I emulated the game a few years ago, because the alternative was dealing with the lousy DRM on the Steam version, and it’s weird (in a good way) to now play this game and see the battle transition animation run at higher frame rates. You can also use the analog stick. 3x speed is nice, but I can already do that on emulators. I know my brother got very into the modding tools for the Steam version of the game, so I wouldn’t be surprised if those tools work on the GOG version already or in the near future.

I can highly recommend this game, and my IsThereAnyDeal extension says it’s currently $3.58 at GameBillet, though I’d say it’s worth every penny of the $20 they’re asking.

It seems cool, and it’s got some ideas. I swung a hammer around, and it’s got a vertical swing, so it essentially just started digging. I did it a few times and then dropped into a dungeon that I didn’t know was there. The UI and onboarding are rough, as to be expected, and I wish I could see what they’re cooking further down the skill tree, but there are some good bones there.

It’s not either/or. Games can be made at all levels of production value and come from teams of many different sizes. Even games made by very small teams can have trouble breaking even at $20, because hardly any game is going to sell as many copies as Hollow Knight: Silksong.

Pricing a game over $20 is hardly greed. If every game was $20, it would be extremely hard for most of them to break even.

A simultaneous retirement/resignation says to me that the two of them were asked to do something very stupid or very unethical. And they’ve stomached a lot of unethical lately.

Jedi: Fallen Survivor?

I think it has to be insane levels of incompetence. They’re not patient enough to wait around for 3 years for Bluepoint to put out something that makes money, so they probably gave them some busy work, like support work for other studios, until they could go through the bureaucracy of closing the studio.

What happened is that pivoting from a bad idea like this takes a long time and a lot of money for a company this large, and they had no plan B, which is stupid, so they’d rather just reduce their operating expenses.

Word is this live service push was Jim Ryan’s initiative, and he left the company right before it all fell apart.

He’s only got vibes to go on in the EU, but the vibes were good from the people representing the movement there. There’s an NGO that already got the ball rolling in the US, and even though it’ll still be difficult, there may actually be legislation drafted in the US before the EU, which Ross finds hilarious. The UK’s initiative hasn’t been going well, but there’s one more long shot chance they have of some movement there.

It happens all the time, but you need startup capital. And a lot of what they did is remaking games (at high quality) that they don’t own the rights to.

What a needlessly stupid thing it was to put them on a live service project, and what a waste to close it down.

Dr. Mario 64 is my family’s most played N64 game by far. It didn’t hurt that it was a game that my dad actually found a taste for. One of the things that made it so easy for everyone to play is that you could adjust difficulty individually for everyone until it felt fair.

I doubt any of us were playing at the highest level of competitive play, but the reason garbage would be a factor for us is when you start taking risks to catch up to a player in the lead. Otherwise, I always appreciated that it was sort of a race to clear your own board. Garbage does slow people down, and not just in the animations but in how much time it takes to clear the garbage from what otherwise would have been an easy clear.

I said this before when you made your Puyo Puyo video, but if you’re left wanting by the state of the competitive puzzle gaming scene, even if you’ve never made a video game before, nothing could be a better target for a first project. The barrier to entry is just about zero these days. Take your pick of Godot, Game Maker, Unity, or Unreal, and iterate on one of these.

I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed.

Not content to look outdated in 2015 or 2023, now they’re going to look outdated in 2030.

Yours is an aggressive timeline, but I think the market is naturally trending that way for a lot of reasons.

Optimizing for development time is a worthy pursuit as well.

They’re also not really comparable. Teams were so small and project timelines were so short that you often knew exactly what the end would look like. My favorite optimization story from 20+ years ago is that a dev (who went nameless, and so did the game, as the story was posted anonymously) made a habit of declaring a large empty variable at the beginning of a project, and that variable’s only job was to be deleted when they encroached on their memory budget so they knew when to stop.

The most anyone can do is make hay while the sun is shining and prepare for a rainy day, because it will rain. This is probably not the first or last bubble in your lifetime.