Continuing to work my way through the Duke Nukem 1+2 Remasters on Evercade. So much love went into these its ridiculous.
Continuing to work my way through the Duke Nukem 1+2 Remasters on Evercade. So much love went into these its ridiculous.
I think regardless of that deal, they were already on the debt-go-round for long enough it would’ve caught up to them eventually. I can’t imagine this was gonna be “one last job then we go clean.” The market would continue to demand more and faster growth until they hit the wall one way or the other.
Seriously. I realize people have Feelings about DRM and always-online stuff, but this is an article about a game that was never especially popular or active entering maintenance mode after a couple of years.
They aren’t shutting it down, they aren’t making it unplayable (though of course either of those things could happen at any time etc etc) - they just are no longer producing content for a game almost no one is playing anymore anyway.
I guess my reaction is partially because I never see articles like this for my other hobbies and while I don’t see articles like this about video games often, I do see comments around the internet about this fairly regularly.
I don’t hear people saying “playing board games helps me with strategizing” or “playing guitar has really improved my hand-eye coordination and playing in a band has helped my ability to cooperate with others.”
Maybe that’s because gamers tend to feel more defensive about the hobby as it has historically been disparaged. People are more likely to picture “CoD yelling person” when they hear you play video games than they are to picture “wonderwall at parties person” when they hear you play guitar.
But, on the other hand, D&D players and Marvel nerds seem to have largely moved on from “but it’s actually really cool and fun and not weird at all.” Maybe video game players should consider doing so as well.
I dunno, ‘game company commissions study to ask gamers to self-report about how gaming isn’t a waste of their time’?
I’m in my mid 30s and have played video games my whole life. I also participate in some gaming communities online and my real-life friends are about 50/50 with regards to gaming. And if asked, yeah, I would probably self report that video games have had a positive impact on my life.
But have they? I’m not qualified to say. I don’t have any actual data in front of me. I do know playing video games often makes me feel good, but I can say that about lots of unhealthy habits.
Was pumping 150 hours into Tears of the Kingdom better for me than the couple weeks of workouts I skipped? Is it good that I drank more beer during that time than I normally would have?
Would my life have been more or less improved if, instead of talking about video games online I had been practicing guitar and finding an open mic night to play at?
Would it have been better for my mental health and hand-eye coordination instead of playing Elden Ring to have gone to Home Depot, bought some wood, and built the shelves I’ve been putting off building in the basement to ease some of our storage issues?
If video games really were an unqualified good, would “my loser boyfriend stays up all night yelling into his headset about Overwatch/CoD/Fifa/Fortnite” be such a common stereotype?
I’m not suggesting video games are bad (or even that the sometimes-unhealthy way I engage with them is bad), but I am suggesting that “gamers say gaming is good for them, actually” does not provide useful data for analysis or discussion.
As someone without an Xbox or a PC, Starfield has very much gotten me back into NMS. Loving the last couple of updates, especially as a PSVR2 player.
I hope I get to play Starfield some day, cause it looks like a lot of fun, but it’s not a hardware seller for me. Probably some day I’ll pick up a gaming laptop or steamdeck or something and check it out along with the other PC games I’ve been missing for the past few years.
Yeah, my plan is PS5, too. I was worried because been playing these games on PC almost literally my whole life, from BG1 and IWD through to PoEII and DOSII. But I don’t have a PC that can play any sorts of games right now, so it’s gonna have to be PS5.
Watching a few let’s plays and streams, it sounds like controller support is solid. So despite not being what I’m used to, I’m confident it’ll be a solid experience.
Right? I’d never heard of either of these games before, but after playing the Goodboy demo and watching some YouTube videos of Witch n Wiz, I’m pretty excited for this cart.
Yeah, it’s not for everyone a lot of folks prefer emulation on steam decks, anbernics, retroids, pis, etc.
The things that drew me to Evercade are:
Anyway, definitely no judgement for you wanting to enjoy games the way you want - that you are enjoying them at all is the important part. Just wanted to share a little bit about how Evercade works for me for folks who may be curious.
I gave away my NES, 3DS, Dreamcast, N64, and all related games and peripherals a few years ago cause they were taking up too much room for stuff I barely ever used.
I’ve already played these games on (3)DS back in 2013 or so, so I agree it’s the best way to play em. But I just don’t have the time, money, or space to be a retro game collector (outside of Evercade) anymore so I’ll make do with playing these games on Switch.
I’m playing through the Switch re-releases now and they’re great. The mapping controls leave a lot to be desired versus the DS originals, but it was never gonna be as good as that magic.
Sorry, argv_minus_one, we Oregonians and Massachusettsers aren’t allowed to note all the things wrong with our states because we get weed and abortions.
I get how it can feel a little inconsiderate for us to gripe in the presence of folks in states where their rights are newly under attack. But also maybe there’s a reason both of our states have high costs of living, low rates of diversity, and pretty bad housing crises?
Of course, sorry I didn’t mean to imply that things aren’t relatively better here. I just get wary when someone talks about how good single-party rule would be for them.
Certainly yes, we have legal weed and nobody is making us register with a government I’d when we wanna look at porn.
However, many - or even most - efforts to address inequality are not real or effective.
The greater Boston area is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country. The city itself is largely out of reach for folks not in tech, biotech, or finance. Meanwhile it has a very rich history of discrimination and segregation that continues to this day with no end in sight. Meanwhile, NIMBY “progressives” continue to vote down proposals for new housing - affordable or otherwise.
Lots of folks being priced out of most of the state and moving down south. And kots of folks wanting to move up here, but can’t make the numbers work.
The trouble with single-party rule is when they get too comfortable. MA has been essentially a single-party state for a long time now. Rather than continually doing good (or bad or anything at all) the legislature has grown lazy and corrupt.
The MA state legislature is one of the least transparent legislatures in the nation. Many legislators are firmly in the pocket of corporations and special interest groups. Our public transit is actively crumbling. And they have sent hardly anything of consequence to the governor’s desk this year.
Single-party rule - no matter the party - is bad news. Which makes it all the more unfortunate that they were able to FUD the ranked-choice voting initiative out of existence in 2020, so there’s no end in sight.
Right, but “just use cameras” is what I mean by “niche peripherals.”
Other than the Wii, no modern consoles have had an installed user base for Move/Kinect/Camera type stuff to make it worth it for many developers to get involved. And even the Wii was just mostly shovelware waggle games, though as I mentioned there were some Wii Zapper games that approximated lightguns.
I think at this point we’re past the sorts of external cameras and tracking necessary for lightgun things even more than we already were. This sort of stuff has already moved to VR and I don’t know that we’re gonna get them back in the physical realm any time soon.
Lightguns don’t work on LCD screens, so they were not feasible on most consoles once folks started swapping out their CRTs.
Wii had a handful of light gun like games (that used the sensor bar of course) with the Wii Zapper, but other than that games of this type have needed more niche peripherals (Kinect, PS camera, now VR) that have made them more niche.
I’ve been enjoying the Evercade Piko Collection 3 cart recently. When new carts come out I like to try out every game and go in-depth on a least a couple games so I have a reason to come back to it later after there’s a new shiny out.
So I’ve been playing and streaming 40 Winks (I’m about halfway through now), enjoying some Radikal Bikers, and loving to hate the hilariously bad Sword of Sodan.
Over the years, I’ve become one to keep my media use as legit as possible. No judgement on anyone who doesn’t, but for a variety of reasons I have chosen to.
For retro games, that means my process is:
Though honestly I can’t really be bothered to tinker with shit as much anymore these days, so often (but not always) by the time I arrive at unlicensed emulation as the solution I’ll just decide to play something else instead.