Jacket_p

@ferryb001 That's a Google/Apple restriction I think as you can't bypass the storefronts for transactions or something.

@spiderman0616 It's because some people are so uninteresting and their life is such a void of joy that the only way they can feel anything is by trying to get people to react to them by being trolls just to get some glimmer of attention. It's playground console wars tedium.

"oooh I owned those nintendorks lol"

AI is excellent for boosting productivity and also help people realise their vision faster. Quicker prototyping and helping shapes creatives who don't have the skill to express their visions in art far better. It can help automater and speed up testing meaning less time in QA. It can HELP (it's so far from replacing proper developers it's unreal) developers get things done quicker, pick up mistakes and bugs sooner, validate code to ensure it's up to scratch. It's a fantastic tool if used right should drastically drop development costs and risks and actually help innovation and news ideas to be developed.

It's also great for making stupid photo's of your mates doing stupid things and making them look ridiculous (Gemini is probably the best at this).

Vibe coding is a joke. Great for very small stupid things. Absolutely useless for anything at scale.

Private software houses (non-gaming) are massively getting in on this. Anyone who doesn't is going to get left behind and will never be able to catch up. I'm not surprised it's happening in gaming.

Edit - I don't work in AI. I'm in Cyber Security. It's going to really make my life both easier and harder in the future...

@thiagofreire good idea. Reducing their revenue is a sure fire way to get a company to drop their prices when sales figures reduce. Because to get the money back from the outlay to make the game they'd have to charge more.

An terrible justification for your poor morals.

@VoidofLight Really?? Most people wouldn't even care about this. Even most gamers wouldn't care about this. It's a subset of a subset of people who'd be 'distracted'.

I mean. Come on, dude.

@VoidofLight I'm pretty sure there's more than one team working at the FBI and they can work on multiple things at once, y'know.

@RejectedAng3L I work in hosting. Keeping Windows up to date is fun enough but Linux is a whole other ball game. It's time, effort, monitoring, compliance etc. It's NOT just a cost of a single server. It's also making sure the code is compatible with new versions of the software AND the server - the version of Linux plus the platform it runs on like Java, PHP, Ruby. Each release needs to be tested, major system upgrades needs to be managed and that's without going in the database layer and that's a whole new layer of costs and fun.

Hosting is not cheap, people's time more expensive and you get to a point where you maintaining a legacy system becomes more cost that it's actually worth. For compliance to some standards you need to ensure that you're updating a patching things within a timescale. As soon as it become a pure drain on resources and finances a company is going to drop them. Sometimes you end up with a system which no-one actually knows how to maintain anymore when people move on from their jobs.

You get to a point where you are literally just throwing money away. It doesn't matter how much you make - if you keep making decisions which are potentially big costs to a business with no return on investment then...well...you probably should go and work for the public sector to be perfectly honest

Edit - it seems after a quick check they moved to AWS a while back so it's not even a one-off CAPEX costs - this is continual OPEX costs which just means a death by a thousand cuts keeping legacy systems going. You also get changed for data egress, storage, compute etc etc. It's not going to be cheap.

@RejectedAng3L Keeping servers running costs money, plus as new security flaws and vulnerabilites are found you need to update and eventually upgrade all online systems else you're a sitting duck to be hacked.

As you say. It's in no way feasible and people need to accept and learn that nothing is forever - things grow, decline and die. That's life. Sometimes it's your favourite pub where you spend your youth, the fields and countryside you played in as a child or online games.

@Geit_de If this was a problem we'd have seen it happen on previous consoles many, many times. I expect a one-way trust (client trust server, server does not trust client) would be in place among a myriad of other significant security measure.

Also Nintendo are just banning machines from using their online servers and servicesm NOT bricking them.

But I suspect you're 'just asking questions'

@PharoneTheGnome They ban your device from their online services, they don't brick your console.

@Kwyjibo_Kitsune I don't think you know what hyperbole means either...

@Kwyjibo_Kitsune I dont think you know the meaning of vaporware, dude.

@Suketoudara outrage generates clicks, innit.

Well. It did.

@Overzeal Yup. Also it's certainly not an 'instruction manual' either. It's really well put together and fun to play. I'm really enjoying it.

Already pre-ordered. Almost costs less than buying my wife a coffee. £8 is nowt these days.

Picked up Mario 3D World and Kirby cheap and the upgrade for the latter so will have plenty to mess around with along with Mario Kart once I get it.

@RubyCarbuncle Aye. I'm in the UK and full payment was taken. So we are both right i guess. Slan

@RubyCarbuncle they absolutely take full payment. Pre-ordered day after rhevdieect and the full amount came out.

Seems a decent price. Less than a pint in a lot of places. I'll grab it on launch for sure.

@SMJ I got Super Metroid for £75 in the 90s. I think that had a dev team of less than 20 people.

We've absolutely been spoiled.

I was really looking forward to this until the reviews. I had the original back in the day and loved it. Even completed it. Once you got used to the controls it was a fantastic game (although some platforming areas were painful I'll admit!). It had a big difficulty curve for sure.

Sounds like this has been a remake for the worse. I guess I'll stick with the OG version.

@N00BiSH I recently got the ROG Ally Z1 Extreme with Windows 11 on it. It's an incredible bit of kit and I've not touched my Switch for a while (I'll go back for sure as there's games to finish).

