JCC Gaming Förceboat Parté - JC G4m3z thr34d (Gaming General Discussion)

Graaaah don't remind me of that insanity, please.

 

It's both. Also chi.

That's right - even jokes about Sony controller naming conventions are actually just valid Kingdom Hearts references.

 

Until Dawn has taken over my dreams. I dreamt that I was being chased by two flamethrower guys. Luckily I escaped.

 

Guys! Guys! Titanfall 2 on PS4 is alive! Like, actually alive! As in matchmaking has gone down from two to five minutes to four to five seconds!

And the servers are full of scrubs! SCRUBS! Delicious, salty newbies who try playing Titanfall like it's Call of Duty or Apex Legends. It's enough to make me fall in love with the game all over again.

 

Those scrubs will probably be me at some point.

 

I can't ever imagine you getting salty over a game Rachel.

 

And that’s why I just stick to single player.

 

You are correct. I come out with a KD of .33 and just go "lol I sucked". My brother, on the other hand, yells about how everyone else on the team let him down.

 

Kingdom Heart is like 90% cut scenes 10% gameplay. But I’m really enjoying it. Awesome and smooth gameplay. A **** load of content.

Olympus was great. In Carona with Rapunzel and Flynn atm. Love those two.

 

A Pathfinder RPG sorta-sequel was announced yesterday. I am excited...

 

If you do bother with Titanfall 2, you seriously need to check out the multiplayer now that the servers have a population. I'm not going to speak ill of the single player campaign, I could rant on for paragraphs about its slick level design that allows for experimenting with all gameplay styles, while still driving a tightly choreographed, slickly paced series of set pieces. I might even do that eventually.

But playing Titanfall 2 just for the campaign is like visiting a Michelin star winning restaurant and only sampling the bread sticks. The multiplayer is where the meat and potatoes of the game really are. There's plenty of game modes to satisfy everyone's tastes, but the signature mode of the franchise is Attrition, an 8 vs 8 death match where the first team to 650 points wins the game. The twist to the mode is that the map is also populated with AI bots of varying resilience to damage. This makes the matches feel far larger in scale, and provides a chaotic feeling environment that few other titles successfully manage to emulate, while also giving less skilled players something to shoot at and contribute to the team's score.

Farming AI grunts isn't going to get you the top of the post-game leader board, nor is it the quickest way to earning a titan drop, as the juiciest scores belong to human players and their titans, but you'll still be able to net a respectable tally and contribute to your share of victories if other players are proving too difficult to handle by yourself.

I'm pumped to see the servers thriving, given that Titanfall 2's original release had no legs. Which was absolutely criminal. It's one of the finest games of the generation, had no live-service junk attached to it and was the first AAA shooter to go with a model of releasing all post-launch content for free. While everyone now applauds like seals when EA and Activision adopt that model for Battlefront and Call of Duty respectively, Titanfall 2 pioneered it and carried no caveats while doing so. There were no gambling mechanics or battle passes shovelled in, just pages upon pages of unlockable vanity items that you earn by playing the game.

Initially there weren't any microtransactions at all, but because the game flopped they eventually cut the planned content short and wound it up with a small set of minor cosmetic items you could buy. Which you couldn't blame Respawn for doing, it was little more than a team holding out a tip jar and asking hardcore fans for a voluntary show of support after a fiscal disaster. And even the most talented, generous artists gotta eat.

So as happy as I am to see the game get a second lease of life, dropping into a game and seeing a bunch of level 1s running around the place now that it's free, instead of having supported the game in its prime and helping the developers invest in a longer, more content rich tail life, I can't help it. Imma yell at the scrubs.

 

MLB The Show No Longer PlayStation Exclusive, Coming to Switch and Microsoft

On the one hand I'm all for quality baseball on the go, hell yeah.

On the other hand A SONY GAME ON OTHER SYSTEMS?!

 

I .... did not realize MLB the Show was a Sony exclusive at all. But they have actually had some games on other systems before, haven't they?

 

Once upon a time.


Now.

 

Nope, The Show is done in-house by their San Diego studio, so it's never come to other platforms. In fact, it couldn't - prior to this, MLB had an exclusive deal with either EA or 2K (I forget which and, spoiler, it didn't matter) where only that studio could produce games for multiple platform holders. Problem is every simulation baseball game other than The Show closed up shop! For years the only cross-platform baseball game was the awful RBI Baseball (not to be confused with the excellent old Sega franchise of the same name because why be straightforward?), because MLB did that in-house. So in addition to Sony putting a game out on other platforms (!), this is also the return of cross-platform baseball games that don't suck. Win-win, really.

 

But my point is that throughout the 90s, no one could've possibly predicted that any Sega game/character would appear on a Nintendo platform; and here we are. The difference, of course, is that unlike Sega, Sony is still thriving in the console market. It's not like they necessarily need to license their game to the other consoles. Sega didn't have a choice if they wanted to continue making any kind of a profit once their console department went under.

 

Yeah it seems like a good deal for all involved. Neato.

 

Can we get NHL back on PC while we're at it?

 

Yeah so, uh, you posted while I was sitting on mine.

The Sega situation is kind of unique in that they didn't have an alternate revenue stream to fall back on after flushing too much money into vanity projects, then they went and bet on the wrong horse (Yeah, the Gamecube, that'll be a hot system! ), and nowadays they're flush with Sammy cash. It's a shame there isn't really a comprehensive writeup of that five-ish year period anywhere, everyone's too obsessed with the Mega Drive years.

 

I think you mean the Dreamcast (which was Sega's last system). The Gamecube was Nintendo's system.

 

No, I mean the Gamecube, which they decided was going to be the place to play Sega games after they shuttered the Dreamcast and had to scramble on projects to recoup money.



Yeah uh... wrong call. And then they decided Jet Set Radio Future was going to be for Xbox I can't even... They did course correct, but it's kind of a minor accounting miracle they made it to 2004.

 

Oh yeah. I never owned one of Nintendo's home consoles so I don't remember the first Sega games to appear on them.

 

Well you see his name is Billy Hatcher because he rolls around a large egg.

It was rough.

 

I'm certainly not arguing that Xbox was a better alternative (look no further than Shenmue II's nonexistent US sales), but I am arguing that the PS2 had such a colossally commanding lead in install base that ignoring it for as "long" as they did (only a couple of years!) was probably what killed off their ability to remain an independent company.

A lot of our best information suggests Sega had been running at a loss since basically the Saturn era. They bet it all on Dreamcast and we all know how that turned out. Then they bet the bulk of their franchises on Nintendo, and by 2004 they were no longer viable on their own. That's right - multi-platform sensation Shadow the Hedgehog was post-Sammy merger. Edgy hogs bought with filthy pachinko lucre.