Gotcha. Yeah, if the season passes aren’t paying for that, then what’s the point? Though to be fair, Street Fighter does the same thing, and all of that stuff is in a part of the game that doesn’t appeal to me, so I hardly see it.

Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: EA on-line activation and Origin client software installation and background use required.

You might be able to hack your way around this, but this prevented me from playing Jedi: Fallen Order on a train on a Steam Deck. Buyer beware. Dragon Age: Origins is on GOG.

I’ve got my own issues with Tekken, but what are you referring to? The scummiest thing I saw them do was locking replays against characters you don’t own the DLC for.

Hallelujah! This was always the worst part of an otherwise fantastic game.

No, it wasn’t. It was a series of very small maps.

Good point. I don’t know how ongoing that is or if steps have been taken to improve things.

I’m sour about how Nintendo makes it hard to get old games on their platforms because it’s the history of this medium and worth preserving, even if they were bad. I don’t care what their reasons are for making bad hardware when they could be making the best decisions for the consumer rather than for themselves. If it was the best decision for both of us, it would be the idyllic model.

The worst:

• Nintendo: Actively standing against game preservation and ownership in an attempt to rent you their back catalog forever; their outdated hardware exclusivity model also stands in the way of future-proofing preservation. They hate their fans, and don’t forget it. They’ll sue you for playing Super Smash Bros.
• Riot: They normalized rootkit anti-cheats, and for something that extreme, it had better render cheating impossible, but it doesn’t. Purveyors of live service games, which also stand in the way of preservation and ownership by putting an expiration date on the game. For the sake of brevity, I won’t expand on the live service concept again in later bullet points.
• EA: Making billions of dollars off of legalized gambling for children. Always-online DRM on games that otherwise never even need to touch the internet.
• From here, you can put most companies that have reduced their library down to live service games for similar reasons as the above.

These companies piss me off, but…:

• Sony: Clinging slightly less to the outdated hardware exclusivity model and pivoted largely to live service games, but the writing is on the wall, so they may abandon one or both of those things in the not-too-distant future. Their new shenanigans with requiring PSN accounts on PC shakes my faith in that though.
• Microsoft: Layoffs to rival Embracer, and not even a successful, acclaimed game will save the developer. Purveyors of live service games, not just from classic Microsoft studios but also from Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda, etc. Still, they eventually bent to the whims of the market rejecting their Windows storefront for anything outside of Game Pass, and they did a ton to make PC gaming as good as it is today, including standardizing a good controller for it.
• Epic: Exclusivity that’s actively hostile to what customers really want, purveyors of live service games, removing their classic games from sale from other stores and their own for basically no reason. But Tim Sweeney, in pursuing his own self interest to become king of the world, sometimes cries loudly enough to score a win for consumers, and Epic is going to be instrumental in any kind of change, in any country, for destroying walled gardens in tech.
• Valve: Making untold amounts of money off of legalized gambling for children, purveyors of live service games, but they’re also basically the only ones creating open ecosystems and allowing them to flourish.

Embracer’s pretty low on the “piss me off, but…” list. They made a horrible gambler’s bet and were surprised to have to pay the bill later, and they do have a few live service games in the bunch too, but outside of that, what they were going for is something I really wanted to see succeed. The big publishers stopped making a lot of types of games that they used to make as they honed in on a select few money makers, and Embracer was picking up old, discarded, forgotten properties or subgenres and trying to show that there can still be a market for those. The fact that the bet has failed could be up to their execution, since as Keighley reminded us at SGF, customers do in fact respond when the right games show up outside of those AAA publishers, and Embracer had a vision. They pursued that vision irresponsibly.

I’ve got so many companies higher up on my shit list.

I thought it was the worst one of those, but it was still a good game.

