Often the fun in watching speedruns comes from seeing how far removed the techniques are from normal gameplay, but in this one it’s the opposite. Aside from the wall-glitching, most of this run just looks like really really high level regular gameplay, which I think is why it’s so beautiful to watch.

That marquee text animation is the best thing to happen to tim-rogers-videos since french press coffee

I actually think the West Wing one is quite nice in isolation, but it feels more appropriate for a Final Fantasy game than American politics.

Death Note season 2

I’ve been enjoying a lot of the stuff I find on itch.io lately for this reason. I frequently start playing a new game on there with zero expectations - of quality, scope, or even genre - and that brings back some of the feelings that first drew me to games years ago when I started playing them. Before I developed a…

Ew.

I already had mixed feelings about how the first game bent the LotR universe into a gritty, machismo hack and slash (albeit a pretty good one). All this new nonsense has permanently turned me off to the series.

What a world.

Sounds like the presence of microtransactions will determine whether or not I buy this game.

I’m just glad to hear it hasn’t been reduced to an action flick like a few other recent reboots of classic sci-fi films (Ghost in the Shell, I’m looking at you).

I think having a mostly full and/or old drive can make the I/O speeds slow to a crawl. I was having a problem recently with this - it would actually download a whole game into RAM in a couple minutes and then spend 45 minutes writing it to disk - so I bought a second HDD and things on that one were zippy again.

Coooooool. It solves a big problem I tend to have with stealth games like Dishonored, which is that it’s usually easier to just run and gun than to be clever and subtle. In this game, those tables get turned on you.

Love the aesthetic too.

The difference is, the “buckets” based on location and load balancing are just separate instances of the same server process, distributed around the world and routed to based on what will give the whole system the best performance. To prevent “cross-contamination” between different player clients, the developers would…

It’s probably more work to keep them separated than to put them together. I’m sure there’s zero difference in the server code; it performs the same logic on the same characters, worlds, etc. It’s probably a headache for all these developers to artificially isolate the different players into separate buckets.

I disagree. Game engines like Unity and Unreal 4 are a big deal because of how much more accessible they make game development. These days you only have to write code when your game actually has unique logic; things like physics and graphics are commoditized. Of course, that comes at the cost of some optimization,…

What’s amazing to me is that, given how much more powerful and affordable the tools have gotten - especially over the last 3-5 years - you’d think the cost would have been significantly reduced, but instead it’s continued to go up. Maybe because the expectations for the amount of content have grown just as quickly?

I thought this was an old Windows screensaver at first

I can live with cosmetic microtransactions, but I refuse to pay for games that let you buy non-cosmetic items with real money. It’s a slap in the face to players who spend the time earning those items, and in multiplayer games it can make the competition completely broken (see Halo 5).

Title is misleading... they didn’t get arrested for giving spoilers, they got arrested for making money off of content that wasn’t theirs. They didn’t tweet “lol _____ dies in the next issue”, they had been posting scans over the course of a year of mangas that hadn’t been released yet, and making tons of money off of…