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markymarg2.bsky.social
A perfectly harmless box. Game dev, half of Dark Roast Entertainment. Games criticism at http://jmargaris.substack.com
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Posts 22 Comments 28

I played the demo for Absolum, the rogue-like beat em' up. A lot of things about it are good, particularly the branching paths and new events as you re-progress. But the roguelike part left me cold. Hard for me to see how it's superior to just a skill tree and crafting a build.

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

One of the worst things you can do in terms of running a project is give the team a close deadline, extend it when missed, and repeat for years. If you have 2.5 years you can do a lot, if you have 5 6-month chunks you can barely do anything.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

The new James Bond game being a young guy origin story so that they can tutorialize to the player without "dissonance" seems like massive overthinking to me. "It would be weird if the player were new to the game but Bond was a pro." Would that be weird? I don't think it would be!

submitted 5 days ago • 3 comments

"The worlds of Major League Baseball and gaming are coming together in a new way tonight as a popular content creator will take the stage in a collab that brings together the Padres and third-person shooter RPG Goddess of Victory: NIKKE." People fought in WW2 to secure this future.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Happy 20th anniversary to killer7! Originally released in Japan on the GameCube and PS2, June 9, 2005. In the name of Harman… 🤫

submitted 7 days ago • 13 comments

GameFan magazine claimed games like Cybermorph and Wonderdog were amazing and gave random Genesis mascot platformers 9/10. That kind of enthusiasm was their (lovable but ridiculous) brand. It doesn't seem controversial to claim (observe?) that the brand of many modern gaming outlets is big sigh.

submitted 7 days ago • 3 comments

The games press is always miserable - that's the niche it serves now. It's reached terminal-stage faux-progressivism where it's a contest to see who can demonstratively sigh the loudest and act the most put-upon.

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

If I'm ever onstage at Summer Games Fest or GDC or whatever I promise I WILL wear this hat and it WILL be a political statement. Please hold me to this.

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

I noticed some incredible attention to detail here: If you go to riseofthedeceiver.com but swap the i and e it redirects you to the right address. (I swear I did this on purpose to test it)

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

They do but we recognize that auteur film directors still employ actors, camera operators, etc. Blue Prince has 4 credited voice actors - it can't be a solo project unless you think one guy did all the voices!

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

The Blue Prince wikipedia page says the game was made by a solo dev, then says that the solo dev paid an artist to work on it for 3 years, then concludes that it was still made by a solo dev. It might genuinely be the stupidest game dev discourse yet.

submitted 9 days ago • 2 comments

I wonder how many action games are going to try to do Spider-Verse style animation before we conclude that it doesn't work. Or maybe it does work. But I'm skeptical. Nobody has ever played a character action game and thought "what this needs is a lower frame rate."

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

Missed a real opportunity to fake intro Kojima and then actually bring up Peter Molyneux.

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

The actual belly these people are trapped in that they get rewarded for posting in the style of "managed to survive another day in...all this (sweeps arm)" and so every day is dedicated to cataloging their misery over things that don't matter at all.

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

Monster Hunter Stories 2 on Switch 2 is SO MUCH better than on Switch 1. On that system it looked nice but it often ran in the high teens framerates - I dropped the game because the performance was such a bummer. Switch 2 version feels solid 60.

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

Interesting to me that a Youtube Man (tm) made a video about how it would be super hard for Switch 2 to be backwards compatible with Switch 1, and not only is it backwards compatible but Switch 1 games run better even if they don't have SW2 patches. Youtube stays undefeated.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

It can be tough to be working on a game and see a cool trailer for a game that's just vaguely similar. If I was working on 2XKO I'd be losing my shit after seeing that Marvel trailer. The games are so similar in premise.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

I went out of town for the weekend and when I got back an Americano cost 75 cents more than when I left. That's how they get you.

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Someone posted my most recent blog to the reddit games sub to tie it in with Cliffhanger Games closing, which at first glance makes perfect sense - a lot of what I wrote about seems reflected in that closure. But looking into the Black Panther situation more it's pretty murky TBH.

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

I like how half of these are very relatable across time and space and half are "petting a pig brings you good luck at strip poker, as we all know."

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

TBH it just seems like bad business to greenlight movie tie-in games scheduled to come out 8 years after the movie. (And 4+ years after the disappointing sequel) Wonder Woman, Suicide Squad and Black Panther are not blue chip evergreen franchises, they're just big movies from 2017.

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

Trying to seriously engage with "is the game industry florglampulizing????" just seems pointless. Someone came up with a term they thought sounded neat and then tried (unsuccessfully) to make it mean something, while the people who agree all project their own different meaning onto it.

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments