A thread for examining the new games of April! Share your personal picks, interesting curios, and not quite there possibles...

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Did you discover some small game that not everyone knows about?
Share that and let us know what it is about!

Already know a thing or two that interests you?
Make a list (or a swanky desire index) of your interests and/or possibles!

Don't know what's so great about an upcoming game you keep hearing about?
Ask here!

Don't follow gaming news that closely and just want to passively see what BigGames™ people care about?
This is the place!

~

Thread concept:

The basic idea is to list new games that you are interested in, as well as games you are potentially curious about or want to give wider attention to. You can briefly describe them or ask other people to help fill you in. The hope is that regular threads like these can act as a collective filter/discovery mechanism to help people decide what is worth checking out.

"New games" means any new title that is being released or ported this month in any capacity (not "backlogs/what you are playing this month"). The angle here is sharing your anticipation and promoting game discovery (as opposed to sharing comments about a first playthrough in progress - that belongs elsewhere).

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• If you want a handy list that covers most of the major upcoming games of the month, here's one text list. Feel free to post other lists or list videos that you find useful.

• Final request: If you are the first person to mention a game please provide (at minimum) a short sentence description. (If it is a very big AAA release though, then don't worry about it.) This is a good convention that makes the thread more useful as a discovery mechanism, and especially helps out anyone who doesn't follow the news as closely as you.

This was fun, thanks for running this! I like the fact that this voting game/community participation game doesn't encourage people to make spite moves, and just play sincerely. About halfway through I was predicting the final round would be Portal 2 vs Mario Galaxy, and I felt really smart until I wasn't :P

I like 5 point scales when I think about scores for personal scoring, but I can see why a published review would use more points. That said I'm the type who believes a score doesn't have a finite resolution, it just gets progressively harder to judge how you feel about it the more decimal points you try to add (and what actually goes into the score, how much weight to give specific feelings, etc.). Even a 5 point scale can feel like you are inconsistent with yourself sometimes!

Here's why scores with a large number of points is appealing:

A lot of people like the idea of ranking all the games (or all the movies, etc) they've played, in order from best to worst. If you do this even part way, you end up with so much ordered data that it is easy to appreciate the idea of an absolute score on even, say, a 100 point scale. This is because once you imagine a few anchor points in your list where you think an "80 game" would be, or a "90 game" or a "50 game", etc. then you can get a good estimate of any game's score by applying a little subjective judgement for how far between the two nearest anchor points it lies.

There's an interesting side subject here on scale types: [1] [2]. Ordering a collection of games (ordinal scale type) is simpler in terms of information content that giving them all score (interval and ratio scale types). With an ordinal system, the only meaningful operation is less-than, greater-than, and equals. However, a score system will usually be interpreted, at minimum, as an interval system. This means it is meaningful to talk about numerical sums and differences: a 9.0 game is not only better ("greater than") than an 8.0 game, but also this difference the same interval of quality between an 8.0 game and a 7.0 game.

I watched a good chunk of the presentation. I'm immensely skeptical about the potential of playing games via streaming a video feed. The shine of the presentation did however do a good job of reminding me that there is an under-served market for this. Obviously, that market has all these caveats carved into it, but because I'm so negative about this stuff I found it noteworthy that I had positive visions associated with the concept.

OK -- all that said I'm still skeptical about this specifically because there was no talk about what it will cost the consumer.

If streaming your games isn't cheap, there is no market for it.

It's not that people "don't have access" to the non-streaming local hardware option, it's that they don't want to buy it. Or they have the hardware but don't want to buy every little game just to sample everything.

If you have the dough, you can play whatever games you want. Money obviates the need for buying a worse substitute. And if Stadia is too expensive for what you get, there would be no reason someone would pick it. The service would obviate itself. I know there was talk about doing big server side calculations with more GPUs than presumably a regular console would not match, but I'm saying that is/will be a small part of the selling point.

If Google wants the public and those GDC developers to think this will be successful (obv. the two are related), they should have given cost information even if they don't have the final price per month or whatever.

Assuming we had the cost information (and the "what you get" information, like the ownership question and what games are available), the next level of skepticism is whether this business can thrive. @Axel, you said you doubt Google expects it to blow up, but I'm still concerned about where that line is. I don't really know, but I feel there must be a point where not having enough users makes the business unprofitable. Cost per user might be too high, getting licensees onboard might be too hard, etc. if the company doesn't have enough scale or, in the case of things like servers, customer density.

I know Netflix works and is successful, but I think it is a mistake to use this as the fount of optimism. Ironically, the fact that games have such a high ratio of "hours of entertainment per dollar" means that substituting the local hardware model with "hey, we'll send you each hour of entertainment using servers and bandwidth" is inherently that much more expensive than movies.

How are the developers being compensated is another tier of skepticism. I've been seeing this tweet linked around:

The Nintendo Switch is only 2 years old, so I'm not that surprised those two games didn't make it to this round.

