one-armed dwarf

Putain to this (end of Act 1 spoilers)

Edgar Wright tends to be solid tbh

According to the update in this thread they are, so it seems like we're going to be hearing about more cancellations/layoffs from this for a bit https://www.resetera.com/threads/publisher-for-upcoming-romero-games-title-cuts-funding-related-to-cuts-at-xbox-game-studios.1234857/ Edit like there's also rumours on bsky that Kojima's Jordan Peele game is getting cut as well, but just rumours

From reading articles about it, they keep bringing up the hands-off management style. Sort of sounds like all these failures now are cause of how decentralised they were, with each new acquisition making teams increasingly alienated from leadership. There'll no doubt be some properly informed postmortem in the next couple weeks I'd guess anyway. Cancelling Perfect Dark just seems like a game over move though. I feel the last big L like that I can recall is when FFXIV1.0 failed, in how much it feels like a brand-killer event

Romero Games had funding pulled last night from their next game, which we don't know much about other than it's an Unreal Engine FPS.

I actually had a much better time with the game this evening by doing with metroid said and trying it on expert, I think cause the game went from being really annoying and inconsistent into just being hard. Which made me more patient with its bullshit for some reason. I did a solo fight with the card lady, foretelling seems like it really works best when solo. I got the professional achievement fighting this optional boss in a mountain being eaten by some other guy or something. So they way I'm rolling is I have the other 3 characters run in first with pictos that synergise with each other, stuff like putting defenseless on base attack with Gustave, and then Maele doing an attack that allows me to take two turns if it hits something with defenceless, removing the enemy shields, then setting things on fire with her gun and then going into her virtuous stance, double casting spells with Luna building up to a 3 stain earth attack. The fights last long enough for each character's kit to interlock in interesting ways, and if I get fucked up then Sciele has all the solo pictos and does big damage with foretelling One thing I notice with the graphics on this is it has a weird kind of 'fried' look or something. I remember DF giving out about over-sharpening or something, which isn't a thing I totally understand but the game looks strange in motion, lots and lots of artifacts, the kind you don't need to zoom in to see. It's over everything.

Cancelled https://variety.com/2025/gaming/news/perfect-dark-everwild-game-canceled-microsoft-initiative-1236446212/

From reading about DA1 it gets described like they made a fully 3D Baldurs Gate with simplified RTWP combat and with an AI system similar to the gambits from FFXII In the bitmap CRPG book I've got, they describe it as the last great RPG they made before becoming more mainstream (not my opinion or anything, not played it, just found it interesting)

With party based combat, one of the things I like is developing a strategy that synergises different characters strengths. Applying burns to buff certain stances or increasing someone's luck to get better benefits out of skills which give bonuses to crits. Levelling up a weapon to also emphasise its crit potential. It's the build theorycrafting that I like about these games, why I liked FFVII Rebirth so much cause it was so good at that (the Baldurs Gate games too). So doing 1 man parties* or not giving stat points to the attributes which govern a particular skill would take the gameplay out of the game for me. So with Clair Obscur I think its systems are clashing in a way that's sort of irreconcilable for me, which is why I describe the game as polarising cause of how you can get your ass kicked by failed parries/dodges but still win a battle (at least in these early hours). I think though there's a mod which tweaks behind the scenes variables separate from the hardcoded difficulty levels (there is one for parries but I'm not sure how far it goes). WRT art direction I think the characters and enemies look cool, but I think the level design feels like someone threw a bucket of potpourri at the level editor. There's a lack of visual composition there, dungeons are confusing but not cause they're designed to be I think, but cause of all the random and similar looking colourful stock assets. I don't feel guided through these levels, nothing has really drawn my eye through them. Which feels like a pretty hard failing here because of the fact that the game's title is a french translation of the Italian term chiaroscuro, which is about contrast of light and shadow in art and photography. I don't like having a big moan about a game others are enjoying, makes me feel like an asshole, but it's what I think about Clair Obscur. *I know there's a picto for lone member parties, and combat which requires it, but it's not how I'd play the whole game

Finally, a new character with an interesting gimmick. Gustav is going on the bench and staying there for being too much of a vanilla sword dude. Doesn't even have a cool skill tree yet. major spoilers dont click edit although, foretell seems sort of hard to work with if things just die too fast on the mid difficulty. This is why I wish the game had a slider system for difficulty modes. I ain't about the hardcore parrying life but I want these enemies to actually be able to take a punch also This turtle thing, I killed it just cause my damage is so high but I cannot stand the parrying/dodging, I missed every single one. It's such a bummer when the game is cool in other areas. It just makes the whole thing feel really polarising moment to moment, because enemies die easily but also hit me with everything, there's no goldilocks difficulty mode

