Video Game News and Miscellany

figmentPez

Staff member
I took a look around the Agents of Mayhem forum on Steam, and it looks like the controller support for that game is broken in a lot of the same ways that Saints Row 4's is. So, they added native Steam Controller support to SR4, broke a lot of things in the process, haven't said anything about when they might fix it, and they still didn't learn enough from their bungling in order to keep the same problems from cropping up in their new game...

I love a lot of the games Volition have made, but damn they suck at patching out problems.
 
Seriously, if I have to download 170 gbs, I probably won't bother. Boy band adventure isn't worth that kind of SSD maintenance.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
Apparently it comes with support of up to 8k resolution.
Minecraft supports 8k, Half Life 2 supports 8k, that doesn't mean anything.

If anything, supporting 8k resolution (if they're doing it on current hardware) means they have less memory to use for textures. I'd say I wouldn't expect them to pass 100GB, but apparently Call of Duty Infinite Warfare clocks in at 130GB. Still, the install size for FF15 and Shadow of Mordor are pretty comparable, around 55GB. The HD texture pack for Shadow of Mordor is is about 11GB, so I think it's likely the PC version of FF15 will stay under 70GB.

EDIT: Just found that Fallout 4's HD texture pack is 55GB. WTF? Yeah, FF15 might be reasonable, might be batshit. It's anyone's guess.
 
The article I posted says that the install size is 170 GB and that it doesn't sound like the ultra super duper textures are optional.
 
Doesn't FFIV still cost $15/month?

It's nice that you can get the complete game install plus the two expansions for essentially half-off, but it's a subscription MMO. You won't be saving that much. :p
 
Doesn't FFIV still cost $15/month?

It's nice that you can get the complete game install plus the two expansions for essentially half-off, but it's a subscription MMO. You won't be saving that much. :p
To me, if the food would have cost that much originally (no premium for the game bundle), then you're getting it free. If there's a premium, then it depends.

Fairly sure that the game comes with 30 days free when you buy it (even like this) so that depends. It IS something like $10-15 per month though. One of the few (along with WoW) surviving subscription MMOs out there.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
I'm still following the development of the A Link to the Past Randomizer, and it's pretty interesting. They've added in new modes and a lot of new options, in addition to refining what was already there. Highlights:

- Triforce hunt mode - 20 pieces of the triforce are hidden in chests and other locations. Find them all to finish the game. Not really much of a mode for single player, since it just make the game randomly shorter sometimes, but I can see it fun for races. I've played this mode a couple times.

- A large variety of skins to play as. Just cosmetic changes, but it's fun to play as Samus, Boo, Dark Link, etc. And some thought has gone into these. Samus upgrades from Varia, to Gravity suit, to Phazon when she collects the armor upgrades, and when you'd otherwise be turned into Bunny Link, she reverts back to her Zero Suit. There are a couple dozen sprite options, though some are very similar.

- Options to remove background music, and to reduce the low-health heartbeat sound.

- Different difficulty levels, and options to choose if you want the randomization to require glitches to complete or not.

- Entrance Randomzier branch - In this alternate version almost all of the entrances on the overworld are randomized. Cave entrances you don't even need to visit in the base Randomizer may lead to important stuff. Houses in Kakariko might lead to death mountain caves, the Swamp Palace could lead to the potion shop, etc. Not a mode I've tried yet, but I might if I'm ever willing to take notes as to what leads where.

All in all, it's a pretty damn fun way to revisit one of my favorite games, and I'm curious as to how far they can take this. Also, it makes me wonder if Nintendo could pull off making a Legend of Zelda Maker, and let players design dungeons the way they can currently make Mario levels.
 
Marc Laidlaw, former writer at Valve and lead writer of the Half-Life series, posted what appears to be the planned storyline for Half-Life 2: Episode 3 on his website, though with the proper nouns all changed. His website's currently getting hammered though, so it's a bit hard to reach, but fortunately it's been copied to Github, although this version has changed most of the names back to their originals. It's also been archived. He probably wouldn't have done this if he wasn't confident that the game would never be made, and that this is the only way the storyline is going to be seen by players.

While the fact that Laidlaw posted this on his personal site does give it some credibility, I still can't help but feel a bit skeptical. Or maybe I just don't want to accept the idea that the game really is never coming out.

