General Game Chat

[Moonface]

iii Initiative Showcase Today @ 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm GMT
I saw this announced a week or so ago but didn't know what to expect from it to post anything about it. Been hearing talk today of it running for almost an hour with over 30 games to be shown, so sounds like it'll be a big thing. The whole showcase is purely for indie developers that are larger than what would be typically thought of under the term "indie", hence the name being iii which is meant to be an indie version of the term AAA.

https://iii-initiative.com/

[Moonface]

A streamer I watch on Twitch started up a playthrough of Brutal Legend yesterday, and while I've heard of the game I haven't ever seen anything of it to know more than it's a game with Jack Black in it. Seeing that it has a lot of actual musicians starring in it as themselves was not something I was expecting, and from what I did see of the game it actually looks fun enough to consider playing it some time. If nothing else, I can appreciate it as a game that would never get made today with the amount of money it would cost just to pay for the people and music the game features. On that note, I'm genuinely surprised that game hasn't been delisted from Steam considering the amount of licensed music in it; I'm used to games with licensed music being killed off within 10 years at best to avoid paying further royalties.

Anyone here ever played the game at all?

[Maniakkid25]

I have not, but I am familiar enough with it to know what you're talking about. It was billed as this big action game, when in reality its more of a zoomed-in strategy game. Also, by the crazy bastards behind Psychonauts, so that's always a plus.

Also, it stars Jack Black. Who doesn't love Jack Black?

[Moonface]

I wonder if another game like that would ever get made nowadays. Apparently the game sold well but I also imagine the cost would be way higher today just for the people and licenses because of how much bigger gaming is now compared to back then. I guess Metal Hellsinger could be considered a modern take on the concept of a metal game using stuff from real artists in a way that's exclusive for the game.


I also saw how the first Fallout game actually looks/plays today because a streamer I watch decided to play it for their first time today. I knew it wasn't anything like the series is now but it was actually a lot more impressive than I was expecting it to be for how old it is. I kinda wish Bethesda would do a remake of that game instead of riding on Skyrim like it's the only good game they ever made.

[ShiraNoMai]

Yeah original Fallout is kind of sick, and I can see why 3 got such a huge backlash when that launched, in the same way that Wind Waker and Metal Gear Solid 2 did at their launches. The subversion of expectations in gamers is such a fickle thing to mess with.

[Maniakkid25]

But the difference with Wind Waker and MGS 2 is that the general consensus turned around for them, and are now regarded as legitimately good despite the backlash. Fallout 3 went on a huge sine wave, with people arguing back and forth about the game, to where it's generally considered not as good as its predecessors simply due to the writing. Fallout 1 and 2 are legitimately some of the best written games of the 90's, full of wit, charm, and genuine pauses for reflection, and that's purely because Black Isle Studios (now Obsidian Entertainment) knew what the f*** they were making. Now that they are both owned by Microsoft, I legitimately hope any new Fallout games are under Obsidian's purview. There's a reason why New Vegas is hailed nowadays as the best of the new games.

[Dragon Lord]

I also saw how the first Fallout game actually looks/plays today because a streamer I watch decided to play it for their first time today. I knew it wasn't anything like the series is now but it was actually a lot more impressive than I was expecting it to be for how old it is. I kinda wish Bethesda would do a remake of that game instead of riding on Skyrim like it's the only good game they ever made.

It's kind of hard to blame them at this point for doing it. You look at their "game of the generation/all-time" in Starflop struggling to hit 5K active players on Steam, yet see 13-year old Skyrim easily maintaining 15-20K+ on a normal basis (and that's probably on the slow end), it's no wonder they continue to default back to Skyrim when their new games continue to sink.

Though the Fallout TV show has given a huge resurgence to Fallout 4 (almost 100K active right now) and Fallout 76 (50K active). But on a normal basis, it has been Skyrim that has kept Bethesda any sort of relevant the last 13 years.

I won't be surprised to see them announce dedicated PS5/XSX ports of the game if things continue to look disappointing for them. They'll need to milk the cash cow again. Although if those rumors of an Oblivion remake are true, then that could be a huge lifeline for them as well.

[Moonface]

Now that they are both owned by Microsoft, I legitimately hope any new Fallout games are under Obsidian's purview. There's a reason why New Vegas is hailed nowadays as the best of the new games.

I don't know the intricacies of the writing in the first two Fallout games or New Vegas, but if the writing for the next Fallout game is on par with what the TV show writing is I'd be pretty excited for it.


In a case of some good news and some bad news, a Konami code variant was discovered in Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness after 25 years because the inputs were drastically altered due to the N64 controller.

On the other hand (which is where the bad news sits), the ESA has said its members won't support any plans to preserve video game libraries online, although they claim it's because they want to preserve copyrights. I can't say I have any trust whatsoever in anything good the ESA claims to say because they're the same out of touch imbeciles who fumbled E3 for multiple years before it just died entirely.

[Maniakkid25]

Yeah, screw the ESA. They only care about their companies' bottom lines, so who gives a rat's ass? And the Castlevania code is pretty neat, and I absolutely understand why it took that long to find lol!

So, I watched a video today that legitimately caught me off-guard. It was a Youtube video about what genre Doom (1993) is. Or rather, what it WOULD be called had Doom not been as popular as it was. See, while it's easy to see what it is NOW, the term "First-Person Shooter" took some years to coalesce. Nowadays we call it a First-Person Shooter because we've grandfathered the game in, but before that point we called them "Doom Clones", so if Doom never was a thing, that term wouldn't exist. And let me tell you, the answer he gets to the question of "What genre would Doom be?" is pretty wild!

[Moonface]

I didn't even think the ESA had a stake in games besides running E3 and wondered why they care so much about copyrights and all the other stuff they came out with over opposing game preservation, but checking their Wikipedia page I see that most of the top game publishers are ESA members and that they're involved in quite a lot of stuff including the ESRB. For how out of touch they seemed to be in the final years of E3 I never expected to see them so involved across the industry as a whole like they are.

Ah, so that's what I saw earlier on social media about Doom and what genre it is. I just kept scrolling by it at the time because I thought it was some random trying to promote their channel (Reddit doesn't really have accounts visibly attached to posts like on Twitter). I'll have to remember to watch that video when I get a chance maybe later tonight or over the weekend.

On a side note about FPS games and the genre, I'm surprised how little Alien Resurrection gets recognized for being either the first twin stick FPS game made or at least the first one made for the PlayStation. It's actually surprising to me that one of the first games to do that wasn't a big title or even from a developer that gets associated with the genre at all. Apparently it was meant to be released in 1997 but got delayed to 2000; although it wouldn't have been the same game had it released at the original time I wonder if releasing a twin stick FPS in 1997 would've changed a lot of other games in the genre between then and 2000.

[Maniakkid25]

Yeah, scratch even a micrometer under the surface, and you find that the ESA is basically a lobbying group for video game publishers. It cares not a whit about gaming, just as long as the feds don't get any funny ideas regulating them (hence the ESRB).

Related to Alien Resurrection, and in the vein of "don't listen to reviews", at least one critic panned that game's control setup. Bet they were eating egg when Halo came out with that exact control setup literally the next year!

[Moonface]

It's funny to see you mention that a critic panned it because while I was reading the games Wikipedia page I saw the QA team fell in love with the twin stick format.

I just watched the video (didn't realize it was going to be as short as it is) and Doom being classified as an action RPG at the end made me chuckle. Now it makes me want to try and reclassify other games as completely different genres than what they're actually filed under.
With how many outlets kept dancing around the bushes of just calling Doom an FPS it leaves me questioning if third person shooters had happened yet or not, and if they had what were they being called? Logically if they were around and being called third person shooters that all the outlets would naturally view Doom as a first person shooter instead of all the different labels they were giving it.

[Maniakkid25]

I don't think the technology was there to make Third-Person Shooters until about the time the FPS moniker shows up. At least, not Third-Person Shooters as we would recognize them. Really, the only third-person shooters there were at the time were arcade games like Metal Slug and Contra, and no one would class those as Third-Person Shooters without some major caveats. The biggest one that comes to mind is Tomb Raider, and that's always been classed as a Platformer, as far as I'm aware. I think it really is an Alone in the Dark situation; the term didn't exist when the game came out, but it obviously is a Survival Horror game. Tomb Raider has a similar vintage. I think it makes more sense that the FPS moniker came first, and was adapted to describe what we now call Third-Person Shooters.

It's wild how recent this history is, and yet it still gets lost to the sands of time because "it's just been that way, right?"

[Moonface]

Yeah I wouldn't call Tomb Raider a third person shooter; gun combat isn't a big focus in it except for TR2 and that game suffers greatly for it.

RE1 would be a game I'd consider a TPS but I would expect it was just labeled a horror game.

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On a side note from this, Sony thought it would be a good idea to force PSN account linking for Helldivers 2 on PC and got such a huge backlash for it they've reversed the decision entirely. It amazes me how after the PS3 humbled them that they still do such stupid decisions.

[Maniakkid25]

Yeah, until they reinstate the sales for those people in the 170 countries that do not support the PSN, I won't consider this a true walkback. They recommended TOS-breaking workarounds when this was still in the pipeline, btw. This whole thing is "we didn't think this one through".