The people who make enhanced editions of old role-playing games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment want to do the same thing for Icewind Dale II. There's just one problem: nobody knows where to find the code.
It's hard to believe that things like this happen - Icewind Dale II was released about 15 years ago, developed and published by big, popular companies. You'd think the source code would be properly protected and stored.
Nintendo has revealed details for the SNES Classic. The standalone mini console will feature 21 games, including Super Mario World, Earthbound, Super Mario Kart, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. But the most surprising inclusion is Star Fox 2, the unreleased sequel to the original Star Fox for SNES.
No Chrono Trigger.
Why would I buy a SNES if I can't play the best game ever made on it? This is a baffling, dealbreaking omission.
Atari CEO Fred Chesnais told GamesBeat in an exclusive interview that his fabled video game company is working on a new game console.
In doing so, the New York company might be cashing in on the popularity of retro games and Nintendo’s NES Classic Edition, which turned out to be surprisingly popular for providing a method to easily play old games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda in HD on a TV.
Chesnais declined to describe a lot of details about the console. But he said it is based on PC technology. He said Atari is still working on the design and will reveal it at a later date.
It seems extremely unlikely that this will be a console in the Xbox, Playstation, or Switch sense, but if it's based on PC technology, it won't be some rebranded Android tablet either. I wasn't an Atari kid when I was young - PC and Nintendo all the way - so I have no sense of nostalgia for the company, but I'm still intrigued.
Almost immediately, fans asked how this happened. Why was Andromeda so much worse than its predecessors? How could the revered RPG studio release such an underwhelming game? And, even if the problems were a little exaggerated by the internet's strange passion for hating BioWare, how could Andromeda ship with so many animation issues?
I've spent the past three months investigating the answers to those questions. From conversations with nearly a dozen people who worked on Mass Effect: Andromeda, all of whom spoke under condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk about the game, a consistent picture has emerged. The development of Andromeda was turbulent and troubled, marred by a director change, multiple major re-scopes, an understaffed animation team, technological challenges, communication issues, politics, a compressed timeline, and brutal crunch.
Many games share some of these problems, but to those who worked on it, Andromeda felt unusually difficult. This was a game with ambitious goals but limited resources, and in some ways, it's miraculous that BioWare shipped it at all. (EA and BioWare declined to comment for this article.)
Mass Effect: Andromeda was in development for five years, but by most accounts, BioWare built the bulk of the game in less than 18 months. This is the story of what happened.
This is a great read, even if you don't care much about games in general or Mass Effect in particular. It's a cautionary tale.
BioWare is one the greatest game studios of all time, boasting a long list of genre-defining games that people will continue to enjoy for decades to come. I never bought into the whole "EA ruined BioWare" nonsense, but with a story like this under my belt - which I almost found a little emotional to read - it becomes harder and harder to discard the negative influence EA has over this great studio.
I enjoyed Mass Effect: Andromeda, and 100%-ed the game despite its uneven quality, and it sports some great moments and by far the best combat system of the entire series, but you'd have to be blind to not see the disjointed state of the game, with some aspects - like the aforementioned combat system - feeling fully realised and polished, while other aspects were subpar not just for BioWare standards, but for gaming standards in general - such as the story, some of the characters, and, of course, the animations. I am grateful to each and every writer, animator, designer, and programmer who, according to the reports in the article, were driven far, far beyond breaking point, for Andromeda.
BioWare and its people deserve a better master - or better yet, no master at all - and above all, the freedom to make their own choices. Most likely in vain, I hope EA learns from Andromeda.
In the nearly 18 months since a CD-ROM-based "Nintendo PlayStation" prototype was first found in an estate sale, emulator makers and homebrew programmers have created a facsimile of what CD-based games would look like on an SNES. Efforts by hacker Ben Heck to get that kind of software actually working on the one-of-a-kind hardware, though, had been stymied by problems getting the CD-ROM drive to talk to the system.
