MudMan

Man, TED talks suck.

That guy scammed you into learning a conlang with the excuse that it does something that all languages do and nobody is even telling you.

Just learn a romance language if you want access to a family of concepts that will carry over easily, friend. It comes with the bonus of being able to talk to people.

Anyway, I’m often light on personal info here, but I’m in a bilingual territory, learned English as a kid, the basics of a couple others through life stuff and I get a few more through osmosis because all languages do that Esperanto trick.

Meeeeh, I’m with you on some bits, not so much in others.

I agree that controller design was much, much better on consoles. I agree that we didn’t understand the technical limitations that made computer action games so much worse. I remember at best we could tell when a game was “fast” or not, but had no concept of framerate, and we were disproportionately obsessed with parallax scrolling but didn’t parse the value of smooth scrolling nearly as much.

But design wasn’t universally bad at all, we’ve just refocused on different things over time, so the list of games that hold up does not line up with what was exciting at the time at all.

I can play Eye of the Beholder right now and have fun. That’s up there with modern entries on that genre today. I can play Lemmings and have fun. I can play Monkey Island or Loom and be absolutely delighted. Civ 1 is simplistic but the core of what’s good in the series is there. Ditto for Sim City. I can play Another World or Prince of Persia, that’s a genre playing to the strenghts of that hardware.

It’s just at the time we were all freaking out about Gods instead, which is barely playable. Or about Dizzy, which is shallow and inscrutable. It was all happening at once and nobody had an understanding of why things were different from other things. It was a beautiful mess and we mostly didn’t even realize.

To keep it on topic, writing game reviews at the time must have been impossible. Nobody knew what they were talking about, and those who did were making games, not writing about them. We couldn’t tell what good looked like on that area, either.

Hah. That’s what you get for playing on a closed system instead of copying computer disks and tapes like us normal people.

I certainly cared a lot more about that cost in the 16 bit era when I was on a console instead, but by that time there were fancy things like VHS tapes with footage of games and demo kiosks and stuff.

But all through the 8 bit era over here there weren’t ads for games anywhere. Not on TV, not anywhere else. Today we’d say magazines were about discoverability. Without them you were limited to whatever was on the cover or the back of the box. It was a crapshoot. At least in reviews you got some screenshots and a description, distorted as it could be.

And it’s not like I was immune to that, either. I had my nose glued to the computer shop every other day staring at Barbarian or Space Ace, which barely count as games by modern standards. I don’t think I ever thought to question whether playing them was any good. That barely felt like the point.

That is also all tinged by it being a formative period and growing up and so forth, so most of us are unreliable narrators, I suppose.

It did the thing reasonably for the time and the context, I can tell you that first hand.

The set of values was just different early on and so was the purpose of reviews.

It’s weirder to me that the audience consensus ended up being that game reviews are meant to be consumer advocacy, like they’re crash test reports for cars or something. I find that depressing. I’ve always gotten mad when reviewers tell you whether a game is “worth your time” or “worth your money”. What do you know of my time and how I want to use it? Or what value I put in money?

Ideally art criticism is about finding a view on a piece of work, an intellectual framing for it, and sharing it with the audience, and there was a brief time of sheer hubris where a few critics thought that was more or less what they were doing.

And then influencers happened and streamers became a thing and now it’s something else. A bit of community curation, maybe.

In the 80s and 90s? It was targeted marketing for a thing that nobody knew about. You didn’t read a review to know if a game was good, you read it to know that it existed, whether it did anything technical that was exciting and perhaps if it did the thing that the arcade game you already knew was doing. A four star review was often on the basis of “sprites big”, and we were all fine with that.

You are assuming the reviews have any bearing on whether I want to play the game. This is a risky assumption.

When Cyberpunk was busted and everybody was hating that’s what prompted me to jump in. I went and got a PS4 physical version of the 1.0 last-gen release when I could find one on sale, even thought I primarily played the game on PC. It’s one of my favorite gaming artifacts. I like it more than any collector’s edition nonsense.

Also, what reviews? I don’t know if I know what “reviews” for videogames even mean anymore.

Anyway, to answer your actual question, if there is a discount at launch (which is increasingly a thing, which is kind of sad) or a decent preorder bonus I can prepurchase. I don’t mind. Otherwise I just get things when I get things.

I am aggressively hoping that this also means they release them on GOG like they did with early PC ports. It is genuinely why I’ve been holding out on most recent Sony ports (and Yakuza games, Sega, I did notice).

You could download games from multiple publishers years before Valve did it, too. Doesn’t mean Valve didn’t come up with the first, largest digital distribution platform for games that was then the template for every first party (and most of the digital media distribution in other media industries).

Best I can do for you is let you have that and agree that piracy invented it and Valve monetized it, which is actually worse?

Well, yeah, but people say they won’t pay 150 bucks for a game, so that stable 60 dollar price had to come from somewhere.

Honestly, it’s a lot of whiplash to see people paint this as a big corporate conspiracy and then turn around to defend Valve who, let’s not forget, invented the whole idea. It’s not like chain gaming retailers were a particularly strong force for good, either, but they did pay wages to more people than Steam, I guess.

It’ll be very interesting to see how much of this is people walking away from the Switch, coming back to the Switch 2 or just… you know, only ever playing Fortnite and Minecraft for their entire lives. The issues here are bigger and not a Sony conspiracy to steal trucker wages (although there’s that, too).

I don’t. Don’t much give a damn what Americans think, either, assuming there’s a distinction to be made there.

At this point I’m camp decoupling. If they want their nationalism so bad they can have it. Quietly, if at all possible.

It is definitely standard MO, and both press and online chatter are letting them get away with it, with no indication that will ever change so far.

I mean, US conservatives are still mocking the French as cowardly, collaborationist and militarily ineffective on account of WW2, so if any of them need a ladder to get down from any high horses they may be stuck on I think I have one in the back.

The conversation is still about this clip and not the actual policy, though.

Which I’m sure pisses Trump off, so there is that, but it maybe shows the press hasn’t learned anything. And it’s too late for the US, but there is still a far right surge to contain back in civilization, so it’s about time they figure it out.

Note that I’m not including the UK there, Labour government or not. That BBC headline is at least as shocking as the event itself.

A bit too optimistic, but hey, at least it’s a post pointing people at GOG, which has otherwise been losing big publisher support (SEGA and Sony used to put some big games there and don’t anymore, for instance).

I’m also not sure that the big failures of prominent games as a service are an indication of a return to appreciating ownership. I’m afraid it may be rather that the established genre leaders are taking all the oxygen out of that space, just as it happened for causal mobile F2P games a while ago.

If the perception makes players more likely to give up on their forever games and go back to buying piecemeal experiences they get to keep indefinitely I’d call that very good news, but I’ll need a bit more evidence before I declare myself optimistic on that subject.

We really don’t talk enough about how the worst rated game of the Tomb Raider reboot from the B studio for the series ended up being the default benchmark for gaming for the better part of a decade.

Good for Eidos Monteal. Guardians of the Galaxy deserved better, too.

And the game itself was made by a Canadian, while we’re at it.