MudMan

It was probably regional, but here there was definitely a split between the computer-focused print media and the console-focused one. PCs tended to get top billing among computer platforms in that space before the micros died out altogether and it was just PC and consoles.

It was all marketing/hobby stuff, though. The Atari ST-specific media feeding into their mini console wars with the Amiga and so on… I don’t see it as the computer brand magazines being more informational and the console ones being more arbitrarily marketing. It was more that the branded magazines were worried with selling you the computer and the multiplat publications were selling you the games.

The mismatch I remember was less between reviews and end result (reviews were less the point than maps and walkthroughs anyway) and more the mismatch between advertising frequency and quality/availability. I don’t remember Night Breed the movie from watching it or from the marketing of the movie or even from playing the game, I remember it from the six month long carpet bombing of magazine advertising we all endured from it.

The review stuff was mostly about them being written by kids who didn’t understand game design, were given something to play for free and seeing something the market had arbitrarily decided mattered in isolation. There were exceptions and people who had the writing skills or the insights, but it didn’t matter because the readers didn’t have the ability to differentiate the two, either.

I would argue a lot of them still don’t and treat whatever vestigial reviews we still have as a shopping catalogue instead.

Meeeeh, I’m with you on some bits, not so much in others.

I agree that controller design was much, much better on consoles. I agree that we didn’t understand the technical limitations that made computer action games so much worse. I remember at best we could tell when a game was “fast” or not, but had no concept of framerate, and we were disproportionately obsessed with parallax scrolling but didn’t parse the value of smooth scrolling nearly as much.

But design wasn’t universally bad at all, we’ve just refocused on different things over time, so the list of games that hold up does not line up with what was exciting at the time at all.

I can play Eye of the Beholder right now and have fun. That’s up there with modern entries on that genre today. I can play Lemmings and have fun. I can play Monkey Island or Loom and be absolutely delighted. Civ 1 is simplistic but the core of what’s good in the series is there. Ditto for Sim City. I can play Another World or Prince of Persia, that’s a genre playing to the strenghts of that hardware.

It’s just at the time we were all freaking out about Gods instead, which is barely playable. Or about Dizzy, which is shallow and inscrutable. It was all happening at once and nobody had an understanding of why things were different from other things. It was a beautiful mess and we mostly didn’t even realize.

To keep it on topic, writing game reviews at the time must have been impossible. Nobody knew what they were talking about, and those who did were making games, not writing about them. We couldn’t tell what good looked like on that area, either.

Hah. That’s what you get for playing on a closed system instead of copying computer disks and tapes like us normal people.

I certainly cared a lot more about that cost in the 16 bit era when I was on a console instead, but by that time there were fancy things like VHS tapes with footage of games and demo kiosks and stuff.

But all through the 8 bit era over here there weren’t ads for games anywhere. Not on TV, not anywhere else. Today we’d say magazines were about discoverability. Without them you were limited to whatever was on the cover or the back of the box. It was a crapshoot. At least in reviews you got some screenshots and a description, distorted as it could be.

And it’s not like I was immune to that, either. I had my nose glued to the computer shop every other day staring at Barbarian or Space Ace, which barely count as games by modern standards. I don’t think I ever thought to question whether playing them was any good. That barely felt like the point.

That is also all tinged by it being a formative period and growing up and so forth, so most of us are unreliable narrators, I suppose.

It did the thing reasonably for the time and the context, I can tell you that first hand.

The set of values was just different early on and so was the purpose of reviews.

It’s weirder to me that the audience consensus ended up being that game reviews are meant to be consumer advocacy, like they’re crash test reports for cars or something. I find that depressing. I’ve always gotten mad when reviewers tell you whether a game is “worth your time” or “worth your money”. What do you know of my time and how I want to use it? Or what value I put in money?

Ideally art criticism is about finding a view on a piece of work, an intellectual framing for it, and sharing it with the audience, and there was a brief time of sheer hubris where a few critics thought that was more or less what they were doing.

And then influencers happened and streamers became a thing and now it’s something else. A bit of community curation, maybe.

In the 80s and 90s? It was targeted marketing for a thing that nobody knew about. You didn’t read a review to know if a game was good, you read it to know that it existed, whether it did anything technical that was exciting and perhaps if it did the thing that the arcade game you already knew was doing. A four star review was often on the basis of “sprites big”, and we were all fine with that.

You are assuming the reviews have any bearing on whether I want to play the game. This is a risky assumption.

When Cyberpunk was busted and everybody was hating that’s what prompted me to jump in. I went and got a PS4 physical version of the 1.0 last-gen release when I could find one on sale, even though I primarily played the game on PC. It’s one of my favorite gaming artifacts. I like it more than any collector’s edition nonsense.

Also, what reviews? I don’t know if I know what “reviews” for videogames even mean anymore.

Anyway, to answer your actual question, if there is a discount at launch (which is increasingly a thing, which is kind of sad) or a decent preorder bonus I can prepurchase. I don’t mind. Otherwise I just get things when I get things.

I am aggressively hoping that this also means they release them on GOG like they did with early PC ports. It is genuinely why I’ve been holding out on most recent Sony ports (and Yakuza games, Sega, I did notice).