I never had a Dreamcast, but this was always the game mentioned in the same breath as Smash Melee back then when we were all getting competitive. These days, I’m a Skullgirls player, and MvC2 is a huge influence on it. The Fightcade implementation has issues, but even if the main player base ends up there for online play, it will be nice to learn the game with a better training mode and to boot it up without emulator jank. It’s worth noting that cross play comes with its own downsides.

They also lock their games down to dated hardware, with laughable solutions for things like voice chat, that we can emulate better than they provide legally, and they’re now just about the only company who won’t steer into the skid and release their current library and back catalog on PC. They intend to only make their back catalog available by renting it to you in perpetuity, eroding the concept of ownership just like the live service games that the article praises them for not following. Their business model is healthy because they have IPs that sell gangbusters on brand recognition, like Pokemon, even when the quality objectively slips, and that’s neither admirable nor replicable.

No, they’re not an idyllic model to follow.

This headline in particular, holding up Nintendo as an idyllic model to be followed, is going to also rile up people with an axe to grind. A brief mention of their litigiousness at the end of the article isn’t really going to make up for it.

Yeah, being able to zoom in and out and scale the UI would be huge quality of life improvements. Maybe even make the Pip Boy map slightly more usable.

Without official support, I doubt they’ll ever map that well at all, but I’ve got an ergonomic mouse in the meantime. Official support would still be better though. Games that only work on mouse and keyboard will be a smaller and smaller library as time goes on, if all goes well.

I’m playing Fallout 2 via GOG right now, and I would really appreciate controller support.

Sure, but like…would it really be the end of the world if it got controller support? I’m far more comfortable on controller than I am on mouse and keyboard, largely because I work on mouse and keyboard all day.

I beat Animal Well on the Steam Deck while I was out of town. I’ve heard high praise for this one, and while I liked it quite a bit, I think I’m less impressed than the buzz I heard. When you see credits, there’s just enough of a tease that there’s more to come that you know it’s out there to find, but toward the end of the game, some of the challenges and traversal were just tedious enough to dissuade me from finding them. So if there’s some excellent stuff still to find after beating it, and I’m sure there is, they probably should have put their best foot more forward than that.

I finished the Fallout TV show, and damn it, that’s the most effective commercial for a video game I’ve ever seen. I immediately picked up the only mainline game that I haven’t finished before, which is Fallout 2. That game is pretty rough at the start, because it doesn’t give you a gun for several hours, so if you spec’d your character for anything but melee weapons, combat is tough and a bit tedious. I got over the hump though, and it’s just what the doctor ordered.

My wife and I have been playing Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. We love escape rooms, and this game plays out just like a really big escape room. Or, if you’re not familiar with them, it plays like Resident Evil 1 without the zombies. The biggest point of frustration has been that there’s no “back” or “cancel” button. All four face buttons do the same thing, and when you’re going in and out of menus, you just have to navigate to the back button in the menu to go out one level. I hope that changes. It seems to be firmly designed for mobile, but on a controller, it’s quite slow. Other than that, the puzzles have been fantastic.

They did it. They freed MvC2. The announcer said he was going to take us for a ride, and I nearly fell out of my chair. The training mode is expanded too. I can’t be bothered to care about anything they’ve shown in the rest of this presentation, but this is a huge deal.

Well, first I’d say that those three DLCs cost a maximum of $45 and not $60, if they were MSRP, with current MSRP being a little less than that, but I don’t know if they ever got a price cut. Second, Steam sales happen like clockwork, for DLC as well, and there’s no way I spent $45. Third, the right feature to the right person might be worth that price, and that’s the benefit of their model. Over the course of so many years, they can keep working on the game and add niche features, some of which might be up your alley, rather than putting out a base game that lacks features important to you and never expanding the game.

I’m not sure why the tutorials for features you don’t have are a problem, because then you wouldn’t be doing the things they’re doing anyway, but I’m sorry that ruined the experience for you. It’s really hard for me to call that a cesspool though. They just put out a lot of product where you can decide what’s important to you, and I’d say that’s exactly what it ought to be.