crispy4000

There is an occasional quest or mini game that isn’t pinpointed out for you. Typically as a result of finishing other quest lines and unlocking something. Yeah and that’s a very good thing. The quests here feel a lot more meaningful than FF16’s. They do pad that with open world activities a bit, but more as a counterbalance.

Time Spent: 45 minutes Rating: **** It feels so good to play, and isn't frustrating in the way that the games that inspired it are. The art is wonderful, arguably better than Shovel Knight's look. Gaining mid-air jumps back by hitting things is a really good idea, I'm a sucker for this sort of canceling shenanigans. This will definitely be one I return to, so it gets the full 4 stars.

Time Spent: 15 minutes Rating: **½ Same lack of originality as Love, but I found this one a little more fun. There's modern touches like wall jumping, but otherwise you just climb up can shoot magic in the cardinal directions. Your character does a little bounce when falling from a high surface, which is a little frustrating. There's very limited lives and a password system, which is odd given that NES games did have save backups. Overall, it's the game you want to remember Kid Icarus being, if it were actually decent.

Yeah, that should be a pretty good pick up. I'm looking forward to it.

Time Spent: 15 minutes Rating: **½ Very minimalist 2d platformer. You can place checkpoints at any time on solid ground to respawn at. No fun physics interactions or anything, and you've seen its platforming concepts elsewhere. It feels good and mostly fair, but loses points for lack of originality.

I expect minor artifacts/ghosting to continue to exist with any upscaller. FSR2 just does especially poorly at lower input resolutions.

Basically, pay up if you want to avoid FSR2 artifacts for the rest of this gen. And stay far away from a Series S at this point.

Time Spent: 45 minutes Rating: ***½ A lighthearted cyperpunk JRPG. The pixel art animation is outstanding in battles, almost 2D Fire Emblem good, and the game has a very slick vibe and presentation overall. The battle system is typical turn-based fare, with limit breaks, elemental weaknesses and and turn orders. It tries to spice things up a bit with phase shifting to swap in spells, but you can easily expand how many of them are equipable at a time, which defeats the point somewhat. There’s a lot of upgrade choices at shops, but what you should buy ends up being fairly obvious at the start. I could see the story being forgettable, so it may not hold up as something outstanding in the long run. But this should be a good time for anyone who likes basic JRPGs and can dig the aesthetic.

Time Spent: 20 minutes Rating: ***½ The pseudo SNES look and sound of this game is nailed perfectly, like a cross of Chrono Trigger and Trials of Mana, with more visible real estate for modern screens. I'm not well versed in traditional tile-based roguelikes, but just for the presentation, this could be the first one I'd get into. Lots of jobs, abilities and classes here, and plenty of other systems running in tandem. It seems overwhelming on the surface, but that's the only thing I'd take from it. The tutorial bits are very text heavy, and I still have no idea what your stamina meter does. Fortunately there's an easy mode for novices, which I'll probably use when I start it again.

I have as much trust of that as I do Microsoft/Sony coercing developers to hit minimum resolution targets with FSR2.

Even if AMD matched that, I think 90fps could become as much of a target as ‘4K’ has on console. That’d be my concern.

I’d be highly skeptical of console developers hitting targets consistently enough if frame gen is thought of as the baseline. We’re seeing so much abuse of FSR2 as it stands. There’s a clear temptation to push things too far. If they can reach 60fps without it, I have less doubts that frame gen on consoles could be great experience. That goes for input lag too.

Both modes in that game underwhelm, truly.

Dynamic 1800p is what One X games often aimed for back in the day. A fidelity mode running that resolution, at 60fps, feels like the ideal sweet spot for consoles to me. PC could push beyond that, but you wouldn't get a dramatically better looking picture resolution-wise. 1800p30 fidelity mode to 1440p60 isn't an exciting enough jump for my tastes.

Yes, you too can ditch Steam with your indie upstart, and attract millions of daily active users. All it takes is some elbow grease and a winning idea. Good luck out there, you miss all the shots you don’t take! Focusing on macro takes like this is what led to Valve giving the most successful games preferential treatment. Most indies are no better off for it. The small studios are generally not aiming to be the next market leading trend.

Which is them walking back from what it was. Hugely successful PC games exist outside of Steam. Perhaps Palworld could have been one of them if they knew what they had. Knowing that beforehand is a complete crapshoot in 2024. It’s a stupid bet. Sure. In spite of recent layoffs and cancellations, the games are still good and plentiful. The grass could be greener still for all if the client-side cut was less.

Their storefront isn’t a monopoly, but their client is. Enough to the point that if you don’t put your PC game on Steam, its probably sending it out to die on computers. Ubisoft, EA and Microsoft have given in now: they can’t miss out on Steam’s user base. Valve made the forward thinking decision to let other storefronts sell Steam keys, and their client remained the point of contact the vast majority of PC gamers interact with regularly. Naturally that promotes their storefront ahead of all others, as does their client’s economy. It’s why even someone price saavy like you still gives them 20% and not 0%. PC games still are cheaper, generally. But I don’t think anyone here is arguing game prices would go down if the royalty cut was less. Epic’s store is evidence to that, with the largest discounts being the occasional coupons subsidized by Epic themselves. So are the sweetheart deals Valve offers - games that succeed enough to reach those high benchmarks aren’t the ones discounted quickly and heavily.

8k is just noise at this point. I think even PS5 has 8k listed on the box, lol.

Depends on the company, and the project. Certainly the little guys could benefit. Being “smart” can only get them so far when visibility is still such an issue and subscription payouts are less. Few find themselves with a breakout hit. On the medium to higher end, a lot if it has to do with margins and risk, and the lack of ‘cheap’ money today. Would the Mandalorian Titanfall game still be alive if EA could offset more of the license fees? Who knows.

I’ll be basing my eventual PC build off overshooting this slightly. But I’m excited to hear more about the new upscaling solution.

Going for that filmic look I guess. The developers said they were looking into 60fps, years ago.

Time Spent: 20 minutes Rating: ** Interesting platformer where you 'jump' up ledges by warping to them with a cursor. And can attack enemies by slashing through the line of your warp. Your cursor itself can take damage. It feels like a long lost Nintendo DS game, retrofitted for a modern game controller. There's one huge achillies heel: the game runs at a 24fps lock. Seriously. It looks and feels awful by modern game standards. There's no hacks or mods to undo this either. Your character's relatively slow movement ends up feeling even worse. It's playable, but an incredible shame for what could have been.

Impacts what gets greenlit, the scale, what studios get shut down, what gets cancelled, etc. Even if the impact feels marginal on our end, I don't have a problem with people generally being paid more for good work at the same price to us. ... or keeping their jobs...

Probably not true. I don’t think Epic’s capable of pulling many people off Steam regardless of the quality (or lack thereof) of their storefront. Just like Bing isn’t pulling many from Google. On the other hand, you have much better aggregation of game imports on GoG than Steam, but CD Projekt Red also neutered their team there a few years back. Humble doesn't have an app technically. They did have one with a choice subscription at one point, but shut it down.