I know I've belabored this point, but I'm gonna make it again. Compare the PS2 and PS4 physical game SKUs. Once you get rid of all of the duplicates (deluxe editions, etc.) you're left with literally an 87% drop in product variety over the last decade. Even if digital distribution were illegal, GameStop wouldn't be able to carry any product that Walmart and Target couldn't. It's not like 2009 when GameStop was the only place to get your weeb Atlus game; in 2009 they published 18 games, but in 2019 they published zero. Walmart even carries NIS games now, lol. And why wouldn't they? Even Walmart can't be that picky anymore.

https://unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/fps-starter-kit

Uh oh, that one's actually pretty good

I feel like at this point, if you want to be competitive in the indie space you need a game type that Unreal Engine and Unity are **** for.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/356705/GameStop_stock_tumbles_by_16_percent_following_poor_holiday_sales.php

GameStop stock tumbles by 16 percent following poor holiday sales

26% YoY holiday sales falloff, despite ~4% growth in overall US holiday spending.

My son has been pestering me to get GTA V because all his friends are playing it. As it is on a sale I caved, installed the family friendly mod and let him loose. Only to discover that I actually had to install something else first to make the mod work. So he was blowing up cars until the cops showed up.
Well, but I think he can handle it...

But that game is fun. Even the boring parts like towing some cars.

Damn it, man. Now he's gonna do that stuff when he grows up.

Well, could be worse. At least he didn't play the Hot Coffee mod. Gunning down innocent people is one thing. But consensual sexual intercourse between adults is on a whole other level.

As someone who worked on fan projects with timelines that were much longer than was advisable, I recently finished playing Black Mesa, the remake of HL1 using HL2/Source.

I had never actually played the notorious “Xen” chapter of HL1 “back in the day.” The team did an amazing job for parts of the game. Other parts... I will assume are some combination of dated design from the original and the “get it out the door” triage mode that allowed this project to see the light of day.

I had so much fun revisiting the Half Life universe that I recently got the Valve Index in anticipation for Half Life Alyx. In the meantime while I wait for that to launch, I have been playing Boneworks. I should call it Barfworks, because I would not advise that anyone play this game if inexperienced with VR or after a long hiatus. (The last time I played VR was years ago when Emon lent me his Oculus DK2)

I’ve heard that VR has endured some brutal “winter” of consumer neglect, but for what it’s worth, Boneworks had some truly incredible-to-me immersive gunplay. Being able to carry pistols akimbo and shoot enemies simultaneously 180 degrees apart a la Matrix/Equilibrium/insert action movie here was awesome.

My gaming space now has some marks on the wall from where my virtual world flailing resulted in some surprising real world damage. :O

What are folks’ prognostications on VR in 2020? It looks like there are some ambitious titles coming out and significant investment by some studios.

Still not convinced by either VR or 3D.

Also, I saw an ad for some game called GRIS on GOG.com lately, which made me think "what's this - a game about the life of Grismath?"

also, don't forget to celebrate the 10th anniversary of toe-doe-uh

VR is trending up pretty well for a new technology segment. It's following a typical adoption curve. People are mostly disappointed because they weren't expecting a typical curve, they were expecting an iPhone curve. What people have forgotten is that the iPhone isn't a segment by itself, it was just a milestone in a segment that had already been growing and developing for decades.

The Vive isn't an iPhone, it's an Apple Newton. The Index is at best a Palm Pilot. Long-term, I don't expect to see big adoption numbers this decade (possibly ever, unless they somehow solve the economic "your mansion must have a dedicated VR room" problem along with all of the technological ones).

So basically I think it'll be fine, but nothing to write home about. The underlying technology will continue to improve. There will be a few games, maybe even a high profile exclusive (yes, I have heard of Alyx, I stand by "maybe"). Headsets will continue to sell as they have. Maybe attach rates will finally get pushed above 1% (but only assuming the broader market doesn't outgrow it in the meantime).



Yeah well, that's what happens when you throw **** over the fence.

...I am, of course, talking about NVIDIA 3D Vision, which is effectively the universe for PC gaming 3D displays.

NVIDIA spent a lot of time and money developing 3D Vision and bringing display manufacturers on board, but did exactly **** all for game developers. There was never an SDK. There was not a single game that natively supported NVIDIA 3D Vision. Instead, everybody - game developers and players alike - had to settle for NVIDIA's janky ass automatic stereo. Most games were unplayable, and the rest had rendering issues serious enough to make you feel sick. Even the games in the logo program, like Borderlands, didn't work correctly out of the box: you had to follow on-screen instructions to disable effects that would make you sick. In theory Borderlands could have done this automatically, but they had no way of knowing when you were using 3D Vision BECAUSE THERE WAS NO F**KING SDK.

