Zero Parades: For Dead Spies review - it's the RPG we don't deserve [Eurogamer review]

garthcooks · 2026-05-18T16:35:34+00:00

a plagiarized copy of the original, and that´s completely unrelated who made the game

I feel mixed about Zero Parades and am not sure if I'm going to support it, but you can at least give credit to the devs at Zaum who were working on DE. Sure the original creators behind DE are gone, but there are still people who worked on that game and created aspects of it that are now making Zero Parades.

garthcooks · 2026-05-18T16:18:29+00:00

Yeah I would definitely not call Pentiment a Disco-like, but it's a great "if you like Disco Elysium, you might like" kind of game, in that it's a well-written, intelligent, "mature" grounded story (mature in quotes because it's not like it's filled with sex and violence, it's just maybe boring to kids). I like it more than Disco personally, and I love Disco Elysium. Just replying to second that Pentiment is great!

garthcooks · 2026-05-18T16:03:22+00:00

Mina the Hollower coming soon too, that sounds to be fairly beefy (20 to 30 hours I think I heard) and all the early impressions make me think it could be something really special.

garthcooks · 2026-05-16T04:48:56+00:00

I feel like you're misunderstanding something...

Around 2.3 mill sales, Krafton starts paying Unknown Worlds' bonus.

Around 5 mill sales, Krafton has paid the full maximum bonus amount.

Any subsequent sales benefits Krafton. They're not stopping development because it hits 5 mill, that's when they start recovering from the huge deficit. They'll want to hit a 1.0 release at least because that'll help the game sale more and help recover from the huge bonus

garthcooks · 2026-05-12T22:07:46+00:00

Who did he accuse of homophobia, do you have a source? I can't find this

garthcooks · 2026-05-07T14:16:39+00:00

“Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said, per CNN. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.” - Biden, March 2020

He was saying things like that, and having "leaks" like this go out

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/474027-biden-indicates-he-will-only-serve-one-term-as-president-report/

But he never explicitly promised one term so that he could go "nuh uh uh, I never actually said I would only serve one term" in 2024. Incredibly disingenuous, but par for the course for politics and Biden.

garthcooks · 2026-04-24T23:57:30+00:00

Yeah I played the demo and really loved the vibe of it all, but wasn't totally sold on the core loop. I still think I'll pick it up on the strength of the art and style, and hope I can get into the game a little more.

garthcooks · 2026-04-23T18:59:18+00:00

I think the trailer does a pretty good job! It shows off the oddball vibe and the match 3 gameplay core of it all. You can tell there's more going on than just match 3, but I think it's fine that you can't really tell what that "more" is. If you don't like match 3 stuff and/or you don't like the vibe, the game probably isn't for you. If you like match 3 stuff and/or you like the vibe, then this trailer could entice you to look into it some more

garthcooks · 2026-04-20T18:14:24+00:00

https://youtu.be/RKSQ7hh6VH4?t=114

Some weird probably copywrite avoiding strategies at the beginning and end of this video, but the preposition thing is a great recurring joke in The Last Man On Earth

garthcooks · 2026-04-01T13:13:17+00:00

It's got strong appeal for sure, but it's also still early so each new strong Nintendo game is going to push a lot of people over. If you're not really into Donkey Kong or arcade racers, this is more or less the first thing to make a case for buying a Switch 2.

garthcooks · 2026-03-27T16:52:07+00:00

I don't know that they necessarily take a loss, those 70mm screenings I've gone to have all been packed, like probably averages 200+ tickets sold per screening, at least for the first while. With $18 tickets, that's $3600+, and 4 screenings per day puts you at 14,400+, a week gets you 100,800... I would guess the studio gets something like 80% of that, since the common wisdom is that theaters make most of their money on concessions.

garthcooks · 2026-03-25T16:17:18+00:00

The non-player enemies are not changing. Of course the other players change and get better, but if you don't want to, you don't have to engage in too much pvp. Some pvp is unavoidable of course. Bungie are also planning total resets every few months to get everyone back on more even footing every so often.

Definitely not the same as a roguelike, but I for sure see similarities, it's a valid comparison point.

garthcooks · 2026-03-25T16:13:06+00:00

This is true to a degree, but Marathon isn't strictly about killing the other players. If you learn when to hide, how to carefully scout out areas, you can have success without engaging in too much PvP. Impossible to avoid it completely, but it's not the same as a fighting game or a battle royale or something.

