The people doing this discourse want to play Twitter, Reddit and Twitch chat. Same dynamic as those who claimed to be long time comic book fans but thought Marvel invented She Hulk for the TV show.

I have that exact gun (first image) in Marathon.

There are many interesting things that could be said about Marathon but the collective gamer community is making angry screaming ape sounds so it kind of feels like "why bother?" On the other hand, counter-balancing screaming apes may be a good thing...

I'm continually surprised by how good many "old" non-blockbuster movies look. Of course some look awful (especially if they have bad transfers) but many middle-of-the-road movies have great lighting, sets, etc. (Compare to that God of War still that was released earlier today)

"It's multiplayer and different players play as different versions of Atreus or something" smacks of "we worked on a game for years without a core concept." Which is something that happens ALL THE TIME now.

Marathon is another game that presents you with a EULA screen and you have to press and hold the "accept" button to accept, even though to accept you first have to move the cursor over to the button *and* there's nothing else to do on that screen. Why!

For some reason I have this image saved in my blogs folder. Probably saved it because of how savvy it is.

1) I think mock reviews are good but I'm wary of ex-journalists providing guidance beyond that because that's not their wheelhouse. 2) My personal experience was that a mock review was useful but the "here's how to make your game better" part of the service was a net negative.

There's something incredible about these guys who spend 16 hours a day on Reddit talking about how all game developers are morons, but they're also trying to learn game development themselves and are currently working on the most basic dogshit thing imaginable. Many such cases!

I agree with the small caveat that calling this "discussion" is generous. Twitter / Reddit etc is the biggest losers imaginable just saying "LOL CONCORD 2" over and over again. There are guys on the Highguard sub who post 50 times a day about how they're glad the game failed. Bottom 1%ers.

substack.com/@jmargaris/p... I wrote about the value of fresh game-developer eyes on a game in development, using feedback I wrote for a Poly Fighter invite-only test as an example. (I delayed posting and promoting this a bit because Poly Fighter just released a public demo)

Update: Voyager made it home safely. Kes, Cary, Seven of Nine, Harry Kim, Tom Paris and Human B'Elanna all died en route. On the plus side I found a garbage ship captain in the delta quadrant, took him to Earth, and he became a professional garbage man...so that's something I guess!

I played the hell out of this yesterday. I have a separate human and Kinlgon B'Elanna Torres but Kes, Lt. Carey and Seven of Nine all died in a transporter accident thanks to Harry Kim - sorry buddy but after beaming three people into space you can kiss that promotion goodbye!

Pretty cool - I haven't used this (making a low poly game don't need it) but it uses one mesh for all the LODs instead of the old way of having like 4 different game objects in the hierarchy and turning them on/off.

I'm loving this Star Trek Voyager game lol. I'm doing mostly show-accurate decisions, but I hope to play through again more unhinged. At one point I got down to emergency power and 2% hull integrity but rebounded.

Sony remakes a Last of Us game once every 2 years just put a studio on permanent Last of Us duty!

In Metroid Samus Returns (the 3DS one) it really annoyed me how you would get a new ability then to exit the room you had to demonstrate mastery of that ability. It was so formulaically "good game design" that it made the world seem designed by game designers rather than by aliens.

I watched part of a Youtube video essay on Highguard and the guy in the video a) was worse at the game than I am, and I am the worst player in *every* match and b) understood it less than I do, and the last FPS I played for more than a couple hours was the Enemy Territory WW2 mod.

Genuinely incredible that today Paul Tassi discovered that teams that employ dozens of west coast developers require "funding" to "pay" for "salaries", something he was previously unaware of and thinks is a huge scandal.

When I wrote this (August '24) I had never played 2XKO - this was based entirely on the advertised features (mostly the control scheme) and who the team had hired. This is, I dare say, dead-on, especially the part about top players fixating on peculiar features.

In X-Men vs Street Fighter Dhalsim's Yoga Flame takes up the entire screen because one guy just thought that would be cool and did it, then his boss was like "you're right that is cool!" Rather than 3 layers of gameplay designers and balance guys carefully analyzing the ramifications.

1. People will compare fighting games to any other game with multiplayer but I think there's very limited utility there. 2. The people who say "MOBAs are harder to learn than fighting games" learned to play fighting games 25 years ago lol.

www.reddit.com/r/gaming/com... Civ 7 strikes me as a great example of "they fundamentally just made the wrong game." Swapping Civilizations (while keeping rulers, who apparently live for 3000 years) is just so strange - entirely antithetical to the core conceit!

