General Game Chat

[Moonface]

Has anyone else here ever questioned the point in keeping their graphics card drivers up to date? While checking if my laptop can run the Halo Master Chief Collection I got told that my graphics card is x months out of date, but I always had the impression that updating it is more for helping it with running newer games and stuff. Since I tend to only play games that released like 8+ years ago I just figured there's no benefit to updating my card drivers so just haven't really bothered about keeping on top of it but I'm suspecting there's a good reason to do it regardless of what I'm actually choosing to play.

I keep mine updated because I figure overall it's just better to do so and not have to worry about it.

The thing for me is I get the impression I can ignore updating it and still be in the same boat of not worrying about it but with the added benefit of not even having to worry about checking for updates in the first place. Especially since in my mind I don't perceive graphics drivers as being like other types of software updates like say, a Windows OS update where they address security issues and such where if I ignore those updates it just makes that thing more vulnerable.

[Dragon Lord]

I guess it depends on the games you play. Like the other day I couldn't get Honkai Star Rail to launch at all, just kept crashing right after launching it. Turns out it was because my graphics drivers needed an update and as soon as I updated them, the game opened and ran flawlessly once more.

[Moonface]

I guess it depends on the games you play. Like the other day I couldn't get Honkai Star Rail to launch at all, just kept crashing right after launching it. Turns out it was because my graphics drivers needed an update and as soon as I updated them, the game opened and ran flawlessly once more.

Did HSR get an update prior to you trying to launch it? My guess would be if they updated the game that they updated something about how it handles drivers so those needed to be updated too so they would both be using matching versions. That sentence comes off as so clueless but I'm a n00b who doesn't know enough about how drivers actually work to write my thoughts better...


Also, for yourself or anyone else who is a fan of games made by Tokyo RPG Factory, that developer has been merged fully into Square Enix who will now inherit all of its assets and liabilities. It may not affect anything since before this merger Tokyo RPG were just a subsidiary of Square Enix and the latter were the publisher for all of Tokyo RPG's games (I Am Setsuna (2016), Lost Sphear (2017) and Oninaki (2019)), but I don't know if this merge happened because SE no longer wants Tokyo RPG as a developer now and just dissolved the studio entirely rather than just bringing it all back directly into SE.

[Dragon Lord]

No, HSR hadn't received any updates prior to the crashing issue happening.

Yeah, I heard about Tokyo RPG Factory. Very sad, as I Am Setsuna was a very lovely game that got a lot of hate for absolutely no reason. As for what it means when Square Enix does this -- it means they didn't make enough money for SE to be happy and they've essentially closed down the company and most likely put its previous members into other teams within SE to work on other projects.

Unfortunately SE always set their goals way too high and when they fail to meet them, they blame the people who made the games instead of themselves for their stupidly high expectations.

To give you an idea of how stupid they are when it comes to this, the new CEO recently announced that they would stop focusing on "mid level games" and only focus on their "high end" games. This despite the fact that it's been their mid-level games that have rated the highest. Games like Octopath Traveler I & II, Triangle Strategy, Tactics Ogre Reborn, Star Ocean 2 R, etc. have been the only things that keep people interested in SE any more. They don't sell tens of millions of copies though, and SE has this delusion that they are a company that can release games that sell 20+ million copies.

Worse yet is that they claim these mid-level games are under performing and that's what is costing them, when it reality it's absolutely flops like Forspoken, which may have only avoided the tag of worst game of 2023 thanks to Starflop, that have cost Square Enix millions. Not the mid range RPGs that they now want to stop making.

It's also weird the double standards they have for a lot of their owns games. They claimed to be unhappy with FFXVI despite the fact it sold over 5,000,000 copies just on PS5 alone and within its first week, yet they seem to be perfectly happy with Final Fantasy VII Remake only hitting 7,000,000 sold back in September of 2023, over three years after its initial release while being on PS4 (MUCH bigger userbase), PC (<) and PS5.

Paired up with their now obsessive pursuit of heavy AI usage in games (most likely to try and drastically cut costs of production), even after their NFT pursuits blew up in their faces (another area they bled money, but refuse to acknowledge it and blame the smaller games instead), they just need to either go under or get bought out by a company that's going to slap them upside the head and tell them to stop being so fucking stupid.

[Maniakkid25]

So, I just found out that Spec Ops: The Line has bren removed from all digital storefronts a couple days ago. The reason cited is "expiring partnerships". Now, normally this wouldn't make news; delistings happen all the time, and this game looks like just another cookie-cutter military shooter. But anyone who has played it knows its probably one of the most important games of its year and its entire genre (and a GLARING omission on my most important games of the year list!).

Without giving too much away to those who haven't played it (and if you haven't, good luck doing so now; second hand copies are going for a hundred bucks now), Spec Ops: The Line forces you, the player, into lose-lose situations, confronting you with its themes unapologetically. To put it another way, its major influences include Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now.

