Messages

1

General / Re: Which Generation Of Console Or PC Games You Think Contain The Best Graphics

« on: Today at 10:59:07 am »

"PC" certainly had generations but it is not as easily defined as with consoles. I'd say they would map out like so:
1 - x86/DOS
2 - x86/L1 cache/Windows 3
3 - Pentium/3D/Win9x
4 - Pentium/post 3D/XP
5 - Bloom/Vista
6 - x64/MP/8.1

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Video Game Database Discussion / Re: Duplicate List 2024

« on: May 28, 2024, 11:58:09 am »

Mistakenly made a duplicate for Trepang2.

https://vgcollect.com/item/266475
https://vgcollect.com/item/255282

Don't use any text formatting when posting in this thread.

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General / Re: 52 Games Challenge 2024!!!!!

« on: May 28, 2024, 10:08:58 am »

18. Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut
Playing this was really strange for me. Except for the opening area (Sarif lab and Detroit hub) I had no recollection of this game. I remembered the UI and some of the characters, but basically none of the levels, the story, the interactions. Strange considering that Steam says I played the original game for 30+ hours. Even the ending seemed alien to me, for I thought that the original game ended with killing a bunch of people like setting off a nuke or something. Also I will say the ending cutscenes were not really expected and weren't really endings. No video showing the choice and the response/future events type thing and instead it was just Adam talking about his feelings over archival footage.

No technical issues with the game except one time. There was one instance where a sound effect got stuck and looped. It was a low frequency sound so it wasn't distracting, but when this happened I heard no dialog. So I may have missed about an hour's worth of audio from either the communicator, environmental audio (people talking in other rooms) or talking to NPCs. Cutscenes played fine and other game sounds including guns worked. It did eventually get to a point where an in-engine cutscene needed to play and the game crashed.

Like the original, I can't see how it would be possible to do a no-alarms run, or perhaps even a no kill run. Maybe it can be done on New Game+ since you can keep your praxis and probably use the stealth options better.

19. Lego Marvel Superheroes
This looked interesting to me, at least these modern Lego storytelling games alltogether such as the Star Wars version, from watching some videos. I tried it out but it really was not something I could get into. The controls were weird. The tutorial messages were too big on the screen, showed too much info too fast and made the controls appear generally confusing. I don't mind a game of this perspective, but I really don't care for having to use fighting game combo system to do things. There was a QTE very early and it was not at all satisfying. Knowing I was just going to be frustrated by these things, I decided to uninstall.

4

General / Re: IGN just acquired a ton of their competitors

« on: May 28, 2024, 09:57:42 am »

So, you won't see a company like IGN publish those kinds of opinion pieces because there isn't any money to be earned expressing those beliefs as it's a minority opinion.

This is actually incorrect. Corporations do this all of the time, but not for the reasons you think they do. They do it as a CYA because many companies have learned from the MeToo/cancel movements of years ago. Fortunately, many companies are realising that they have been catering to a vocal minority and this has been effecting their bottomline. So they will either change or go under.

I don't understand the need to trust what a website says. They just provide information.

Game reviews became worthless as soon as streaming became available. I stopped reading them not because of what the authors wrote about, but that it wasn't helpful to me to decide if I wanted to play something or not. If I am interested in something and there is no demo available, I will watch someone streaming it. Then I can decide for myself whether I like it. Since games are not all about graphics or story or whatever else is typical to be graded in a game review.

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Hardware and Tech / Re: New PC Talk...

« on: May 28, 2024, 09:49:05 am »

Do you think there's a big difference in PC specs needed between emulating older games versus playing modern titles at lower graphical settings?

This should be obvious, but it may depend on what you mean by older games. You can run emulators on pre-Pentium CPUs, so that should answer your spec question.

I ran NES and Genesis emulators on the Compaq Elite 440CX I had in college, it was a 386 running Windows NT 3.51. My Windows 98 computer (Shiva) has a Pentium 4 and runs console emulators as well as an old version of MAME. Now certainly neither of those computers could run Retroarch or other modern emulators and certainly can't run modern games at any graphical setting.

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Video Game Database Discussion / Re: Category/Platform Requests 2.0

« on: May 24, 2024, 05:36:02 pm »

Russian websites are blocked by common corporate firewall products by domain or DNS. After seeing the site from home, I was able to confirm that cassette and added the category.

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Video Game Database Discussion / Re: Category/Platform Requests 2.0

« on: May 24, 2024, 12:04:27 pm »

Added the two Toymax sub-cats

I can't get to the Russian site that image is located on

Videogamekraken seems to indicate that the games for Giocatraduci and Agenda-Game are interchangeable.

