Jank Mail - Numbers, crunching

Another week in the PC gaming mines and oh, such wonders it has produced. Nic Ruben wrote an ode to parrying in general and its delivery in Onimusha in particular. 

At their best, nailing a string of parries and ripostes feels like performing Swan Lake while winning a rap battle against god. At their worst, they're the design equivalent of blending a bag of spinach into sugary pasta sauce so fussy toddlers don't realise they're eating quicktime event.

Graham spoke to the people who put Spelunky 1 in Spelunky 2 to create a new, still more powerful Spelunky. This is very important to people like us who have spent hundreds of hours in each game.

Spelunky 2's World 1, by comparison, feels designed for the player. "Spelunky 2 essentially did away with level feelings and moved its extended content into dedicated areas you can visit by taking branching paths, which ends up trading variation for player choice," says SNF. One of those choices happens at the end of World 1 after you fight a mini boss. You can decide whether to go left or right to determine what kind of World 2 you get, but that kind of decision is empowering in a way I don't want from Spelunky. 

For this month’s Living in Sim, Brendy signed up for the extraordinarily Y2K-coded combat simulation of Dagger Directive. 

I don't think of myself as a gun guy - the type of person who obsesses over caliber and recoil. When you grow up with British Army patrols and Land Rover convoys and chinooks landing in the fields behind your house you develop a sort of instinctive teeth-baring mistrust of anyone in a green helmet who is really into rifles. But - as I wrote during my recent ridealong with US virtuatroops in Vietnam - I am not immune to the play of war. 

This week’s Total Playtime podcast has an unimprovable title care of Nate and a bunch of GTA 6 chat care of everybody else, and last week’s Lie-In includes Graham’s bold assertion that gamers should not have rights alongside palpably grudging references to GTA. 

There is of course no such reticence out there in the wider world, as shown by the fact that compilation of GTA 6 footage was Netflix’s most-viewed “show” and sold a lot of consoles, confirming that Rockstar still has the juice. Still no news on the PC release but there is some about an officially-endorsed roleplayer server for GTA Online, which is conspicuously from a third-party and not Rockstar’s own mod platform so you have to assume they’re working on the next thing. 

Otherwise the collective processing of things that happened at Gamescom has continued, including at Gamecom itself, which apologised for saying “skill issue” to indie devs who had their laptops stolen at the show. GI also summarised the keynote from self-appointed Industry Layoffs Guy Amir Satvat, who has totted up the numbers and confirmed they are: bad, with the headline claims of overall growth concealing the fact that everything is being steadily concentrated into a diminishing number of uber-games, while a blossoming number of undergraduate game development qualifications funnel bright new talent into jobs that don’t exist. The whole piece is a worthy read although I’ll spoil the punchline of three potential outcomes being (a) a small number of megabrands ruling the landscape (b) a sprawling mass of tiny companies that can barely afford to exist or pay people properly or (c) a sustainable middle ground of mid-size companies built on careful cost control, which is a bit more boring but would at least mean far fewer GoFundMes for laid-off developers.

In happier crowdfunding news, Double Fine launched their Kickstarter, which was swiftly successful although Brutal Legend 2 remains an as-yet still locked $100,000,000 stretch goal. Bloomberg has a characteristically great interview with Tim Schafer, of which my favourite line is “Asha’s not going to shoot my dog. I’m going to shoot it” but I have a lot of time for “we never actively tried to make a game we thought was going to lose money,” which is simultaneously the strongest reason both for and against backing the studio. 

Sony had a Playstation showcase, because we only had one other showcase this week and the games industry can no longer survive without broadcasting a string of game trailers at least once every 48 hours. This level of showcase inflation is matched by similar levels of game-title inflation as represented by stuff like The Eminence in Shadow: Phantom Echoes and WPCA: World Phasebound Control Authority, all which barely stand out from a mass of anime-styled third-person combat within which Stupid Never Dies stands as both exemplar and description.

A leak of 12 terabytes of vintage Valve data revealed a load of mildly interesting ephemera including an early Portal beta, a game Valve already told us we’d killed and was chill about, and some builds of Take-Two games which it almost certainly will not be chill about, given that it already unleashed the winged monkeys to seek steadily more specific Discord records of the people who leaked GTA 6.

The Zero Company developer furloughed most of the company before the game came out, which is not officially layoffs, yet, but it’s looking that way which is reasonably crushing for a game that has been well received and sold ~600,000 copies. Activision is serving court papers to CoD cheaters and filming the process for content, which is the sort of detail that would have been left out of The Running Man for being too depressing. There’s a new PAX but it’s boardgame PAX. 

The makers of Disneyland and the makers of Planet Coaster have announced a partnership and they won’t say what the game is so I’m going to be contrary and assume it’s a Buzz Lightyear reskin of Elite Dangerous. Aggro Crab are the latest developers to spend the earnings from their hit game on publishing other people’s. There’s game jam to make videogame poems next week and to nobody’s surprise Edwin is all over it.

SteamDB sold itself to the people who bought NexusMods for fairly bleak reasons and will henceforth have to make money, but they have pledged no programmatic ads or feature removal and they’ve treated NexusMods okay so far so it’s not a terrible outcome all things considered. Likewise the King of Meat guys kept most of Amazon’s money and they’re in a pretty good spot, which is a nice outcome. 

 The Ori guy released his own vibe-coded Metacritic knockoff to be the “one source of truth for gamers”, which is the sort of thing that happens when you introduce AI-based coding to forum arguments about review scores. Any attempt to “fix” reviews always goes the way of that XKCD comic about standards except with the additional and overwhelming futility of trying to apply a scientific method to personal preference, so it’s all a huge waste of time but at least it keeps people busy. 

What did we learn from the comments this week? Jonespaulr is aligned with our prime directive, on the subject of Dagger Directive. 

Give me moronic guards clipping into a door forever and incredibly wonky ragdoll physics; get out of here with your realism and torture-porn adjacent stuff. 

Number9 says what we’re all thinking about the HDMod for Spelunky.

It is always so awesome to see this level of dedication to tinkering in modding communities. It always boggles my mind what people can accomplish when they put their mind to it. 

Agingdanform is an old man who has no truck with the iteration that delivers excellence in parrying. 

In MY day, there was no "right way" to make games, people made shit up as they went along, and whole genres were born and died in less than a decade.

Zorgulon will not escape the marketing.

I remember being faintly exhausted by the hype around the last GTA, a game that I never actually played. This latest union-busting edition has achieved such stratospheric levels of marketing that I wouldn't be surprised if I were appearing in it as an NPC.

That’s it for this week. Go and play some PC games.