crispy4000

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Hopefully the main show keeps on its upward trajectory. It's great that there's something centralized, gives more games a chance to stand out instead of trying to make it to Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo's.

Time Spent: 20 minutes Rating: **½ Into the Breach mixed with a dash of Final Fantasy Tactics visuals. I'm not super familiar with the former, only having tried it once or twice. But this game has a so-called "shade" mechanic that kind of kills the fun. In essence, enemies that are in range to hit your at the end of their turns will still deal you damage. You can only avoid it if you kill these enemies, or use a character with a stealthy maneuver to avoid it. Not a fan. Oh, and some enemies will respawn several times.

Summer Game Fest: Fri June 7th, 2pm PT / 5pm ET Sony: Thurs, May 30th 3pm PT / 6pm ET (thread) Microsoft: Sun June 9th, 10am PST / 1pm ET (followed by CoD deep dive) Nintendo: Confirmed for June, likely to focus on Switch games Ubisoft: Mon June 10th, 12pm PT / 3pm ET THQ Nordic: Aug 2nd EA / Capcom / SquareEnix / etc: ??? Next Indie Direct: June 1st (thread) Best Next Indie Summer Showcase: June 4th, 8am (thread) OTK Games Expo: June 4th Guerilla Collective Online Showcase: Thurs June 6th, 10am PT / 1pm ET (thread) Access-Ability Summer Showcase: Fri June 7th, 8am PT / 11am ET Day of the Devs: Fri June 7th, after Summer Game Fest (thread) Devolver: Fri June 7th, 5pm PT / 7pm ET Wholesome Direct: Sat June 8th, 9am PT / 12pm ET Future Games Show: Sat June 8th, 12pm PT / 3pm ET PC Games Show: Sat June 9th, 1pm PT / 4pm ET Latin American Games Showcase (thread) Women-Led Games Future of Play: TBA Upload VR: TBA Level 5: TBA Trebeca: TBA, but games are listed here, and will have demos. Includes a post-release talk on FF7 Rebirth: The 2024 Summer Gaming Showcase Schedule WWW.GAMEINFORMER.COM Keep track of every big livestream happening throughout the summer.

Tried a little bit of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. The movement reminds me of a good platform fighter, even if the parry system is a bit too telegraphed for my liking. And I can appreciate the fact that it was seemingly designed as a last-gen game, so that it runs blazing fast on everything. Still I might not be in the mood for it yet, for whatever reason. I think I had a little more fun starting up Axiom Verge recently. Can't really put my finger on why. Maybe the frequent cutscenes at the start of PoP.

Jez actually pulled together a fantastic article on the situation here. One of your biggest cheerleaders weaponizing his knowledge of your corporate structure and institutional failures to call foul. Ouch. This just made everything said about exclusivity in the roundtable update pointless.

I probably spent more time looking at the few screenshots they released than their dumb CG trailer, which I scrolled through looking for gameplay.

Yes, in a way? Triangle Strategy was but only for 6 months: the PC port hit in Fall, not far from to the other games they offloaded. Octopath II was an everything but Xbox thing in the beginning.

The argument the FFXVI team was making at least is that they could release sooner focusing on just one platform. But that's clearly not a tradeoff the rest of the industry feels is justified anymore. And it's come back to bite them with how far the PC release still is. It better not be EGS timed exclusive again. If so, they really don't get it. But there's lots of dumb short term thinking in the industry lately, so I wouldn't be surprised.

Don't forget Triangle Strategy, Octopath Traveller 2 and Crisis Core Reunion. And all these were multiplatform too.

Time Spent: 20 minutes Rating: *½ All style and no substance. Actually the style isn't that great either outside of the occasionally slick cutscenes or 3d effect. Gameplay-wise its like those old hoverboard TMNT arcade stages got turned into a racing game, with extreme rubberbanding and much shittier, looser controls. Hitting barriers doesn't even make you crash, but slow down a tiny bit. You then take cash you picked up at random for repairs between races, even though there's no health bar when you're on your hoverbike. This is really just a bad game concept marked by even worse execution.

They kept Games Pass PC pricing lower than console because it wasn’t picking up in the same way. That was before we got news that console subscriptions were flattening.

