Castle Magus

"CD Projekt Red has apologized for the Cyberpunk 2077 launch issues on PS4 and Xbox One."

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This doesn't surprise me at all. The modern video game industry gonna modern video game, after all. CD Projekt (Red or otherwise) is not, and has never been, the messiah of the modern video game industry that far too many gullible dupes try to make it out to be. To steal from one of the comments under the above video, maybe they should rename themselves to "Seedy Projekt."

Ian is totally right. It's deception. It's absolute bullshit. And Pat's "crossing the Rubicon" point about no longer being able to rely on consoles to provide a consistent experience is a good one, too (if a bit behind the curve, because that's been the case for a while now, if not necessarily to such a huge degree as this).

I got Supraland and the DLC Supraland Crash on Steam the other day.[1] I have since finished both games, including 100%-ing the base game. (EDIT 2, the next day) I haven't yet 100%-ed Crash (currently at around 70%-ish), but I'll probably do so. As of this edit I have also 100%-ed Crash, as well as gotten all the Steam achievements, both for Crash and the few in the base game that I'd missed, which was above and beyond 100%-ing. (/EDIT 2)

So, the game is pretty cool. It is indeed a sort of hybrid Metroidvania/Zelda-like/Portal-like game. First person perspective. You play as a little toy guy who is, in the base game, tasked with bringing the flow of water back to his home village. The entire game takes place in a diorama set up in some kid's backyard. (And let me tell you, seeing that gargantuan kid off in the distance [and sometimes not so far off] in various places just watching everything is creepy and almost a little scary, really... especially during a certain moment near the end of the DLC Crash.) The creators of the game joke about how "small" the game is in one of the trailer videos (embedded above), but it's actually pretty huge, at least from the perspective of your player character. The gameplay is, I'd say (and as shown in the pie-chart at the end of the above embedded video), around 40% exploration, 40% puzzle-solving and 20% combat, against cartoonish skeleton enemies. You get six main weapons/tools, which get several upgrades over the course of the game, including upgrades with how they react with each other, along with a bunch of other power-ups for the character himself that make traversal, puzzle-solving, and defeating enemies simpler.

The Crash DLC (accessible from the main menu of the base game once you have it) is basically a full-blown expansion pack, an entirely new campaign. While you can play it before the main game, it's recommended to play the main game first (I mean, obviously). It's shorter and smaller than the main game and rather more linear. Harder puzzles, less fighting and less overall exploring (though, from what I understand, there are some other secret areas that I haven't found even hints of yet in the DLC campaign, so maybe there's more exploration than I'm giving it credit for). The flow of the game for the DLC is 1) make it to the main town, 2) find enough materials to build a rocket, 3) launch in the rocket, 4) crash back near the beginning, and 5) go back to step 1. This repeats around five times or so, with slightly different/harder puzzles between the starting point and the main town each time. Also, it's kind of funny in that even though you mostly just have to re-collect the same weapons/tools from the main game, the order you get them in is almost exactly the opposite from the order in which you get them in the main game (e.g. the basic sword is one of the last things you find).

I have to admit that I had to look up a few things on walkthroughs and such, and every time I did, the solution was simultaneously "that was simple I should have figured it out" and "I probably never would have figured it out." A lot of it was that I was making things harder for myself than they had to be, trying to do things in more unorthodox ways that almost seemed like they should work, without even thinking about the simpler, "intended" solutions until they were pointed out to me in guides or whatever. That said, the times I felt the need to look stuff up were far fewer than in some games of this type that I've played before. Most of the stuff, even the crazier puzzles, are usually pretty intuitive (even if at first glance they might seem incomprehensible), at least in the sense of "I figured out what I need to do, now I just need to figure out how to do it" sort of ways.

In any case, whether you bother with the DLC or not, the base game by itself is plenty good enough. It's kind of awesome to be able to, at the end, just basically fly all over the map with crazy jumping and ludicrous speed and all the power-ups, when at the start you were relatively slow as molasses, could hardly jump at all, and only had a puny wooden sword.

So, yeah, I would recommend Supraland and Supraland Crash. They're pretty cool. I know I've said in the past that I was kind of done with playing games where you're in a first person perspective with a target reticle in the middle of the screen that you use to shoot enemies, but if there were more games like this and less of the ultra-gritty modern urban combat shooters, I'd be much more lenient on that stance (especially given that the guns are used way more for puzzles than for fighting in Supraland).

[1] - Also available on consoles... but conspicuously not available on GOG, even though it used to be, before it was delisted for asininely dubious reasons. Basically, the devs felt they weren't making enough money on GOG to justify taking the effort to keep the game up-to-date on there, so decided to just pull it entirely. How it is any more difficult to update the game for GOG than it is for Steam or whatever is beyond me. And, yes, Steam is DRM, in and of itself, so for the devs to say "there is no DRM on Steam" is bullshit. Honestly, this issue here and the devs' attitudes toward GOG users and Linux users is probably the only black mark I would place against them. All of which is nothing, really, against the game itself, as the game itself is fine... but... I have to admit that if I'd known about this behind the scenes horseshit before I'd already bought and finished the game and the expansion on Steam, I may well have not bothered buying it at all in the first place, on Steam or anywhere else. However, with that said, I'll say now that I'm looking forward to any future DLC expansions/sequels to this game that may see the light of day someday, because the game is just that good, despite any shitty attitudes of the devs. (EDIT) After looking into it a bit more, it appears that there might have been some bullshit on the part of GOG itself as well in this case, so maybe the blame shouldn't rest solely on the devs of this game. (/EDIT)

"Twin Galaxies has sued Billy Mitchell for fraud in a new lawsuit."

