It was straight-up free (as in: no tiers, just free) for a long time to early adopters of the Nvidia Shield. I can’t remember when it was introduced but I think it was with the first iteration of Shield TV.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a patent Microsoft just hasn’t been willing to license use of.

I remember when the Sixaxis came out. It was missing vibration. It was because Immersion sued Sony (and ultimately won) over patent infringement of rumble motors. Sony ended up having to pay somewhere around $100 million.

I can’t comment on this title in particular but if you load it on your PS5 and receive a toast which reads something to the effect of “when playing on PS5, this game may exhibit errors or unexpected behavior” then it means some part of the game is absolutely fucked up but still “playable.”

For example, Star Ocean: Till the End of Time messes up very late in to the game on the PS5 where a space ship environment zooms very far out, the controls become locked in such a way where camera control doesn’t work, and directional movement controls seem arbitrarily mapped. While someone more patient and talented than I may have been able to navigate through that issue, I couldn’t proceed until I continued the game on my PS4 via cloud save transfer.

I thought the protagonist was great. It was a man coming to the realization that he wasn’t so much a heroic renegade as he was a malicious bad guy.

I’ve rarely considered it beyond functionality. I’ll play a female in a fighting game if I like how the character plays. If the choice is purely aesthetic, I generally just choose whatever the default is. In Dark Souls III, I played a female because I thought I could make a beautiful character (and I think I did)

specifically*

You’re trying to get games built for a different OS (e.g., Win98) to run on your current OS. If it doesn’t work out-of-the-box, you’re going to need to seek a solution that either requires emulation or significant hoops to jump through. For example: if the game was built for a 16-bit machine, and you’re running a 64-bit version of Windows, the game is just not going to work natively.

DOSBox may not work as it’s an x86 emulator intended for MS-DOS. However, earlier versions of Windows (up to Win95) were just shells to MS-DOS. So, if the games in question were built for Win95 or earlier, DOSBox could be an option. I’ve also successfully installed Win98 on DOSBox but have run in to issues with drivers.

It may be best to simply list the games you’re trying to get running and seeing if someone else has gotten them to run in Win10.

Ha. For me, one of my biggest gripes with GTA is how cars don’t behave like any semblance of a car that I know.

Video Game: Star Ocean: Till the End of Time

Tabletop Game: Atlantic Chase

I hope this show is about nothing but collecting forks.

And did you have to explain it to him, or was that just the first opportunity he had to raise the question, and you answered right away without him having time to figure it out himself?

I suppose it was a bit of both.

It was three of us playing. I had finished the game already by the time we started. At first, we left it to him to explore the systems on his own. He got frustrated with that and would complain that we weren’t telling him what to do. So, we gradually explained more and more until we just started making decisions on our own. He was still frustrated. For example, late in to Act I, he would continue to throw his cleric in to the middle of battle as a melee fighter and die. Shortly after that, we all decided to stop playing.

There are a lot of tutorials in the early game that explain so much of this stuff that you have to explicitly dismiss that they’re hard to miss.

I must have missed them, then. I don’t recall any tutorials explaining anything beyond the cursory “you have to be in range to attack” or “potions heal HP” type of things. In fact, I loaded up my save and perused the tutorials again. The tutorial titled “Combat” simply tells you that there’s an initiative roll, combatants are listed at the top of the screen, and during a turn, a character may take an action, bonus action, and move. It’s entirely unhelpful. It may as well be a fighting game tutorial which says, “use punches and kicks to defeat your opponent.”

The opening moments of the game actually require you to use your movement in turn based combat in order to continue, and you can observe which enemies can reach you or not as you approach your objective.

I got through it by just running past most everyone. Sure, you can clearly see you have to move and that you have actions to take but nothing else is explained beyond that. I think that opening sequence is a great example of the lack of explanations in the game. My buddy thought he had to kill absolutely everyone on the nautiloid. We tried twice before telling him that you can continue moving past enemies. The thought never occured to him. I can’t blame him, either. All you’re told is that you have to connect the transponder in a certain amount of turns and narratively, there’s a sense of urgency. Nothing tells you that you don’t have to kill everything on the screen. That might seem painfully obvious but that’s my point: things obvious to one person are not obvious to another. That doesn’t make someone stupid, either. They just have different experiences and different expectations.

Nothing in the game explains that encounters are not immutable. Nothing in the game, as far as I can remember, explains the value of environmental elements and how to leverage them in combat. Nothing explains the tactical value of oil or water on the ground. Nothing explains the concept of crowd control at all. Nothing explains how to keep backline party members safe. This is all left for the player to discover.

