realMyst

Of course, that’s not the most recent remake of Myst. The current one is called, er, ‘Myst’.

Sigh. Looking forward to Riven. Again.

My suspicion is that the game would have been delayed had the new Harebrained Schemes game not just flopped.

Quality, no. Reception, yes. These two things aren’t necessarily the same.

Give it a few weeks and it’ll be $7.99. Maybe even $5.99 depending on how many sales they got last time it hit $7.99.

They keep it at this price because it allows them to advertise an ‘80% discount’ several times a year, which gives them better visibility in the sales.

Which is a wholly different level of suck. But hey, ho.

If you have a quest marker, you can jump straight there using the quest log, no fiddling around with the map required!

In previous Bethesda games I eventually just started doing calculations in my head constantly about whether the stuff I was grabbing was worth the weight involved. I’m still not quite at that point for Starfield, but I’ll get there.

Counterpoint: If not having room for a $70 game because there’s a $60 game already on there (which also isn’t normally a problem for him because his main gaming system is his $500 gaming console) is an issue, then the article is already being written from a position of privilege.

A shame, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Volition was never quite the same after the THQ bankruptcy, and that was still several years before Embracer took over.

Now there’s a difficult job!

I’d make a joke about the pistol having repeatedly fired blanks over the last couple of years, but I think that’s the point of a starting gun isn’t it?

Bloody ChatGPT

It’s also a holdover from arcade games, which would have an ‘attract mode’ when there was nobody playing.

I replayed through Hypnospace Outlaw. And hoo boy does that game hit harder when you’re playing it whilst the major social networks are crumbling.

Still waiting for more Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment genre games, personally.

The gameplay loop uses getting to interact with the characters and to advance the various subplots as part of your reward/consolation at the end of each run. I’d call that story-heavy.

Vampire Survivors has more story than vampires. Which is a low bar to clear but it just about does.

I’m not enjoying just how often it wrenches control away from you to either show you a barely animated cutscene or a flyover.

Well that’s certainly a shitpost and a half there.

Can confirm, Bastion is a fun little hack and slash that does a couple of very clever things narratively.

Jesus Christ I cried my eyes out at Spiritfarer. (Also I was on the final beta test, so I’m in the credits for that one!)

Meanwhile, Minecraft trundles on as a multiplatform title 9 years after its acquisition. 🤷

Hades. I don’t think I’ve come across a game so carefully paced as Hades, both plot-wise and in the gradual introduction of game mechanics. Which is bloody impressive considering that it’s a roguelite.

I’m looking forward to seeing people who haven’t played it before react to two things; Missile the Pomeranian, …and I’m just going to keep schtum about the other one.

Galaxy brain: “hehe boomstick go boom”

Galaxy Brain: hehehe, boomstick go boom.

That’s long enough away to release Skyrim at least three more times.

Xenia may get XBLIG support eventually, but considering how long that’s been in the works it could be a long time yet if ever.

Office DisOrders (aka Office Politics) wasn’t XBLA, it was one of the less curated (but wonderfully weird) XBLIG titles, which had their own subsection on the store and which exclusively used the XNA Game Studio; essentially it was a sort of Net Yaroze (to go even older and more esoteric) model but for the early broadband age.

A lot of those games are straight up lost media, I believe. Although a handful have made it across to PC in recent years, such as the utter standout I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1.