shinymcshine

Look, I'm a plant not a flower....

Haven't played this for years, but it's pretty hugely disappointing news for some:

Is that 1m copies in 24 hrs of a single player offline RPG, in the same week as EA said DA Veilguard underperformed (in sales) as it didn't have an online element.....?

Played the first one - was okay, but the sequel just sounds like an awful lot of the same (which will clearly  appeal to some, but having to hard skill learn the lock picking and archery mechanics all over again probably means I'll give this one a miss).

I understand the point you're making - but is it really that fundamentally different than things such as:

- Autotuned music vocals 

- A music track created by mixing vocals from various takes in a recording session

- Extensive use of green screen & CGI

- Hollywood musicals that used uncredited singers, passed off for many years, as being performed by the actor in the star role

- the use of virtual appearances of dead

actors (e.g. Peter Cushing & Carrie Fisher in SW movies)

So I'm never convinced if a industry wants to take a stance against 'AI' why they might still tolerate the above ?

Nearly broke the 1m points for a single hand (950k) as I ended up with a x3000 multiplier on a 10/8 ante endless run....

Party based RPGs : when you build up potential party of 12 or so companions as you do various quests (inc. their personal plotlines) but when it comes to the save the world / universe final battle you can only take 3-5 with you - and the rest just stay in camp in a big sulk rather than popping up as NPCs to actually help you out !

Enemy placements - specifically notable but not exclusive to Tomb Raider and Uncharted.

' Hey boss, reporting for work, what's today's job?'

' Right you need to abseil down that cliff, shimmy along the narrow path, swing across the gorge, and there's a little alcove with some boxes, that you need to guard in case anyone tries to steal them'

' Sounds unlikely, and a lot of effort to get there, must be valuable '

'Not really, just a few empty crates and a slack handful of ammo and a couple of bandages..'

' Okay, I better get moving, since I only get paid the mercenary rate once I'm on site don't I...?'

' Damn right soldier, have a good day!'

I suppose I just expected with Xbox Storage management system enabled, that it'd balance out installation and saved games between the internal SSD and the expansion SSD so it didn't create issues such as I experienced.

And that the self help instructions might direct you to check whether storage space might be the cause of the issue.

Bought and downloaded 3 games in the Xbox 3 for 2 sale the other week and went to play one of them, 'Maid of Sker', for the first time today (Series S).

Only it didn't work - I clicked on the icon, and screen went black then returned to home screen. So I went through the Xbox help screens, checked there was no system outages, that it was showing as purchased etc and finally uninstalled and reinstalled.

Still didn't work.

Oh well, I'll try another game that I bought at the same time 'Cultist Simulator' - this came up with error message - 'insufficient space on storage' - which seemed weird, since I'd bought a SSD Expansion card just before Christmas.....

So I checked my storage space - and despite having checked the box previously to allow Xbox to manage storage between Internal and Expansion SSD - the internal capacity was at 99.5% full, with external at 5%. So I think it just wasn't leaving any sufficient cache to allow the games to run !

So I just manually transferred a bunch of things from internal storage to expansion card and everything is fine ....

Well apart from that clearly the 'let Xbox managed my storage' isn't really up to much (there must be a general rule about storage caches, so why didn't it just start using Expansion card way before it hit that?) - and that none of their self help check steps actually suggests checking storage capacity and free space.

Oh well, it was a learning experience - and all is good now.

Article about the Video Game History Foundation and a move to create a digital archive of video games magazines from yesteryear.

I love a nostalgic look back at old games, reviews and features - but as I often found with Retrogamer it's then quite problematic to actually get hold of many of the actual games to play (a problem that's not been addressed within the industry, even if more recent titles) - so maybe that ought to be addressed by publishers / licence holders etc too.

Then again nostalgia does often come with a warm rose tinted glow, so maybe those gaming memories of the past are, in many cases, best left as just memories.