Goldeneye has turned into the king of getting conditional/backhanded respect. Screw that. I'm on team Goldeneye all the way, god dang it! It's as great as it ever was. Or almost as great. Whatever. Where's Brandon? He'll back me up.

The present day (or year) always has so many advantages over a random day in the past, so easy "Yes" for me. Being spoiled with the number of games means you can focus on what appeals to you most. Youtube and Twitch make it really easy to discover games you will love from titles you've heard from conversations. It's hard to say whether this moment (or recent few years) feels like "a special time for video games" though. I kind of don't have a sense of what that would be.

The minuses? Microtransactions have been covered. Having TVs that are incompatible with older systems wasn't a problem before.

I think one understated "plus" of the good old days is that the culture of gaming and gaming discussion used to be almost entirely about sharing a mutual interest, and wanting to talk to people who were similarly excited. Today, it gets mixed with other factors that you could name. We're all guilty of it in some way, I think. There is also more habituation going around, i.e. in more activities and conversations it is taken for granted that games are "exciting" and/or that has worn off more often. And again, it's not something you can blame on one group of people.

One example that strikes me is how online gaming forums used to be so much smaller, but each post felt incredibly meaningful. Nowadays it feels normal to be in-and-out, post smaller comments that are tiny snippets by old standards, and read less of what was being said earlier. I think Twitter and smartphones accelerated the shift in our perspective.

More broadly, in the past if an ordinary person did some external gaming activity, it was only about having an extreme amount of interest in a game or gaming in general. If you made a mod, did a review, made a cool video, wrote a FAQ/walkthrough, completed speedruns, or did something competitive it was just about wanting to connect with others or wanting a way to express yourself. Communities for these activities didn't really exist the way they do now, so when you engaged in them it felt less like an "architected" decision. There was an absence of structure before, no wider status to be gained, and no money to be earned.

Come on, QUAKE! Older brother Doom isn't on the list, this is your chance. Gogogo!

OoT vs SMB3 counterpoint:

Ocarina of Time is all around still a rad game to play today, both gameplay and story. The call to adventure and forced loss of innocence. Great temples, fun combat, and more spells/tools/consumables than most Zeldas.

SMB3 has that underground level where you need to find a leaf and fly a stunned Koopa Shell to the top.

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Unrelated general thought about this thread:

I'm not sure how hard it would be, but it would be neat to have the bracket tree with all future matchups listed (i.e. where in the tournament each winner advances to) so we can let our imagination speculate on which match will take down which game. If you post the 'adjusted' seed order, maybe another individual knows a website or some other automated method to create such an image for us.

The big picks: Devil May Cry 5 and Left Alive, and Sekiro.

I still don't know as much about Left Alive compared to typical AAA releases, other than it is a shooter in Square's cool "Front Mission" mecha universe, and it has some MGS/stealth action vibes. I guess that speaks to how much the concept has been appealing to me so far. I have high hopes!

DMC is the series that regularly piques my interest in "stylish action/character action genre", and it is doing it once again. Time once again to disregard how it feels like I bumble though this genre a tad more than I learn my way through.

Yoshi's Crafted World is a possible for me. Not all that down to play it from the looks of things, but I'm always interested in seeing how Nintendo's platformers turn out.

Oh, and there's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice ...that little gem!

Sekiro is Fromsoft's next methodical action game, iterating on Dark Souls and Bloodborne with a new setting and gameplay concept. I think it is hard to get across an accurate level of anticipation for Sekiro. For one, if you are hooked on this stuff and don't dislike Samurai-style settings it's very hard to refuse. For another, it feels like the pedigree means it is going to be outstanding for sure, right? If there's any game in recent memory that I worry about having too high of expectations for, it's this one.

A thread for examining the new games of March! Share your personal picks, interesting curios, and not quite there possibles...

.

Did you discover some small game that not everyone knows about?
Share that and let us know what it is about!

Already know a thing or two that interests you?
Make a list (or a swanky desire index) of your interests and/or possibles!

Don't know what's so great about an upcoming game you keep hearing about?
Ask here!

Don't follow gaming news that closely and just want to passively see what BigGames™ people care about?
This is the place!

~

Thread concept:

The basic idea is to list new games that you are interested in, as well as games you are potentially curious about or want to give wider attention to. You can briefly describe them or ask other people to help fill you in. The hope is that regular threads like these can act as a collective filter/discovery mechanism to help people decide what is worth checking out.

"New games" means any new title that is being released or ported this month in any capacity (not "backlogs/what you are playing this month"). The angle here is sharing your anticipation and promoting game discovery (as opposed to sharing comments about a first playthrough in progress - that belongs elsewhere).

.

• If you want a handy list that covers most of the major upcoming games of the month, here's one text list and another. Feel free to post other lists or list videos that you find useful.

• Final request: If you are the first person to mention a game please provide (at minimum) a short sentence description. (If it is a very big AAA release though, then don't worry about it.) This is a good convention that makes the thread more useful as a discovery mechanism, and especially helps out anyone who doesn't follow the news as closely as you.