ampersandrew

Preservation is why it’s important to have emulators as soon as someone has figured out how to get one running. Nintendo should be embarrassed that pirating their games often lets these people experience their games better than if the games were run through official channels. I was sure tempted to pirate Metroid Dread instead of buying it, but it wasn’t because I couldn’t afford it, just wanted it for free, or had some notion of retribution toward Nintendo. I was tempted because the Switch is terrible hardware, I prefer to play games on my PC, and it would run better on my PC. I think that was the last Nintendo game I bought. I haven’t pirated any Switch games to date, because the only actual retribution I want toward Nintendo is for both my money and my time to go to games where the companies are less shitty. I’m not going to fault someone for wanting to play Tears of the Kingdom at frame rates higher than 23 FPS and resolutions better than 540p with no anti aliasing, and the best way for Nintendo to cut back on that piracy is to make the game for PC like everyone else is doing these days, but they know the upside of Switch sales is worth more to them than what these pirates cost them. Piracy will also preserve the game better than Nintendo ever will. I honestly don’t care what the percentages are of freeloaders by comparison, because it doesn’t matter.

EDIT: Oh, btw, I have pirated plenty of their back catalog, and I’m sure you have too. I’d love to buy them, like I bought Sega Genesis games and like I bought old Mega Man games on Steam, but how strange! There’s no legal way to buy those old Nintendo games digitally. You can only rent them in perpetuity. Nah, I’ll just pirate them.

The 3DS and Wii U digital stores were just decommissioned, and preservation is a bullshit excuse?

Having seat belts is objectively better than not having seat belts. It doesn’t mean that the way transportation is structured around cars in the US, for instance, is safe enough. Having kernel level anti-cheat may result in fewer cheaters or less obvious cheaters, but it doesn’t mean it’s worth giving that company such deep access to your computer, as the video shows.

There are plenty of ways to curb cheating. It still happens in fighting games too, but the way the genre works makes it far less prevalent. FPS games these days are largely designed around things that are hard for humans but easy for computers to do while looking like humans. Just spitballing, but if aiming was less of a concern, like it might be in the likes of old James Bond games or Metroid Prime, there are other ways to build competitive strategy around an FPS besides how well you can get your tiny crosshair to line up over a tiny target. Otherwise though, I’m with you on it being inevitable. There’s no way to truly stop it.

Cars are actually a great analogy here but probably not in the way that user intended. The way we use them and the scale at which we use them are inherently unsafe, but seat belts and air bags are an illusion sold to make us believe that we solved the problem as best we can, even though we didn’t.

From my experience with fighting games, people are also prone to mislabeling others as smurfs when they just know one or two more things about the game that give them an edge. I’ve observed replays in Street Fighter 6 that people claimed were smurfs, but they were absolutely playing at the level their rank said they were.

They’ve all got server side anti cheat too.

Fortunately, since it’s playable offline, it doesn’t seem to matter how many people will be playing in a month.

People Make Games has a 2 hour documentary covering it. It was a little dry, so I didn’t even make it all the way through, but nobody seemed great in that situation.

Of which? Running a server for Xonotic? You can download it from the web site and follow the instructions. Battle Royales with fewer than 99 players? The Darwin Project operated with only 10. Spellbreak appeared to max out at 42.

It’s literally dead after it stops making money when the devs turn the servers offline. If you release a FOSS battle royale, you understand that the game either needs bots or organizers to get enough players to fill it. That’s no different than running Xonotic, just at a different scale. (There were/are also battle royales that operate with smaller player counts than PUBG or Fortnite or whatnot, which makes this easier to solve.)

There’s no reason it couldn’t be done. Devs just don’t release the server code anymore. Pirate servers for MMOs are run all the time.

In this case, I’d be rewarding for them for at least porting the HD versions from the last remaster to the PC for the first time, in a way that actually preserves those games outside of consoles and piracy. If you want to see the least that Konami can do, I’m told we should look at their collection for Silent Hill.

If it works, it works. It would be nicer if they did better, but they solve enough of my own problems as someone trying to run those games in the modern era that I’ll easily put up with it for some of the best games ever made.

Justifying a price will vary from person to person, but for some of my favorite games, freed from consoles officially, with less setup than emulation, they’ll be worth it to me as soon as it works on Proton and I feel like replaying them again. By then, it will be on sale for $45 or something.

They’re the same ports that Bluepoint put out last console generation before Sony bought them, and those ports were good enough for me. In all likelihood, Bluepoint is under no obligation to assist any further, and the fact that these ports are working exactly as well as that last collection did for everyone outside of Linux is more than I was expecting out of Konami. Compared to the previous PC releases of MGS1 and 2, or going through the hassle of emulating these things, I’ll still take the collection of some of my favorite games ever, once Proton is working anyway. Especially of interest to me is if Volume 2 includes MGS4, because that would be the first time it’s been free from PS3, and emulation for it still isn’t great.

No, it’s not. It’s just the nature of the differences between the two things. When you push code at a company putting out a consumer product, you have to be aware of all of the other things it affects. It’s also made by people who have to coordinate with each other, go home to their families, and fix 100 other bugs that the modder may not have noticed but are higher priority at Bethesda for a handful of different reasons. A modder can no-life their script for 36 straight hours and fix the one issue they were laser focused in on at the expense of something that they didn’t even know it affected.

It’s been not even two months. Modders are going to have different priorities and incentives than a company will, not the least of which is a QA pipeline.

Bethesda’s got a rocky history for sure, but I don’t think Starfield is the best candidate for an “if ever” qualifier since it just came out, especially considering people are calling it the least buggy launch they’ve had.

At this point, I trust Valve to get this game working on Proton inside of a few months. Emulating games like these that are multi-disc with all sorts of fourth wall breaking, I’d rather take the collection at the expense of resolution and PS1 graphical options.