Text from his website in the spoiler below:

Dearest Playa,
I hope this letter finds you well. I can hear your complaint already, “Gertie Fremont, we have not heard from you in ages!” Well, if you care to hear excuses, I have plenty, the greatest of them being I’ve been in other dimensions and whatnot, unable to reach you by the usual means. This was the case until eighteen months ago, when I experienced a critical change in my circumstances, and was redeposited on these shores. In the time since, I have been able to think occasionally about how best to describe the intervening years, my years of silence. I do first apologize for the wait, and that done, hasten to finally explain (albeit briefly, quickly, and in very little detail) events following those described in my previous letter (referred to herewith as Epistle 2).
To begin with, as you may recall from the closing paragraphs of my previous missive, the death of Elly Vaunt shook us all. The Research & Rebellion team was traumatized, unable to be sure how much of our plan might be compromised, and whether it made any sense to go on at all as we had intended. And yet, once Elly had been buried, we found the strength and courage to regroup. It was the strong belief of her brave son, the feisty Alex Vaunt, that we should continue on as his mother had wished. We had the Antarctic coordinates, transmitted by Elly’s long-time assistant, Dr. Jerry Maas, which we believed to mark the location of the lost luxury liner Hyperborea. Elly had felt strongly that the Hyperborea should be destroyed rather than allow it to fall into the hands of the Disparate. Others on our team disagreed, believing that the Hyperborea might hold the secret to the revolution’s success. Either way, the arguments were moot until we found the vessel. Therefore, immediately after the service for Dr. Vaunt, Alex and I boarded a seaplane and set off for the Antarctic; a much larger support team, mainly militia, was to follow by separate transport.
It is still unclear to me exactly what brought down our little aircraft. The following hours spent traversing the frigid waste in a blizzard are also a jumbled blur, ill-remembered and poorly defined. The next thing I clearly recall is our final approach to the coordinates Dr. Maas has provided, and where we expected to find the Hyperborea. What we found instead was a complex fortified installation, showing all the hallmarks of sinister Disparate technology. It surrounded a large open field of ice. Of the Hypnos itself there was no sign…or not at first. But as we stealthily infiltrated the Disparate installation, we noticed a recurent, strangely coherent auroral effect–as of a vast hologram fading in and out of view. This bizarre phenomenon initially seemed an effect caused by an immense Disparate lensing system, Alex and I soon realized that what we were actually seeing was the luxury liner Hyperborea itself, phasing in and out of existence at the focus of the Disparate devices. The aliens had erected their compound to study and seize the ship whenever it materialized. What Dr. Maas had provided were not coordinates for where the sub was located, but instead for where it was predicted to arrive. The liner was oscillating in and out of our reality, its pulses were gradually steadying, but there was no guarantee it would settle into place for long–or at all. We determined that we must put ourselves into position to board it at the instant it became completely physical.
At this point we were briefly detained–not captured by the Disparate, as we feared at first, but by minions of our former nemesis, the conniving and duplicitous Wanda Bree. Dr. Bree was not as we had last seen her–which is to say, she was not dead. At some point, the Disparate had saved out an earlier version of her consciousness, and upon her physical demise, they had imprinted the back-up personality into a biological blank resembling an enormous slug. The Bree-Slug, despite occupying a position of relative power in the Disparate hierarchy, seemed nervous and frightened of me in particular. Wanda did not know how her previous incarnation, the original Dr. Bree, had died. She knew only that I was responsible. Therefore the slug treated us with great caution. Still, she soon confessed (never able to keep quiet for long) that she was herself a prisoner of the Disparate. She took no pleasure from her current grotesque existence, and pleaded with us to end her life. Alex believed that a quick death was more than Wanda Bree deserved, but for my part, I felt a modicum of pity and compassion. Out of Alex’s sight, I might have done something to hasten the slug’s demise before we proceeded.
Not far from where we had been detained by Dr. Bree, we found Jerry Maas being held in a Disparate interrogation cell. Things were tense between Jerry and Alex, as might be imagined. Alex blamed Jerry for his mother’s death…news of which, Jerry was devastated to hear for the first time. Jerry tried to convince Alex that he had been a double agent serving the resistance all along, doing only what Elly had asked of him, even though he knew it meant he risked being seen by his peers–by all of us–as a traitor. I was convinced; Alex less so. But from a pragmatic point of view, we depended on Dr. Maas; for along with the Hyperborea coordinates, he possessed resonance keys which would be necessary to bring the liner fully into our plane of existence.
We skirmished with Disparate soldiers protecting a Dispar research post, then Dr. Maas attuned the Hyperborea to precisely the frequencies needed to bring it into (brief) coherence. In the short time available to us, we scrambled aboard the ship, with an unknown number of Disparate agents close behind. The ship cohered for only a short time, and then its oscillations resume. It was too late for our own military support, which arrived and joined the Disparate forces in battle just as we rebounded between universes, once again unmoored.