Now, NVIDIA actually promised an SDK. Most likely their negligent management decided to cancel SDK development after looking at the initial adoption numbers. But, ...well, like I said. That's what happens when you throw **** over the fence. Nobody wanted to buy into 3D Vision because it made you want to throw up. Game developers couldn't make games that supported 3D Vision because there was no SDK. And NVIDIA wouldn't make an SDK because people weren't buying 3D Vision.

Try not to think about this too hard while you hack away on your RTX exclusive game.

I've been playing Fallen Order for the last week.

It's fun, and it's hitting that nostalgia spot for me.

I like the droid.

I don't know about "hard core" gaming in VR yet. I have an Oculus Quest and I enjoyed the Vader Immortal series (even though it was overpriced for the amount of gameplay). My son likes Beat Saber and my nieces are in love with Job Simulator. When I have family over everyone really likes the "intro to vr" game that came with the quest (can't remember the name). They like the 360 degree youtube videos (especially the nature stuff and skydiving which makes me nauseous). A few people have played through the Vader Immortal games as well and they liked them. I can't get anyone else to try Job Simulator, they say it sounds boring. I don't know how to describe it in a way that entices them to even boot it up.

It seems like the games for Oculus Quest are too expensive. And most of them don't have demos. I would go from buying almost nothing to buying a ton of games if they were about half the price they are now.

The problem is that if you don't try it, you don't know what you are missing. So they need to have a way to get people to try it. Maybe that means steeply discounting the headsets and hoping to make money on games, I don't know. The non-tethered quest seems like a great step, I don't think I'd enjoy being hooked by wire to a computer. I was talking to a guy at Costco who routed the wires through a set of pulleys mounted to his ceiling. However, I really want to try a higher-end headset to see how much better it is.

The space thing is definitely an issue. We have a living room with no furniture (just a wall-mounted TV) that my wife uses for exercise videos. It's still a little too small.

Even Brian's VR mansion is not enough!

I think some of the "wow" factor of putting on a VR headset for the first time gets lost once you've used it for a while. Half a dozen people who have tried my oculus quest, as soon as the put the thing on, they say, "Wow, I'm in a huge mansion!!" It's just the default room you're in with the floating menu and that's enough to wow people. Sign me up for Oasis as soon as it's ready.

All I want is to sit in a chair and play a fancy new Rouge Squadron game. A new Crimson Skies would also be amazing.

Anything red, then.

So I happened across a couple videos somewhat recently that I thought some here might find interesting.

Nintendo's big mistake that made Super Mario 64 super slow
Did Nintendo really forget to Optimize Super Mario 64 ? | MVG

TLDW first video Nintendo forgot to optimize Super Mario 64's code which results in severe slow down.

TLDW second video Nintendo didn't forget but wanted more control over the code.

Can’t watch those videos, in a car. Here are my initial thoughts that are probably covered by the videos.

They almost certainly didn’t do it because they wanted more control over the code.

It could be they developed the entire game and QA tested with a non-optimized build to make debugging easier. Then they were close to the release deadline, and didn’t have time (or didn’t want to spend the money) to QA test an optimized one. Floating point math can behave very differently with optimizations, so if they were in this kind of situation it would be much smarter to ship a good-enough unoptimized build than risk shipping an untested optimized one.

Another possibility is that they developed the game in a very old school way, so running it at a higher frame rate would literally make the game run faster. This would be a problem in a few different ways. If the game was always developed this way, then gameplay would have been tuned for the frame rates they were getting. It could also be that frame rates are more consistent without optimizations (as a rule of thumb, game developers always try to optimize for the worst case. slower but consistent is better.) I don’t think this is the case, but I’m not a Mario 64 expert. I don’t think I remember seeing the game zip along in emulators. But it could be.

Another possibility is that they forgot to test an optimized build for a really long time, and then late in development they discovered that their release build crashes. Rumor is something similar happened to Sonic 2006.

Another possibility is that there wasn’t a good optimizing compiler available at the time Nintendo was developing the game. So the above stuff applies, just not for a particularly deliberate reason. If they tested and tuned for the non-optimized build it could be too risky to turn optimizations on late in the project. It’s good enough.

Oh, one more note. Mario 64 was written in C. You’d expect much less benefit from optimizations as you would for C++, which generates hundreds of trillions of inline functions that you need optimizations+link time code generation to clean up.

I mean there are still big gains for C, but running an unoptimized C++ game is dire.

I had meant to share the first video a couple weeks ago when it was first suggested to me but forgot which I'm happy I did because Modern Vintage Gamer did a sort of response video later which left me better educated on the topic. Still, it seemed like an interesting enough topic to share here.