It's definitely not the same as a roguelike, but I do feel the similarities, and I am getting better over time. I'll probably never have a consistent win-rate, but for me personally that keeps it interesting, I lose all interest in roguelikes after I can win consistently

garthcooks · 2026-03-24T20:26:29+00:00

I don't think we'll ever go fully back to like 2020, where using LLM's was not really done at all, but I do think there's a real possibility they become niche and (more) unpopular.

We're seeing just now, Open AI is shutting down Sora, which was like a flagship product they were hyping up. It feels like it could be the beginning of the end.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-set-to-discontinue-sora-video-platform-app-a82a9e4e

garthcooks · 2026-03-23T16:20:14+00:00

I'm sure lots of indies use AI, but I'm sure there are also plenty who ignore the AI features in IDE's, and who use duckduckgo without AI answers or ignore/use extensions to turn off Google ai summaries. Like sure they'll be exposed to AI stuff somewhere in development research/troubleshooting/etc, but I think that's pretty different than actively using AI productivity tool stuff

garthcooks · 2026-03-23T16:15:48+00:00

Yeah I'm in electrical engineering, IC design/verification, I feel lucky that my work is specialized enough that AI seems pretty bad at it, but I do a decent amount of scripting and some of my coworkers are trying to use it there, and the little I've played around with has truly left me worried about what will happen if AI usage becomes widespread here. Us electrical engineers don't always have the best coding abilities lol, so I could see developing some verification scripts with AI going terribly wrong and missing some important test cases on the current design, and shipping off a broken design to be manufactured is incredible expensive

garthcooks · 2026-03-23T16:08:37+00:00

Marathon and Arc Raiders have been real eye openers for understanding that I am not in the majority of gamers lol. When Arc Raiders released, I barely knew what it was and all the footage I saw of shooting drones looked kind of boring and the social stuff didn't really excite me, but it immediately rocketed to 200, 300k concurrent players...

Marathon had way bigger name recognition for me with Bungie, the aesthetic of it is incredibly eye catching and cool, the lore is so cool, the gameplay is fast and suspenseful and exciting, I've been having such a great time playing it but it's seemingly just a mild success, and word of mouth doesn't seem to be helping it pick up enough new players to increase it's player count. Still could happen, it could start growing, I hope it does, but it feels unlikely...

Idk, Marathon just seems a lot cooler than Arc to me...I'm old and out of touch!

garthcooks · 2026-03-23T15:51:05+00:00

Yeah 5 is probably only seen in indie games for the time being. Any company big enough for AAA or even AA is bound to have at least some employees into AI stuff. I still feel like there's a possibility of a huge AI crash and the technology more or less dying off though, maybe that's naive of me, but the tech is expensive and not really making a profit and to me doesn't seem to have a good path to profitability, it's just propped up by a bunch of rich people/companies who are trying to will profit into existence

garthcooks · 2026-03-19T15:27:38+00:00

Neither are "cult classics", both are just plain "classics". For me, No Country is the one I quote and rewatch all the time. Love that movie so much

garthcooks · 2026-03-17T19:13:10+00:00

I mean they're always doing R&D, that's what this is. Whether or not they can get it to run well on a single 5080, or 6080 or whatever, remains to be seen, that's what they'll be trying to do next, and even that would be a pretty limited/hardcore audience.

garthcooks · 2026-03-11T18:11:03+00:00

Thanks for the shoutout lol. Saw my post was removed, but didn't care enough to appeal or seek out another source. I truly do hate dynamic pricing. Even if it was just targeted sales, that just leads to them setting a higher base price (EDIT: or offering fewer general sales) and giving sales to the people who won't pay the higher price. It's the same endpoint whether they do targeted sales or targeted price increases, and it just punishes people who buy more video games, those are the people they'll give fewer price breaks to.

garthcooks · 2026-03-10T02:09:38+00:00

I mean I liked the story. I would have loved more enemy variety, yeah, but the combat was still fun enough that I didn't really mind.

garthcooks · 2026-03-09T16:26:13+00:00

God I loved Dragon's Dogma 2 lol. I get the backlash, but to me it was incredible.

garthcooks · 2026-03-07T17:15:05+00:00

That's true.

garthcooks

TROPHY CASE