Spoilers go here

To drive this home, let me tell you about one of the more harrowing sequences in the game. In it, you are forced (by the game) to launch white phosphorus into a bunch of enemies that you have no hope of killing otherwise. Now, white phosphorus is nasty, nasty stuff, able to ignite on people's skin and do all sorts of horrific things. Amazingly, it's not illegal to use; it's just illegal to use against civilians. Guess what those enemies you were bombarding were, in the first place? Yeah, there's a comment about the game that puts it best.

"This War of Mine makes you suffer the horrors of war. Spec Ops: The Line makes you commit the horrors of war." (Emphasis is mine)

We will probably not see a game like Spec Ops: The Line in a good few years, if it's even this decade. It was one of the best games in it's genre, and now it is gone for most people; existing only in Let's Plays and legacy consoles. This game being delisted is a great loss to gaming history. Welp, there's always piracy...

[Moonface]

No, HSR hadn't received any updates prior to the crashing issue happening.

Huh, I was expecting you to say it did. I wonder why your drivers were fine with it then not if nothing about the game changed.

Yeah, I heard about Tokyo RPG Factory. Very sad, as I Am Setsuna was a very lovely game that got a lot of hate for absolutely no reason. As for what it means when Square Enix does this -- it means they didn't make enough money for SE to be happy and they've essentially closed down the company and most likely put its previous members into other teams within SE to work on other projects.

Unfortunately SE always set their goals way too high and when they fail to meet them, they blame the people who made the games instead of themselves for their stupidly high expectations.

To give you an idea of how stupid they are when it comes to this, the new CEO recently announced that they would stop focusing on "mid level games" and only focus on their "high end" games. This despite the fact that it's been their mid-level games that have rated the highest. Games like Octopath Traveler I & II, Triangle Strategy, Tactics Ogre Reborn, Star Ocean 2 R, etc. have been the only things that keep people interested in SE any more. They don't sell tens of millions of copies though, and SE has this delusion that they are a company that can release games that sell 20+ million copies.

Worse yet is that they claim these mid-level games are under performing and that's what is costing them, when it reality it's absolutely flops like Forspoken, which may have only avoided the tag of worst game of 2023 thanks to Starflop, that have cost Square Enix millions. Not the mid range RPGs that they now want to stop making.

It's also weird the double standards they have for a lot of their owns games. They claimed to be unhappy with FFXVI despite the fact it sold over 5,000,000 copies just on PS5 alone and within its first week, yet they seem to be perfectly happy with Final Fantasy VII Remake only hitting 7,000,000 sold back in September of 2023, over three years after its initial release while being on PS4 (MUCH bigger userbase), PC (<) and PS5.

Paired up with their now obsessive pursuit of heavy AI usage in games (most likely to try and drastically cut costs of production), even after their NFT pursuits blew up in their faces (another area they bled money, but refuse to acknowledge it and blame the smaller games instead), they just need to either go under or get bought out by a company that's going to slap them upside the head and tell them to stop being so fucking stupid.

Yeah, I've viewed SE as being ridiculous with expectations ever since they said Tomb Raider 2013 was a failure because they put such a high sales goal onto it, and each game following that got a bigger budget under the idea it would equate to more sales. I always wonder what state SE would be in if FF14 wasn't bringing in so much money for them on a regular basis.

So, I just found out that Spec Ops: The Line has bren removed from all digital storefronts a couple days ago. The reason cited is "expiring partnerships". Now, normally this wouldn't make news; delistings happen all the time, and this game looks like just another cookie-cutter military shooter. But anyone who has played it knows its probably one of the most important games of its year and its entire genre (and a GLARING omission on my most important games of the year list!).

Without giving too much away to those who haven't played it (and if you haven't, good luck doing so now; second hand copies are going for a hundred bucks now), Spec Ops: The Line forces you, the player, into lose-lose situations, confronting you with its themes unapologetically. To put it another way, its major influences include Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now.

Spoilers go here

To drive this home, let me tell you about one of the more harrowing sequences in the game. In it, you are forced (by the game) to launch white phosphorus into a bunch of enemies that you have no hope of killing otherwise. Now, white phosphorus is nasty, nasty stuff, able to ignite on people's skin and do all sorts of horrific things. Amazingly, it's not illegal to use; it's just illegal to use against civilians. Guess what those enemies you were bombarding were, in the first place? Yeah, there's a comment about the game that puts it best.

"This War of Mine makes you suffer the horrors of war. Spec Ops: The Line makes you commit the horrors of war." (Emphasis is mine)

We will probably not see a game like Spec Ops: The Line in a good few years, if it's even this decade. It was one of the best games in it's genre, and now it is gone for most people; existing only in Let's Plays and legacy consoles. This game being delisted is a great loss to gaming history. Welp, there's always piracy...