I’ve been playing Larian games for a long time and I don’t remember a single one of BGIII, DOS2, or DOS ever explaining these concepts. If you walk in to these games without the understanding that you are expected to be observant and play around with the game mechanics, you will have a bad time. There are innumerable posts on the Web by people frustrated with the game because they don’t know what to do. My buddy is not an isolated example. People think differently.

My buddy tried fighting in melee combat as a low-level cleric. That might be a totally valid thing to do in something like Final Fantasy. My buddy thought he had to kill every enemy on the nautiloid. Maybe that’s just what you do in something like Diablo. Hell, I just finished a dungeon in Star Ocean which required exactly that. (It even told me upfront that would be the expectation of the dungeon) We are taught things which influence our decision making process. Without being told otherwise, it can be hard to understand exactly what is being asked of us as players as we try to reconcile those expections with our experiences.

My buddy didn’t need to be told what to do. What he needed to be told is what he can do and why he might want to do those things. In that, Larian failed him and, in my opinion as an adoring fan of their games, they have a habit of doing so.

While I agree in principle, I think a game needs to make it clear when something isn’t window dressing. My buddy just couldn’t understand why positioning mattered. It never clicked for him because he figured RPG combat was just “swing a sword/shoot an arrow until the other guy dies”. We had to explain it to him. He also never thought to explore the UI for information as to why his movement was reduced or why he was disadvantaged, despite having icons next to his character with tooltips explaining what status effects were in play. While it may seem obvious that things are happening on screen and one could deduce that something meaningful is occuring, I think if I’m honest, I can’t blame my buddy for not understanding. I’ve fallen victim to it myself.

Sometimes we just don’t, on our own, interpret information as being meaningful. Consequently, we unduly discard it before making decisions. I think it’s important to be told in one form or the other when something matters. Whether that’s tutorialization or otherwise, I think it’s important. I think the more complicated the game, the easier it is for a player to fall in to a trap of discarding important information and subsequently becoming frustrated.

I think even something as simple as the game making its expectations clear from the start could go a long way. Something as simple as conveying to the user that they are expected to be attentive as they play.

I love both Baldur’s Gate III and fighting games but disagree. I think both are woefully inadequate at explaining their rules to players. Larian games need to not only make BGIII’s rules as clear as a rulebook but also make tactics and strategies plain and clear to the user. Otherwise, it is very easy to fall back on decades of video game expectation only to realize your expectations are wrong. I had a co-op game of BG3 with a friend. My friend couldn’t understand why he had to position his units anywhere. Didn’t understand why inventory wasn’t just immediately being teleported to a shared infinite item box. Didn’t understand the basic mechanics of D&D combat (which even then, Larian changes to various degrees) Didn’t understand why decisions had any meaningful consequences. Didn’t even understand what he was supposed to be doing narratively despite there being a quest log and having us recap the story up to the point we were.

While fighting game tutorials have gotten better, I still have yet to experience one that explains very basic things that the FGC takes for granted. Things like health bars being identical physical lengths but representing different numerical values. Things like “waiting for your turn.” Things like meter management.

Complex games are great. But complex games need to recognize that they have a larger duty to teach than simpler games. I think video game design needs to take a page out of tabletop game design and provide some analog to the tabletop rulebook: complete with not just rules but detailed explanations, sidebars, and examples of play.

I think Larian Games do very little to explain their rules to the player. I, too, found it incredibly frustrating when I played Divinity: Original Sin and later, DOS 2. So while I didn’t carve out time from my day to learn the ins and outs of Baldur’s Gate III, I did have experience with the other two games that helped me navigate it.

I adore these games but it took many hours of training for me to understand what it was I was even supposed to be doing.

Star Ocean: The Second Story R. Brilliant remake.

You don’t really need to start with First Departure.

I (genuinely) don’t understand. What exactly was disrespectful?

I think it’s just an effort to collect a licensing fee.

Price per unit time suggests that the only value of a game is in how much time it consumes.

The value calculus is going to be different for everyone but for me, I tend to look for:

• A game which is a game first and foremost rather than an entertainment experience. That is to say: something that demands decision making of me in which I can either increase or decrease the payoffs of those decisions. Games which focus heavily on cinematic scenes, heavy QTEs, or long dialogs disinterest me.

• I am often willing to take a punt on a game that tries to do something creative and interesting.

