Are you unfamilar with gaming’s FMV phase in the 90s? It served a role during that time, but was always jarring. The in-engine game models are so good now that you can either just render the cutscenes in real time with the engine (and with a fixed camera with no user input you can use some tricks to ramp up the…

Hah, that game is how I learned what “Pharmacy” meant (I never even played it, I just saw an ad for it and asked). My mom would occasionally let my sister and I call the Sierra hint line, but we had to haul ass because it charged by the minute. Man, what a weird concept.

That’s the dilemma of adventure games. You have to inject “challenge” somehow but in a way that feels fair and fulfilling. I think LucasArts succeeded more than Sierra (as an aside, I’m pretty sure I could type every command needed to complete space quest 2 right now, from memory, in order). The problem is that…

I mean, you should be careful, but you don’t need to be THAT careful. With even the slightest bit of caution about what you touch you’d probably be fine on carpet, wearing socks, in winter. I wouldn’t recommend it, but just setting it up on a table would probably be fine. I always tell myself never again, but…

Make sure you switch to the alternate movement mode in the options. That was a fix in response to the movement complaints that takes away a lot of his momentum and makes him more snappy. The UI isn’t memorably good, but it was functional enough for me. My complaint with the game is the usual with RPGs. You have a…

The quote in the article explicitly says no royalties, so I think that model is out.

Yah, I upgraded from windows 7 and my only complaint, if I were to have one, is that it’s basically like windows 7. Which is why I skipped 8, so I guess that’s really a good thing.

Harrison Ford had a glorious beard in The Fugitive

I guess this reinforces the stereotype that gamers are obsessed with TitS. The Third.

Hmm, this is where I don’t know the buying habits of the general public. We probably don’t buy full-priced titles on a whim, instead we know what we’re interested in well in advance. But if most people just hop on steam and see what’s hot, then that could be a problem. But then again, if you’re on steam, steam tells…

It wasn’t that many years ago that true “indie” game developers weren’t a thing. If you didn’t have a big publisher, you couldn’t distribute your game and that was the end of it. Now the big, traditionally produced games are still there, and there’s a massive flow of cheaply developed, cheap games. Nobody is getting…

You can tell it hits a nerve by the toxicity of so many comments. And the comments are so weird. “I don’t have an opinion one way or the other but...” followed by some gibberish that seems to imply the person very clearly has a strong opinion, followed by some unrelated link to a webcomic on rhetoric, because that…

I’m guilty of not researching these things enough, but my understanding is that developers can still make desktop apps in the traditional way. The directx sdk is actually part of the windows sdk now. In fact, I don’t believe UWP apps can be deployed on windows 7? In addition, it looks like making a UWP app involves…

As an outsider looking in, I get the gut impression that AAA game studios really overstaff. It’s well known in software development that past a certain point adding more developers lowers productivity and makes things harder for everyone. That’s especially true in programming, and probably true even for the other game…

Boy, Gabe sounds pretty steamed!

So I’m an amateur (read: I’ve clumsily programmed shaders in HLSL and GLSL for self-enrichment), but isn’t phong specular reflection the standard for games? Like...did they just not have specular reflection before?

The second game’s combat is considerably improved. The first game is a little tedious, the second is a whirlwind.

I don’t have the expansions, but everyone gets the v3.0 upgrades and tweaks. Some UI tweaks that are fine but weren’t critical, some gameplay balancing tweaks (especially on my main character, a cipher. Increases focus requirements but also boosts some spells. Making level 3 puppet master cast “fast” has already…

Quest for Glory 4 leaps to mind. Unfinishable at launch. Getting a patch required mailing of disks to and fro. I remember having that problem several times. Fortunately my mother was computer savvy and knew when to contact the company and when to whack the old 386. I think a couple of times we were mailed unique fixes…

Adding stealth (a concept that was conspicuously absent before) and more timed missions (which did exist in the first game but less) isn’t a drastic change to the mechanics. Those elements are used to ratchet up pressure and add more strategic depth. Without any kind of pressure, XCOM players all do the same thing,…