I Had a Random Thought (About Video Games)

[Sno]

OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD.

(For the uninitiated, that is a Steam port of the PS4's remake of the 360/PS3's awesome EDF2025.)

[Bjorn]

Oooooooooo!  It includes splitscreen coop!  So many console ports to PC that have it on console end up stripping it out coming to PC (I think because it is often more resource intensive and they can't guarantee the minimum specs will allow it).  I've wanted to play this for years and just never got around to it last gen.

[Dewar]

I forget if this is the one I played before or not.

[Justin Leego]

How is it that God Hand hasn't been remastered or even just straight up ported for current consoles and computers?

This is the 10th anniversary year, get some priorities, interactive entertainment software industry!

[neonrev]

Street Legal Racing: Redline, an early open-world racing game/early entry in the car parts and tuning sim game genre was released as abandonware in 2014, and a community-cleaned up version just hit steam. SLR:R was one of those games from when I was young where I played hours and hours of it despite it not being great (still pretty good though) because I had nothing else. Gonna pick it up, only $7 and I'm pretty sure I had a freeware version with a trivially removable timer back in the day, so I should pay for it at least once.

Maybe check it out? Looks rough, but I remember it fondly as feeling like an open world racing game RPG, where you start off with a little shitbox racing other shitboxes for petty cash, and slowly work your way up by upgrading individual parts of engines and buying new cars, flipping them as you go, simulating in great detail the effects of crashes, making cooler and cooler cars until you enter some Fast and the Furious desert race. There are also hilarious police who enforce traffic laws but are not great at driving themselves.

[eot]

Had to haul my CRT out of my apartment because I'm moving (yes I still have a CRT).

Damn thing weighed 26 kg lol

[eot]

Video talking about why Deus Ex is good and stuff if you're in the mood for that

[Ben X]

I'll try to remember to re-post this in my FPS thread when I get back to it! (I'm spending my computer time polishing up my jam comics at the mo, and my new monitor also needs to get repaired, but hopefully I'll get back on it after that.)

[Mawd]

It'd be nice if we had more squad based puzzle/shooters like that Republic Commando: Star Wars game. Maybe a FEAR reboot where you play one of the psychic commanders with squads of clones.

Some of these Warhammer Left For Dead clones migth have done better as squad games too.. 

[SecretAsianMan]

Man I loved Republic Commando.  Its a really underappreciated game.

[Justin Leego]

Street Legal Racing: Redline

So.. how is it?

[neonrev]

So.. how is it?

Pretty decent actually, especially for a group of modders working on what is apparently just a mess of source code. The game is still exactly what I remembered, the driving feels better than I remember and it's still as much fun as ever to strip a car down to a chassis and build it back up. I remembered there being far more detailed info about each part and a lot more interaction between them than is visable right now, but they are also overhauling a lot of the UI to bring it to a more modern place it seems, so maybe it'll be added in later. Right now the game is quite buggy, there are a number of hard crashes I've experienced and a lot of reports of other instability, but the most recent version seems much better, and is no longer forgetting my audio and video settings after shutting it down. The team working on it is doing a good job, there are minor version updates every few days while they are focused on trying to fix bugs (the release version was seriously bad, and was never really fixed, just spackled over.) and make it play nicer with modern hardware and OS's. After that they say they intend to bring in workshop support (It turns out it had a vibrant mod community) or just mod support of any kind, do a pass to improve textures and models (some of that is already started, they seem to be getting help from outside modders submitting new textures and such), add some content that was locked off, add more simple 'race' events (that's new to me, but it's possible that it was in the old game), and then just keep adding new cars and parts I guess. Multiplayer support has also been talked about, but I have little hope for that.

It's really interesting to think about the motivations and practices of a group of previously separate modders joining together into a small team that then takes on the task of fixing someone else's broken game, and then supporting it into the future. It's cheap and I don't think money, or at least profit is really a priority here, it really does seem like these guys loved this game and want to see it be it's best self. The community is a pretty vile and rabid place, which surprised me, and I worry slightly about the team, as modders, getting distracted by the literally constant screams for workshop support (which I'd guess is actually a complicated thing to set-up) and more cheats from the actually vital work of stabilizing the engine and bringing graphics and the user experience up to modern standards.

I'd say it's well worth a buy, and worth keeping an eye on. This game, looking better and running smoothly, would beat the shit out of any other street racing game (that has a 'build the car' element) I've ever played.

[SecretAsianMan]

Interplay has put its IP library up for sale.  I hope someone picks up Freespace.  While I'm not sure I'd actually play a new Freespace game, Freespace 2 is one of my favorite games of all time.  And I say that as someone who isn't into flight sim games.

[undermind9]

Sacrifice would be an incredible pick up too, innovative for the time with limitless story potential.  It really resonated, played around the same time Homeworld and a lot of StarCraft - peak RTS in my life.

[Bjorn]

Voodoo Vince is returning in an HD remaster!  I remember really just digging the hell out of Vince, it was one of those games picked up because it looked cool knowing nothing about it, and it was a great 3d adventure/platformer game. 

[Griddlelol]

I've made a conscious effort not to buy a ton of games this year just to stick with the zeitgeist. It's nice to talk about stuff as everyone is playing the same thing, but man, it's a lot of money. 

 

I'm just sitting back and spending a ton of time with Overwatch, Hearthstone, TW3 (again), MGSV (again) and any freebies I get on PS+. It's pretty nice. I even started up my old sae game of Xenoblade Chronicles X I never finished and managed to get the Skell. Shame about the story in that game...it's terrible.

[Dewar]

Waypoint is doing something interesting with their end of the year coverage.

 

https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/waypoint-high-fanfic-overwatch-dogs-save-the-prom

 

I'm not sure that's what I'm really going to Waypoint for, but at the same time some the stories that Austin makes up about situations in games (such as his Sol Trader stream) really make watching him entertaining.

[Zeusthecat]

I'm sure this has been asked before but when exactly was it established that Mario was Italian?

[Patrick R]

His name is Mario. His brother's name is Luigi. I think it was whenever those names were revealed.

[Atlantic]

I have become less clear on whether Mario and Luigi are Italian or Italian-American or something else.

[Zeusthecat]

Watching the Super Mario Bros cartoon as a kid, I just thought they were from New York.

[Patrick R]

Are you asking when they became Italian and not Italian-American? Because there are plenty of Italians in New York. 

 

Pretty sure Super Mario 64 is when the voice started.

[SecretAsianMan]

I previously researched this.  From a Q&A with Miyamoto

 

Quote

Q: Mario is Italian. Or we assume he is Italian, was there something behind that?
As a kid, I was a big comic fan and I liked foreign comics as well. So I drew some characters that had more western type features with a little bigger noses and what not. Now with Mario, I think with Mario Bros. we had a setting of course that was underground, so I just decided Mario is a plumber. Let's put him in New York and he can be Italian. There was really no other deep thought other than that.

 

[Zeusthecat]

Huh, well that is certainly anticlimactic. I guess I can kind of see the logic behind "he is in a setting that is underground so let's make him a plumber" but the "Let's put him in New York and he can be Italian" is random as fuck. In a good way of course.

[SecretAsianMan]

20 hours ago, Zeusthecat said:

Huh, well that is certainly anticlimactic. I guess I can kind of see the logic behind "he is in a setting that is underground so let's make him a plumber" but the "Let's put him in New York and he can be Italian" is random as fuck. In a good way of course.

 

All of Mario is random as fuck.  I think him being an Italian plumber from New York is maybe the most sane thing about it.