cikame

It's not quite the same but i always saw those quick couch multiplayer games like Samurai Gunn, Duck Game or even something totally different like SpeedRunners as the same "genre" as Power Stone, that is a simple competitive multiplayer focused game you can jump into with 2-4 players, but more specifically i suppose the game that perfected the uh... "arena fighter" was Smash Bros and there have been a few Smash inspired indie games.

They really should do an online remastered version of Power Stone though, been saying it for a long time.

It has a story?

I mostly post here when i disagree with someone or to play a devils advocate when an opinion hasn't been floated, i'm never sure how valuable that is (and i have been banned once before possibly by accident) but i rarely simply fully agree with someone. I'm comforted when people talk about having healthy debates or arguments from multiple sides or walks of life to settle on real truths, how often those debates actually result in mutual agreement and whether they need to is questionable, but it's more valuable and less terrifying to me than echo chambers, and i'm worried that AI generated content has the ability to better create and endlessly feed those echo chambers.

Current AI is not AI, it's a fortune telling 8 ball with a hundred billion answers and the answers it contains are provided to it by people, what kinds of people? We don't know, the media generated by AI is going to contain the opinions and experiences of the data it's been trained on so i think it's fair to suggest it cannot be impartial or respecting of a sea of different opinions, and how significant that is i guess depends on whether you're simply feeding anime fans or discussing politics... or what year it is.

Here's a random thing i experienced today, i watch aviation videos on Youtube and started watching this but a couple minutes in i started to wonder... is this AI generated? The narration makes a few odd pauses, at one point calls the C-130 a jet and the American accent feels like it starts slipping into something else and sounds a bit like the Irish host of Real Engineering, there's also not a lot of human touches to the channel, no channel description, no community posts, no playlists. I'm very aware of AI generated Youtube channels it's something that Kyle Hill talked about a year ago but if i was watching an AI channel i was way into it for 2 minutes before i started feeling weird, and no one in the comments is talking about it.

Also, and this is totally off topic, but a guilty pleasure of mine recently has been listening to what i assume is AI generated 80's versions of nu metal songs, when did this become possible?

There are so many contradictions going on, Call of Duty as a live service requires that players dedicate their time to it, but it's generally understood that the value of Game Pass is having "free" access to a good variety of games and not playing one game for months, it's a cheaper option instead of buying lots of games at least in the short term but they're thinking of raising the price to compensate for the loss in COD revenue, everybody's math including the ex ceo of PlayStation suggests that current subscription models cannot support the budgets of AAA games without unrealistic numbers of subscribers but they can't just not put it on Game Pass because the subscription model would collapse due to anti trust.

It's a mess, how do you sell investors on a service that reduces the potential overall earnings of a product, especially after you just spent $75 billion for that product.

They will still make money, this doesn't stop COD being profitable, it just seems obvious that they will be making less money.

I'm going to try and respond without going deep into my Shenmue obsession.

I agree with everything you said, it's one of those games where i overlook most of the negatives for the overall package, when the first game came out it was like nothing else, i think more people would consider it an industry defining game if it wasn't so... "unique", some people would say "weird", or if you're Gerstmann "bad", but its presentation, voice acting for every character and even the full orchestral soundtrack were achievements that belong to Shenmue, and everyone should respect it damnit :P.

There are few games whose worlds i would consider real places that i've lived in and properly experienced, usually because levels in games are things to be moved past, but the "life sim" part of Shenmue forces you to stay in these locations and explore them many times until they become familiar because not having a map means you need to use your eyes, ask for directions, and explore every nook and cranny because sometimes, like real life, there isn't anything to do (unless you haven't spent your pocket money, in which case you go to the arcade and play Hang On). I played the first game in 2000 when i was 11 so you can imagine how invested my child self was in Ryo's home town of Dobuita, role playing having breakfast, saying good morning to Ine-san, sparring in the dojo, buying milk for the cat, pretending Nozomi is my girlfriend etc... there's very few games i've had that experience with.

I'M RAMBLING AHH, what i really want to talk about is Shenmue 3.

I backed Shenmue 3 but i really wasn't expecting much from it, Yu Suzuki wouldn't have the budget or team to create the next entry the franchise truly deserved, but this would probably be the last Shenmue thing ever so why not. My lack of excitement meant i didn't even get around to playing it until last year, 4 years after its release, and i don't know if it was due to my low expectations or how long i left it but... i really enjoyed it, but yes it is flawed.

