Tomba_be

I bought this game years ago in a Steam sale, only because that content restoration mod was said to be 'complete' back then. But trying to use that mod crashed my PC in horrible, hardware-busting ways, so I gave up. I guess I'll try again now!

Superhero games in a world with innocent, vulnerable civilians are far more interesting of course. But I fear it's pretty much impossible to do in a Batman-licensed game. We can be sure there are very strict licensing contracts that prohibit Batman hurting a civilian, even when the player gets "punished" for doing it. And having civilians just be invincible is just plain dumb. The only way I could see them allow for an inhabited Gotham is to split the game in a Bruce Banner part and a Batman part. In the 'Bruce Banner'-part you go around doing investigations, gathering intel,... mostly during the day (and perhaps some fancy parties). Trying to hurt a civilian as Bruce would just get you arrested and result in an immediate Game Over. But at night (and for example when entering a "hostile area" during the game, you would get the Arkham-style Batman gameplay because you would be sure you would almost only encounter criminals.

The Infamous games started doing something more interesting in which your behaviour mattered, but it mostly ended up in just having a meter going one way or the other, and civilians cheering or booing you. I hope some more superhero games start exploring that route, but I'm afraid they will have the extra problem of having to create a new IP to base the game in. Very few famous superheroes are of a "whatever gets the job done" mentality, save perhaps Watchmen or Wolverine. Most recent successful characters are all of the "I can't kill/hurt anyone ever"-type (Batman, Daredevil, Arrow, Flash,...), even to the point were the hero is allowing more innocent civilians to be killed because they refuse to take out the big villains...

Divinity: Original Sin also did this an interesting way. You could kill absolutely everyone in that game. But it would also make it a lot harder when every NPC treated you as an enemy or refused to talk to you. Much more combat, no way to buy/sell gear, repair,... And if a Kickstarter game can build a world like that, big AAA-games should be able to do that as well...

It truly saddens me how many people believe the free market is holy, and that government should not spend money on art. The government can spend trillions on warfare to increase the profits of Lockheed and Haliburton, bailing out bank executives, corrupt and incompetent politicians, insanely expensive projects with no other goal than to funnel money to private businesses. But dear oh dear if it spends 0.00001% of taxes on something that tries to make the world a better place. Firing off one less cruise missile at a village just for laughsies or sending one less drone to shoot innocent civilians because it makes for a good story to tell at the bar, could fund many people creating silly games, while doing no harm!

Even when a company like Tale of Tales makes games that don't appeal to 99.9% of the audience, even if the games are mostly plain bad; they are trying new and interesting ideas. Some are bad ideas, which no one will find out it no one tries them first. Some of those ideas will (and have been) picked up by other developers, improving the concept and creating games that might appeal to more people. There is a huge deficit of creativity in the gaming industry (as in most current art forms), and funding strange, weird things is GOOD and NECESSARY.

They need the time and opportunity to create art. That's what the government funding is for. If you only had people creating non-commercial art in their spare time, there would be a lot less of it, and the world would be a poorer place for it.

The idea of this kind of funding is that it helps the creator to create their project, so he can sell it, and make more new things with the income of that project. If the creator had to give it out freely, ALL of money required would have to come from the government instead of just a portion, which would decrease the amount of projects that can be helped by funding. Also, the idea is that projects that are commercially successful have to pay back their funding AND a portion of the profits, so that money can be spend on other creators.

If only there were some way to make the "real world" a better place. Oh right, that's what the government is supposed to do. To quote some guy: "it's easy to confuse what is, with what ought to be"

That is complete nonsense. People have been making and playing games for thousands of years. Even when there was no such thing as free markets. Many humans have a need to express their ideas, and entertain themselves and others. The first "video games" were just experiments by scientists who wanted to try something cool instead of doing boring calculations.

The Flanders Audiovisual Fund usually invests in a wide array of productions, both very commercial and more experimental. It also takes a cut of the profitable productions afterwards, so it has to rely less on government subsidies. That way it has some more creative control about where the money goes. This has for example resulted in way more pretty decent movies than a small country like Belgium should have. But since Belgium now has a very conservative, right wing government, all of that is being being shut down rapidly. The big media companies have helped the current parties to power (by Fox-style scaremongering) and now they want to be paid back by having all small scale forms of entertainment eliminated. Belgium used to have a very quirky media scene, with many weird TV shows, arts,... but it's being reduced quickly to a very bland mix of soaps, reality shows, cooking programmes and "talent" shows. Yay capitalism.

The fairly obvious use case for streaming Xbone games to the Oculus would be a) freeing up the TV & b) the ability to play the game on a huge TV.

If VR in fact turns out to be the medium of the future, Oculus will probably be worth that amount 10 times over because of the patents they hold. Just licencing it out to VR manufacturers will be a golden goose for decades.

If VR games still require me to use a camera stick, they are doing it wrong.