MudMan

Hah. I almost wrote that I also think the two Ultima Undergrounds are better than Deus Ex despite being much older and having an objectively very clumsy interface. Then I thought that’d get us in the weeds and pull us too far back, so I took it out.

Look, yeah, Deus Ex rolled in elements from CRPGs and had good production values for the time. But all those things were nothing new for an RPG, they were just new for a shooter. Baldur’s Gate and Fallout were a few years old. The entire Ultima franchise had been messing around with procedural, simulated worlds for almost a decade at that point, which in the 90s was a technological eon.

And yeah, System Shock had created a template for a shooter RPG, they just applied it to a lone survivor dungeon crawly horror thing, rather than try to marry it to the narrative elements of NPC-focused CRPGs, which is admittedly a lot more complicated. And Deus Ex was fully voiced and had… well, a semblance of cutscenes. In context it’s hilariously naive compared to what Japanese devs were doing in Metal Gear or Final Fantasy, but it was a lot for western PC game standards.

But it wasn’t… great to play? I don’t know what to tell you. Thief and Hitman both had nailed the clockwork living stage thing, and at the time I was more than happy to give up the Matrix-at-home narrative and the DnD-style questing for that. The pitch was compelling, but it didn’t necessarily make for a great playable experience against its peers.

I didn’t hate it or anything. I spent quite a bit of time messing with it. That corny main theme still pops up in my head with no effort on demand. I spent more time using it as a benchmark than Unreal, which I also thought wasn’t a great game.

Also, while I’m here pissing people off, can we all agree that “immersive sim” is a terrible name for a genre? What exactly is “simulated”? Why is it immersive? Immerisve as opposed to what? At the time we tended to lump them in with stealth games, so the name is just an attempt to reverse engineer a genre name by using loose words that weren’t already taken, and I hate it. See also: character action game. Which action games do NOT have characters?

Man, I am a grumpy old fart today.

The closest thing we had was the System Shock duology, since both predate Deus Ex. Deus Ex was basically accessible System Shock. Having dialogue trees and NPCs without losing the open-ended nature of System Shock’s more dungeon crawl-y approach was the real selling point. Well, that and the trenchcoats and shades. The Matrix was such a big deal.

But even then, each of those elements were already present in different mixes in several late 90s games. Deus Ex by some counts was one of the early culminations of the genre blending “everything game” we were all chasing during the 90s. The other was probably GTA 3. I think both of those are fine and they are certainly important games, but I never enjoyed playing them as much as less zeitgeist-y games that were around at the same time. I did spend a lot of time getting Deus Ex to look as pretty as possible, but I certainly didn’t finish it and, like a lot of people, I mostly ran around Liberty Island a bunch.

I played more Thief 2 that year, honestly. I played WAY more Hitman than Deus Ex that year. I certainly thought System Shock 2 was better. Deus Ex is a big, ambitious, important game, for sure, but I never felt it quite stuck the landing when playing it, even at the time.

I’m not of the opinion that more simulation and more “realism” are always better, but I would absolutely take a System Shock 2 remake, especially after the System Shock one (1 one?) turned out great.

Kind of overrated? I mean, it was cool to see a bit more of a palatable cinematic presentation in real time to go along with the late 90s PC jank, and that theme did kick ass, but it’s less groundbreaking in context than I think people give it credit for. And it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as System Shock 2, in my book.

I guess Mechner was the lead programmer in that he probably woke up and told himself “Jordan, you’re gonna code some Prince of Persia today” and then he did it.

By the time someone else was involved it’d have been for porting to other platforms, at which point I think his input wasn’t super frequent or close. The 80s games industry was a very weird place.

This actually looks and moves super smoothly, it’s clearly the result of some really good animators deploying a ton of experience and working really closely with gameplay designers.

I love the original PoP games, but a) they’re on a different genre altogether, and b) both tools and technology have come a long way.

Now, if you want to be a grumpy old man about something here, make it the fact that you can only use the stick for movement. Because THAT is worth being mad about.

I mean, no thanks.

But they did this already, right? Their “Timeline” feature in Windows 10 recorded a log of your activities to display it in your Win+Tab menu screen. I switched it off immediately, but the point is this is a new approach to an old feature they have done in the past.

Everybody must have turned it off, though, because it hadn’t been present in Win 11 until now. It’s still a dumb idea.

Thought it was fake.

It’s not fake.

A lot of the competitive RTS crowd transitioned to MOBAs and it’s hard to scratch that itch with an old-school RTS now. Having the full offline and online package was key of the time when those games were popular and you don’t get that when the competitive space has moved on.

But you have a point. RTSs at their peak were super triple-A stuff, with mind blowing execution and production value for the time. Point and click adventures have a bit of the same problem, they used to be these massive technical showpieces and as a mid-size or indie thing they are a tougher sell when the modern equivalent of investment is going to absolutely insanely huge games in other genres. Even when a triple-A studio does one of those you tend to not get as much of a massive investment, and when you do (say, Total War: Warhammer, or even Manor Lords) they do see success. It’s just never going to be the same because you’re never going to call your friends over to show them Warcraft 2 running on your PC.

Gotta say, I’ve never seen a service make a better argument against using that service than whatever is left of HBO.

Some day somebody will write a book about what sort of insane The Producers nonsense is going on in there and I can’t wait.

