I have no clue who currently owns the Atari hot potato, but whoever they are went and bought AtariAge.com . That means it's dead. The forums will likely be deleted very soon, so if there's important legacy information there, get it now.
Whenever a big company buys a fan community site, that means the fan site is dead. Every single time... Every... single... time... no exceptions... ever.
Yes, it's true. It's unclear if he was fired after over 30 years as the voice of Mario or if he retired (he is 67 now), but after the rumors that he was unhappy with Nintendo's choice for Mario's voice in the movie, I don't think I'm giving Nintendo the benefit of the doubt here, they probably decided they don't want him voicing Mario anymore. I don't see how this isn't a mistake! The voice in the Mario Wonder trailer, which as I suspected at the time is confirmed to not be Martinet, sounded a bit off, you know? And yeah, it was, it isn't him. That's really unfortunate.
I wonder if they will have a new single voice actor for Mario or if we'll see different people. Even if it's mostly just voiced sound effects, his voice is important to get right...
Nightdive Studios did it again. On the tail of the recent remastering of Rise of the Triad, they've given us an amazing remaster of a rather contentious Quake 2. The game had... flaws as it was the first id made after Romero left the company, and unfortunately it showed. The level design consists of numerous tubes, and the enemies are very... samey. The remaster does a few things to fix this. Namely, it reenables a number of AI subroutines to make the enemies more interesting to fight. But, the biggest contribution? They put in Midway's Quake II 64 (like Doom 64, a whole new game). Now, it's not a true port of that game. Instead, the levels are brought in from the N64 game but are running in the Quake 2 engine proper instead of a modified Quake 1 engine as on the N64. Still, the new AI additions manage to enhance that experience too.
But, the biggest addition is a whole new campaign from Machine Games. They proved themselves with their campaign in the Quake 1 remaster, and their dedicated to good retro shooter level design is on full display here, with the benefit of zero hardware limitations meaning they can just ooze out hundreds of enemies all over the place and make levels that are detailed and sprawling. This is frankly the best campaign ever made for Quake II, and I'm including both the second expansion pack and Midway's Quake II 64 in that assessment.
It's good stuff, and unlike so very... very many modern ports, they kept full support for LAN play and direct IP connections.
How very Edge, Nintendo, how very Edge Magazine of you. Or maybe, when you could play Space Invaders on that one PS1 game's loading screens? Yeah that...
Nintendo, don't forget just how many gameplay mechanics you flat out stole in the early days. Balloon Pop is Joust. Devil World is Pac-Man. Heck you straight up copied Pong and changed the name to Color TV Game 15. You open this door, there will be problems Nintendo.
For those who don't know, Belgian studio Larian, the developers of the Divinity series, has been working on a D&D game called Baldur's Gate 3 for several years now. The game is now getting close to completion, it releases next month, so press have gone to see it. The press reaction is quite positive.
As for me, though, it's complicated. I'm sure it will do well and be popular, but I've been skeptical about my interest in it all along and still am for various reasons. On the one hand, I love Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 a lot, but... is this really Baldur's Gate? It sure doesn't seem like it. Is this game a real sequel (from a completely different team), or just some random D&D game using the BG name in order to get attention? I've always assumed the latter and see no reason to think otherwise. Yes, the game is set in the city of Baldur's Gate, but when it comes to computer games the name has certain expectations and I don't see much of a connection.
Also, I know Larian is well thought of, but I haven't played any of their games much. Also I've rarely loved European RPGs, they often feel even jankier than north american ones... Bethesda excepted of course but I don't like their games that much either. I know Larian may be the best european RPG developer though so the should be good as a standalone title... it has been in early access for like two years now. They have had a lot of time to get feedback and improve it. I hope it will be polished beginning to end, we'll see.
As for the gameplay, it looks like the game will feature a very faithful adaptation of the d&d rules, with turn-based combat using fifth edition D&D rules. The problem is, what made BG's engine so good was the pauseable real-time play. BG3 isn't pausable real-time, it's fully turn-based. This makes it more accurate to D&D, but a clearly very inaccurate Baldur's Gate / Infinity Engine game. That's not infinity engine combat! That was one of the first things I heard about the game and as soon as I heard that I basically stopped paying any attention to BG3. The Infinity Engine that was used in BG1 and 2, Icewind Dale 1 and 2, and Planescape Torment, is my favorite RPG game engine. This game has totally different gameplay. It looks like a good turnbased RPG, but it's clearly not Baldur's Gate. I get wanting accurate D&D rules, but ... call it something else.
Also, the first trailer was ... pretty messed up, wasn't it really gross? it was too much and turned me off from the game. ... Looking it up yeah it was a guy becoming a mindflayer. Why was that your announcement. I hated that trailer, it left me expecting the game to not be something I'd be interested in. The game looks better than that trailer, but it made a bad first impression. The story of this game has absolutely nothing to do with Baldur's Gates 1 or 2, it is entirely new. The first two tell a continuing story, this isn't an episodic series. The characters are also all new. This is not a sequel to Baldur's Gate, it's an entirely different game using its name.