So on the new games front, as in games with actual recent release dates that I've been playing are Terminator Resistance and Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order. I bought both on sale and chose to do so because I wanted to support these games. Terminator has mediocre reviews and much of the criticism is valid but it has a lot of charm and is far more faithful to the first two Terminator films than any film that followed. I've beaten the game once, actually twice as I went back and picked up at a point that let me make different choices to see the different ending. Actually the endings are basically narrated slides that can change depending upon obvious choices you make in the game. I chose to make the worst choices on the first play through. I'm playing through again on the hardest difficulty but it's not really all that hard. I purchased the game on GOG.

The Star Wars game I haven't actually touched in a couple months but one of these days I will kick my kid off the Xbox and get back to it. I enjoyed what I did play.

There's something oddly familiar in the main screenshot here...

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/material-collection-bundle

holodeck.sbsar

Oof.

GameStop employees report extreme pressure from ‘desperate’ bosses

Doom 3 is $1.49 on Steam. I only had it on Xbox so I finally picked it up. I thought about getting the BFG version on GOG but this video persuaded me to stick with the original. Played for a couple hours and pretty slowly at that. I have it at the easiest difficulty and I'm using it to try to retrain myself to be better with the mouse and keyboard controls.

If you haven't played it, I suggest picking up FEAR, another game of that era. I've played a lot of FPS's since then but there hasn't been anything as stimulating as FEAR's shooting gameplay. Instead of waves and waves of enemies modern FPS's like to use, this game centers around squads of enemies that try to support each other.

I should try Doom 3 again. First time I played it, LCD screens weren't great; I remember looking at just portraits of grey.

I've tried doom3 multiple times over the years and never really could get into it. I make it through a few levels and I just get tired of the tight, dark corridors and attempted "jump scares." It just didn't do anything for me. If you must play it maybe the duct tape mod will make things better. http://ducttape.glenmurphy.com/

I've been enjoying it and FEAR is something I plan to pick up on GOG one of these days. Definitely not playing with the duct tape mod though, lol!

I'm aware the game has other movement options. Haven't done much VR but wouldn't teleporting like that be really disorientating or even nauseating? I guess it simply isn't the ideal way to play.

It can be a little disorienting, but it's by far the least nauseating option.

VR's kind of a ****show really.

That's actually interesting. I figured with "free" movement, you could try to focus on a point in the game world to minimize sickness when transitioning through the level. Then again, I never demoed a VR game with free movement (only standstill ones or in a vehicle).

VR sickness happens when the acceleration indicated by your peripheral vision disagrees with your vestibular system. Focusing on a single point (as long as it includes cropping out the peripheral vision) is one way to ease this problem, but it’s not as effective as just teleporting.

Unfortunately since games mostly aren’t really games anymore and are actually some kind of weird vacation simulator I’m not sure what a good solution for this problem is. What everybody wants is a holodeck, what we’ve got right now is a somewhat novel input device that makes you throw up and nobody knows how to design software for.

Thanks, that's probably why the player, supposedly, is no longer grabbed and pulled up by the iconic barnacles in the game (if the rumors are true). Otherwise, a sudden vertical motion like it would just ruin people.

Any motion at all, vertical or otherwise. Elevators, vehicles, falling down pits...

Which is fine. As all know, all of the best Valve games are famous for their slow, methodical motion, tactical shooting, and complete lack of platforming. That’s why half life is a perfect fit for VR.

I'm currently playing Doom Eternal. Nice game, once you're past the first three levels. Though I don't like the platforming sections so much. And for some reason the game looks better and worse than Doom 2016. I don't really know why that is. Might be due to the redesign of the demons.

i bought a (non-gaming) laptop and decided to throw some older games on it to see how they did...

well on my lunch break at work i learned three things

1. my laptop can run Day of Defeat: Source just fine
2. my work's wifi is terrible for gaming... between the severe rubber banding (i got lagged into my own grenade... twice) and the typical laptop keyboard just feeling all kinds of wrong i'm surprised i managed any kills
3. battery life while gaming isn't great but it won't die on my lunch break

Public service announcement for everyone ignoring the JK issues thread:

[Unable to find specified attachment] [Unable to find specified attachment]

https://www.moddb.com/news/enhancement-mods-for-jedi-knight-and-mysteries-of-the-sith-april-2020

That said, someone really ought to make an injector for Dark Forces.

Or rather - who's up for finishing DarkXL?

I thought DarkXL was a white whale.

YAR! Dark XL that foul beast did take me leg! I will pile upon the harpoon with all anger hatred and malice!

/end Narration

Annoyingly, Lucius (the developer) dropped off the internet shortly before the next release, which was supposed to be the 1.0 release for Dark Forces. Back when it was in full swing development, I put my editing on hold waiting for the then promised level editor.

*looks at WDFUSE Files last updated 2006*

Sad Yar,,,,

I'd heard he died. Literally, I mean.