MudMan

It was probably regional, but here there was definitely a split between the computer-focused print media and the console-focused one. PCs tended to get top billing among computer platforms in that space before the micros died out altogether and it was just PC and consoles.

It was all marketing/hobby stuff, though. The Atari ST-specific media feeding into their mini console wars with the Amiga and so on… I don’t see it as the computer brand magazines being more informational and the console ones being more arbitrarily marketing. It was more that the branded magazines were worried with selling you the computer and the multiplat publications were selling you the games.

The mismatch I remember was less between reviews and end result (reviews were less the point than maps and walkthroughs anyway) and more the mismatch between advertising frequency and quality/availability. I don’t remember Night Breed the movie from watching it or from the marketing of the movie or even from playing the game, I remember it from the six month long carpet bombing of magazine advertising we all endured from it.

The review stuff was mostly about them being written by kids who didn’t understand game design, were given something to play for free and seeing something the market had arbitrarily decided mattered in isolation. There were exceptions and people who had the writing skills or the insights, but it didn’t matter because the readers didn’t have the ability to differentiate the two, either.

I would argue a lot of them still don’t and treat whatever vestigial reviews we still have as a shopping catalogue instead.

Meeeeh, I’m with you on some bits, not so much in others.

I agree that controller design was much, much better on consoles. I agree that we didn’t understand the technical limitations that made computer action games so much worse. I remember at best we could tell when a game was “fast” or not, but had no concept of framerate, and we were disproportionately obsessed with parallax scrolling but didn’t parse the value of smooth scrolling nearly as much.

But design wasn’t universally bad at all, we’ve just refocused on different things over time, so the list of games that hold up does not line up with what was exciting at the time at all.

I can play Eye of the Beholder right now and have fun. That’s up there with modern entries on that genre today. I can play Lemmings and have fun. I can play Monkey Island or Loom and be absolutely delighted. Civ 1 is simplistic but the core of what’s good in the series is there. Ditto for Sim City. I can play Another World or Prince of Persia, that’s a genre playing to the strenghts of that hardware.

It’s just at the time we were all freaking out about Gods instead, which is barely playable. Or about Dizzy, which is shallow and inscrutable. It was all happening at once and nobody had an understanding of why things were different from other things. It was a beautiful mess and we mostly didn’t even realize.

To keep it on topic, writing game reviews at the time must have been impossible. Nobody knew what they were talking about, and those who did were making games, not writing about them. We couldn’t tell what good looked like on that area, either.

Hah. That’s what you get for playing on a closed system instead of copying computer disks and tapes like us normal people.

I certainly cared a lot more about that cost in the 16 bit era when I was on a console instead, but by that time there were fancy things like VHS tapes with footage of games and demo kiosks and stuff.

But all through the 8 bit era over here there weren’t ads for games anywhere. Not on TV, not anywhere else. Today we’d say magazines were about discoverability. Without them you were limited to whatever was on the cover or the back of the box. It was a crapshoot. At least in reviews you got some screenshots and a description, distorted as it could be.

And it’s not like I was immune to that, either. I had my nose glued to the computer shop every other day staring at Barbarian or Space Ace, which barely count as games by modern standards. I don’t think I ever thought to question whether playing them was any good. That barely felt like the point.

That is also all tinged by it being a formative period and growing up and so forth, so most of us are unreliable narrators, I suppose.

It did the thing reasonably for the time and the context, I can tell you that first hand.

The set of values was just different early on and so was the purpose of reviews.

It’s weirder to me that the audience consensus ended up being that game reviews are meant to be consumer advocacy, like they’re crash test reports for cars or something. I find that depressing. I’ve always gotten mad when reviewers tell you whether a game is “worth your time” or “worth your money”. What do you know of my time and how I want to use it? Or what value I put in money?

Ideally art criticism is about finding a view on a piece of work, an intellectual framing for it, and sharing it with the audience, and there was a brief time of sheer hubris where a few critics thought that was more or less what they were doing.

And then influencers happened and streamers became a thing and now it’s something else. A bit of community curation, maybe.

In the 80s and 90s? It was targeted marketing for a thing that nobody knew about. You didn’t read a review to know if a game was good, you read it to know that it existed, whether it did anything technical that was exciting and perhaps if it did the thing that the arcade game you already knew was doing. A four star review was often on the basis of “sprites big”, and we were all fine with that.

You are assuming the reviews have any bearing on whether I want to play the game. This is a risky assumption.

When Cyberpunk was busted and everybody was hating that’s what prompted me to jump in. I went and got a PS4 physical version of the 1.0 last-gen release when I could find one on sale, even though I primarily played the game on PC. It’s one of my favorite gaming artifacts. I like it more than any collector’s edition nonsense.

Also, what reviews? I don’t know if I know what “reviews” for videogames even mean anymore.

