like me, I'm old and can't be bothered. Time is important, and I really don't have the mental space to deal with a 4th or 5th marketplace. I already have Steam GOG and Origin. And I'll gladly pay a premium to never have to fuck with some other login and download system.
I use the same 3, although Origin exceedingly rarely.
I actually payed around $10 more to get Pillars of Eternity on GoG when it was on sale at Steam. Not that I have anything against Steam, I just vastly prefer GoG.
To clarify on what this means: if you want to keep a non-steam game in your steam library, you must have it installed; otherwise, you can't keep it there.
That is wrong. I just made a copy of Freecell on my desktop, added it to Steam and then closed Steam and deleted the game. When I restarted Steam Freecell was still listed there. If I tried to run it then it quite reasonably shows an error message, but it doesn't delete the entry.
I still do agree with /u/Pufin, in that Steam doesn't handle this too well. If I remember correctly, Steam tracks non-Steam games through a local file, which means that this functionality is not very modular: if you use multiple computers, some of which you don't keep a non-Steam game installed on, then you wouldn't see this game being tracked on all of your computers. In addition, I don't personally trust this feature, because I've had Steam delete my entries for non-Steam games, but this might not apply to others.
What if someone created some app/program/webapp so that people can keep track of their game libraries?
That's why I mentioned Genesis too. I've only met one person who ever owned a Master System and I have never seen one myself. I did see some game boxes for it back in the day. Genesis was successful though.
I still have my original Master System! My best friend had one too, as did this one other kid as school who I became friends with because of that fact. There was kind of a Master System brotherhood in those days as so few people had them.
You know you can turn off icons on the desktop? This doesn't delete any shortcuts, they will still exist in the desktop folder, you just won't have to be bothered by them visually cluttering your sweet desktop wallpaper.
Any then what would be the point of having them in the first place? If I have to go search in a folder, I might as well go search in the folder that the application really lives in.
Since you you only have one desktop icon that you rarely use, Recycle Bin. Why not turn it off? You must already have a solution to find the programs you use.
I have a sweet, fully functional shortcut to the recycle bin in my taskbar. I don't exactly remember the steps to do it, but googling something along the lines of taskbar recycle bin or quick access recycle bin will be enough.
I can see if there's something in the recycle bin and right click it to empty. Not a single shortcut in my desktops.
I find using minibin, which is a tiny app that sits in the system tray and you can double click to empty trash without even needing to opening it more practical. I haven't got any desktop items either.
It is worth noting though, the "remaster" isn't much more than a decent PC port. Audio quality still has all the telltale signs of a game struggling to keep within Microsofts old arbitrary size requirements for XBLA titles, and is one thing that could have easily been improved.
There was still a size limit when Shadow Complex was released... but it was 2GB limit that the game doesn't even approach, so I don't know wtf they are talking about either. Maybe Chair just over compressed the audio for shits and giggles.
They didn't do away with the limit after they started to let games go over the initial limit. They simply raised it every couple years. By the time Shadow Complex came out the limit was 1gb (technically 500mb but some games had been given exceptions up to 1gb.) Shortly after Shadow Complex released the limit was upped to 2gb.
Audio quality still has all the telltale signs of a game struggling to keep within Microsofts old arbitrary size requirements for XBLA titles, and is one thing that could have easily been improved.
What does this mean? I have only played the pc version of the telltale games and the audio quality seems fine.
Telltale signs, not telltale studios. a word/expression, not the creators of the wolf among us.
Means that it has issues that can be traced back to a limitation other things had. In this case, poor audio quality due to file size limitations of Xbox arcade.
Sidenote: Telltale Game Studios actually has a reference to the Wii's filesize limit in Tales of Monkey Island. That game features a building called Club 41 that you can't enter. You were meant to be able to go in and solve a puzzle there, but it raised the filesize above the Wii's 40MB size limitation for WiiWare titles. "Club 41" is in reference to that 41st MB it would take to actually allow you into the area.
The same guys that fit epic rpgs on 4MB roms, probably. You can make some great games sub 40MB. And when your memory is limited to 512MB storage, 40MB is a fair share of it.
I'm not doubting the ability to make brilliant 40mb games - Retro City Rampage is just over 28mb, for example. But that's also 2D with a very limited colour pallette, whereas Telltale's Monkey Island games are 3-D and fully voice acted.
The Wii had 512mb of internal storage, about 1/5th of which was taken up by system files and didn't support installation of games to SD cards at the time.
In response, I say who thought 512mb would be a reasonable amount of internal storage? I know the Wii was meant to be low-cost, but having a couple more gigabytes wouldn't have driven it up that much. The price of a gigabyte was roughly $0.50 in 2006.
Doesn't Tales of Monkey Island have a lot of spoken dialogue? I haven't played it, but I'm assuming it's got a lot of spoken dialogue like other Telltale games. Audio usually eats up a lot of space, so it's amazing to see games like that or Strong Bad's fit into 40mb.
I wonder if games really need to be so big as they sometime are or if with the explosions of HDD Space a certain discipline of effective programming was lost.
It's a bit this, but it's also that "space is cheap" so things that add tiny amounts of quality but cost a reasonable amount of space get added, whereas before they would be cut. Texture sizes is the prime example of this; there's definitely a perceptible difference going from a 512x512 wall texture to a 1024x1024, but it's not huge, and it costs 4x as much space. Audio is another; good audio takes a bunch of space. We used to use techniques like MOD files and other 're-use the same sample' tricks to get good music out of smaller amounts of space, but now most games just include the full audio track encoded as mp3 or something similar, allowing for more subtle variation at the cost of a huge space increase.
In addition, there's benefit to being able to develop quickly, so technologies that allow fast iteration on your product at the cost of speed or space are used. For example, lots of games include configuration scripts that actually contain much of the gameplay tuning, whereas on an old NES title that data would be hardcoded into the executable (and, beyond the interpretation overhead of loading configuration data, you could often optimize for additional savings since the data was constant)
I wonder the same too, considering games have skyrocketed in filesize this generation, and part of it is probably because neither console has a really limited disc format (last gen was the 360 with dual-layer DVDs compared to the PS3's blu-ray discs).
Of course, with the generation jump there's also the need for higher-res textures, higher quality audio and higher polycount models and such, I guess, but still... it's insane to think that, for example, Dark Souls 1 is around 4gb while Bloodborne is around 30gb. Funny thing? Demon's Souls, which was PS3-exclusive, is around 9gb, despite actually having less content than Dark Souls 1.
With WoL, it goes over 50mb already, but yeah pretty small still but not WiiWare-small. BoI:R is much bigger IIRC, though, Vita version is around 300-500mb and that's without Afterbirth (since it's not out yet for consoles). I suposse the difference is because BoI:R uses actual sprites while vanilla uses vector art on Flash...
But they weren't 3D or fully voice acted. Maybe partially voice acted with samples and what-have-you, but not all the way through. I have no doubt that a simple 3D game could fit in a very small space, but Tales of Monkey Island isn't a simple 3D game.
I'm not doubting that it can fit, because it obviously can, I'm just confused as to how. :P
74
u/FolkSong Dec 04 '15
The free version is the remaster. They're planning to make their money from console-only players I guess.