It’s honestly incredible that Bing even still exists, much less is still being actively being pushed by M$

In that case, I’m still not sure what the Intellivision brand even has left that Atari would want… I guess they could do one of those nostalgia re-release collections of old Intellivision games, but I feel like the nostalgia market for a nearly 50-year-old console mostly known for being a failed competitor to the 2600 is… very niche.

Huh, first I’m hearing of this Amico thing. I don’t know if it really has the support to capture enough of the market it seems to be going for… It looks like it’s trying to go for the “family-friendly, easy-to-use” concept that the Wii had, but the Wii had Nintendo behind it, along with other major publishers making games for it. The games included also look rather… basic.

…Annnnd it’s also a Tommy Tallarico thing. Of course it is. Why on earth does Atari want this?

Good to see they’re branching out with their business model. Can’t just commit to a single strategy these days. Sometimes it helps to rebase your priorities to avoid creating new issues.

Ok, bad jokes aside, how did it taste?

Oh, so I guess the “uncompleted level count” just refers to “uncompleted by anyone except the creator.”

Did Mario Maker have any kind of safeguards against users publishing troll levels that were just physically impossible to beat? Since there’s only one uncleared level left, I assume so, but I would’ve thought that the easiest way to verify a level could be beaten would be to make the creator beat it themselves before it could be uploaded.

I would’ve expected either loads of unbeaten levels or no unbeaten levels at all, but having only one unbeaten level is interesting…

Id, Bioware, and Bethesda have all been mentioned, and are strong contenders.

Ludeon Studios and Ghost Ship Games each only really have one game (RimWorld and Deep Rock Galactic, respectively), but they’re so damn good and they both have such a strong relationship with their communities that they’re definitely among my favorites at the moment.

I have a love/hate relationship with Paradox Interactive. Their DLC model… leaves a lot to be desired, but I have yet to find much else that scratches the grand strategy itch in the same way they do, and the level of mod support they provide is impressive. I don’t know if I can call them my favorite, but I’ve logged over 1000 hours into EU4 alone, so I have to at least mention it, I feel.

Warframe.

As far as the ethics of it, whatever, there are games where you can do worse. I just think it’s annoying that the devs went this far out of their way to cynically controversy-bait up attention for themselves. There was no need for this - it adds nothing to the gameplay beyond shock value.

We don’t currently foresee any changes to our funding model, as Homecoming is not required to pay any up-front or recurring license fees. We continue to be overwhelmed by the generosity of the community when it comes to keeping the server online.

It doesn’t seem like Homecoming is having to pay anything for the license, at least. It’s not like NCSoft is able to make any money from CoH anymore, so they may just be taking an opportunity to build some community goodwill for little opportunity cost. If they demanded any revenue for the license, it’d cause community backlash, and a donation-funded fan server of a long-dead MMO almost certainly wouldn’t be able to afford any meaningful licensing costs, anyway.

Unless it’s Madden, in which case the exclusive license to use the NFL’s trademarks means there’s no competition, so they can just release a $60 roster update every year and still make bank from the people with gambling addictions to Ultimate Team.

Same here, I was a teenager when I originally played it and didn’t stick with it for too long, but I remember the character creation was really versatile and flavorful.

I think there’s a right way and a wrong way to do a remake/remaster. If a game doesn’t run well on modern hardware and/or its online features are long gone, a remake can be justified. But to be a truly great remaster, it should also improve upon the original without messing with what made it great.

For example, the Age of Empires remasters were phenomenal, and the AoE2 remaster in particular basically revived the entire series. Not only did it add a fresh coat of paint visually, proper HD/widescreen support, stability updates, and such, there’s been a pretty solid stream of new content and extended support. And it wasn’t even sold as a full-price title to begin with.

But remakes of games that still run fine on modern hardware, don’t really add much of anything new, and are priced at or near full-price? Yeah, cheap cash grab. There’s no reason to remake a game less than 10 years old.

The problem with the Steam Awards is that they try to get as many people to vote as possible, even if people haven’t actually played the games in question.

People will see a bunch of games they haven’t played, be like “oh hey I at least know the name of that one” and vote for it even though they have no idea if the others are more deserving or not.

SR4 is where the series jumped the shark for me. Turning up all the wacky random insanity worked great for SR3 and helped it find a niche to differentiate itself from other GTA-likes, but trying the exact same thing again made it go from parody to farce. It was very obviously trying so hard to top SR3’s absurdity, but it just went so insanely overboard with it that I got desensitized to it, and it all came across as just plain stupid.

And on top of that, they give you superhero powers that basically make using cars obsolete… in a GTA-like. The vehicle customization was one of the best systems of SR3, but they actively disincentivized using vehicles altogether in 4.

“People die when they are killed.”

…Who said anything about roguelikes? (Wait, did prev commenter edit?)

I played CDDA for a while about 5 years ago. I really enjoyed it for a while, but after a certain point it seemed like the devs just got more interested in simulating fiddly minutiae to micromanage in excruciating detail over actually developing interesting new content or fixing existing broken systems.

NPCs were an absolute mess around that time, but the devs were messing around with implementing individual vitamin and mineral meters and making installing bionics more fiddly.

It’s funny that Aftermath is writing about bad game journalism practices when they themselves have an initial “you must register to read our articles,” but then after registration, hit you with an actual hard paywall after a couple of articles.

If they want to paywall their content, that is their prerogative, but they could at least be up-front about it, instead of only telling me about it after I went through the trouble of creating an account.

I thought it was like 60-80GB last I played, which was a couple of years ago.