If it was before XP, it was all DOS underneath.

Doesn’t Counter-Strike still have this? It serves a different use case than a proper ranked mode, usually, though I’ll admit I’m long out of the loop on Counter-Strike.

Have you played the Metal Gear Solid series? If not, don’t look them up beforehand. And this might seem strange, but for the optimal effect, don’t pirate them either.

I didn’t know CS did this, but yeah, at a high level, that’s how I’d address it, too. It’s probably not a solution that scales super well due to the manual review required, and I know that game has a reputation of people still being annoyed by cheaters, but it might be the best we can do without being very invasive, like the ring 0 stuff.

I’ve heard High on Life is a metroidvania, but I haven’t played it myself. You’re right that 3D metroidvanias are exceptionally rare.

Nah, cheating is just absurdly hard to stop. Even ring 0 anti cheat doesn’t stop it entirely. At some point, I feel like the answer is similar to piracy, in that you must accept that there’s going to be some amount of it, and then find a way to mitigate the damage. Because there are solutions to both of them that both go too far.

Batman: Arkham Asylum. It doesn’t come up a lot, because only that first game is a metroidvania and Arkham City might be most people’s favorite in the series, but it absolutely counts. I love Arkham combat. It’s better in the sequels due to some slight tweaks in game feel, but that combat in a metroidvania is just excellent, and the game is just so well paced. It’s a shame what WB did to that studio.

They’re just games that favor those categories. Even if Peak pops off, it’s not going to win a category like art direction or narrative, ever. It was far from a slow year.

The only explanation I can come up with is that they’re a studio that reliably ships finished projects, and maybe that was all Paradox was looking for.

Echoes of Paradox moving Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 to The Chinese Room for some reason none of us on the outside understand.

I don’t believe I said anything like “all games deserve ongoing maintenance”.

If it costs them nothing, then what does the cost of servers have to do with anything? If someone else wants to run servers at their own expense, that’s their prerogative. Why would you have an issue with a bad game remaining playable? That’s valuable history that everyone can learn from.

In this case, the ask is to release the server binary and allow users to point their game to a different server when the official one is gone.

What do you believe the cost to Sony is for community-run servers?

Your entry level PC is what I would have called high end as little as four years ago. I built a machine in 2021 with a Ryzen 5 5600x and an RX 6800 XT; it still runs the latest UE5 games at high settings. I would call that above and beyond entry level.

Yeah, leaving it ambiguous like this leads to wild speculation, and I think you misquoted that with your own assumptions. You might be right, but Digital Foundry seems to think $400-$500 is possible. Given the cost of my own mini PC, which is older and requires higher margins than Valve can get away with, I would even believe $400-$500. But we just don’t know. Everyone’s best guess for the price of this thing has a low floor and a high ceiling, which will make this all really funny once we know the actual price.

that will cost more than a console

Is that part of the quote? Because I just saw “priced like an entry level PC, not like a console”, which was more ambiguous than saying “priced like a console”. One man’s entry level PC is $300, and another’s is $1000. I have a mini PC with the power of a PS4 Pro, which I’d easily consider entry level, and it cost me $530 about a year and a half ago.

I liked it a lot. It’s engrossing enough to make you just want to keep going to the next episode, and it’s beautifully animated. Other than the story stuff, the gameplay loop is just This is the Police, and I think this improves both the Telltale design and the design of This is the Police by way of pacing. It did still leave me wanting more as a video game, but as a story and a comedy, I loved it.

The correct lesson to take away from it, that they won’t ever do, is to release multiplayer games in a way where they can live on without constant updates or a central server.

Going from YouTube comments on gaming channels that don’t focus on PC gaming or Linux, I don’t think many people remember the first Steam Machines from 10 years ago.