Well… you know, it’s the same people exploring the same ideas through the same archetypes. I think that comes through pretty clearly. All joking about specifics aside, it’s kinda hard to miss once you notice.

At some point we’re gonna get to the synths parts and I’m expecting blow for blow repeated scenes at this point.

Yeah, so… no, that’s fanboy stuff. That’s not how massive corporations make their decisions, not how artists make their decisions and, very specifically, not what is actually in the show.

Plus of course what you’re saying is different to the online panic about NV “not being canon”, which Bethesda has now explicitly denied. The NCR very much exists in the show, it’s just been significantly downsized to early Fallout levels. Not because Bethesda is “diminishing the creations of everyone who isn’t Bethesda”, though. If I had to make an educated guess based on how reality actually operates, I’d assume it’s because Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan wanted to make a show about a postapocalyptic wasteland and having a democratic government that has been running mostly fine for the past 100 years kinda gets in the way of that.

So yeah, welcome to franchising, where war never changes and neither does the status quo. It’s mostly absurd that people in Fallout are still roaming around in reclaimed pre-war gear and doing the Mad Max schtick five generations into the postapocalypse, but Fallout gotta look like Fallout, so Fallout will look like Fallout until Fallout stops making money, at which point it will not look like anything anymore. Yay capitalism.

Hey, wanna know what they’ll do to New Vegas? They’ll probably do some variation on the plot of New Vegas. Mr. House and the Legion will probably still be around in some form despite it not making a ton of sense in continuity. Just like this season was all about leaving a vault to look for your missing dad, just like Filly just happens to have the same layout and landmarks as Megaton, just like there’s a Dogmeat and just like Vault 33 now needs a water chip and will probably have to send someone outside to look for it. Because it’s recognizable IP and recognizable IP has to be in the show so it can be fueled by recognizable IP.

I think the show is solid, but I did notice at one point that it’s basically a reskin of Westworld and now I can’t unsee it.

I mean, naive girl gets the nature of her world redefined for her and is poised to become a revolutionary fighter? That happens.

A ruthless, cruel cowboy who isn’t a cowboy but plays one for a long time, has god mode on and looks like an actor you know was left in the sun for too long? Surprisingly specific, but yep.

Is actually based on a videogame full of NPCs? In different ways but yeah.

Beloved older actor plays a figure of corporate authority with a secret plan? Getting into stretch territory but I see it.

I still enjoyed it, though. Looks so much better than the trailers, too, and it took me a while to realize it’s because the trailers really had to hide the gore so they looke really cosplay-y. Hard to look cosplay-y with so many chunks flying around.

So… I keep seeing people say this online.

I assume they’re saying it before they finished watching the whole season. Because they do explain what happened to the NCR and explicitly acknowledge New Vegas in at least two very significant ways.

They are, though, by any reasonable definition. Despite what the cryptobros would have you believe, there is no need for a blockchain to have a tradable, persistent token associated to an asset. Besides the fact that the tokens are stored on Valve’s servers instead of a distributed blockchain, there is no difference in how those work.

The cryptobros tried to convince everybody that a blockchain made the tokens “non-fungible” as in automatically interoperable and endlessly persistent, which was a lie that only survived until the first time the assets, which were all stored on servers and not in a blockchain, got deleted.

That’s a different discussion in any case. The point is it’s a stock market of tokenized, tradable items where the transactions are monetized by the company by taxing the trades. It’s the same on Roblox and Steam (and in all the NFTs people dumped all that money on).

I disagree with the author, the enshittification of Steam started ages ago. Day one, in fact. It’s come and gone in waves.

Yesterday there was an article on the explotative practices of Roblox doing the rounds around here. Some of the bad praxis around monetized UGC called out there was pioneered by Steam. Online DRM for single player games? Steam was there at ground level. NFT stock markets? Steam tried really hard, they were just bad at it. Gig economy automation replacing human moderation and greenlight processes? They banged their head against that wall until they uberified PC game development successfully. Loot boxes? They are remarkably resilient. Where others have moved on, Valve insists on keeping them around for CounterStrike 2.

Also, CounterStrike 2.

There are also ways in which Steam is ahead of the competition, or they wouldn’t have the near-monopolistic position they have. Their Linux support may be motivated entirely out of spite and an ironic fear of Microsoft’s monopoly, but it’s welcomed. Their client is easily the best in the market and there are crucial features from it that should have been universalized by MS or Nvidia and still haven’t been, somehow. It’s good stuff.

But it’s been enshittified since day one of Steam, when it launched torjan horsed with CS and Half Life 2, and it remains problematic in many areas, including its role as a single point of failure for game preservation on PC.

I do find it weird how much of a fuss the second video makes about the pseudo-NFT marketplace in Roblox considering Steam has had every single one of those features in place for a while.

These are good videos, as usual for PMG, and they do highlight relevant issues, but I’m sometimes frustrated by these things in that they mix genuine, dealbreaking concerns with things they flag for this example but not when they surface elsewhere and with things that are legitimately either standard practice, long term gaming-wide concerns or… just fine, actually.

Which is not me defending Roblox, to be clear. Roblox is a mess and it’s crazy how successful they are at keeping a low profile about some of the stuff they do compared to other successful games and platforms and relative to their size. For an American company it’s insane how little they are on the spotlight for some of this stuff. But “some” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. These videos run the gamut.