Those problems are now a thing of the past.
In a newly posted video, Heck lays out how the system's CD-ROM drive suddenly started sending valid data to the system literally overnight. "I was working on this yesterday and the CD-ROM wasn't even detecting the disc," Heck says in the video. "I came in this morning and jiggled the cables around and got ready to work on it some more, and all of a sudden it works... did a magic elf come in overnight?"
I'm a sucker for exotic game hardware.
One of those fans, a programmer from Kansas with an offbeat sense of humor and an unmissable skillset, released a PC emulator for the NES - a reverse-engineered software version of the hardware platform. Called "NESticle", its Windows icon was, quite literally and indelicately, a pair of testicles.
NESticle, nonetheless, did something amazing: It allowed people to play old Nintendo games on cheap computers made by Packard Bell and other firms, and did so while introducing a number of fundamental new ways to appreciate those games. Divorced from Nintendo's famously draconian licensing strategy, it introduced new ways of thinking about well-tread video games.
Would we have the retro-friendly gaming culture that we do today without its existence? Maybe, but it's possible it might not be quite so vibrant.
This is the story of how NESticle helped turn retro gaming into a modern cultural force.
I have a retroarch setup on my PC with support for various systems from my childhood, stocked with the games I played as a kid. Other than such personal use, emulators for classic systems serve a vital function in our culture: they make sure old titles will still be playable long after the last hardware to play them on has perished.
In the early life of the Nintendo Switch, when it was still codenamed Nintendo NX, there were a lot of rumors floating around about the device. We saw a console with an oval shape and a screen that seemed built into the buttons and rumors that the new device would run Android as its operating system.
While the product we have today resembles nothing of those early prototypes, it looks like the Android rumor may not have been far off. Cyanogen's Kirt McMaster tweeted early this morning to say that Nintendo had approached him about designing a custom Android-based operating system for their new console, but he had some choice words for the company.
Add this to the list of terrible business decisions by Cyanogen and its CEO.
In Kingsway, Andrew Morrish's upcoming PC role-playing game, monsters are pop-ups, quests are emails and your backpack is a cluttered file folder. That's right, it's an OSRPG.
Coming to PC later this year via Adult Swim games, Kingsway is a role-playing adventure that takes the form of the Kingsway Operating System, which is basically a primitive Windows/MacOS for the monster-slaying set. Travel the King's land via World Navigator window, slaying monsters as they pop up on your desktop. Drag-and-drop windows to your heart's content.
Incredibly creative, and I can't wait to play this when it comes out. And honestly - the 'operating system' looks better than most of the actual operating systems we have today.
Interesting little tidbit for the weekend: we now know what operating system the Nintendo Switch is running. Since it's basically an NVIDIA Shield, I kind of expected it to be running Android - heavily modded, of course - but it turns out it's running something else entirely: it's running FreeBSD.
Like Sony, Nintendo also opts for FreeBSD for its games console. This means of the four major gaming platforms, two run Windows, and two run FreeBSD. Fascinating.
The Switch is a console sandwiched between a bar of success lowered by the disaster of the Wii U and the considerable ground Nintendo must make up.
Compared to the Wii U on its merits, the Switch is a slam dunk. It takes the basic concept of the Wii U, of a tablet-based console, and fulfills the promise of it in a way Nintendo simply wasn’t capable of realizing in 2012. It’s launching with a piece of software that, more than anything in the Wii U’s first year, demonstrates its inherent capability of delivering what Nintendo says is one of the Switch’s primary missions: a big-budget, AAA game that exists across a handheld device and a television-connected portable. The hardware lives up to its name in how easily and smoothly it moves between those two worlds, in how dead simple it all is to make something pretty magical happen.
I am genuinely excited by the Switch, and the prospects it brings to the table. I'm worried about the lineup of games - or lack thereof, really - so I'm not going to jump in straight away. The reviews of the device and its launch Zelda title are positive, though, so I'm looking forward to what Nintendo has in store for the Switch.