If Microsoft do a Surface type handheld at a good price which means you can play PC games then it could be onto a winner. They don't need to though as plenty of upcoming handhelds are using their OS and they'll get a cut anyway.

@N8tiveT3ch It's the hangover from the pandemic. Gaming boomed over lockdown, companies massively over hired to try and keep up. Lockdown finished and so did the boom. It happened outside of gaming - Devs were being hired on silly money - it was called the great resignation and smaller companies got screwed when loads of devs left for big money. To me seemed for clearly unsustainable salaries.

Turns out they were.

So end of boom, end of pandemic and people are gaming less plus cost of living so people are buying less luxury things like games...add in overstaffed companies with people on big money...and game development costs going nuts...

This was always coming unfortunately

AI is going to be key in reducing the costs and development times of games. It's going be a hugely useful tool that's a massive enabler. It can't come soon enough.

@Ryu_Niiyama as I said it my last comment it's because a lot went extra fat during '21. Also people got greedy and went for big wages rather than job sustainability

@garfreek a lot of tech companies over hired during the pandemic and there's been a steady reset since then. '21 was called the great resignation in smaller companies as bigger companies hoovered up staff. We lost nearly all of our dev team for quite stupid wages offered by other companies and it seemed even then it wouldn't be sustainable.

Turns out it wasn't. We've taken the some of the good ones back already.

@Wexter Yeah I agree. The look of Yenn was a little jarring at first but agree that the actor captures her very well. Ciri was spot on.

The writing was not after the first season.

The Wheel of Time seems to be quickly following the same path. Another shame as that starting really well too.

@HeadPirate the games are not the reason the books were translated to many other languages.

The Netflix series started well but poor writing really let it down. It's just not very good by the third season which is a shame as they had a really rich lore to pull from. Nothing to do with not being like the game or the books; it's just not great and a huge missed opportunity.

@ZeldaFan83 One Piece is a good example of how it should be done. Oda stopped Netflix messing around with it too much and said he'd stop it being released if he wasn't happy with it.

I liked it better when 'free to play' games were what you got on a cover tape/disk/CD on a magazine.

To be honest I liked it better when we had magazines and not the endless junk news cycle we have in gaming now.

/Old man shouting at clouds

Doesn't need it. Most casual gamers don't care. Most older gamers probably won't be that bothered because that's the way things were when moving generations. If it's not I'll just get another spare switch. Consoles last for years. I'd they didn't retro gaming wouldn't be that big.

A-murh-ri-kah!

The land of the lawyers and litigation.

And the lawyers are the only ones who win from things like this.

Fantastic game. Had it for both PC and Xbox360 and it's an absolute blast. Good story, top soundtrack and great fun to play. Certainly worth checking out.

Sad that it happens but it happens. Companies move on and need to change to stay relevant. Roles and structure change and some people can roll with it and some people can't.

Also gives a good chance to get rid of deadwood or problematic people.

Yep. Worth the price and £40 ain't much these days. You'll spend more on a night out and that won't last as long and you'll feel terrible the next day.

Still have the cartridge at my Dad's.

It's a game that's always stuck with me and had everything. I just need to hear the soundtrack and it takes me back to sitting up late playing the hell out of this.

A true SNES classic that was also no pushover! The Pure Land toom me absolutely ages to get past as it was a brutal jump in difficulty

Remember seeing and playing this in the local computer shop and it was ridiculous. And fun. And gory.

I'll be tempted to pick this up

@Sambuc ah man. Good luck.

You suggested people actually pay things instead of just getting them for free cos preservation and stuff.

(Or entitlement...)

They should get Naughty Dog to do them. I'm sure they've got to be experts at remakes and remasters by now.

The guy's 63 years old now. Why would he have to be involved in the remake or have to be told? He doesn't own the IP and made the game as part of his role at Square. Did a fantastic job and while we can admire and respect his work (and he's got some absolute gems in his CV) but we should be championing new blood and new people in the industry.

Looks good funs for families and people with friends. Well. In the real world anyway.

Guess the negativity from 'Gamers' online makes sense 😉

I'll probably pick it up for when I meet up with family and friends.

Got to see this on my honeymoon back in 2017. Hadn't heard of it before I saw it in the store. Impressive.

If it has split screen local 4 player and the stages from the PS1 I'm all in. Always preferred multiplayer over the campaign but then that was what Quake 2 was all about.

@brunojenso I did like the "it's not my fault it's Nintendo who make me do it"

Some paper thin justification there.

Piracy is wrong. You're not entitled to everything just because you want it. It's up to whoever holds the IP/copyright. Life's tough sometimes and you can't always get what you want.

Tempted to buy and play through Persona 5 again.

What a game. One of the greatest JRPGs of all time.

@Thirteen1355 then I'd expect you'd not begrudge paying for them or rewarding the developer of those games if they had such an impact. But you just got them for free so well done you.

To be fair maybe people prefer the Ubisoft-Clone exclusives from Sony with no building mechanics.

I've struggled getting into any of them really. The best open world game on the PS5 is Death Stranding imho.

Good article. The weapons breaking is great. Adds peril and causes you to think on your feet and keeps combat from getting stuck in a rut.

Agree that rupees in the older Zelda games became completely inconsequential at a certain point in the game. When you'd open a chest in Link to the Past and get a rupee you'd start to feel cheated.

Updated as I'm not an entitled cheat with no patience.

@MrLinkTathapast The US version of Phalanx is a good example of how to do this.