Microsoft always needed console sales: without leverage on PC, it’s where they could best push any initiative forward to change the industry. I don’t know when it became such a talking point that Games Pass was their only concern, but it’s borne out to be folly. It’s like those who said Nintendo stoped caring about gamers during the Wii era. You know, after launching it with a new Zelda. The base is who evangelizes.

I still have a shrine or two to wrap up I believe. Maybe at some point. Underground in this game is just too large and pointless for me to want to explore the whole thing.

I have little doubt he hears things. It’s more that the information may not be current or reliable.

And yet FF7 Rebirth underperforms. Still solidly sitting as the #1 rated game of the year.

@Xbob42 You forgot the Kingdom Hearts series never making it off the Epic Games Store on PC. That’s an embarrassment for the ages.

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: *** Good silly fun. Kill enemies, destroy terrain, save 'bros,' rinse and repeat. I like the differing playstyles for each character, but wish the game didn't chose for you, some are way better than others. It feels very loose, which is both good and bad. There's no precision to this, at least not in the opening stages.

Humble Choice less so, as a paid bundle of Steam keys. They usually lead with a headliner or two that while older than on Games Pass, is essentially where they go next. Even on Epic you get a free well known gem every once and a while, Guardians of the Galaxy being the biggest in recent memory. Old or obscure doesn’t mean bad. We’re getting to the point where several of them were Games Pass highlights, like Sable and Call of the Sea.

I won’t argue that the breadth is more and more substantial. My point wasn’t to say that they offer something superior. Just that there’s so much free stuff or dirt cheap stuff everywhere on PC it becomes harder to justify money on a rental library.

Yes, but also no? I think I have 90% of the Bethesda back catalog now acquired through those two. There’s clearly a pecking order, where the console subs get things first. Most things do trickle down to the others eventually, outside of some of the Japanese stuff.

I’m noticing that with 30fps games, more visual noise tends to help. Anything with motion blur, heavy post-processing, racing games, etc. You’re more likely to see distracting (ie: blocky) frame gen artifacting when you have movement against (relatively) solid colors or patterns. The ghosting is mostly pretty marginal by comparison, but you can see it if you look out for it. Tried a few games on Dolphin. Wind Waker got very distracting with all the breakup. Wave Race Blue Storm looks absolutely stunning though. Skies of Arcadia was somewhere in between with its artifacting, but damn does it feel great to finally run around in that game at a pseudo-60. It’s all about your tolerance I suppose, but it could be good in RPGs. I hear FFX’s PC port also doesn’t run at 60fps?

The recent update has apparently cleaned up most all the UI/text artifacting. I still see some around cursors in some games, but they have some options to mitigate it. It's more the other artifacting that is problematic, especially some bottom of the screen issues in 3rd person games. I suspect games with less than perfect frame pacing will also struggle a bit. I don't have a VRS display, so 30 to 60fps is the only use case for me. I bought it mainly to play Okami, wasn't disappointed.

Oh, and just to mention it, this is supposedly better for frame gen in games that lack it than AMD’s AFMF, in most cases.

Lossless Scaling's newest update is nuts. I bought in ($7) after reading about it. It's not perfect at low base framerates. I can occasionally see ghosting around my character as the camera spins, warping near the bottom of the screen, or heavier artifacts depending on the game. It does this thing where certain elements it can't seem to perfectly interpolate feel like they update at a reduced rate. And input lag definitely feels like 30fps, no solution there. Needing to run in borderless fullscreen likely doesn't help. But on a handheld or old PC (like my 1060 vintage), this is potentially game changing for certain titles. I use Nvidia Control Panel to put games at 30fps, then scale up to 60fps with LSFG 2.0. Motion blur options in games also help reduce artifacting I find. It's really the games with 30fps locks that this has the best use case for, at least for low fps gaming. I've tried Okami, its wild how much more bearable it makes the game now. I was just complaining about Nuclear Throne not having a 60fps option on PC. It works pretty great with 2d games too, not as clean as a genuine 60fps, but very close, and much preferred to 30fps, which is the point. It should work in emulators too.