Discourse has become a bad word because most of it is bad. In particular video game discourse is endlessly repetitive, where people cycle through the same topics making the same points without progressing. There is no real point-counterpoint or advancement, so discourse should come with air quotes

@tolkoto.com After listening to your robo-racism on a podcast I just have one question for you: this you?

In Banner Saga player and enemy turns alternate, but you can't choose to move the same unit each time it's your turn. In Last Defense Academy your squad takes a turn then the enemy squad takes a turn, but you can choose to move the same unit as many times as you want. Those are close-ish.

There should be a word where when you refactor a bunch of stuff and have hundreds of errors, you fix them, but then you're scared to press play (or whatever) because you know you'll hit a bunch of bugs that are way more subtle than compile errors.

This game has been remade twice but both remakes are changed and weird enough that there really isn't a definitive version beyond the original. (Which is also messed up in its own way) The newest remake inadvertently (?) made abusing a couple of obscure items the main mechanic.

Seen many smart people say something along these lines but I've honestly never really understood what it means. I don't really care what the intent of game is and also how would I know what the intent is? I can see what a game is doing, I can only guess at what it's trying to do.

It's got to be confusing to be confronted by the guy from your arm tattoo.

It's interesting how often I see bad game design in real life now. Beast Games was one example. (I only watched a summary don't judge me!) Another is a podcast I listen to tried to do a D&D style adventure thing but the rules were horribly broken.

I've played a few action games recently with very awful and very similar sound design, and it's making me suspicious that a group of sound people have convinced themselves that "sound shouldn't be distracting" or something along those lines is a "best practice."

They should ban Jesse Singal because on his Reddit sub he encourages his followers to make Bluesky accounts for the express purpose of starting arguments, harassing people and making the site worse, as some sort of payback. You don't even have to broach the topic of if he makes people "unsafe."

I get the sense with some of these "streamer bait" games that some people genuinely don't know if they enjoy they game or if they enjoy that their favorite streamer enjoys the game, or maybe those two things aren't actually different to them.

@tolkoto.com I think you've heard of Brain Lord because I spammed it in your twitch chat one day. (Maybe when you were making a best SNES games list?) It's a pretty cool game!

I thought this was hyperbole but that's literally the entire story. Guy who looks like Harvey Weinstein loves a fictional actress, who has never appeared in anything, simply because he imagines that she's a virgin. That's news you can use!

The whole thing is silly in that backers position Klein as a pragmatic realpolitik guy who Just Knows How To Win, but all he can win is a "webby 2014 blogger of the year" award. He has poor political instincts and there's no evidence that he has any idea how to win at electoral politics.

"Squeeze holes" are a great example of something that served a purpose, became a common feature of AAA games, and now persist despite no longer serving that purpose. Now you have games and demos that include them issue a disclaimer about how they *aren't* loading! (substack.com/@jmargaris/p...)

Great news for games who want Cristiano Ronaldo to be a hidden unlockable character in Jedi Survivor 3.

This is the power of AI - save a little bit of money and in the process make something much worse. (Of course if you don't care about quality at all saving money has has always been easy, no AI required)

I've been playing a fair amount of emulated PS2 and 360 games recently and it's interesting - once you increase the internal rendering resolutions of both PS2 game often look better, precisely because they lack features like bloom and depth of field.

I think a lot of these older games used per-vertex Blinn-Phong specular, which tends to produce dimmer, more spread out highlights. They get adapted to modern per-pixel PBR GGX math with normal maps and the result is much sharper, more contrasty highlights.

A broader question: why do we keep hearing about this company when their one notable accomplishment since 2016 is creating Concord while pretending that they didn't create Concord?

I can't believe this is real - genuinely assumed it was a joke. There are few people on earth (or at least outside of Japan anyway) who like both Street Fighter and Banshee's Last Cry as much as I do. And I have proof: I name dropped it in an old Gamasutra blog.

"The groups" say "this is the right thing to do, and here is some (maybe bullshit) polling that says it's politically feasible." The Dem consultants say "just do whatever polls indicate is popular, regardless of any principles." It's a very straightforward distinction!

The idea behind this company appears to be to collect VC money and use it to build game studios that they'll then sell off to other companies. The product here isn't games, it's game studios. (Probably a rough road ahead when your first big product was the Concord studio)

I had some buoyant object code that I experimented with years ago, brought it back for some lava. These objects float in lava and interact properly (ish) with the character, like the character weighs them down. (At the end I tried to show off and died oops)

A while ago I installed some Steam demos and when I try to launch them it just says "no licenses." Incredibly undescriptive error message and the idea of limited time demos seems...dumb? Especially on Steam where people are often hoarders.

Our 40+ political pundit podcast bro class is totally unequipped to fathom a guy who was into furry block puzzle porn games, Sea of Thieves, and who used a Donald Trump user name under multiple layers of irony poisoning. In other words, the statistical average Dota 2 player.

Brian Fleming clearly hasn't heard "ideas are nothing, execution is everything." Goes a long way towards explaining why these Ghost games are so awful. (I presume - I will not check metacritic as I am extremely confident)

This is vapid nonsense but done up in prestige podcast format - meaningful looks and camera angles, swelling music, NPR voice, etc. This is a great illustration of the danger of our "public intellectuals" just being know-nothing podcast guys looking to sell mugs.

Retweeting for night owls, Australians, and other sick freaks

I haven't played Silksong but IMO "Metroidvanias" work well when either you can ignore most enemies and they are more like environmental hazards (Super Metroid) or if fighting them is fun and there's a reason to, like fighting tougher enemies in a Castlevania to get the items they drop.

This is such a weird graphic to produce, where the most expensive edition of the game looks like it's missing content from the cheaper versions. The more I look at this the less I understand it.

Nobody is riding a dino in this picture.

open.substack.com/pub/jmargari... 2XKO's "intuitive" control scheme cannot be learned, only memorized, as it doesn't follow much apparent logic in terms of what result you get when you press a direction and a button. And more thoughts on replacing motion inputs with dodgy alternatives.

At my local Starbucks you can use 100 stars to get a croissant, or 200 stars to get a Grande Americano, but they cost exactly the same amount.

Male professional leakers collapsing into fainting couches because someone with a feminine name broke embargo to say they liked a game lol.

Youtube suggested this Data East video from the Fighter's History lawsuit: youtu.be/kGnutyhfIL0 I don't think Capcom had a strong case but some of this is very amusing. Ray can't be a Ken clone he has different colored eyes! Our Zangief guy has "a more liberated appearance." (long hair)

I tried the demo for Blades of Fire and I like a lot of it, but I find that I just can't get into games that present as open-worldish but in reality it's all paths, and the graphics are so good that it's hard to tell what's a path and what isn't.

I saw a post from someone who said they work as a game designer, about how Silksong is full of bad game design and how they'd fix it, and I wanted to say "all the 'fixes' you're suggesting would result in a game that sells a third as much.' " Where do people learn this game design stuff?

This week's Strange New World's episode was about how you might think evil triumphs when good men do nothing or that all people have the capacity for evil that can manifest blah blah but no actually the source of all evil is a bunch of CGI Slimers. I dunno man...

jmargaris.substack.com/p/2xkos-cont... 5000 words to say "seems weird." If nothing else I think it's interesting from perspectives like what makes a control scheme learnable, the importance of button names, and how systemic Street Fighter's controls are.

I was going to write about this but not sure I'll ever get to it so I'll just say it here: Monster Hunter Wilds is about a kid who is sad about killing Monsters, then learns that killing Monsters is cool and grows to enjoy killing them. That seems very weird!

A latte and an elephant ear at my local coffee shop is like $13, personally I think games should cost three times as much! (I've never actually purchased an elephant ear as I am not a billionaire)

One of those is The 7th Guest, a game that was planned to ship for the Super Famicom CD before Nintendo and Sony broke up. I have impeccable sources, this one is an absolute lock!

Logging into Blue Sky knowing that everyone is waiting on pins and needles for me to weigh in on 2XKO's use of two special move buttons.

Game dev friends: does anyone have a good source of information on "player fantasies." (As in, "let's make sure to fulfill player fantasies with our FPS game") Good definition of the term? Examples? First uses? etc.

I touched on this when I wrote about Silent Hill: Homecoming years ago. I think if your game comes across as being about combat mastery then players will usually try to "git gud" at tough encounters rather than circumventing them.

A little more broadly I think this speaks to how much tools and workflows determine what's in a game, rather than being created to service the game. You can do a lot of art styles using Unreal Engine but the Unreal Engine Look is the easiest and cheapest, so UE games overwhelmingly use it.

It's interesting how many of these are little barks from RTS games. (Maybe because you hear them so often)

What I love about these comics is how relatable they are.

I'm seeing a bit of Monster Hunter: Wilds discourse with Silksong. Complains for 5 minutes. Of course the game is still great, I mean it's the next game in the series. Complains for another 5 minutes. I mean of course it's amazing tho. 15 more minutes cataloguing complaints.