A team of 300 Ubisoft employees should split into 100 teams of 3 and each release a game - that would definitely fix things!

This is what they took from us.

Brigandine is pretty cool it's like a Dragon Force style pseudo-board game with a Risk-like map, where you can choose from a bunch of different starting kingdoms with different characters, locations, etc. Like a Romance of the Three Kingdoms with a fantasy bent. Cool art on this steam version.

This isn't wrong but I would be wary of flattening all these flop stories. I'm a Fighting Game Guy and I've followed the development of 2XKO. (I also met the guys behind it at an MIT arcade in like 1998...) I don't think they expected big numbers, I think they expected a solid foundation.

TC Carson and Jeff Goldblum are the same genre of human

I once rented (or maybe borrowed) this game and I've never been able to figure out what it was. I even looked through a list of all NES games and didn't find it. (I'm dumb who knows) I thought maybe I just imagined it. But this is it. MY LIFE'S GREATEST MYSTERY HAS BEEN SOLVED!

Ironically this is the sort of poorly-informed gamer take that this guy claims isn't significant. Highguard does not include "edgy" characters - that's just not a thing. If anything the opposite, the characters have a bunch of "wholesome" corny dialog. He's outsourcing his opinion to youtubers.

I keep saying this: publishers are looking for games that are 90% done, have well-established communities, and are clear hits, but the developer runs into medical issues and needs bridge funding. Then the pub will give them that bridge funding while offering no marketing or console porting.

I've posted and deleted so many tweets over the years to the tune of "it's so fucking pathetic that Valve employees act performatively woke but do nothing about this incredibly predictable shit that happens with every game featuring women or minorities." (I might leave this one up for a while)

I think A Realm Reborn was probably a bad thing for the industry in that people still point to it and say "maybe we can pull a Real Reborn." But A Realm Reborn happened because they replaced the lead on the game, and the new lead brutally identified the existing problems and pledged to fix them.

Most of the problems with the game stem from high-level decision-making. The people who should be laid off are the people writing the layoff emails. No offense to those people (I've met some personally, they're nice guys!) but they made some fundamentally misguided decisions.

Psyduck is the best because it looks like his head is about to do a Scanner's style explosion, or maybe he's about to inflict that on someone else who knows.

It seems like all of this is the result of one guy at Valve waking up on the wrong side of the bed one morning and deciding that this game needed to be singled out while dozens of more offensive games floated by.

Interesting - sort of like how in the contemporary US we have Darren Aronofsky, who is (presumably) both blind and deaf.

This looks suspiciously like Cham Cham (Also I assume this is a hentai visual novel like 98% of PC-98 games...)

To all the other countries: please continue to boo our athletes. To our athletes: feels bad but we gotta take the L here - try not to take it too personally.

Something odd about this new Horizon game's art style is that it makes the creatures not look particularly mechanical.

Broadly speaking the people who want to quit their white collar consulting jobs to be farmers or who want to become trad farmer influencer types are the people with the least exposure to actual farming - their entire knowledge of farming is Stardew Valley screenshots.

I would say "I could fix her" but she doesn't need fixing.

This is why you should document variables when you create them

People got mad at that "why don't games work more like Hollywood?" series of tweets but it's weird that, when describing a video game producer, you have to say "it's different at each studio." It really doesn't need to be different!

I've heard that game design candidates typically don't like "play our game and write up feedback" take home tests. What are the specific objections to that? Too broad? Spec work? Puts you in the awkward position of being critical while trying to be hired? Retweets appreciated (research!)

This is why they love AI so much. They've spent their lives struggling with the most basic tasks and it's genuinely life-changing that a computer can write out a complete sentence for them. And they assume it's life-changing for everyone since they're surrounded by these complete dunces.

This guy does a "spicy" interview every two weeks. It's honestly a little sad. Find a hobby or something instead of living out the rest of your life as "guy who worked at Bethesda and has no respect for former co-workers."

I like how many pointless close ups and slow zooms there are - mimicking the language of cinema without any understanding of how that language is used.

It is genuinely crazy to pitch "real accountability for murder" as a common-sense "reform" like it's some dull procedural matter. It's going to be the same people in ICE and the same people running ICE so what you're asking for is a pinky swear from the murderers to stop murdering.

It's the same "if you try hard enough you can do anything" mentality that makes people think they could beat a grizzly bear in a boxing match. But it's also a fundamentally lazy world view in that it discounts planning, preparation, training, strategy and basic competence as not part of trying hard