Dcubed

Room is now open!

Aww yeah! The BEST Duel Mode board! The mindgames gonna be sick yo!

To be fair, @S.C.G was the one who truly got done dirty during this game. He really should’ve won

If you’re not using original hardware for this venture (be it via an Everdrive or original carts), I hope you’re at least using an official N64 controller (Switch or OG N64). So many N64 games are built around the eccentricities of that controller’s design that playing with any other controller would be doing a disservice to many of the games in the N64’s library (Sin & Punishment and Jet Force Gemini immediately spring to mind). But yeah, Mario 64 good! So good that it basically had to carry the console by itself for almost 3 months post launch!

Never said it was. I like how brazen it is with its idea theft actually

Gee! Wonder where that game got its inspiration from…

Games for modern systems price collapse at retail so quickly that it’s often not even worth looking at second hand prices. That plus the rise of digital also encourages thrifty laggards to pick up games at regular 80% off prices on their respective stores. Most publishers not called Nintendo have successfully devalued their games and have trained people to just wait for heavy discounts. Case in point? Compare Mario + Rabbids (and its sequel) to literally any other Mario game on Switch. The difference in average selling prices is staggering (and indeed, it’s the biggest reason why I did not buy it right when it first came out, and instead chose to wait). Meanwhile, retro games are just continuing to appreciate in value. Probably because for the most part, they’re just better games than the slop that gets put out by the traditional side of the industry these days.

Sadly that’s the state of modern gaming. Your physical discs are basically just glorified unlock keys and will eventually become coasters when all the online servers get shut off. At least Nintendo are good about doing reprints of all their games with their respective updates being placed on the carts. They’re pretty much the only publisher that regularly does this though sadly.

Sounds to me like Julius has been playing too much of Virtue’s Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma

Well I guess they met the target of “before Xmas” in the end The Pocket auto updater is also apparently adding support for custom palettes and such as well. Nice.

https://comicbook.com/gaming/amp/news/god-of-war-games-ps5-remaster-release-rumor/ Hope this is true. I have no interest in the reboot GOW games, but the original trilogy? Yes please!

Personally, I only find interest in Friend leaderboards. I’m usually more interested in competing /comparing against friends than strangers.

There’s nothing else that needs to be said.

Pistols at 20:00 it is then!

I made @BowserBasher’s Mario Golf skills look like crap… More highlights! Fun times as always!

More interesting stuff regarding the ballooning budget dillema... A presentation from 2022 was found that shows Insomniac presenting how mid-sized games like Miles Morales could be more profitable than mega AAA budget games like Spiderman 2... Here Insomniac are showing that three mid-sized games could be made for the budget of just one AAA game, and bring in more revenue; while also being made quicker. Of course, given that we know Insomniac's 10 year plan going forward, it seems that there's a disconnect between what Insomniac want to do and what Sony/Playstation want from the studio... ... still, it's nice to know that Insomniac leadership seem to agree with me and @Hero of Time here! Good shout, you may well be right. They're amongst Sony's most unproductive studios... I'm sure that if one studio is getting the axe, it'll be either them or Bend.

https://trekmovie.com/2023/12/20/paramount-global-holding-merger-talks-with-warner-bros-discovery/ Rather timely. Will be very interesting to see how this one pans out... Even if WB and Paramount merge, they'd still only be worth around $30-40 billion; a tiny fraction of their rivals... but then again, the courts may not take kindly to WB merging again so soon after already merging with Discovery... ... and what would happen to WBIE?

New key art... https://www.segasammy.co.jp/cms/wp-content/uploads/pdf/en/ir/management_meeting2023_e_day1.pdf Why you cribbin' my words SEGA?

New key art (and new logo!) https://www.segasammy.co.jp/cms/wp-content/uploads/pdf/en/ir/management_meeting2023_e_day1.pdf

New key art... AND A NAME! https://www.segasammy.co.jp/cms/wp-content/uploads/pdf/en/ir/management_meeting2023_e_day1.pdf @Julius Time to update the thread title

New key art... https://www.segasammy.co.jp/cms/wp-content/uploads/pdf/en/ir/management_meeting2023_e_day1.pdf If that's not Lizardcube, I'm committing sudoku.

New key art. https://www.segasammy.co.jp/cms/wp-content/uploads/pdf/en/ir/management_meeting2023_e_day1.pdf

They should just be lowering the graphical fidelity and letting the consoles just run the games at 4k 60FPS. That's what they sold these consoles on. Stop increasing the focus on graphical fidelity! Nobody is forcing you to keep pouring more and more manpower and money into shiner graphics; the most popular games are rarely the most graphically intensive ones anyway. We live in a world where stuff like Vampire Survivors can sell over 10 million copies and literally look like a bootleg Mega Drive game. Also, the average selling prices of their games are quite low too... averaging around $30 or so going by the leaks. They're probably being too aggressive with discounting their games as well (and ironically not agressive enough with their pricing on PC, or release timing for that matter). It's all well and good selling 10 million copies, but if you're only selling most of those at an average price of $30 on discount? You may as well have sold only 5 million at full price.

It's bonkers isn't it? There's no way this is sustainable. It's not hard to see why Jim Ryan was pushing for recurrent GAAS revenue, but surely the ultimate answer is to curtail these budgets? It's just like Ted Price himself said, "is 3x the investment in [Spider-Man 2] evident to anyone who plays the game?” No it bloody isn't! Cut your budgets, reduce your scope, reduce your graphic fidelity, get games out in 2-3 years instead of 5-6. Nobody cares if they can't see each individual pore and body hair on your character models; they just wanna swing around as Spiderman like in the old PS2/GCN/Xbox game! Like, what's happened with Naughty Dog is crazy. 4 years of development work and potentially $100-200 million just down the toilet... and now they'll be lucky to get a single PS5 game out for the entire generation! This has to stop! Not publicly at least. But I can imagine that Sony's other studios are being forced to make cuts to pay for the sins of Naughty Dog... that's a huge amount of money and time just thrown away. It's also quite shocking to see how small a margin that they're even making on their first party titles. Sony do have some legitimate megahits now that can seriously give Nintendo's own first party productions a run for their money (both in terms of sales power and critical appeal), but they're only making ROI margins of around 40-60% at best... nowhere near as much as you would expect. They really are making most of their money off of 3rd party microtransaction royalities.

Here's an example of good reporting from Kotaku... https://kotaku.com/what-hacked-files-tell-us-about-the-studio-behind-spide-1851115233 Fascinating stuff. Seems like Insomniac are in the firing line for their skyrocketing budgets and Sony want some significant headcount reductions (between 50-75 people). Sounds like even Insomniac themselves don't feel that the massive 3x budget increase of Spiderman 2 over the first game was worth it (needing 7 million copies sold just to break even is insane!). Also sounds like Sony are planning to close one of their Playstation development studios... (“there will be one studio closure.”). Wonder who could be on the chopping block? I can't imagine that it'd be one that they acquired just recently, so my guess is that Bend Studio isn't long for this world. Now THAT'S newsworthy.