Video Games Thread

ArgentinaGuard wrote:
Obviously you have to pay for video games or do you think the world lives in yugoslavian socialism?

CD Project Red made 2 of my most favorite games but the Russophile in me will never part a cent for a Polish company.

No I never paid for the Metro and Stalker series either. In retrospect that was a very good decision. Saved me some beer money that didn't go to some liberasts or worse, hohols.

That sounds like great news as long as they do a decent job...

For a while the British had "advanced home computers" with the Sinclair Spectrum ZX-81. The Japanese had an enormous range of consoles and computer games.

Well I just see it as Russia wanting to create its own options and systems for gaming... why would they rely on western platforms... a hostile culture that wants to kill them and steal all their land and resources...

I would say the same drive should be made for boosting the Russian movie industry too...

Here in New Zealand Peter Jackson used Weta Workshop and put them on the map though they had been chipping away making movies and things before that... I rather suspect Putin wants to have something like that for computer game console hardware and games that run on them...

They could probably start with a console that allows you to play old games from old consoles and computers and video arcade machines and then work on upping the hardware and software to run current games... perhaps VR glasses or a helmet with VR and sound system and a control glove with the console built into the helmet to make it mobile.

I think the whole 3 months thing isn't exactly a demand but a suggestion. If I'm a betting man, the industry was probably already pushing the government to come up with an incentive program for this very thing meaning there were companies who already had plans or has something they can cook up.

I suspect the 3 month deadline is to get all the various groups talking and working together on ideas and potential solutions rather than 3 months to start serial production.

They have a lot of talent and it really comes down to getting it to work together to see what can be achieved.

Apple can fabricate at the latest generation process at any fab they want. Russia can't do that. If you made the chips in Russia you would be talking Playstation 3 level.

Well like I said they could start with a system that emulates older gaming machines as a sort of base model and start to evolve from there.

It makes sense to look at the production capacity and potential of Russian companies and look at what will boost production of useful hardware that will be useful in other areas of computing. Creating a separate branch of electronics that is only useful for these consoles and nothing else does not really make a lot of sense, but clever use of chips and resources could lead to new ideas in computing.

I remember the first computer I bought... an Amiga 500 in the late 1980s, it was way better than traditional IBM clone PCs because it had dedicated custom chips for various roles including graphics and sound chips, whereas the early 286 and 386 and even 486 PCs barely had embraced the idea of graphics and sound cards.

The old sound blaster cards were not amazing and the graphics cards were pre 3D cards... I think the first decent graphics cards I had were two Voodoo 2 graphics cards linked together which meant I could play games like Deus Ex and Il-2.

Perhaps Russian developers could get together with Chinese companies and make something that can compete with Xbox and Playstation... perhaps something innovative like the Wii that emphasises movement rather than sitting on your arse passively watching a screen.

Like I said, use new technology like control gloves and VR goggles and surround sound systems... perhaps in a helmet based set up with a backpack for more hardware to make it fully mobile.

This would mean gyros and other technology would be needed, but they are working on similar systems for their armoured vehicles and aircraft, which could benefit both parties in terms of finding solutions to problems and also increasing the production base so significant numbers can be produced if demand is there.

Adding Chinese developers and potentially Chinese production for the Chinese market would expand the potential customer base and looking at India as a market and production centre would be a good way to spend some of the excess rupees they have by making components in India.

Obviously it needs to be a Russian system that can be fully made in Russia by Russians, but expanding the market outside Russia is another factor for the future and there will be a few Chinese and Indian gamers who don't want to play a western oriented game where the US are the good guys and everyone else is the bad guys...

