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.
I played Remake when it was included in PS+ back in ~2020, and I played the original right after (I was very confused by the ending sequence of Remake at the time). I have yet to play Rebirth, but I’ll get to it after a replay of Remake and before part 3 comes out.
I thought very little about the story differences between the two. The part that stood out to me was, politically, why people would support Shinra at all (a change in Remake), as you hear more from the average resident of Midgar. And I thought they gave you more time to get attached to all those doomed folks in your band of eco terrorists before they die.
I’m way into prog rock, so the soundtrack was just better for me in Remake. Maybe it’s not as good as the orchestral version of the original soundtrack, but that wasn’t in the original, so I only have the MIDI to compare it to. The main theme sounds fantastic, way better than the original actually, and you still get that Kansas-esque battle theme against the robot when you’re scaling the tower. Loved it. Going from either of those back to the original MIDI is cute, but it’s a downgrade.
The story changes are because this isn’t a straight upgrade meant to replace the old game. This is a game whose story is about the reverence for the original game. Or at least, that’s what it sets up in Part 1, and I can’t speak to Part 2. As for wasting your time, yeah, it does that. I had a great time skipping the side missions in Remake, and from what I heard of Rebirth, that’s probably what I’ll do again, since that content is pretty phoned in. The original game’s version of wasting your time is a random battle encounter rate that’s set too high, plus the macguffin hunt right before the end of the game.
The AI bubble isn’t immune to basic realities of economics. Eventually the bubble pops, and prices come back down; they can’t keep getting investment for demand that doesn’t exist. Analysts think that will be as long as two years, so take good care of your stuff for at least that long. And as a silver lining for replacing anything that does break, there ought to be more refurb or used parts available in the near term, since Microsoft made a bunch of people upgrade their perfectly usable machines due to Windows 11 and TPM 2.0 requirements.
That is surprising. Don’t expect this game to run well on Switch 1, lol.
I just played Escape from Ever After. Every bit as good and polished as the old Paper Mario games. $25. They cost $50-$65 back then.
It was a Sony show. They barely mentioned PC. There’s no listing for Volume 2 on the eShop, and to set your expectations accordingly, I would only expect this game to run on the Switch 2, not the Switch 1.
Not impossible but a colossal pain in the ass such that no one ever thought they’d dip into their pocketbook to fund the work.
It’s a handful of podcasts, and spoilers abound during GOTY in December.
I want to play it, but they made me wait past spoiler season, so I won’t be paying full price for it anymore.
The juice may not be worth the squeeze there, but there might be money in buying the IPs for pennies on the dollar and releasing dead games as self hostable with bots to fill out a match.
Not in multiplayer, at least. LAN was deliberately patched out, and we know from Alanah Pearce’s channel that this game in particular could have LAN back extremely easily if they wanted it.
And Peak was made in under a year.
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This is by far the best use of a rabbid to date.
Skullgirls is very much still alive. I play it every week, and there are people still holding beginner brackets and such.
Not to try to dissuade you from your stance, because as an American who could not be more divorced from knowing anything about soccer, I only learned about Ronaldo when he was announced as a character for Fatal Fury; but a guy who can do mixups with a soccer ball is among the more interesting character designs in that game. Shame who it had to be attached to, but it wasn’t nothing.
But doesn’t it speak volumes about the genre of the eighth best selling game of 2023 can’t support three years of service (as in meaningful content updates)?
Oh, they could have, but this is NetherRealm Studios. This is the first time they went 4 years between fighting games. Ordinarily, they’re on a two-year cadence, and each game sells multiple millions of copies. Which do you think makes more money? Selling a game at $60-$70, or selling DLC to people who already bought an old game? The experiment they tried this past game was the big cinematic expansion, because it was successful for MK11, but they were going to do a series of episodes for MK1 that basically meant the story was never-ending; and they replaced the Krypt mode with Invasions, which was also intended to be never-ending. Neither of those things took off, and this big cinematic expansion also cost $50. Their average customer was not thrilled about Kameos, so it makes far more sense for them to just put out the next Injustice game, as long as their parent company can keep from collapsing long enough that DC superheroes are still intellectual property that this studio is allowed to use.
While there weren’t any Fatal Fury entries, the characters did have presence over the years via King of Fighters, and Mai and Terry were even in SF6.
King of Fighters games are not multimillion sellers. People being vaguely aware of Mai and Terry does a bit of help, but brand recognition takes longer than that. Fatal Fury didn’t get enough production value out of its development budget to do anything like SF6’s world tour mode, or NRS’s story modes, that would bring in the less sweaty players. Instead, it just got Saudi money thrown into marketing a game that was never going to make that money back.
SF6, arguably the biggest game in the genre, is currently in 60th place in the steam 24 hour charts. You might argue consoles have a higher share for the genre than games you find on steam, but still, that’s not totally mainstream.
No, in fact, that’s an old way of thinking. Since the pandemic, there have been a few ways where we’ve been able to measure the share of players on each platform in certain fighting games, and PC is the biggest one every time; I’m sure there are outliers, but PC is the largest platform whether we’re talking about fighting games or not. 60th place on Steam’s charts is phenomenal and not at all niche! There are so many games on Steam being played by about 140M people per month. Only being beaten by 59 of them is incredibly successful.
Except for Fatal Fury, which is a revival of a series that people haven’t heard of in decades, all of those games are tremendously successful and could not be counted as niche anymore. MK1 did poorly by Mortal Kombat standards, which still made it the eighth best-selling game of 2023. DBFZ sold over 10 million copies. The genre is not the problem; not even being a tag fighter is the problem. This game just didn’t take off, and free-to-play games need volume. If anything, the genre is in a gold rush, and there’s still more money to be made, but you’ll have to charge for it up front.
Optimizing for development time is a worthy pursuit as well.