Modern Gaming (I think.)

[owsf2000]

I -was- going to rant about how the latest Batman game on PC was apparently so poorly put together and released to the point where the devs have actually stopped selling the game on PC until it's been finished. This is apparently their second PR damage control action. I don't know what their first response to PC gamers being pissed off at them, but apparently it just added fuel to the fire - much like how people are now up in arms over the Destiny DLC bullshit and the dev's interview that basically told long term players who had spent 100 dollars on the game that they'd have to buy the 80 dollar collectors edition if they wanted the couple of exclusive DLC items added to it - even though they already owned 75% of the collectors edition. (So it'd be like spending 80 dollars to get "40" dollars of DLC after spending 100 dollars on the game.)

Oh I shouldn't get started on a rant about that. Especially since I have no interest of ever picking up the online only game.

Yeah, I was actually going to talk about Anime conventions and how I'm going to go to one this weekend, but now I don't feel like typing it up after the mini-rant above. (I could say lots more about what I think of it.) Anyway, yeah, I'll be offline for a few days this weekend as I go to one. I'll probably talk about it on here on Sunday or Monday. Only downside of it is probably going to be me not being able to work on my Atari 7800 game over the weekend. It's starting to take shape! Links to the current beta/alpha/whatever of the game are in the first post of the thread. You'll need an emulator to play it. Either Prosystem or MESS will work. MESS will be more accurate with colors/etc. I'm not going to be optimizing the colors for real hardware until I can sit down and play it on real hardware myself.

Comments

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

So Arkham Knight is actually out now? Huh. First I've heard of it, which shows just how out of touch I am with video game news lately (even though I must have at least gotten the Steam announcement email that it was out, I don't recall it or just didn't pay any attention to it if I did). I might pick that up someday, if I ever see the "complete" version with all the inevitable DLC on sale for $5 or so on Steam. Maybe. Assuming they've actually fixed it into a playable state by that point, of course. To be fair, the PC versions of Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, and Arkham Origins were all pretty cool games, especially considering the total of maybe $15 tops I payed for all of them, including all DLC, on Steam not too long ago. (This, though, after I had paid full price for vanilla Asylum and City on 360, several years ago. Ugh. Yeah sure I had fun enough with them at the time and all that good shit, but thinking back on having done that now, though... Ugh. At least I didn't bite on Origins until it was in the $5-$10 range, and I don't feel like I missed out on anything at all by waiting a few years to play it.)

And I give exactly zero fucks whatsoever about Destiny at all, aside from the general "So this is what the video game industry has fallen to, has it?" casual dismissal. The AAA video game industry as a whole is already well on its way to the sewage treatment plant by this point in history, if we're going by the "flushed down the toilet" metaphor. As always, I continue to hope that this sewage treatment plant comes in the form of another huge industry crash like the one back in 1983. Something is going to have to give way, sooner or later, though.

As for conventions... I had nine opportunities to go to PAX Prime when I lived in WA, as it would have been a relatively short bus ride to go... but I never actually went, for whatever reasons. There have been other conventions that I've vaguely considered going to in the past as well, be they anime or brony or sci-fi conventions or whatever, but I always ended up not going. Hell, even just watching videos of other people at cons tends to make me feel slightly agoraphobic. I don't think I actually have bona fide agoraphobia or anything, because I think I could handle it if I ever did eventually go to a con or something, but still... I'm really ambivalent about the concept of going to cons, in general.

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

If you plan on getting it for Steam, you'll be waiting til "Fall 2015" apparently. It's been pulled from the store until it actually runs like a PC game. Apparently WB has the frame rate -capped- at 30fps as well. It mentions the minimum and recommended hardware for playing the game on one page and when it gets to "Expected FPS" it says as much. "30 (capped)".

Wonder if they were planning on adding DLC to "boost" the frame rate.

For the con, this one is both anime and video games, and I doubt I'd go if it was just me. I'll be going with some family that are right into it as well. (Some of them cosplaying!) Some of the panels/lectures I'll be going to will be cosplay related as well. Mainly how to make armor for cosplay outfits. Next year I might end up cosplaying myself - I'll be putting together up to 2 costumes. The first one being an easy to make thing - either Ryu or Dan. ;) For the other one, I haven't decided but it'll end up being something that requires more work in the end. I just want the Ryu/Dan cosplay as a backup in case I can't pull off something more flashy.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

"payed" => "paid" of course. Wish I'd seen that before edit lock.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Heh. Speaking of Batman and Destiny bullshit...

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

One of the commenters on the forum I linked went:
"I think it's preposterous, this even occurred. As stated many times, how did this game make it out of QA?"

The answer to that of course is that it was never put IN to QA to begin with. Apparently the PC port was an outsourced job to a small company that has a dozen people AND they were given 2 weeks to port the PS4 version (I believe) over to the PC.

And you can see the result of that.

Another person on there seemed to try to suck up to the devs with "Yes RockSteady only did the console games they let a third party do the pc version probably because they were running out of time. "

ie: "oh no, it's not our precious developers fault at all!" uh, yes, yes it is. If your game isn't ready, you don't let it be sold in the first place.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't get the whole "It's not their fault since they didn't do the port themselves, they let someone else do it, so it's 100% that group's fault instead" bullshit. It's Rocksteady's fault because they were too lazy/rushed/whatever to properly bother with the port themselves.

More importantly, it's WB's fault, since they're the goddamn publisher over the whole thing and should have had more QA devoted to it, one way or another. Then again, it was almost assuredly because WB just had to have the PC version be out at the same time as the console versions and thus foisted the port onto this shitty third party dev that this mess happened in the first place.