Anyway, to answer your actual question, if there is a discount at launch (which is increasingly a thing, which is kind of sad) or a decent preorder bonus I can prepurchase. I don’t mind. Otherwise I just get things when I get things.

I am aggressively hoping that this also means they release them on GOG like they did with early PC ports. It is genuinely why I’ve been holding out on most recent Sony ports (and Yakuza games, Sega, I did notice).

Well, I think there’s a nuance between the notion of people hosting files and sharing them for piracy purposes, which is technically no different than hosting and distributing any other file, and a platform for digital distribution of media.

You could argue that peer-to-peer services with built-in search, like Kazaa or eMule came a lot closer and that’s defensible, but the birth of modern platforms is less on the tech to host and share the files and more on the ability to do DRM and sell access tokens digitally. Modern digital distribution is less an iteration on piracy software and more a response to it to provide something that could compete on convenience while being monetized, having DRM and, yeah, cutting a lot of people out of the money loop.

And on all those counts… yeah, it was Steam. Valve did it first and did it effectively while music labels and movie studios were still hoping lawyers would fix things for them.

You could download games from multiple publishers years before Valve did it, too. Doesn’t mean Valve didn’t come up with the first, largest digital distribution platform for games that was then the template for every first party (and most of the digital media distribution in other media industries).

Best I can do for you is let you have that and agree that piracy invented it and Valve monetized it, which is actually worse?

Well, yeah, but people say they won’t pay 150 bucks for a game, so that stable 60 dollar price had to come from somewhere.

Honestly, it’s a lot of whiplash to see people paint this as a big corporate conspiracy and then turn around to defend Valve who, let’s not forget, invented the whole idea. It’s not like chain gaming retailers were a particularly strong force for good, either, but they did pay wages to more people than Steam, I guess.

It’ll be very interesting to see how much of this is people walking away from the Switch, coming back to the Switch 2 or just… you know, only ever playing Fortnite and Minecraft for their entire lives. The issues here are bigger and not a Sony conspiracy to steal trucker wages (although there’s that, too).

Sure. It’ll just be messy and painful for me a few weeks after the people who caused all this, so I intend to enjoy them.

I don’t. Don’t much give a damn what Americans think, either, assuming there’s a distinction to be made there.

At this point I’m camp decoupling. If they want their nationalism so bad they can have it. Quietly, if at all possible.

It is definitely standard MO, and both press and online chatter are letting them get away with it, with no indication that will ever change so far.

I mean, US conservatives are still mocking the French as cowardly, collaborationist and militarily ineffective on account of WW2, so if any of them need a ladder to get down from any high horses they may be stuck on I think I have one in the back.

The conversation is still about this clip and not the actual policy, though.

Which I’m sure pisses Trump off, so there is that, but it maybe shows the press hasn’t learned anything. And it’s too late for the US, but there is still a far right surge to contain back in civilization, so it’s about time they figure it out.

Note that I’m not including the UK there, Labour government or not. That BBC headline is at least as shocking as the event itself.

That is a hilarious blend of 19th and 21st century language.

Look, I am on board with cultural exchange. For whatever else social media has wrought there’s at least that. I’m even more on board with that cultural exchange not being Americans forcing their grabage onto the rest of us. That’s a rare occasion.

All I’m saying is don’t mistake that for the non-US versions of stuff not doing at least the same crap the US versions are doing. And viceversa, which is why seeing US authorities freak out is kinda funny. But it cuts both ways and it’s worth remembering that.

I absolutely agree that I don’t trust US social media apps and the level of overreaction here is probably a measure of how much some of the data they collect is being used for strategic purposes.

But also, don’t trust Chinese social media either.

The difference in coverage is shameful, but the lesson here isn’t “Chinese socials yaaaay”, it’s that it’s all bad and messed up.

It is very strangely worded and structured. I mean, the point is fairly obvious and by extension not… wrong, but the analysis and the writing aren’t great.

Which I guess is on par for what’s left of Kotaku these days.

Man, the Windows XP computer I have up in the attic is currently feeling unusually tense.

Look, I think MS should not discontinue support…

…but the weird amplification of the panic around it seems to me like it actively ignore the user patterns (and security outcomes) we’ve seen from Windows users for the last three decades. If this was less panicky and more targeted to business users I would take it more seriously. Getting some Y2K vibes from this whole thing.

Gasp. How dare you, my good sir/madam?

No, seriously, I get it, but no. PoP, Flashback or Another World are way more playable. They look worse, though.

There are more. The most famous are a duology of side scrolling action adventure things in the 16 bit era. They adapted Tintin in Tibet and Prisoner of the Sun.

They look great for the time, but frankly, they’re both a chore to play.

Worth taking a look if you haven’t heard of them, though.