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All I can say about Billy Mitchell is to echo Ian's "Eh, fuck 'im."

The only thing I knew about Jace Hall before this was that whole Street Fighter music video thing. And the only reason I knew about that was because of Street Fighter High.

I don't care if it's on a 84% off sale and only costs $7.99 USD (though also with $44.41 of DLC [and that's with the DLC itself at 50% off]), I'm still not buying that shit if it has Denuvo in it, which it still does.

"The new PS5 console is here! But does it REALLY matter? We discuss a Kotaku article making the case."

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I haven't read and won't be reading the Kotaku article in question, so I'll just have to take Pat and Ian's word for the content of it. In any case, people are surprised and angry that a Kotaku article is pretentiously crappy? That's a part of the reason I quit following Kotaku (and most other video game "journalism" sites) years ago. Video game "journalists" get way too big for their britches far too often. *shrug*

"EA has been punished in Europe with steep fines for FIFA loot boxes."

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As Ian says, five point eight million dollars is pocket lint to EA at this point. As Pat says, if 10-20 other countries each also started fining EA five point eight million dollars or something similar for this horseshit, then maybe, just maybe, EA might then finally start to care the tiniest of bits.

The actual video, or at least my interest in it, ended at around the 6:00 mark. The latter five minutes or so of the video degenerated into them talking about trading cards and Logan Paul or whatever the fuck, and my eyes just glazed right the fuck over.

"Should streamers pay game developers and publishers a licensing fee to play their games? We discuss this controversial opinion."

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I guess my reaction to this is most like Ian's "eat my asshole," but I have to say that my threshold for not giving a shit about this is way lower than theirs, mainly because the modern video game industry has already done so much other asinine dumbfuckery for the past few decades now that I just can't bring myself to care all that much about any new shit that moronic dingleberries in the game industry like that Alex Hutchinson guy feel the need to say, one way or the other.

But I will say this, there have absolutely been games that I have bought that I otherwise would not have bought if I hadn't watched even a partial stream of them beforehand. If anything, devs should be paying streamers marketing money for all the otherwise free marketing the devs are getting from the streamers (or, you know, consider whatever money that the streamer is already getting from doing the stream in the first place, and just call it even-steven, if they must be tightwads about it).

Huh, so some shitty mobile port of a freemium MMO game was released on Steam and is now calling itself Torchlight III, apparently. I guess that's what happens when the original developers were shitcanned[1] and then the IP owners tried to continue on with the IP anyway, egregiously fucked it up completely, and are now trying to scam unsuspecting dupes with their inferior horseshit by marketing it as a true sequel to a beloved game series. It's basically fraud in all but name. Hell, I'll just go ahead and call it fraud in name, too, outright.

The first two Torchlight games were great. But this thing here, though? This is some of the stinkiest dogshit to ever drop out of a dog's asshole, and it can lie there on the sidewalk and dry into the turd brick that it is, for all I care, because I'm not touching it.

[1] - From Wikipedia: "On November 3, 2017, Perfect World announced the closure of Runic Games, along with large layoffs at Motiga. Perfect World said the closure was to reflect their company's focus on games as a service." In other words, Perfect World can go straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200, as far as I'm concerned. Fuck Perfect World, and to hell with "games as a service," too. Runic Games: yet another once good game developer who was ruined by being bought up by a bigger, shittier company.

"The popular Farmville Facebook game is shutting down at the end of the year!"

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Thoughts prior to watching: And nothing of value will be lost.

Thoughts after watching: And... nothing of value will be lost. Also, I think Pat just likes trolling Ian. I mean, he can't really be that dumb, can he?

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"Shortly before the console's release, Microsoft offered to buy Nintendo for twenty-five billion dollars. Nintendo of America's then president, Minoru Arakawa, originally thought the offer was a joke. But once Microsoft's intentions were clear, Nintendo took the offer seriously and discussed the deal in Japan over six or seven meetings. Microsoft wanted Nintendo to drop its console business and make games for the Xbox. But Nintendo's CEO at the time, Hiroshi Yamauchi, didn't like the idea and believed Microsoft lacked an understanding of the industry."

We dodged a nuclear warhead with that one.

And now, almost 20 years later, it is blatantly obvious that Hiroshi Yamauchi was, of course, entirely correct. Not that that has stopped Microsoft from force-feeding its fetid "understanding" of the industry down the throats of gamers and other developers (including Nintendo itself) during that time. *weary, defeated sigh*

So yeah... still slowly but surely plugging away at getting through the videos on the DidYouKnowGaming? Youtube channel. I'm up to the "within the past 3 years, so they show up as released '2 years' ago" videos, even though this one here is less than a month shy of being a full three years old. Not sure if I'll ever get fully caught up, at this rate.