Those gameplay changes you mentioned are the worst parts, fighting is passable, Ryo's blood is now 99% garlic and the money requirements are extremely tedious, but... the game is kind of beautiful to look at, they did the absolute most with their budget, and the Shenmue DNA is fully intact in that i became a familiar part of its world, even though i'm old now there were moments where i felt the kid in me wanting to roleplay, i opened every drawer, examined every object on the shelves and breathed the world just like i did in the previous games, i kept sending screenshots to a friend of the most boring things like market stalls or people's houses because for some reason in Shenmue they feel like real lived in places.

I won't hold the game up as any kind of major achievement, as a Shenmue fan it did what i needed it to do, it fed my soul.

Thank you for enjoying and writing about Shenmue.

@shindig: Even though i think a PC as a console is a ridiculous idea i don't see how Valve would benefit if that were not the case, but i also don't know what MS would get out of it, does MS get a cut of sales or is it just a desperate measure to get people to use their Xbox's? It would be super weird to have two game stores on the "console" and on one of them the sales are better and MS doesn't make any money from it.

It's hard for me to gauge how many die hard fans there are of the first game, besides its themes it's not a game that leads conversation in any genre or discussion, not even story, it did a thing that we were happy to see and we moved on. I can't remember what the gaming landscape was like at the time and how that might have affected people's perception of it.

So the idea of a sequel is odd, is it more of the same? Having played the first one the idea of more isn't the most exciting prospect, and i don't think the marketing has been effective at explaining why you might want more, at least not for me.

It's a weird one, people have been talking about its presentation but beyond that it doesn't feel like it has mass appeal.

Hi, it's me, i've defended DOA a lot on this forum before so i won't go crazy this time.

Despite fighting games being bigger than ever before it's still only really the most popular games that can maintain a healthy player count, so many millions play FPS that if you wanted to dedicate yourself to a less popular option with only a few thousand players you can, but it's harder for everyone from casual to pro to justify putting time into a fighter that only has a few hundred.

I think DOA does sell pretty well, there must be a reason why we're up to number 6, but despite its very good gameplay, presentation and decent enough netcode in the latest entry people still fall back to the thriving communities of Street Fighter and Tekken, it's where all the fighting game content creators and tournaments are so i can't blame them for wanting to be involved and included.

What would another franchise have to do in order to overthrow the Pepsi and Cola of the genre? One way is wait for them to change their receipe and anger their customers, for the longest time the biggest games at EVO were Marvel and Street Fighter (and i guess Smash but... you know), when SF5 arrived with a solid presentation and not a lot else fans started looking at other options, Marvel Infinite disappointed the next year and cemented the idea the Capcom had lost their way, at the same time Tekken 7 came and took all of that thunder propelling the franchise to the main stage at EVO. I don't know if DOA has the receipe to compete if a moment like that were to happen again, and it's obviously not something you can predict, but hopefully it can continue to exist with a casual audience and maybe see some growth if people start looking for something different.

Here, courtesy of me and some free video editing software enjoy the DOA2 intro, my entry to the franchise, i even learned this song on guitar :D.

It hasn't been mentioned yet so i figure i should, the PO'ed remaster was announced on April Fools day.

Maybe they've got a list of IP they've got the go ahead on and PO'ed somehow found its way on there, maybe as a package deal for something else, it's not the most in depth remaster they've done but it's a good quality, maybe their dev pipeline for KEX engine remasters is refined to the point where this didn't take much time, maybe the interns worked on it, whatever the case the budget was low enough for a "why not it'll be funny" decision and here it is, John at Digital Foundry finds the game culturally significant so it's worth it in my eyes :P. Whatever the reason i assume it didn't take much time away from whatever their next project is.

The price should be lower though alarmingly £16.75 in todays market could be considered a low price, their prices have been steadily increasing with every release and the acquisition by Atari probably hasn't helped.

Hey, at least it's not Kingpin Reloaded.

@ll_exile_ll: I don't know much about pay in Poland or whether there's tax incentives in game development, but i do know they have world leading employee protections, so at the very least the people working their should be treated better than the US studios.