Savaged Regime

Ecco Jam (no clue why I did this. Just played with the portamento glide on an arp and then built everything else on top of that).

The late 80s was the post Tower of Druaga period where I think a lot of studios leaned into obtuse secrets. They didn't factor in how it was the communal arcade aspect that made this work for Druaga and was not something that translated smoothly to the home console market.

This retroactively reads like Netflix writing

I wonder how many people making fun of this guy in 2008 grew up to be embittered chuds in their 30s obsessed with how wokeness has ruined their favorite video games and other media from their childhood.

Still not over the fact that they listed PC by mistake at the end of the Demon's Souls remake launch trailer.

Making Trance like it's 1996

Gotta get that SEO back from the Mario movie.

Old PC games allowing for keybinds with modifiers seems like a rarity.

Wasn't 4 the most profitable one though? And that's the entry with the scaled down budget that most felt like a return to the zany scrappy premises of the original series.

It makes total sense when you think about how the rail shooter part is very frantic with a lot of action going on at once compared to Virtua Cop or Time Crisis, and they still manage a very decent framerate. Deviously brilliant optimization trick that really paid off.

A hilarious thing I noticed in Die Hard Trilogy is that the characters are not 3D models, but rather mannequin sprites made of photographed body parts. In motion they vaguely pass for blocky polygon figures, but in stills they look like something straight out of a Terry Gilliam cartoon.

I swear every modern Metroidvania these days are using heavily silhoutted boring foregrounds. It feels like they actively don't want you paying attention to the stage visuals in a way the older games never did. Takes away a lot of the joy in exploration for me.

I've heard anecdotes from senior artists being aghast over junior ones doing stuff like saving flat blank color textures in 4K resolution.

Yeah, something was seriously lost in translation along the way.

These panels from 93 or so I think look great, but later on he adopted this rougher minimalist style likely to help with deadlines for the cheaper books he was put on. Also didn't help that Marvel had started with digital gradient coloring by then which I think didn't fit the aesthetic at all.

It's unfortunate that I came to associate his artstyle with the most depressing period of the Spidey comics which I ultimately stopped following in the middle of the clone saga.

Was hoping it would have rather been that 90s western faux anime style that always looked distinctly off-kilter which I find endearing. People are too good at drawing it authentically these days.

I also remember an old interview with the texture artist for Mirror's Edge who had this scathing soapbox rant about the typical use of normals and speculars in that era which looked like "porridge".

Obfuscation and sowing confusion among their own brand names is like their MO at this point. Remember that court hearing where they tried and failed to explain to the lawyers what "Xbox" was actually referring to in specific contexts?

Already got plenty of those. Also what informs my perspective of how I dislike modern sample pack practices. Like, a House Vocals pack will already have everything heavily chopped up and pitch shifted. Why not just give me the base recordings and let me have the agency to do that on my own terms?

Sure

More than just Splice, I've felt pretty alienated by the overall state of modern sample libraries as a whole. Browsing on Black Octopus is just a wasteland of overprocessed (ie almost unusable for me) samples packaged with offputting AI artwork. Never thought I'd get nostalgic for cheap photobashes.

NWN2 and Dragon Age are another pair that have funnily similar story beats. For one each game starts with your paternal figure sending you into a swampy ruin with temporary tutorial party members to fetch a macguffin. Meanwhile you're stalked by a mysterious shapeshifting lady with unknown motives.

It always amused me how many weirdly specific elements and narrative beats were mirrored between Unreal and Metroid Prime. I'm sure there are even more similarities I forgot about (and yeah, I know about the Brinstar reference Alexander Brandon put in the soundtrack).

What makes me unsure is not knowing how much of this is due to the tech itself, or just the fact that having so many complex material layers these days significantly raises the skill ceiling on designing and implementing them in a believable manner.

PBR textures often have a very artificial "clay" look to them that always distracts me way more than the more primitive use of texture materials, and I'm not really sure why that happens so often. Like the cobblestone in HL2RTX looks worse to me than the original baked diffuse texture from 2004.

Reportedly this short was subconsciously the inspiration for Toejam & Earl a decade later.

This game also lets you live out the ultimate power fantasy by having rich parents to fall back on for every financial setback.

Put an extra NVME SSD in my newly bought prebuilt PC today and what should have been a straightforward procedure turned into over 3 hours of kafkaesque computer surgery. It's unbelievable how complicated slotting in a tiny card can be. Constantly terrified of breaking something along the way.