Huh. I’ve used Sony’s site recently and I just opened it to see if I noticed anything broken but it seems fine. Of course somebody not seeing a bug doesn’t mean the bug doesn’t exist, it’s not that I don’t believe you. All I’m saying is I’ve been primarily on Firefox for a while now and that hasn’t been my experience.

… Is it?

I genuinely haven’t encountered anything broken using it, short of Youtube. And that’s less Firefox and more all the extensions trying to make it usable, I think. There are a couple of bits of functionality missing, but in terms of sites working, it seems perfectly fine.

Thanks for the link! International press is still running the 33% estimate they probably got from the French morning papers or have taken down the results, so my references hadn’t updated the number.

For the record, the image is not new, there was a lot of international coverage regarding Le Pen’s presidential chances in 2022. But presidentials are presidentials, only one person gets to win. Legislatives raise a lot of questions about parliamentary dynamics, alliances and the potential for the second round to generate another bout of Macron shooting himself in the foot followed by him shooting everybody else in the foot for good measure. That, and there is more paranoia about the tilt right across the EU and internationally about the US.

No, please, free me from this. Because in my head I’m super annoyed at how well this seems to work and I need rescuing from an expert.

FWIW, I’m seeing projections based on the counts that still have them at 34, but I guess we’ll see.

I agree that a resurrection of the cordon sanitaire is probably a positive and I agree that Macron was extremely clumsy, like much of the EU’s centre and demochristian right, in sliding towards far right positions they just can’t defend any better than the actual fascists. But still, from an international perspective France is now firmly in the club of Central European countries with a major fascist problem in a way it wasn’t yesterday, even if the outcome was already understood to be going this way.

I’ve genuinely never felt the need, but I also don’t post for clout or proactively, I’m more of a reply guy in that I prefer the version of social media where I talk with people rather than at people and I do not give a crap about followers, upvotes or starting popular threads. Believe it or not that tends to do a lot to minimize the use cases for blocking, in that people rarely take the time to chase me around or specifically target me, even when things get heated.

But hey, if somebody is bothering you block away. I don’t have a moral stance on it.

I get that immersion tends to normalization…

… but man, 34% is still a LOT. Especially when it’s 2x the previous result and the largest bloc.

It’ll be good if they are prevented from having easy access to legislative action, but it’s still an underpants-threatening result in my book.

It’s not just the games that support it, it will also tag other metadata it knows automatically on all games, like achievement unlocks. And you can manually add tags, too. It’s all telemetry that Valve and the devs are already extracting from you, of course, plus whatever you volunteer in manual markers, but it’s still a bit creepy to see it laid out on a timeline like that.

Well, it’s two different things, one is the background record, which is less “freaking out” and more “not for me on PC”.

The other is blending the background recording with metadata on a timeline, which starts getting Recall-y in terms of logging a video recording of what you were doing where there is also a data record of what you were doing. I do think that part starts stepping over to kinda creepy.

It’s more useful here than as a OS feature, though, because yeah, I can see it saving one the trouble of recording different matches separately or having to scrub back and forth to find certain things.

Yeah, I get that, but that’s also true of Steam Link and Steam’s general streaming solution (which I presume is what this is using) and it’s trivial to get a different window to show up or even to get to the desktop from the in-game streaming, particularly if you have a non-Steam app in your library.

So yeah, it’s gonna be on demand recordings from me… assuming the quality holds up (Nvidia’s kinda sucks). Otherwise that’s what OBS is for.

Well, that was MS’s argument and I don’t think it flies there either.

On a console it’s fine, it’s only ever gonna catch a game. On the Steam Deck as well, same deal.

For a desktop PC that you also use for work and media and other stuff… yeah, I want to be extra sure that if I alt-tab from a game to quickly answer some work email that’s not going to accidentally be recorded anywhere, even locally. Like Recall, I can see people who would not mind that as long as the data stays in their computer, I myself like knowing that I don’t accidentally leave exposed files with potentially sensitive information laying around without my knowledge.

I mean, it’s fine, it just means turning the feature off. I don’t use the equivalent feature from Nvidia for the same reasons. I still think it’s funny that MS got (rightfully) put on blast for basically doing this and then Apple and Valve both announced similar features immediately afterwards. It’s made for some awkward mental gymnastics on the Internet recently.

Hah. So if you turn the background recording on it keeps a browsable timeline with metadata about which modes you were playing, presumably based on your rich presence data?

How freaked out do you think everyone at Valve was this past month watching Microsoft’s Recall feature get ripped to shreds?

All joking aside, I do not trust background recording on PC. I’ve seen how easy it is to bypass Steam Link’s restritions on streaming your desktop, I guarantee that some of these clips would end up with something I don’t want in them. I do think metadata annotation on long manual recordings is potentially interesting, but it IS creepy.

Neat. Not the version I played, and arguably a lot of those issues were fixed in the PC port. But then, there are a lot more options for accurate hardware-level emulation and preservation of period-appropriate Amiga than the much muddier explosion of PC specs, so it’s weirdly a cleaner way to preserve an optimal version.

I’m never sure how much to push early releases like these, though. Is the clumsy one-unit-at-a-time approach to Dune 2 worth messing with? Or do you just go play the (extremely good) remaster of Command & Conquer at that point?

Even better. There’s a solid chance Bumble wasn’t even born when loss.jpg happened.

What a life.