Gabe Newell sits perfectly still, leans forward. His hands are laid on his lap. Only his eyes are moving. They shift rapidly from left to right and back again. He's physically here, he's sort of listening, but I'd say he's also somewhere else, mentally untangling the knots of the future.
The way he talks bears this out. He's unscripted, exploratory. He ranges far from corporate dogma and empty visionary horseshit. He admits when he’s been wrong in the past, or that he might be wrong right now about one of the biggest gambles of his career.
I like this about him: the act of engaging with journalists without a script, enjoying an actual conversation, prodding ideas that might be important outside the confines of a media event.
While I wouldn't go as far as putting Gabe Newell on the same pedestal as tech personalities like Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds, I do feel Gabe is a similar sort of person. He worked on the first few releases of Windows at Microsoft, and then, as we all know, founded Valve, one of the most influential gaming - and therefore, technology - companies in the world, responsible for some of the best games of all time, and one of the most successful - if not the most successful - game platforms of all time.
While Valve is far from perfect - Half-Life 3, customer service, etc. etc. - I do feel the company has managed to create a great platform with Steam, which, even though it uses DRM, seems to be unobtrusive in its implementation and truly made PC gaming better, if not outright saved it in the face of ever-better consoles.
When we consider any new features or changes for Steam, our primary goal is to make customers happy. We measure that happiness by how well we are able to connect customers with great content. We've come to realize that in order to serve this goal we needed to move away from a small group of people here at Valve trying to predict which games would appeal to vastly different groups of customers.
Thus, over Steam's 13-year history, we have gradually moved from a tightly curated store to a more direct distribution model. In the coming months, we are planning to take the next step in this process by removing the largest remaining obstacle to having a direct path, Greenlight. Our goal is to provide developers and publishers with a more direct publishing path and ultimately connect gamers with even more great content.
This is a big step for Steam, and will make it incredibly trivial for developers and publishers alike to publish games on Steam.
With those out of the way, TASBot moved on to a similar total control run of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. After a few minutes of setup, the Zelda screen faded out, then faded back in on a bordered window with an ersatz logo for the "Super N64." Without any forthcoming explanation from the runners on stage, TASBot started apparently playing through a glitch-filled speedrun of Super Mario 64 on the Super NES, following it up with a similar glitch-filled speedrun through Valve's PC classic Portal. After that, the scene somehow transitioned to a Skype video call with a number of speedrunners speaking live from the AGDQ event through the SNES.
No one on the AGDQ stage acknowledged how weird this all was, leaving hundreds in the Herndon, VA ballroom and nearly 200,000 people watching live on Twitch temporarily guessing at what, exactly, was going on.
AGDQ (and its Summer counterpart, SGDQ) are some of my favourite events in technology, and I have the entire marathon streaming for the whole week. The TASBot block this year was, as the excerpt above describes, insane, and this article explains how they did it.
The Nintendo Switch will be released March 3 worldwide for $299, Nintendo announced today during a press briefing in Tokyo.
Nintendo will sell the Switch for 29,980 yen in Japan. In Europe, the price will vary by retailer. The Switch will be available in two configurations: one with gray Joy-Con controllers, and the other with neon red and blue Joy-Con devices. Otherwise, the hardware will be the same: 32 GB of internal storage with a 720p touchscreen.
I'm somewhat curious about the hardware, somewhat interested in the new Zelda they showed off, but I'm appalled at the pricing in Europe (you'll be plonking down around €400 for the console and a game), and disappointed in the weak launch line-up and pretty meagre collection of games they showed off for the coming year.
The Mario and Zelda franchises have basically become like Call of Duty - every year, we get pots, remakes, of a new game with a few new mechanics, and that's it. There's nothing wrong with that - if people enjoy them, they enjoy them, and that's great - but I feel like Nintendo could be doing so much more than this.