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Video Game Database Discussion / Re: Category/Platform Requests 2.0

« on: May 24, 2024, 10:25:41 am »

Arcade
- DECO Cassette System
ITT
- Ideal-Computer
LCD Games
- Sanyo Giocatraduci (can also put the cart from Sanyo Agenda-Game into here)
PC-50x
- Videomaster Colour Cartridge

CPS Dash already is to go into Arcade Boards as per:
https://vgcollect.com/forum/index.php/topic,10835.msg177710.html#msg177710

Is the Arcadia II just branding or is it different or incompatible with Arcadia?

APF Imagination Machine looks to be an accessory, similar to say, Sega CD. It adds the ability for MP1000 to use cassettes. Will need an example of a retail released cassette existing before creating this sub-cat.

DECO Cassette System is for the games only, not the security Keys.

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General / Re: IGN just acquired a ton of their competitors

« on: May 23, 2024, 12:17:42 pm »

All major new sources have paid articles. It even happens in television news, especially for local TV news where segments consist of three things primarily: 1. Local stories, 2. national stories, 3. paid stories. The paid stories are done as a form of advertising, they are either acquired by the company itself (they have sales departments) or come from one of the services they subscribe to. Print media does the same thing and since online news websites are based on the workings of legacy (print and television) media, it is expected that they work the same way.

In the early internet things were different because those legacy media corporations did not have a large foothold. Sure they had their own websites but there were many other websites that sprang up where news was being delivered by non-affiliated aka regular people. This is "on the streets" reporting which is usually better in at least that it is organic. Over time those new internet alternatives disappeared, either were bought by the new guard of online media (who were able to suplant legacy media since they were not quick enough to adapt) or disappeared over time like forums. Independent media barely exists now and the on-the-streets equivalent is only found on social media sites.

There is always going to be bias. The big company's bias is driven by money and the regular person bias is their own opinions. You won't ever escape that as there are far too few people who are able to deliver information in that way. And if metrics are correct, people tend to prefer news that is biased or opinionated more than just straight information. Straight info is the domian of specialized fields (science and finance) and the average person is not interested in that type of information.

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General / Re: IGN just acquired a ton of their competitors

« on: May 22, 2024, 12:06:08 pm »

The loss is huge. This isn't good for the gaming industry. Every site being under one banner means less trust

IGN has a history of doing this. They purchased/merged with GameSpy and subsequently nuked the Planet sites many years ago. IMO, the online landscape for gaming news went down the toilet back then and not this recent thing.

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Modern Video Games / Re: Funko Fusion

« on: May 21, 2024, 12:00:38 pm »

Emojis > Chibis and I hate Emojis

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Hardware and Tech / Re: How Do I Find And Download "AV to USB 2.0 Driver For Windows 10

« on: May 21, 2024, 09:18:22 am »

Need the Hardware ID as shown in Device Manager.

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General / Re: VGC's Anonymous/"General" Topic:

« on: May 20, 2024, 12:01:03 pm »

I recently created a Discogs account to manage my small collection of music. After cataloging everything I own that's already present on the site, I've begun submitting new items. For my first submission, it took well over an hour to finalize it as I tried to understand their system and UI alongside additional (unwarranted but welcomed) feedback which was quickly given from other members.

Discogs has an in-depth database with an incredibly active community to help build it. Something like that for VGCollect seems nice, but the experience also felt a little overwhelming. I can't imagine many casual collection-tracking members—especially new ones—willing to go through that process to catalog a simple CD or game.

Discogs is extremely annoying for adding missing items. Since I had previously worked in the music industry, I have some CD and record releases that are not on there, and getting them to be added onto there was such a pain that I stopped using the site.

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Video Game Database Discussion / Re: Metal Gear Solid Day One Edition Switch

« on: May 20, 2024, 10:57:52 am »

What seems to me is that this is one of those situations where an entry was made for a game before it came out, and wasn't updated with the correct art/title when it did release.

So I'm pretty sure that this is the item you are looking for:
https://vgcollect.com/item/246932

A quick check on Ebay seems to indicate there is no non-Day One Edition that was released.

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News / New DB Mod - nathan776

« on: May 20, 2024, 10:52:43 am »

Let's congratulate our new DB Mod, nathan776!

(previous threads like this say "let's welcome" but he has already been on the site for a long time and that didn't make sense lol)