I saw this news when it broke too, with the big thing I saw irking people was the lack of warning about the delisting (so nobody had a chance to grab a copy) and how expiring licenses are going to affect so many digital games as time goes on. I had an inkling about the game having some important themes addressed in it but forgot what it specifically covered before now.

I'm also curious when a game like that can get classified as abandonware or something. If the game isn't being sold anymore, it should be fair game for it to be distributed for free like abandonware is instead of just being kept in a publishers pocket collecting dust.

[Maniakkid25]

According to US Copyright, theoretically it would truly be abandonware after 95 years, as that is the amount of time that things under US Copyright law become public domain. This is one of MANY reasons why Copyright is broken. Unfortunately, because the IP is still owned by 2K, distributing it any longer is now Copyright Infringement hence the joke about piracy. It's the same thing with any other abandonware that hasn't either been made freeware or otherwise open to distribution. This is why Area 51 2005 downloads can still be found, as long as its the Air Force ad one, because that was made freely available to anyone that wanted it. Correction: Area 51 freeware installs are NOW copyright infringement because the game changed hands, so the deal expired. Bullshit. So, with Spec Ops: The Line, the game will be public domain long after technology surpasses it and it can't be ran anymore, hence why so many people are up in arms about preservation; there's just no other way for people to experience it now. It sucks!

[Moonface]

According to US Copyright, theoretically it would truly be abandonware after 95 years, as that is the amount of time that things under US Copyright law become public domain. This is one of MANY reasons why Copyright is broken. Unfortunately, because the IP is still owned by 2K, distributing it any longer is now Copyright Infringement hence the joke about piracy. It's the same thing with any other abandonware that hasn't either been made freeware or otherwise open to distribution. This is why Area 51 2005 downloads can still be found, as long as its the Air Force ad one, because that was made freely available to anyone that wanted it. Correction: Area 51 freeware installs are NOW copyright infringement because the game changed hands, so the deal expired. Bullshit. So, with Spec Ops: The Line, the game will be public domain long after technology surpasses it and it can't be ran anymore, hence why so many people are up in arms about preservation; there's just no other way for people to experience it now. It sucks!

If it takes 95 years for something to become true abandonware, does that mean games such as Destruction Derby 2 on My Abandonware is technically still piracy, even though the original studio and publisher are both defunct and as far as I know didn't transfer all their IP to other parties?
It's unlikely to be trackable, but it'd be really funny if downloads of pirated versions of Spec Ops: The Line have spiked in the wake of the delisting due to the news of it bringing attention to the game. I also wonder how much revenue 2K missed out on just from not giving people a heads up on the delisting to try and get in some last minute FOMO sales.

[Maniakkid25]

If it takes 95 years for something to become true abandonware, does that mean games such as Destruction Derby 2 on My Abandonware is technically still piracy, even though the original studio and publisher are both defunct and as far as I know didn't transfer all their IP to other parties?

Yes, it is. In fact, this sort of thing has a specific term: an Orphan Work. Though, looking it up, Psygnosis is owned by Sony and Reflections Interactive is owned by Ubisoft, so theoretically the copyright is buried in one of the two conglomerates' files, probably completely forgotten about. A similar thing happened with Metal Arms: Glitch In the System. While the dev and publisher no longer exist as distinct entities, both of them were absorbed into Activizzard (which is now owned by Microsoft), meaning someone, somewhere theoretically has a proof of ownership to Metal Arms. It's probably been completely forgotten in the shuffle of companies, but it exists!

This is actually the problem with orphan works in general. Theoretically, someone, somewhere can prove they have the copyright, and be able to sue for a lot of money. This is why it's dangerous to keep circulating abandonware and yet ANOTHER REASON copyright is broken. It sucks! It fucking sucks.

[Moonface]

I'm curious how it would work out for indie games if their studios went under. If the copyright for a game is tied to the company itself rather than an individual person, would that mean if the studio closes that the copyright goes with it? I'd assume not but I've only just had that hypothetical scenario come to mind so I'm literally just vomiting out my thoughts as they come in my head here.

[Maniakkid25]

It would theoretically be whoever can prove the copyright, so if the indie dev was a one man studio, he or she could prove that, while the company was dissolved, they were the sole proprietor in a courtroom, given that incorporating requires a paper trail to exist. If there were more employees than that, then it becomes a little more complex, but I imagine the same rules apply: whoever owned the company owns the copyright. This all assumes that the copyright nevet traded hands, because that can happen; this is how Copyright Trolls exist, after all.

[Moonface]

Interesting. I wish I knew an easy way to check who holds a copyright to something; I'd love to find out who actually holds the rights to really old games where the studios dissolved and stuff. Alas, if it was easy to track such things then Digimon Tamers wouldn't have run into the trouble it did when airing in the UK.

---

So I was reading a random Reddit thread out of boredom and saw a comment in it that describes a game I've never heard of, and it sounds like one of the most broken games to get released.

There is a notorious Japan-only NES RPG called Hoshi wo Miru Hito (aka Stargazers), and the Japanese community refers to it as the "legendary shit game" because of how utterly broken and ass-backwards the entire game is. Virtually everything that you could possibly imagine being wrong with the game is indeed wrong.

So imagine you're playing this game for the first time and have no knowledge of how completely busted it is. You wander around the world map, fighting enemies and doing pretty low damage considering that none of your characters have any weapons, only their bare fists to fight with. So you manage to somehow find your way to a town (which is more difficult than it sounds because towns are *invisible* on the world map) and locate the town's weapon shop. You buy a new, basic weapon for each of your party members, and then you head back out onto the world map to grind a little more.

Only now you find that you're suddenly doing 0 damage to everything.

Congratulations, the game is now unwinnable.

Why? Well, due to a programming error with the damage calculation algorithm, any time your Strength stat is compared to an enemy's Defense stat, it always results in the total damage being 0. However, while barehanded, your raw Strength stat is the only thing used in damage calculation, without comparing it against the enemy Defense. This means that by equipping any weapon whatsoever, you will always do 0 damage no matter how strong you get, making it impossible to kill anything, yet fighting barehanded will actually let you deal damage.

Problem is, you now have to start the game over, because as it turns out, once you equip a weapon for the first time, there is no unequip option. You could only trade one piece of equipment for another - you can never become barehanded again. 

tl;dr: Your bare fists in Hoshi wo Miru Hito because due to a damage algorithm error, using any weapon makes you deal 0 damage.

Edit: Because this blew up, here's a few more fun facts about the game.

1. The game is a fairly long JRPG... with no battery backup saves. Instead, you are required to input a very lengthily password every time you start the game up again.
   
   
2. However, because of the way the password stores certain parts of data, it can only remember things in multiples of 4. First of all, you start the game at level 0 instead of 1, but lets say you grind up to lv 3, get your password and turn the game off, the next time you start the game up you'll be back at lv 0. This rule of 4 also applies to money IIRC.
   
   
3. Not only are the towns and dungeons invisible on the world map, but every time you return to the map from another area, it spawns you in the location that you started the game at, rather than just outside of the town/dungeon.
   
   
4. When you try and escape from battle, the calculation is backwards. If you "fail" to escape battle, you'll escape. Likewise there is a spell that is supposed to give you a 100% chance of escaping from battle, but it never works.
   
   
5. There is a hallway in the final dungeon that you must pass through in order to get to the final room. The game has a 100% chance of crashing when walking through this hallway, and there is no normal way around it. However there is a walk through walls glitch that lets you bypass the hallway, but without it, there's no way to beat the game.
   
   
6. So let's say you somehow manage to force yourself through this atrocity of a game, and use the glitch to bypass the crashing hallway. You enter the final room to find out that the alien invaders that have been threatening the world and brainwashing the people of Earth are actually sentient dolphins from outer space, and they offer your party a deal to join them and conquer the universe. If you agree, you get a bad ending and a non-standard game over. If you refuse and decide to fight the aliens, the game crashes every time.
   

[Maniakkid25]

This is some "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" crazy level crap. Like, seriously, I've heard of Adventure Games puzzles that are less brokenly stupid than this, and I've talked about my fair share of Adventure game puzzles! And that includes the Blade Runner game with a bomb defusal puzzle that is impossible on modern PCs, because the puzzle is tied to the CPU's clock speed! OOPS!

[ShiraNoMai]

Doesn't help that apparently this game was commissioned to be made by one dude with a massive time crunch because the publisher intended on making this a suitable competitor with Dragon Quest of all things. They were going to ship a game whether he was finished with it or not, and uh, well it clearly was not lmao.

There's a lot of fun lore in the AGDQ 2020 speedrun of the game (naturally running in the Awful Games block) if you care to give it a whirl:

[Moonface]

And that includes the Blade Runner game with a bomb defusal puzzle that is impossible on modern PCs, because the puzzle is tied to the CPU's clock speed! OOPS!

At least for that game its issue is just from becoming outdated but sounds like it would work otherwise given the right hardware. 

Like @ShiraNoMai already pointed out, the game I mentioned just didn't get finished it turns out because one poor soul had to crunch it out. According to the AGDQ run of it the final boss fight crashes because it just flat out doesn't exist, rather than being a coding problem like most other issues in the game. It also weirdly got ported to Switch back in 2020 as well, presumably without any changes made to it.

There was also a fan remake of it which I assume addresses all of the problems with the game, but I didn't look into the specifics of it to find out.