I don't think we'll ever see Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and the cliffhanger conclusion makes Half-Life 3 unlikely as well. The best chance of Half-Life getting a second wind will likely come if J. J. Abrams and Bad Robot can get the Half-Life film to screen. If that comes to fruition, and it doesn't bomb like almost every game movie before it, maybe, just maybe there's a chance of Gordon Freeman’s story continuing. Roll your eyes at the movie mention if you want, but how else will this franchise get a pulse again?
The interview you are about to read sheds some insight into how Valve works as a developer. Yes, someone at Valve could just say, "Let's make another Half-Life" and do it, but there are huge risks and hurdles involved in doing that. Prior to this interview, I was in the camp of, "Valve just doesn't get it." Now I'm in the camp of, "Valve is probably doing the right thing, but it's disappointing."
This interview opened my eyes to Valve's unique way of developing games, but also provided a bit of closure for someone who wants to see Half-Life continue. In the days before publishing this story, I reached out to Valve one last time for comment, but my request went unanswered. Without further delay, here's the interview.
This is a must-read.
This is one of those projects that's just all around cool: Anders Granlund is bringing Wolfenstein 3D to the GameBoy Color, and since the GBC is quite hardware-constrained, he needs to employ some extreme measures to accomplish this. One of these measures is to add a co-processor into the game cartridge.
"Funky Fantasy IV" is a 100% machine-translated version of Final Fantasy IV for the Japanese Super Famicom. The project is still unfinished, with little bits and pieces of untranslated menu text still strewn about, but all of the main and important text has been run through Google Translate.
Looks like my venerable profession is safe.
For now.
Frank Azor explains to PC Gamer why SteamOS seems to have kind of... Faded away:
"Valve ran into some delays with the controller, and while that was occurring, Windows 10 was being released," Azor said. "I think Microsoft learned a very valuable lesson - a lot of valuable lessons - with Windows 8 and tried to correct those with Windows 10. It's more gamer focused, I would say. Every subsequent release has focused on gamers. Although their execution isn't perfect, it's definitely improved compared to Windows 8."
He continued: "I think the need right now, for Steam Machines and for SteamOS, isn't as great as it was two years ago, and that’s contributed to the reason why the momentum has faded. We still offer SteamOS and the Steam Machine platform with the new version of the Alpha - the new Steam Machine R2 - and we still sell hundreds of units, thousands of units every month. But it's not a major initiative for us like it was two years ago because it's not necessary right now. We're in a good place with Windows."
Microsoft did better with Windows 10, and lest we forget: Valve totally botched everything they could possibly botch with SteamOS.
Of course, it only works if you have other people to play with. A few gamers who bought Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare through the digital storefront built into Windows 10 have discovered they can only play with other gamers who also bought the game from Microsoft. Xbox One players can only play with other Xbox One players, and PlayStation 4 players can only play with other PlayStation 4 players. This has always been the case. The trouble is that this time not all PC players can play with other PC players. For unknown reasons, Windows 10 Store customers are segregated from customers who bought the game from Steam, which is by far the most popular platform on PC.
That's like buying a game from Target and learning you can't play with people who bought it from Best Buy. Call of Duty fans who made the unfortunate of mistake of giving Microsoft their cash are left sitting in lonely multiplayer lobbies waiting for games that'll never start.
Only two people were looking for a multiplayer game.
In a few hours of testing, I haven't seen any noticeable problems with the graphic or sound recreation on the NES Classic Edition. Even the flickering and slowdown issues that were a forced part of that original NES game design seem to be captured accurately.
Colors are rendered brightly and accurately (unlike similar NES emulation on the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS), with big, sharp pixels by default. So far, I'm really enjoying the CRT filter, which adds a pleasant fuzziness to the edges of the sprites without being distracting.
Sounds like a winner. Too bad the device doesn't include the ability to install additional games.