• I tend to not like games that demand a high degree of memorization and/or dexterity.

• Games which perform well. A recent example of a regretful purchase I made was with Shin Megami Tensei V. I adore the series but the framerate on the Switch really brought my experience down to a level where I just didn’t want to play anymore.

The weights of these things will change from game to game and other elements may enter or exit the equation from time to time, of course.

tri-Ace games have fantastic combat mechanics, imo. Give the original Valkyrie Profile, any Star Ocean (later games have more intricate combat), or Resonance of Fate a spin.

I’m not sure how ad blocking is going to work once more and more ads are delivered via the domains you don’t want to block.

Most jobs in the game industry are employment, not contracts.

I recoiled when I read, “my dad actually owned a PS2 when I was born.” Oh time, you cruel beast.

People have different preferences but generally, “up” is the thumb button.

There’s an “up” button as well.

It’s basically just an arcade stick where you replace the lever with buttons.

The machine can be identified via a GUID or hash without leaving anything behind.

I guess good luck to the mid-size developers who take service deals, then.

In addition to the mentioned Godot, Monogame is available as well.

The article quotes Todd Howard as saying a design goal was providing the player with a feeling of being an explorer.

Yeah, I’m rather bored with the wide-but-shallow approach Bethesda games take. Tons of geography with maybe 20% filled with things of consequence. I am uninterested in collecting 42,000 wheels of cheese or finding some random space hobo on a planet.

Well, except for the fact that all four PS3 AC games are listed as “Ingame” on the RPCS3 compatability list.

Wireless. While players should be unpairing any controllers prior to their matches, sometimes they don’t and a third party can wirelessly interfere (intentionally or not) with a match.

I can’t think of any wireless sticks off the top of my head other than 8Bitdo’s offering. They’re generally not legal at tournaments.

Personally, I like just about anything from Hori. I like their Fighting Edge stick a great deal. It doesn’t seem to be in production anymore, unfortunately. I’ve since modified mine pretty extensively but I liked it a lot right out of the box.

I have a Qanba Obsidian that I use whenever I play games on my computer. Again, it’s out of production but Qanba now offers the Obsidian 2.

They’re two of my favorite sticks and I own a lot.

Seems like you’re ultimately annoyed that you can’t faceroll the game with simply bigger numbers in certain stats.

That’s not it at all. What I want is the freedom to approach the game using the mechanics of the stats, the way the game had worked for decades before. If that means “faceroll[ing] the game”, then so be it. I thought the final boss of Verdict Day (among many others across the series) was incredibly difficult but I didn’t have a problem with it because the game let me respond to that difficulty with building my mech rather than requiring me to be dexterous and having intimate knowledge of action game mechanics. AC6 just doesn’t play like the mech sim I expect the series to be. It plays like an action game and demands I master the action. It feels less MechWarrior, more Titanfall. I know that’s a reductive analogy and all three games are fairly different but hopefully my point gets across.

And you also seemingly have a hate boner for Dark Souls.

Then you’ve misread. I adore the Souls series. That doesn’t mean I want my From games to be homogenized in to it.

You’re also gonna have a pretty unsuccessful time chasing the gameplay of your childhood too. I firmly think if you got the AC you think you wanted, it wouldn’t reach those expectations at all.

I disagree. For what it’s worth, I wasn’t a child when Armored Core first released on the PSX; so, I’m not really chasing childhood nostalgia. Regardless, I thought Verdict Day was brilliant. Granted, it was ten years ago but it was nearly fifteen years after the original AC.

Soul Edge (renamed to Soul Blade on console)

AC4 was more super robot than real robot. AC5 was real robot but half-sized. AC5 also had a global multiplayer war. So, they’ve experimented with the series over the years.

That said, if you haven’t liked AC in any form it has taken, I can’t imagine you’re going to like AC6.

The thought of such a video being fifty minutes long makes me nauseous.

Yeah, it was on the Vita and PS4.

I have all of them installed on my PS5 save for Marz via the following two titles:

• Cyber Troopers Virtual-On Masterpiece 1995~2001
• A Certain Magical Virtual-On

I adore the series. Really wish it was more beloved. My local arcade had the sit-down dual cab for the original.

Well, no. I mean using other characters while one is in a conversation. During conversations, there are some buttons in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. One of those will allow you to swap to another character. You will then be able to do whatever you wish with those characters while the original character is in their conversation.

If you wish to use a different character for a conversation, you can simply start the conversation with the given character.