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/jan/28/video-game-history-foundation-digitised-archive-games-magazines

Okay now here's the 'problem' - I just can't stop playing this - not in a hyper addicted every minute of the day sense, but every time I have a gaming session it's Balatro.....

Completed another couple of Challenges too (On a Knifes Edge, Mad World)

Is there a logical time to stop (aside from 100% completion or hitting a 'brick wall' .....?)

I don't know, so long as I feel I'm still enjoying it I'll continue....

South of Midnight and Clair:Obscur are (unsurprisingly) the ones that appealed to me most - wonder if they'll come straight to GP ?

So if my ranking was:

DA:O loved it, played through many times (inc Awakenings & DLC)

DA2 liked it, played it through a couple of times, characterisation was good, but combat & character/inventory management felt dumbed down

DA:I had some high points, but disliked just  holding down single button for most combat, way too much focus on collectibles in large area, quite liked the war table, but only played through once

Would Veilguard be for me ?

Did the third challenge this morning "Rich Get Richer" and it was pretty straightforward, just making sure I kept sufficient $ not to adversely affect chip scoring - on reflection I was probably a bit too cautious with spending money - but completed it on first attempt.

Now, noting I've got several challenges still to unlock I'll be slightly disappointed if one isn't called "Chip's Challenge" as a nod to the maze puzzle game.

That Directors Cut is handy, but I got this one just before the final ante on one run, which was great as the final ante boss was a $300000 massive blind - negated and reduced to $100000 thankfully !

Maybe this ends up as Switch 2 getting remasters of PS/Xbox (previous gen) exclusives to enable PS5 / Series X/S (and beyond) to get future AAA console exclusives....

Yep, seems to be quite useful (on NS its ZL I think).

I'm getting a little annoyed with the length of time it takes to get to the final blind (best part of an hour most times) esp. then if it's rules are completely restrictive to your build so you have little or no chance of winning*.

Also I really wish there was an undo (or some sort of intelligent check mark before inadvertently submitting a hand that might screw your build (e.g. I had the Ride the Bus joker (don't score on face cards) upto a +15 multiplier, then accidentally hit submit rather than discard on a pair of queens which then zeroed that multiplier (after 15 hands of not playing face cards.......).

Anyway, completed a couple of the Challenges and will no doubt continue for a while, as moaning aside, I do enjoy it.

*No unique to Balatro as its just as applicable to many deck builders (or maybe my skill at playing deck builders ...)

I think my biggest flaw is not card counting (i.e. keeping track of what I've already used or discarded) then I keep hanging on a certain distribution of cards to come out that either can't or are statistically remote.

So I should at least check the in-game deck tracker more during play.

Remembered doing something along this theme before, and mine still stands (albeit my dad is no longer around).

Pretty sure parts of that same arguement applies equally to music, TV shows, movies etc.

Lethal Bizzle - Babylon's Burning The Ghetto & Selfridge's Girl Not on Myspace, were good for the gym too

Use to love Outkast, so maybe add - Humble Mumble and Ain't No Thang

1 hour ago, HandsomeDead said:

I think there's too much fretting over the name.  It's a numeric progression which worked for PlayStation pretty well all this time and it looking kinda similar doesn't stop people getting confused about a phone upgrade.

TBF they didn't give us too much else to talk about aside from; the Name; Joycons; and MK9...... 🤣

10 hours ago, one-armed dwarf said:

Well it's called the Switch 2, I think that's as clear as they can be there. I do think it's a hard sell, but normies will buy the iPhone 15 so the barrier isn't lack of knowledge it's whether it matters

I think that'd be fine if they hadn't released a NS 1.1 (battery improved etc) NS 1.5 (NS Lite) and NS 1.75 (OLED) - I know Nintendo routinely go down this route of iterative improvements to their consoles - but NS 2 doesn't sound enough like an Upgrade (to new capabilities) it's more like the latest Update (improving what's already there) - so I think it would have been clearer had they used a different name and branding.