What happened next is even harder to explain. Alex Vaunt, Dr. Maas and myself sought control of the ship–its power source, its control room, its navigation center. The liner’s history proved nonlinear. Years before, during the Disparate invasion, various members of an earlier science team, working in the hull of a dry-docked liner situated at the Tocsin Island Research Base in Lake Huron, had assembled what they called the Bootstrap Device. If it worked as intended, it would emit a field large enough to surround the ship. This field would then itself travel instantaneously to any chosen destination without having to cover the intervening space. There was no need for entry or exit portals, or any other devices; it was entirely self-contained. Unfortunately, the device had never been tested. As the Disparate pushed Earth into the Nine Hour Armageddon, the aliens seized control of our most important research facilities. The staff of the Hyperborea, with no other wish than to keep the ship out of Disparate hands, acted in desperation. The switched on the field and flung the Hyperborea toward the most distant destination they could target: Antarctica. What they did not realize was that the Bootstrap Device travelled in time as well as space. Nor was it limited to one time or one location. The Hyperborea, and the moment of its activation, were stretched across space and time, between the nearly forgotten Lake Huron of the Nine Hour Armageddon and the present day Antarctic; it was pulled taut as an elastic band, vibrating, except where at certain points along its length one could find still points, like the harmonic spots along a vibrating guitar string. One of these harmonics was where we boarded, but the string ran forward and back, in both time and space, and we were soon pulled in every direction ourselves.
Time grew confused. Looking from the bridge, we could see the drydocks of Tocsin Island at the moment of teleportation, just as the Disparate forces closed in from land, sea and air. At the same time, we could see the Antarctic wastelands, where our friends were fighting to make their way to the protean Hyperborea; and in addition, glimpses of other worlds, somewhere in the future perhaps, or even in the past. Alex grew convinced we were seeing one of the Disparate’s central staging areas for invading other worlds–such as our own. We meanwhile fought a running battle throughout the ship, pursued by Disparate forces. We struggled to understand our stiuation, and to agree on our course of action. Could we alter the course of the Hyperborea? Should we run it aground in the Antarctic, giving our peers the chance to study it? Should we destroy it with all hands aboard, our own included? It was impossible to hold a coherent thought, given the baffling and paradoxical timeloops, which passed through the ship like bubbles. I felt I was going mad, that we all were, confronting myriad versions of ourselves, in that ship that was half ghost-ship, half nightmare funhouse.
What it came down to, at last, was a choice. Jerry Maas argued, reasonably, that we should save the Hyperborea and deliver it to the resistance, that our intelligent peers might study and harness its power. But Alex reminded me had sworn he would honor his mother’s demand that we destroy the ship. He hatched a plan to set the Hyperborea to self-destruct, while riding it into the heart of the Disparate’s invasion nexus. Jerry and Alex argued. Jerry overpowered Alex and brought the Hyperborea area, preparing to shut off the Bootstrap Device and settle the ship on the ice. Then I heard a shot, and Jerry fell. Alex had decided for all of us, or his weapon had. With Dr. Maas dead, we were committed to the suicide plunge. Grimly, Alex and I armed the Hyperborea, creating a time-travelling missile, and steered it for the heart of the Disparate’s command center.
At this point, as you will no doubt be unsurprised to hear, a Certain Sinister Figure appeared, in the form of that sneering trickster, Mrs. X. For once she appeared not to me, but to Alex Vaunt. Alex had not seen the cryptical schoolmarm since childhood, but he recognized her instantly. “Come along with me now, we’ve places to do and things to be,” said Mrs. X, and Alex acquiesced. He followed the strange grey lady out of the Hyperborea, out of our reality. For me, there was no convenient door held open; only a snicker and a sideways glance. I was left alone, riding the weaponized luxury liner into the heart of a Disparate world. An immense light blazed. I caught a cosmic view of a brilliantly glittering Dyson sphere. The vastness of the Disparate’s power, the futility of our struggle, blossomed briefly in my awareness. I saw everything. Mainly I saw how the Hyperborea, our most powerful weapon, would register as less than a fizzling matchhead as it blew itself apart. And what remained of me would be even less than that.
Just then, as you have surely already foreseen, the Ghastlyhaunts parted their own checkered curtains of reality, reached in as they have on prior occasions, plucked me out, and set me aside. I barely got to see the fireworks begin.
And here we are. I spoke of my return to this shore. It has been a circuitous path to lands I once knew, and surprising to see how much the terrain has changed. Enough time has passed that few remember me, or what I was saying when last I spoke, or what precisely we hoped to accomplish. At this point, the resistance will have failed or succeeded, no thanks to me. Old friends have been silenced, or fallen by the wayside. I no longer know or recognize most members of the research team, though I believe the spirit of rebellion still persists. I expect you know better than I the appropriate course of action, and I leave you to it. Except no further correspondence from me regarding these matters; this is my final epistle.
Yours in infinite finality,
Gertrude Fremont, Ph.D.

