a good thing.

Documentation is also good, but it often doesn’t account for edge cases or your unique situation. Not to mention, the majority of the public is not going have the desire to deal with documentation.

I actually tried to do this in the OG GoldSource, but I could never get them to move to the next map. This was on the early maps (office complex), I was too busy trying to stay alive in the later maps.

Why can’t they get a Steam/GOG/Windows Store Key for the games from the Luna store which will sunsetted? That seems like the reasons way forward if they don’t want to run the Luna storefront.

Or am I missing something? From my understanding, the article states that only “bring your own game” entries can be played on other platforms (of course they can, since the game are probably from Steam,/GOG etc.).

I personally don’t understand how people play RPGs on console. I don’t mean this in an arrogant or aggressive manner, back in the day (most of 2000s) consoles completely fucked the PC game market, but that’s not the case today.

These days it’s irrelevant, the market is so huge that one can play tons of unique PC only RPGs and it doesn’t matter what Obsidian or Bethesda are doing.

In context of RPGs, consoles make it difficult to have skills systems, include text, allow modding (I still play Fallout 1/2 and Arcanum every few years, more than a quarter of a century later) and do result in UI/UX inefficiency which in turn limits themes and approaches that can be used in world building.

One just has to look at VTMB 1 (computer focused) and VTMB (cross platform, but UI is console based and game design was console focused).

I got both Death Stranding and Heavy Rain for pretty cheap, but that was 5+ years after release.

I wouldn’t pay full price. if you waited for 3 years, you can wait some more for a better price. And unless you insist on top of the line blockbusters and are not interested in any thing else there is an infinite ocean of games with all sorts of concepts and new takes on existing formulas.

That being said, I guess if you want Spider Man, you can only get it from Sony? There are no “Arthropod-man” indie variants, are there? Or is that a no-no for US comics book (and games based on US comic books) fans?

They definitely want to sell hardware and have closed platforms built around their hardware.

But that’s not as easy to do as it was even 10 years ago.

The nature of gaming is changing and it’s more difficult to differentiate based on hardware alone. You have indie games which tend to be multi-platform, you have Roblox, Fortnite, PC specific games have also become more common.

And it’s difficult to manage hardware costs and show meaningful graphical quality improvements. Hardware subsidies in the first few years of a new console are basically not viable anymore.

Even Nintendo’s handheld dominance is being slowly challenged (their games are extremely expensive on a relative basis).

I don’t know if making the painting for this kind of game tedious and slow is a good idea. It’s authentic, but not everything needs to be authentic in a video game.

The review for Necronomicon: The Dawning of Darkness (2000) on Steam (91 positive, 116 negative) and on GOG (3.3 with 56 reviews) suggests it’s not total trash.

And it’s made by Microids, a relatively well known studio in the adventure games space. They made a bunch of early 3D euro-adventures starting from the early to mid 2000s including; the Syberia series, the Atlantis series, Amerzone (which recently saw a remake released).

My personal favourite is Post Mortem (2002), which is a bit formulaic, but I like the 1920s Paris setting.

A lot of their games are not on GOG and while you can find them without too much difficulty, I suspect some don’t run well and require modding. I am personally curious about Road to India: Between Hell and Nirvana; I like the setting, even if the main story seems somewhat cliche.

Not if there is no impact on your console platform if a given market segment would never spend money on your platform in the first place.

I bought Death Stranding and Heavy Rain on PC, I would not buy a Playstation just to play those 2 games.

It’s their call of course, I think the era of consoles as a siloed platform is slowly coming to an end.

Great game, but the PC port UI is comically bad and lazy. It so bad on 32 inch monitor.

Interesting to see Sony commit to what is essentially the classical PS2 style console model, when it’s increasingly looking less viable (rise of indie games, relative increase in PC share, inability to subsidize console devices, decreasing returns on graphical improvement costs).

I wonder why Sony didn’t go through with something like a 4-5 year delay before release on PC (it seems that was their plan). One would assume this would allow them to target two completely different parts of the market.

I am really curious if this decision will be explained (at least at high level) in their financial reporting or perhaps even in interviews.

I think the art style holds up pretty well even today. A strong creative direction, as well as integration of visuals with gameplay, story and atmosphere is what defined good graphics for me.

I would argue by that definition SimCity 4 (from 2003!) can hold its own against any modern city-builder: