Sumez

5 minutes ago, Brickman said:

but it’s worth a watch if you’ve got nothing better to watch and looking to kill some time

Is this a realistic situation for anyone?  I envy those people

9 hours ago, Brickman said:

I’m actually surprised how many said they have never even heard of it.

I can understand not seeing it but this movie was pretty big at the time and I vaguely remember some people shitting on it just because they don’t like Ben Affleck which caused some controversy.

It's not like I'm not keeping up with movies. It's hard for me to find the time to watch them, but I always keep tabs on what's coming out, and I have a massive list of things I still need to see. Most of them newer than 1999 probably.

But I have literally never heard of this movie before, the title is completely new to me. I'm gonna assume it never had an international theatrical release.

Edit: seems it was shown here

3 hours ago, CMR said:

I've never played Skyrim.  Oblivion and Fallout 3 were enough to convince me not to bother.

If those don't click with you, you definitely made the right choice 

I'm interested in a few of these. Where are you shipping from?

9 hours ago, avatar! said:

I just looked, at Xbone exclusive games I would play and here is the list --

Hi-Fi Rush

It was released on PS5 earlier this year.

Same time LRG announced they were doing a physical.

I've never even heard of this one 

Lol did they just retitle NES Remix in order to sell more copies to the VGS segment?

Looks like it's working 

Shadow Man (Remastered) - Beaten 2/5

Shadow Man is a breed of games that felt ubiquitous at the time, but just aren't made anymore. It's a game that rarely gets any attention, even though I feel like it was pretty high profile back when it came out.
It's a mix of everything that was the late 90s - 3D Zelda-slash-Tomb Raider style exploration with plenty of platforming and a collectathon structure that gives you access to new areas when you find and collect certain numbers of macguffins. Spice things up with an edgy demon/voodoo/world of the dead theme, and a synth-heavy industrial horror soundtrack, and you got 1999 in a nutshell.

I'll be honest, the game doesn't give a good first impression. Awkwardly animated cutscenes that dump a ton of complex lore on you, but give you no idea about what is going on. Areas are bleak and repetitive, and hard to find your way in. Enemies barely telegraph attacks, and even taking a hit gives you little to no feedback. The controls feel familiar, but are off in various ways that are bound to throw you off ever so often all the way until the end. And the combat in general is really just plain garbage.

But give the game a chance, and you'll eventually get dragged into the bizarre worldbuilding, and the complete maze-like stage layout. For every few steps forward, you'll run into new branching paths, and for every path you explore, new branches continue to show up, making it incredibly hard to even keep track of what options you have explored, and where you are even headed. Every stage will open shortcuts and wrap around on itself like a really solid Soulslike map, feeling like a complete mystery until you're done surveying every corner.
Upgrades are frequently required to explore specific areas of one map, although often it is not clear what you need until you have it, and the game will not shy from sending you really far into any one area before realising you can do nothing here yet and have to come back later. And it's not like it outright tells you that either, you'll just have to make that conclusion yourself (or go back and ask the game's single helpful NPC).

But it actually works, and never feels frustrating, mostly due to the idea of the game's main collectible, amusingly literally called Dark Souls, caps and all.
Like Mario's stars or Jiggies in Banjo-Kazooie, these artifacts, once enough have been collected, allow the Shadow Man to open various gates placed throughout the entirety of the game's massive interconnected world. And you better remember where they are located, because you don't get much of a map to rely on either. So no matter where you go, or what dead ends you end up in, you'll always gradually get closer to opening the next major gate.
There is a LOT of backtracking in this game, but every time you go back to an area you'll likely discover brand new places or ways to get around, so throughout my entire playthrough that never felt tedious at all - instead it feels incredibly rewarding finally being able to reach and collect that Dark Soul you spotted five hours earlier!

Complimenting this is a cool tome that you find quite early on in the game, containing a bunch of cryptic texts and crude drawings, most of which seem ritualistic, and make little sense with the modicum of information you have at that time. But inspecting it later on, you'll likely spot bits of information that suddenly make more sense to you, and help informing you about mechanics that otherwise seemed obscure. 
It's not quite on the level of the pages that you find throughout Tunic, but the experience is not dissimilar, and it's a cool gimmick that I wish more exploration-focused games would attempt.

Although the majority of the game takes places in the world of the dead, you'll occasionally travel to the real world to combat a group of serial killers, the game's five major bosses. They have a really weird dynamic, because there's a whole mechanic in place, where the protagonist is unable to turn into Shadow Man during the daytime, and therefore has less powers while there. But these areas also feature very little combat in the first place, and once you figure out you can't complete them in this state, you probably won't go into any of the others until that plot point has been solved, rendering the whole day/night issue irrelevant.

The real world areas are very tonally distinct from both eachother and from the rest of the game, and offer a really cool chance of pace. But personally, due to the circumstances described above, I ended up just doing all of these at the tail end of the game, and I imagine that's how most people play it. On one hand, it would have been better off if you're enticed to actually do these sporadically throughout, but at the same time I also really appreciate the highly nonlinear structure of the game.

SRG are selling their remaining copies of Inscryption on eBay. Just thought you guys would like to know

7 hours ago, TDIRunner said:

But MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY, they have also announced that the HD remaster for TR I-III is also coming to LRG.  That is amazing news.  Now they just need to announce a physical version of the Dark Forces remaster.

I'm up for this! Also announced is Animal Well, the first game from Big Mode. And I'm really hoping for news on Hi-Fi Rush some time soon. Hopefully it didn't get canceled after Microsoft shut down Tango.

Agreed with most of that on Tunic, and I said some of the same things a few pages back on my own writeup. It's a game that does (at least) two widely different things. It does both of them really well so it's hard to criticize it for it, but I do wish it was more focused in its design.

11 hours ago, Floating Platforms said:

Man, with this game, my brain always feels like it's failing me. Amazing how you can feel temporarily smart when you figure something out only to learn it opens a single room and not the next area.

Have you started taking notes yet? I really recommend getting pen and paper out for anything that looks suspicious

Haha yeah I'd say influence is definitely a matter in importance, i just think if what you influenced was a massively successful predatory business model, it's probably not very important to anyone outside of the few people who made a lot of money on that 

14 hours ago, Tulpa said:

Candy Crush is unimportant to most of us here in and of itself, but objectively, it did influence mobile games and beyond to some degree. In that sense, it is objectively important. 

Well I disagree I don't think something being influential says anything about its importance. In that case, wouldn't you just be asking "what is the most influential game"?

what I think is important is definitely also not the same as it being my favorite 

9 hours ago, Tulpa said:

Commercially successful is important in and of itself, because it influences a lot of what comes next. 

But is the things it influenced something that holds any importance to you?
It's certainly not important to the advancements of human civilization, or similar effects on our daily lives. It's not gonna cure cancer or end wars, that goes without saying, the subject is video games.

So what matters is, do you feel that an influx of hundreds of thousands of match-three gacha games - existing mostly as a business model, moreso than a creative endeavour - hold any relevance to the recreational pastime that interests -you-?

Personally I find it extremely unimportant at least. No matter how succesful it was.

No

2 hours ago, DefaultGen said:

It is easy to forget more people play mobile slot machine apps than Nintendo Switch. Something like Candy Crush is probably the real answer. Casual/mobile gaming and microtransactions that make billions are probably more influential to the whole industry than big 3D worlds that are fun to play in.

But is Candy Crush important? Or is it just commercially successful

People here seem to conflate those a lot. "Important" is more subjective

5 hours ago, wongojack said:

Diablo is definitely a similar game, and it also emphasized its multiplayer community for years.  There would never be a WOW without Diablo.

I'll believe you when you said you haven't played Diablo or MMORPGs much, because they really aren't similar at all

5 hours ago, RH said:

Did the Wii experience translate well past Wii Sports?  Not for most games, but it did for a few.  Regardless, everyone including their Mom, Dad, Grandparents and Dog had a favorite game on the Wii Sports disc and it was literally a global phenomenon. 

Eh same for Angry Birds and a bunch of other momentary fads

31 minutes ago, Tabonga said:

Despite the subsequent excursion to cloud cuckoo land I was merely asking why they would do it - not that they shouldn't.

Yeah, but when you're giving something a name or a title, you usually wanna focus just one something that sounds cool or catchy.  Using an English name isn't odd at all, unless you're expecting that they wouldn't. Hence my question.

It's probably less common to use other languages for things that are already in English because English speaking culture generally doesn't get exposed as often to foreign languages. There are definitely plenty of examples though, here's a few popular ones: 

Contra
Wolfenstein
Celeste
Ultima
Deus Ex
Disco Elysium

And that's just for video games

22 minutes ago, Tabonga said:

I used to work with a slew of newly arrived Vietnamese immigrants (they had their green cards and everything) and they didn't have a word for hamburger so they just started using that word.  

I always found it amusing to listen to them talk in Vietnamese  (which is a very smooth flowing language to listen to) and they would break their flow by interjecting hamburger mid-stream.

Thinking about it I don't think I'm familiar with any language where hamburger isn't literally called "hamburger". That's not the same as the word not existing in that language, there's just really no reason to invent a new one. Similarly, Americans will also use words like "macaroni", "pizza" and "pasta" (even though they are frequently used incorrectly). It's not really unusual for words to come from other languages. English is almost entirely comprised from that.

In general it seems to me that food items are among the words that most frequently don't get changed when adopted by other languages, and quite obviously the same is often true for tech-related terms.

5 hours ago, wongojack said:

He has explained that as a teacher, he observed that Japanese students are often very good at memorizing English words but lack a lot of confidence when actually trying to speak English.  This sort of comes out of a cultural quality where failure is to be avoided and being wrong is simply seen as being very bad.

So, they tend to know a lot of individual words or phrases but don't have a lot of practical ability to speak English.  Because of this, English gets used in strange ways all over Japan as others in this thread have stated.  It is recognized and sometimes even new meaning is given to a foreign or English word and then reused without understanding of the word origin etc.  One example I heard recently was the word "Viking" is sometimes used for a buffet.  This is because saying the Swedish word "smorgasbord" was waaay too hard, so they swapped in another word that was vaguely Scandanavian and went with it.

Anyway, the Japanese tend to use and adopt foreign and English words quite regularly, so seeing them in brief use in a title seems to fit right in with how they interact with foreign languages.  At least in a public or marketing sense.

This is not a Japanese thing, it's true for literally any culture in the entire world that has regular exposure to the English language

3 hours ago, wongojack said:

I think you could make a case for the Diablo series.  I guess it really started in the last century, but the evolution into World of Warcraft (which did happen in the 21st) kinda kicked off the whole MMORPG genre.

WoW is more like the aftermath of the MMORPG genre being kicked off.

If you want to look at the game that influenced every MMORPG to come out since (including WoW), EverQuest 2 is probably the bgigest contender. Before that game, most MMOs actually felt quite unique and trying to do wildly different things. After EQ2, there's a bunch of stuff that's just *expected* from the fans of the genre right down to standardized keyboard shortcuts and command line macros!

As for Diablo, it's something else entirely  Biggest thing it kicked off was the color coded loot trash you see all over.

I can see the argument for GTA3, but I'd rather go with a game that did something good for video games and help them getting back on the right track.

Demon's Souls (or Dark Souls) is the obvious answer.