Moving a nostalgic chat about a very old game from the micro electronics thread:

I posted:

I remember a computer game I used to play in the 1990s called Frontier elite II, by a guy named Brabham or something... it was a 3D space simulator but with very simple graphics, but the physics were excellent... though it did cheat in some areas. Basically you started off on Planet Earth in a small basic ship and you traded and did jobs to earn money to upgrade your ship to improve your capacity to earn money... once you had enough money you could upgrade your ship to a bigger ship, which needed bigger engines and could carry more weapons and might have a larger crew etc etc

It mapped out the Milky Way... all the star systems you could fly to, each with planetary systems and in the case of the solar system there were multiple space ports on earth and satellites in earth orbit as well as on the moon and on other planets in the solar system and moons and also space stations all over the place you can land or dock and sell products and buy products. You can fly through all sorts of star systems and randomly come across pirates... once in a star system you have hydrogen fuel which you used to move around each star system (the flight between star systems was flown in hyperdrive) but some star systems were enormous and there was an accelerate time feature so you can traverse the enormous distances in reasonable time... you could fly towards a planet and as you approached things like planets and space stations eventually their gravity took over and you could fly down through the atmosphere and land. You could mine resources on moons and planets and space rocks etc etc.

What I am trying to say is that this game came on a single 880K Amiga 500 floppy disk and ran on a computer that came originally with 512K memory. I had the 512K RAM expansion card which made it a 1 MB computer... amazing... I know... it had a clock speed of about 7.6 Mhz, but the graphics in the game were convincing enough... you could see outside the space ship in a third person view if you wanted.... lots of hours wasted on that game.

Firebird replied:

I think I remember that game as a little kid.
I would always buy arms, and drugs and hoes to trade.
So I would always get chased out of that sector of the galaxy.

I cheated... when you start out with the tiny ship you fly out of patrolled space near the planets and you dump a ton of hydrogen fuel. Fuel is dumped but it stays in your inventory but you free up one ton space on your ship. If you keep dumping it eventually you will sustain damage but the physics are as real as possible so if you have a 15 ton tiny space ship with 5 tons of engines, that limits the size and power of the engines you carry and how much space you have for cargo and other equipment and gear. When you have dumped 50 tons of stuff you probably have sustained some damage, but you can fly to a nearby space port and dock and repair the damage and buy an auto repair system and a couple of shield generators, so when you go out and do it again you don't get any damage and you can free up thousands of tons of space, so you can put all sorts of stuff onboard including thousands of shield generators making you almost impossible to destroy with conventional energy weapons or missiles. The size of the engine you put in your tiny 15 ton space craft could be something a huge thousand ton space craft requires, so your jump distance in hyperdrive becomes enormous... you can jump around in single hops instead of flying from system to system. Then you can be safe from almost anything and go mining or exploring. You can even get a scoop and fly low over gas giants to capture hydrogen fuel. No more fear when the warning alerts you to the presence of pirates...'

Ironically the game would be just fine on even the cheapest smart phone, the gameplay was more important than the simple graphics and exploring and interactions was what kept me playing. The Physics of flight in space was excellent and pretty accurately implemented... the time shift function allowing traversing enormous distances reasonably quickly.

https://generalsrotr.fandom.com/wiki/Trident

"frustrating Russian ambitions in the Black Sea and south-eastern Europe."

When you lost in real battles you attempt to win in fictional game.

>Looter shooter with far less depth than Metro
>UE5 but with PS4 graphics
>About as much atmosphere as fucking Tarkov

Like seriously, that's the swamp area?

This is Velen from the Witcher 3 from 10 years ago:

The-thing-next-door wrote:These morons do not seem to realise that Morozov was born in Russia and buried in Russia.

I would also like to know how someone could be such a fool as to conceive of a manner in which Russia could somehow invade a continent it is already located on.

I abandon all hope about SWR Production having any sensible understanding of history and politics when I discovered they wrote "EU media strive for transparency and neutrality" in the lore.

They also have a very hostile and impolite response to the community when people point out that their lore is inconsistent to the truth, either physical or historical.

To be fair, the game-play and faction balance is nice, but I guess there is it a rule for game-making teams in the West to demonize Russia to sell their products.

kvs wrote:Triple A game companies only have shit on the menu.   DEI, poor design and general contempt for gamers.   That is why people are playing old games.

Most people play mobile shit. We deserve what we get.

Another soulshit. Its a visual spectacle sure, but its just... boring.

Then again you have to be braindead (and unemployed) to really enjoy soulshit and its hundreds of hours of repetitive gameplay grinding and memorizing fights...

No wonder the bugmen flock to it like white on rice.