A new APWOT day is a good day.
Happy Dragon Age day! If any of you spoil Veilguard for me before I can get to it (gotta finish 2 and Inquisition replays first…) then the Dread Wolf will eat you, thanks
Anyone using Moonlight/Sunshine for game streaming and have any tips about getting smoother performance out of it?
Got a real hankering to play Elden Ring yesterday because the freezers at little Sainsburys were humming exactly the same note as the drone on Altus Plateau.
Playing Metaphor: ReFantazio which has some of the most stunning UI work I’ve ever seen. Meanwhile I can’t get the text boxes to reflow properly in my own game engine.
Astro Bot is so so good.
Rolled credits on 1000xRESIST. Need to go away and have a proper think about it but safe to say it’s the best game I’ve played this year.
Just got myself unstuck from a tricky Lua-C interop thing that I’d been going round in circles on for weeks now. Pleased!
This post brought to you by my rediscovering that the 3DS is simply my favourite bit of gaming hardware ever created.
Become increasingly clear to me that bells-and-whistles graphics do not matter - that much is obvious to everyone - but also, as a Computer Toucher, that the really exciting thing is talented teams pushing underpowered hardware to the absolute limit.
Managed to go the whole way to and through one of the UK’s largest airports yesterday and not a single StreetPass hit. What have we become as a society?
Wrapped up Final Shape and, goddamn, they really stuck the landing.
This game is hard and I am bad at it
Not sure how I only just clocked that the gap between Game Boy and Game Boy Color was nine years, that’s wild
Bloodborne is a cosy game, I will not elaborate
I introduced Lucy to Tunic and now it’s 2am and she won’t come to bed
The challenge with putting an action sequence set to a musical number in your game is that the action has to be really good in order for me to justify listening to the same song for double-digit minutes. Control earns this. Alan Wake 2, sadly, does not.
Might ship a game tomorrow
Just submitted the final build of Feud 2.0 for review to the stores. It’s real, it’s happening, we’re doing it
Rolled credits on Witcher 3 after playing off-and-on for about eight years. Just outstanding, sad it’s over.
Not sure yet if we’ll get any kind of boost from visibility on Steam when we leave Early Access but here’s hoping.
Working out who to contact for press stuff in games now seems so much harder than it did five years ago. How does this work? Who do I talk to? Aaaahhh
Actually just not finishing the demo to not spoil myself for launch
Any games press types On Here who would like to try out a prerelease build of Feud 2.0? Get in touch if so!
Quite a nice day of Feud polishing and bug fixing. Still got a couple of localisations to review and import but other than that I’m feeling good about the release on the 23rd!
Also the little tribute to Super Mario Sunshine in the cassette levels made me cackle
Not sure if I always get the Best Dressed commendation at the end of a Destiny match because I’m the best dressed, or because I’m actually quite shit at the game
Ultra Sun was the last good Pokémon game. My mind will not be changed.
eos4j v1.2.0 has been released! This new version adds support for the Ecom
interface in Epic Online Services. It also fixes a bug with conversion from
timestamps to Java Date
objects.
As many have written, 2023 was a great year for the games themselves and a pretty dire year for the industry and the people working in it. Let’s hope things improve in 2024.
Just saw the Wide Ocean Big Jacket devs have a new game out - instant buy for me.
Just played a tiny prototype of what might well become the next Bearwaves game and I am very energised.
Sounds like my computer might actually be able to run Alan Wake 2, which is a relief.
Rolled credits on Signalis last night and haven’t been able to get it out of my head, so it’s good this excellent video essay from Sam Greer exists.
eos4j v1.1.0 has been released! This new version features support for the Leaderboards interface in Epic Online Services.
Had my first report on eos4j this weekend from someone actually using it in their game! Very exciting.
I worked at Improbable in 2019, when Unity tried to change their TOS to screw us over. They ended up backtracking and put their TOS on GitHub, saying they would not change TOS retroactively.
It appears to be gone.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16hnibp/unity_silently_removed_their_github_repo_to_track/
I went to see Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City the other night. In the bar on the way in, I confidently said to my partner, “immersive theatre is video games”.
It isn’t.
Alright, I caved. I have a Steam Deck. I also have £45 of store credit to get nice games for it; recommendations please!
I will admit it irks me slightly that my application for a Switch developer license was declined when the eShop is full of shit like this.
https://kotaku.com/nintendo-switch-eshop-aaa-digital-clock-release-1850205218
Rolled credits (well, you know what I mean) on Lightfall. I actually quite enjoyed the action movie vibe of the campaign as a whole but every complaint about the narrative is valid; it feels like we’re back to the bad old days.
I had a really great year in 2022. I also played fewer games in 2022 than maybe any year previous. I don’t necessarily want to think about what that might mean, thank you very much.
I’m genuinely impressed that 2021 managed to be a generally worse year than 2020, for a variety of fun reasons. It had some high highs but also some very low lows. It was a year in which I mostly quit social media (a positive change!), which means I was out of The Games Discourse for the last third. Do I miss it? Like hell.
2020 has been hot garbage. It has had very few redeeming factors and I am not appreciative of it at all.
Some great games, though.
I finally got around to picking up Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC. This was a very big step for me. Let me explain.
In my early teens, after experiencing my first death in the family, I developed an odd fascination with the preservation of spaces.
I love games. I love playing games, I love reading about games, but I’ve realised that what I love most is talking about games, as anyone who’s spent time around me can attest.
What a great year, eh? OK, so 2016’s been fairly appalling, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been some great films, games, albums and a bunch of other stuff. Here are my top Things this year, from as many genres of Thing as I can be bothered.
This isn’t really going to be a game review. Taken purely as a game, and ignoring its wider impact, Pokémon Go is not very good. It crashed frequently before a recent update, there’s nothing to do outside populated areas, the drain on battery and mobile data is high, and it’s incredibly hard for new players coming in to the game a few weeks late to catch up.
It’s been a little while since I was really excited for the release of a game. The last time was probably Halo 4’s release this time three years ago (for the record, it was disappointing), and the last time I pre-ordered a game was, I think, Mass Effect 3, six months earlier.
The game development landscape has changed significantly over the last few years (understatement of the century, but whatever). One of the most significant of these changes , especially for game developers - though it’s one that often goes unnoticed - is the rise of screen resolution and aspect ratio fragmentation.
Anyone who knows me will know that I’m not really a huge fan of the beautiful game. I am, however, quite into gaming, and so thought that it was only fair this latest upgrade get a review. I’ll look at a few different sections. Without further ado…
Before I begin, I should point out: Uplift isn’t dead. The Kickstarter for Uplift is dead. Sensationalist title, I know. Let’s pretend I’ve been learning how to be a journalist. Because having a blog definitely makes me a journalist, right? Ahem.
Polytron’s XBLA hit (and personal favourite of Mojang’s Notch) has finally made in onto PC in the last couple of weeks. I downloaded the game yesterday and finished it this morning, after a small delay - I saw the sunrise creeping at my window and decided I’d better get some sleep. FEZ is absolutely fantastic.