Kena: Bridge of Spirits really is an excellent game, I've done a couple of playthroughs at different difficulty levels, and there is so much more depth to the gameplay than I realized on my first playthrough. It's fun, challenging, has a decent story, beautiful environments, and some really cool bosses. The fact that it's an indie studio's first game still blows my mind.
Just wanted to add my own recommendation of Kena to anyone who might be interested, even though it's a more recent game.
You make a very good point about cutscenes. I'd love if there there was a frame gen & upscaler that exclusively worked on pre-rendered cutscenes to fix the issues in older games of cutscenes looking way worse than gameplay. I know for popular titles, there are sometimes mods that replace the cutscenes videos with upscaled versions, not having to fuss around with that could be really neat. But for gameplay, I'd much rather play at even 50fps native with variable refresh, without artifacts or additional latency, than a faked 120fps that still runs at 60hz of latency with added artifacting.
The next mainline Tomb Raider game is also going to be Unreal 5. That is if Embracer hasn't bankrupted themselves or sold Edios/Crystal Dynamics before then (although I'd be thrilled if that happened).
Lots of good suggestions in these comments so I'll throw a couple oddball suggestions out just for fun. Dredge isn't exactly a full-on horror game, but has some Lovecraftian horror elements, and I really enjoyed it. Not sure that kind of horror really fits the holiday though, so I'll also suggest Pumpkin Jack, which is even less of a horror game, but is a pretty enjoyable 3D platformer with a lot of inspiration from the season and holiday.
My personal theory is that we subsidize dairy not for the milk, but for the cheese. As far as I'm aware you can't make cheese out of plant milks, and we've gotten pretty reliant on cheese as a source of protein and other nutrients in our American diets - especially among children and lower income diets.
That makes two delisted Marvel-IP games in my Steam library. I haven't played Avengers yet, but I have a feeling that this probably isn't as big of a loss as when Deadpool was delisted.
They do, but only when their own start to make trouble for the party elites. Like Madison Cawthorn and his accusations of Washington orgies and cocaine use. He wasn't held accountable for anything when he was their agent of chaos, but once the chaos started hurting them, they were all in on holding him accountable.
I recently played through Dredge, and enjoyed it so much I went ahead and spent the time to unlock all the achievements. I saw the news of this delay on Steam, and was really glad that pretty much all the comments there were praising the studio for not pushing something incomplete out just to hit a deadline, and encouraging them to take all the time they need.
Sailing around the world costs money, but you can learn about other places through other people sharing their experiences on tiktok. There are livestreams teaching language, where you can get a much more personalized teaching and your questions answered without judgement for interrupting, there are carpenters sharing useful tricks, and showing how to build things for yourself. There are livestreams showing how to operate a crane at a shipping port, and what that career is like. TikTok has a lot more than the dancing, meowing, and giggling, although if that's what you watch a lot of and interact with, it will happily give you only that, but that's a user problem, not a platform problem.
When my mom was a kid, her grandpa would often watch/listen to the TV, while listening to the radio, and watch out the window and announce who was driving down the road in front of their farm by recognizing their vehicles. Nobody considered it brain rot, his family considered it a skill he had.
Just reading that reminded me of a half-dozen projects that I haven't touched beyond buying the parts for. And another bunch that are mostly working, but could really use some finishing touches so they aren't as jank, but they made it to the barely functional stage, so that's where they'll probably stay until they fail enough to get any of my attention.
Honestly, Unreal has been in a different league ever since Epic started dumping Fortnite money into it. That's probably why Unity tried to start charging more, because they've been falling behind for the past few years and can't afford to keep up. Not that I think it's good to leave Epic/Unreal without decent competition, but I'm more inclined to blame Fortnite for the downfall of Unity than the indie devs Unity just scared off with their desperate cash-grab.
Looks interesting, although the comments about other git repo services being bloated, complicated, and resource heavy, followed by a paragraph about AI features that have been added, with more planned in the future, seems a touch ironic to me.
I was always skeptical of Philips Hue because they seemed shy about using local only or even the fact that they're just zigbee bulbs in their marketing. I ended up going with Sengled zigbee bulbs for myself, but I've always heard that Hue bulbs have the best brightness consistency and color. Also been noticing lately that the smart bulb market has been flooded with WiFi and Bluetooth bulbs, and there really isn't a lot of choice left in the zigbee/local only market. Hopefully this change by Philips doesn't lead to them dropping zigbee compatibility in future products, but them making moves like this doesn't give me much faith.
It's not like most phones are getting updates past two years at this point anyway, and while it would be nice if we could actually get software updates and keep our devices longer, I have my doubts that is ever going to happen on Android. I have more faith that someday I'll get my dream RISC-V powered phone with several Linux distros to choose between or even dual boot.
IoT devices are a slightly different story, but I'm skeptical that Linux offering 6 year kernels has made a meaningful difference in those devices actually getting updates.
Epic is Unreal not Unity, fair to be done with them as well, but for once they aren't part of the problem here. Unfortunately this kinda gives Epic a huge advantage in the industry, as Unity was arguably one of the best competitors to Unreal, but even that gap has been getting wider for a while.
The big ones for me are a cover/replacement for the fabric face gasket, prescription lens inserts, and for long play sessions a fan insert for the headset can be a nice to have, but I don't run mine all the time since sometimes it's just adding noise. The face gasket has probably been the hardest thing to get right, since a lot of third-party ones either don't have enough padding, or are hard to swap in and out, so I kinda prefer having a full extra magnetic insert so I can easily change between the original which is most comfortable for me, and something else that I'm less worried about sweating all over for more active games.
I've spent over $1500 on VR (HTC Vive, and Valve Index, plus some accessories for both). I've never been able to talk myself into even a Quest 2 for $200 back when they went on sale shortly before they raised the price due to "supply chain issues." I enjoy VR experiences and I'm personally okay with paying enthusiast prices for hardware that improves the experience, but I want nothing to do with Meta/Facebook's ecosystem, at any price.
With as many Unity games as there are, saying only 10% of developers will end up having to pay is still quite a large number of developers.
Also, I wonder how against the TOS it would be for game devs of existing titles to sandbox Unity behind a firewall and prevent it from accessing the internet. And they say the change applies to old games, do older builds of Unity have the telemetry already? How long has it been in place?
Yep, hopefully Godot ends up being the real winner, because with as many AAA studios that have started to abandon their own in-house engines in favor of Unreal, it's starting to feel a bit like Epic is going to end up with more than a healthy share of the market.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits really is an excellent game, I've done a couple of playthroughs at different difficulty levels, and there is so much more depth to the gameplay than I realized on my first playthrough. It's fun, challenging, has a decent story, beautiful environments, and some really cool bosses. The fact that it's an indie studio's first game still blows my mind.
Just wanted to add my own recommendation of Kena to anyone who might be interested, even though it's a more recent game.