The Odyssey trailer has leaked, well some of it at least. Spiderman as Telemachus, the Punisher as some other dude, probably a suitor Matt Damon has already been confirmed as Odysseus

This game still exists I saw numbers were way down but no idea what counts as good for a game like this. If it declines tho I blame them focusing on Fantastic Dorks for the first batch of dlc instead of Wesley Snipes

Haven't seen it but watched all the death scenes on youtube, my favorite is the

Interesting how FFX-coded stuff is in this, from its battle system to the sort of pilgrimage story structure. I find it kind of mid though, like a 7/10 Mistwalker RPG in how it's a callback to an older type of JRPG but not as good as them. There's nothing so far that the game really excels in, what stands out about it is the fusion of action elements in turn based combat but the parry element of that is frustrating and also feels like its biggest cliche, so maybe that is the main reason it can't break out of 7/10 territory for me. Suffice to say I'm full of Lost Odyssey vibes with it. I am on my way to some village of little dudes. Knowing that it's not particularly long and I'm playing on the mid difficulty level*, I reckon I can just mainline it and clock it and move on. *I wish it had the difficulty sliders that Doom and TLOU2 has, so I could take the difficulty modifiers from Expert for everything except parry and tune the combat systems into something I would enjoy more, because I like the resource stacking/debuff combining stuff.

That doesn't sound like a steam issue specifically tbh, it (probably) can't fuck your graphics driver or connected monitors like that, it just holds a link to the executable and clicks on it for you. I've had issues with monitors flicking on and off when doing dual monitor tho, nvidia really seems to hate it for some reason.

I had the same experience as craymen (had to run weird powershell scripts with admin privileges to fix it), but not when I used it recently for Doom. But I had other issues with folder permissions, where they lock the whole thing down. Their delivery system feels like a hangover from the UWP days, when windows store was more of a mobile app store Not using GP anymore anyway

Taking a break from a lot of the history stuff I was reading, I got To Kill a Mockingbird. I've never seen the film (well I saw a little bit of it in The Darkness video game) so I didn't really know what it was about, but more than halfway through I sorta conclude it's like a William Faulkner book but really straightforward (they teach it in US schools so I guess I see why). Like Faulkner in that it's about deeply ingrained prejudice in the Depression era southern states of the US. But written in a very cliched and patronising way, trying to generate understanding for people who only know hate. I'll complete it, but its simplistic messaging isn't doing much for me, but going in I didn't really understand that it was a book for children tbh. It's a very short and easy read anyway

These guys who hop up in your face and then frame trap you after you mistook that for an attack and tried to parry. I'll parry that shit with an alt-f4 fuck you too

Yeah big picture mode sucked for years and years until Steam Deck It's still got issues, but I prefer it to the PS5 UI at least. Point and click interfaces are better though I think

Does anyone just find modern high budget games a bit fatiguing? Like, you expect the first 5 hours to be some very slow paced and unengaging setup. I think it's why I'm playing older games more and more cause I just know that every new game will require significant upfront investment to really get into, which can mean several evenings. It doesn't help either that game dev is so expensive and sequels feel more iterative, calling into question how worth it it is to spend that time (personally speaking anyway) This was my issue both with Ragnarok and TLOU2, the latter of which I gave up on. It's also why I decided not to buy Death Stranding 2. I don't know of a way of connecting this thought to the topic tbh but I guess there's a possibility that the reason games like FortNite and Roblox are so popular is they aren't really like this at all, they fulfill a different function than these extremely pristine and slow paced 'prestige' games do and maybe Sony was really trying to react to this trend with their huge investment in GAAS. Meanwhile MS haven't really managed to pivot their output to this change in tastes at all.

Did anyone change their sound settings for this? I feel like the whistling audio cue that's supposed to signal a parry gets buried underneath everything else. I already turned the music down so I could hear what characters are saying, but I might need to put it down even further

I don't disagree with that, I think though I feel forced into using it more as standard search engines have become plagued by useless SEO shit (a lot of which, ironically, written by AI). One of the reasons I've gotten back into reading is I feel like we're heading towards a cognitive crisis, where people will outsource literacy itself to AI and their ability to absorb, understand and critically evaluate information will atrophy. So I want to redevelop these muscles a bit

It is doing something for me, the characters and world are really well done, like I said*. Its just I don't think I'll be getting on with the battle system * presentation a bit inconsistent tho, with the lip sync being off. Wonder how it is in french

Curious how many of us have basically replaced search engines with AI. I'm sort of already there, or at least it's neck and neck with using reddit as my main search engine. But I've ended up using AI to summarise chapters of books that I took a break in, so I don't as easily forget where I left off. Reason I mention is I see firefox has integrated AI chatbots into the browser sidebar. Kinda seems like it's going to become the thing now.