EDIT: Laidlaw himself is claiming that this was just a fanfic he wrote based on a dream he had:

 
Last edited:

figmentPez

Staff member
While the fact that Laidlaw posted this on his personal site does give it some credibility, I still can't help but feel a bit skeptical. Or maybe I just don't want to accept the idea that the game really is never coming out.
Hey, as long as we're not just accepting that this is some wild dream fanfic, why not just go crazy with speculation!

Maybe it's a rejected plotline for HL3, one of many they considered and discarded, and it's being released now as part of a marketing move to stir up HL3 buzz again before an announcement of Valve's next big project...

Half-Life the Collectible Card Game.
 
I'm really skeptical of Metroid: Samus Returns after seeing this trailer:

If I had a 3DS I'd be interested in this remake, since AM2R got shitcanned (and NOBODY here has a copy... like seriously, I'm sure that NOBODY here has a copy on their hard drive *wink*wink*). I wonder how many years before it comes to Switch? I'm guessing 2, though 1 if the new Metroid for Switch gets delayed to maintain hype. Or they may release them together. We'll see I guess.

What I find bullshit is the actual in-game advantages that you can only get via Amiibo. Those are NOT minor features it would seem.
 
Marc Laidlaw, former writer at Valve and lead writer of the Half-Life series, posted what appears to be the planned storyline for Half-Life 2: Episode 3 on his website, though with the proper nouns all changed. His website's currently getting hammered though, so it's a bit hard to reach, but fortunately it's been copied to Github, although this version has changed most of the names back to their originals. It's also been archived. He probably wouldn't have done this if he wasn't confident that the game would never be made, and that this is the only way the storyline is going to be seen by players.

While the fact that Laidlaw posted this on his personal site does give it some credibility, I still can't help but feel a bit skeptical. Or maybe I just don't want to accept the idea that the game really is never coming out.



EDIT: Laidlaw himself is claiming that this was just a fanfic he wrote based on a dream he had:


There's still half a hope:






And since this is just the Ep. 3 outline, it makes sense.

Though i don't recall if they officially said Ep.3 was cancelled or not... it's been s long.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
I haven't played Metroid since the NES, and have all but given up basic platformers. That said, I would play the Hell out of that.
Maybe you're in the target market, because I'm pretty sure it's not aimed at people who played Super Metroid, Fusion and/or Zero Mission. The movement and combat appear to have more in common with Other M than with the sprite-based games. Samus is stationary every time she fires her gun in that trailer, which is a huge departure from the way other side-scrolling Metroid games have played.
 
Secret of Mana Remake



Man, I haven't played this game since the original SNES version. Loved it back in the day, though. At the very least, this'll go on my Steam wishlist.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
Man, I haven't played this game since the original SNES version. Loved it back in the day, though. At the very least, this'll go on my Steam wishlist.
I played Sword of Mana, I know how badly they can mess up a combat system, and how horribly they can weigh a game down with a tedious leveling system. At this point I have absolutely zero faith in SqareEnix to be able to make a game I want to play.
 
Last edited:
That looks really cheap to me. Also, hopefully they do more than just give it a relatively unattractive 3D facelift and actually finish the game the way it was meant to be before it was gutted by the downgrade from CD to cartridge.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Jay
£30 for a 25 year old game (and pre-order bonuses. Ugh.) Yeah I think if I do end up getting this it will need to wait for a sale to knock a large chunk off the price.
 
Top