So overall, I would say that I am interested in Baldur's Gate 3 because it's an apparently accurate D&D game, but not at all interested in it because they are using the name of some of the best RPGs ever; that's a drag against it, really. I imagine the name will get them more sales though so I get why they'd use it. Still, the game probably should be named something else. This game should NOT have been released (or about to be released) as Baldur's Gate 3, it should be a game with some other subtitle. Without the gameplay, characters, or story of Baldur's Gate, there's literally nothing connecting this game to the games it is not a sequel to but pretends to be a sequel to other than its name. How obnoxious.
Ah remember earth? I can see it now... like a lovely painting in exquisite detail.
Well, it's also a book trilogy I've been reading through and it's about to become a TV series. Funny thing is, in reading this very dark sci-fi trilogy, I'm reminded of A Link Between Worlds of all things.
There's a concept in this book series called the "Dark Forest". It's a solution to the fermi paradox that basically says that yes, there's aliens out there everywhere, and all of them are hiding, because if they reveal themselves, SOME civilization is going to destroy them at the speed of light. So, you know, on a galactic scale that's tens to hundreds to thousands of years. The reasoning is that while civilization expands, the number of resources in the universe remains the same. Further, survival trumps all other concerns, such as morality. Thirdly, there is no way to resolve the chain of suspicion in a timely manner when cut off by time scales that mean whoever you even made an alliance with is dead and whole new generations that may have wholly different values will almost certainly "change the agreement". So, in this dark forest, the moment you hear a sound whether from a rabbit or a lion, shoot immediately and hide always. No Federation can form in this universe.
There's also a weapon described through a fairy tale. A painter from a farwaway land can paint anyone they've seen, turning them into a lovely painting but the original is gone, now painted. This was meant to secretely convey a weapon called a two dimensional foil which pulls in spacetime around it at the speed of light forcibly compressing everything into two dimensions, a vast painting on the scale of a star system.
I ended up thinking of Link Between Worlds not just because of Yuga painting everyone into paintings in the same way as that fairy tale, (and that impossible to defend against weapon), but because Princess Hilda is absolutely treating Hyrule the way aliens treat the discovery of other civilizations, as a dark forest problem. Sneak in, take, save your realm at the expense of the other for survival is all.
Also, for some reason the cover of these books says "As recommended by BARACK OBAMA", as if I care about book recommendations from politicians.
So, last year Microsoft announced it was going to buy Activision-Blizzard-King for $65 billion. This set off a long process of getting the merger approved by regulators all over the world. Most ended up approving it, but two, the UK's CMA and the US's FTC, tried to stop it. The legal process in the US is for a court case to decide the result, and today the judge came back with her ruling: the FTC's request for an injunction to stop the merger is denied. The FTC's case was pretty poorly presented at the trial, which was mostly livestreamed and had some interesting stuff come up because of it, so this result is not surprising at all. The FTC focused its case on Call of Duty and how much Microsoft could get from getting ahold of that series, but Microsoft insisted that CoD would stay multiplatform for at least a decade, which I believe; they'll probably treat CoD like Minecraft. Other Activision and Blizzard stuff will probably go PC/Xbox-only, but not CoD for a long time.
(Meanwhile, MS also said that King's mobile games were actually probably the number one reason why they want to buy the company.)
Meanwhile, as for the UK regulator, the CMA, it seems that they are going back into negotiations with Microsoft, so maybe now that they know they're the only regulator trying to stop the deal and that their case was incredibly bad -- basically the CMA focused their rejection entirely on how it'd give Microsoft too much power in cloud gaming, even though there is no proof that cloud gaming is going anywhere -- maybe they'll back down now. I hope so, that's an absurd reason to block the deal over.
What do I think about the merger, though? As I have said before, Activision and Blizzard have a very poor track record of how they have treated their employees over the past two decades or so. Microsoft is certainly also flawed in that respect, but they're no Activision, so it should be good for Activision's workers if the merger goes through. Additionally this should get Bobby "I love Republicans and don't care about harassment at my workplace" Kotick out of the industry, which would be great. Kotick, who remember is the longest-termed CEO in the tech industry, did some good things back in the '90s when he saved Activision and led them to make a series of fantastic games, most notably MechWarrior II among others, but for several decades now every story about him has been bad. It's either about his support for Republican causes, giving jobs to awful people, not doing much about the bad work environment at his company for women and such, how he makes insanely huge salaries (like what was it $150 million a year?), etc, etc... if this gets him out, even with a golden parachute, I'm in favor.
On the other hand, having the very first third party videogame developer, and a company that is one of the largest third parties, get bought up by a first party really says a lot about how this industry is going. AAA development has gotten absurdly expensive, beyond the means of all but the largest companies. And so mergers continue as studios get larger and larger and fewer and fewer companies buy up as many of the major studios as they can. This is a bad trend, and Microsoft and Sony are both guilty of encouraging it, but considering how expensive development is now I understand why it's happening, unfortunately. There's probably not much that can be done so long as development costs stay high, and I can't see them going down unless there's a crash or something!
The result of mergers like this will be even longer dev times and even more expensive development for the increasingly small number of titles in the AAA(AA) space. But what can you do? People want the best graphics, the largest worlds, and such, and that costs a lot in money and time. I hope that it also results in more smaller games as well though, which it could -- ActiVision has basically done nothing with any of its back catalog in recent years, they only make CoD. I hope MS uses some of their many good older IPs for either new games or classic collections. An Atari 50-like collection of Activision classics would be a fantastic start, for instance...
