Video Game News and Miscellany

GasBandit

Staff member
Gearbox has done other good things, especially if you go back to 2000 or so - they did the half life expansions, they made Counterstrike, and they spent 2005-2008 releasing Brothers in Arms games, at least some of which were well received. It was part of what got our hopes up for Duke Nukem Forever - up until that point, Gearbox was mostly aces.
 
Oh good, I was just thinking I haven't played a game that looked awesome and ended up mediocre in awhile.

Stupid RTS segments were lame as hell and came out of fucking nowhere.

Edit: Ugh, and they even call it action-adventure in the blurb still. False advertising leaves me a bitter individual.
Don't blame DoubleFine for this. If they had their way, they'd have been promoting the RTS stuff Day 1 because that was the entire point of the game. It's EA's marketing team that promoted it intentionally as an action game.

Though I agree, the RTS stuff was the worse part of the game. Everything else was great but the difficulty of the RTS segments in the late game really made me want to put it down for awhile.
 
Some shit is going down at Valve. 25 employees from their Android and hardware departments developing the Steambox have reportedly been fired and a bunch of important folk are gone too.

Moby Francke, Half-Life 2 character designer and Team Fortress 2 art lead
Jason Holtman, director of business development for Steam and Steamworks
Keith Huggins, character animator and animator for Team Fortress 2 “Meet the” video series
Tom Leonard, software engineer for Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead
Realm Lovejoy, artist for Half-Life 2, Portal, and Left 4 Dead. She was also part of the original DigiPen-turned-Valve team that created Narbacular Drop, the inspiration for Portal
Marc Nagel, test lead for Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and patch updates
Bay Raitt, animator for Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal
Elan Ruskin, engine programmer for Left 4 Dead, Portal 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Matthew Russell, animator for Team Fortress 2 “Meet the” video series

Also are reported fired or gone. Gaben going on a fucking rampage.
 
That looks a bit like a group of people leaving to form their own company. I wonder if it's because Valve seemingly has ZERO new projects in the works and these guys want to... I dunno... make games?
 
If Robin Walker is gone, something serious must have happened. I wonder if we're going to hear Valve's admission of leaving the game industry as a developer and just focusing on Steam now...
 
If they do, fuck Valve for teasing "Ricochet 2" (the in-joke codename for Half-Life 3) for so long and openly. Fuck them right up their assholes with knives.
 
Don't blame DoubleFine for this. If they had their way, they'd have been promoting the RTS stuff Day 1 because that was the entire point of the game. It's EA's marketing team that promoted it intentionally as an action game.

Though I agree, the RTS stuff was the worse part of the game. Everything else was great but the difficulty of the RTS segments in the late game really made me want to put it down for awhile.
Honestly, I still blame them for the RTS parts being so lame anyway. Marketing I'll lay on EA, sure. Weird RTS gameplay that doesn't flow well at all I'll lay on the developer.
 
The World of Tanks publisher/studio/whatever they are purchased Gas Powered Games today. That's a thing that happened.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
The World of Tanks publisher/studio/whatever they are purchased Gas Powered Games today. That's a thing that happened.
I think their actual company name is wargaming.net. Well. It's something I guess, better than just closing their doors. We'll see if it gives them any legs.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
So. Bungie is apparently completely deranged, or in serious, serious denial about mouse and keyboard and just shooters in general, and what people want in them. Two weapons! Because guns are heavy, guys.
"I have a 360 controller for my PC, but I rarely use it."

:confused: I really hope he means "I rarely use it to play shooters", because there are a lot of games on PC that control better with a gamepad. (Maybe he just plays those games on a console, poor bastard.)

Anyway, Bungie's statements are even crazier. C'mon, if you don't want to develop for the PC, just say so. Don't lie about the industry as a whole just to justify your decision.
 
On some of the game forums I visit, every now and then people propose allowing PC and Xbox Team Fortress 2 players to play against each other.

Inevitably someone points out the Xbox players will get destroyed by anyone using a mouse and keyboard, and the idea fizzles out until someone raises it again.
 
Rock Paper Shotgun did an excellent piece on this. Basically, even with only reported PC game sales numbers, PC games outsell each individual console's games. If we could put in digital sales (which don't have released sales numbers), it likely wouldn't be close. PC Games also have a much longer life than console titles.
 
They tried that with Shadowrun, they gimped the PC controls of Shadowrun so that the gamepadders would be able to compete. Shadowrun closed FASA studios and Microsoft decided that the PC, the platform running on their own OS software, was bullshit because they couldn't charge people for using the internet on it so they would never allow xbox and pc to interact again.

Some Sony Europe guy recently intimated at Playstation 4 being able to play with other platforms on platform agnostic games.
 
I tried to play Tera, a game where positioning completely calls whether that 900-pound monster is going to flatten you or not based on where you're looking and moving, with a gamepad and a keyboard/mouse to see the difference.

I'm never playing it with a gamepad again. I'm sorry, but if a PC game has an option between the two there's no reason to use a gamepad. The response time on looking around between a mouse and control stick is astounding. The mouse is much more precise and quick, the stick feels like it has glue holding it down comparatively.
 
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