Wednesday news, part two:

The Future Games show is returning next month and has a special guest: Karlach, who is helping to reveal 'over 40 games'
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-future-games-show-is-returning-next-month-and-has-a-special-guest-karlach-who-is-helping-to-reveal-over-40-games/
The flowers are blooming and we're finally transitioning out of frosty weather and dark, dreary nights. That can only mean one thing: A new season is upon us, and with it the Future Games Show Spring Showcase, as hosted by our sister site GamesRadar+. It's happening on March 21 at 1PM PDT / 4PM EDT / 8PM GMT, and it'll be a presentation chock-full of over 40 games from the likes of Bandai Namco, Quantic Dream, The Chinese Room and more. You can set a reminder for the show over on YouTube.

Italian soulslike drops 'suicidal' June release date after realising it was set to come out the same day as Shadow of the Erdtree
https://www.pcgamer.com/italian-soulslike-drops-suicidal-june-release-date-after-realising-it-was-set-to-come-out-the-same-day-as-shadow-of-the-erdtree/
So far as I can tell, choosing when to release your videogame is a kind of haruspicy. (...) Usually, anyway, but sometimes fate is kind enough to make the choice glaringly obvious. That's what's just happened with Enotria: The Last Song (via PCGamesN), an upcoming soulslike from Italian studio Jyamma Games. Promising a world "inspired by Italian folklore where the brightest sun casts the darkest shadow," the game was originally set for a June 21 release date, which probably sounded like a great time to release a game right until Shadow of the Erdtree's trailer dropped last week and announced a release date of, ah, June 21.
The unfortunate coincidence led Jyamma CEO Giacomo Greco to take to Enotria's Discord, announcing that, yes, the studio is "perfectly aware" that a "release on the same day as Elden Ring for us, as for any other game, would be suicidal," and that the studio would be consulting the auguries to choose a new release date in the very near future. (...)

Today's big Guild Wars 2 update may add new weapon proficiencies and a new legendary armour set, but what I really care about is this adorable cat tree
https://www.pcgamer.com/todays-big-guild-wars-2-update-may-add-new-weapon-proficiencies-and-a-new-legendary-armour-set-but-what-i-really-care-about-is-this-adorable-cat-tree/
Yes, sure, there are a bunch of new features dropping in today's major update for Guild Wars 2's Secrets of the Obscure expansion. New story chapters continue the wayfinder's campaign into Inner Nayos—home of the demonic kryptis. A new section of that map will be available to explore, with new events to complete. A new weapon proficiency will be unlocked for each profession, further expanding each specialisation's toolkit. And the first tier of the new open world legendary armour set will be released, finally letting players craft the highest rarity of clothes without having to venture into raids, PvP or World vs World.

Helldivers 2 devs say no, farmers aren't handing planets to the Automatons on a silver platter—they just aren't helping
https://www.pcgamer.com/helldivers-2-devs-say-no-farmers-arent-handing-planets-to-the-automatons-on-a-silver-platterthey-just-arent-helping/
Helldivers 2 has a great metagame layered over all the bug- and bot-blasting: The Galactic War, which sees players defending and liberating planets in a dev-controlled campaign. The whole thing has this fun air of mystique to it at the moment—can you actually cut off supply lines? Are the devs making it hard on purpose? Are the bots secretly being controlled by Hatsune Miku? Okay, I made that last one up.
One theory has been particularly thorny—the insistence that farmers are ruining everything. (...)

Didn't see this one coming: Roblox has an official Jaws game
https://www.pcgamer.com/didnt-see-this-one-coming-roblox-has-an-official-jaws-game/
Here's a collaboration no-one saw coming: Steven Spielberg's 1975 horror classic Jaws is coming to Roblox, the hugely successful creation platform beloved by a predominately young audience. But then I probably saw Jaws when I was about eight years old (obsessed with sharks), so I can talk. 

Warren Spector hails Epic Mickey as 'a real labor of love', says he's got an idea for the third entry but the day job makes that 'impossible'
https://www.pcgamer.com/warren-spector-hails-epic-mickey-as-a-real-labor-of-love-says-hes-got-an-idea-for-the-third-entry-but-the-day-job-makes-that-impossible/
(...)
Warren Spector remains best-known for his work at Looking Glass Studios and on Deus Ex, so directing Epic Mickey was something of a change for him too. Spector's now posted about the announcement of the remaster on LinkedIn (first spotted by Nintendo Everything), paying tribute to the designers and the project as a whole.

Side-scuttling strategy game Crab God will let you amass a crustacean congregation
https://www.pcgamer.com/side-scuttling-strategy-game-crab-god-will-let-you-amass-a-crustacean-congregation/
The biological phenomenon of carcinization has struck again and now it's strategy games that are evolving into crabs. Newly announced Crab God is a side scrolling (side crawling?) strategy and management game that puts a group of underwater followers into your omnipotent pinchers. 

After 8 years, the Genshin Impact developer is revitalizing its first hit RPG with a massive update aimed at new players
https://www.pcgamer.com/after-8-years-the-genshin-impact-developer-is-revitalizing-its-first-hit-rpg-with-a-massive-update-aimed-at-new-players/
Bear with me on this one: The Genshin Impact developer's original Honkai RPG—not Honkai: Star Rail—is getting a massive overhaul this week.
Honkai Impact 3rd, MiHoYo's sci-fi action RPG that came way before Genshin Impact, is launching its "Part 2" update on February 29. Part 2 launches a new storyline set on Mars with three new characters and a new male or female protagonist—just like in Honkai: Star Rail.

Persona 3 Reload is almost certainly getting the classic 'The Answer' expansion at this point
https://www.pcgamer.com/persona-3-reload-is-almost-certainly-getting-the-classic-the-answer-expansion-at-this-point/
Earlier this month a dataminer found evidence of six forthcoming DLC packages for Persona 3 Reload, seemingly confirming that the Answer expansion—a meaty campaign released alongside Persona 3 FES—is definitely coming to the 2024 remake. But now there's some even more compelling evidence, and this time it can be gleaned by simply playing the game.

Helldivers 2 community briefly mourns the loss of Malevelon Creek, a gloomy jungle planet that's fast become the holy grail of the playerbase
https://www.pcgamer.com/helldivers-2-community-briefly-mourns-the-loss-of-malevelon-creek-a-gloomy-jungle-planet-thats-fast-become-the-holy-grail-of-the-playerbase/
I'm pleased to see that Helldivers 2's strategy of creating an overarching, narrative-driven campaign is already working. Just like people grow attached to their roombas, wanting them repaired rather than replaced, the player base has been growing fond of certain planets, despite all tactical evidence pointing to signs that things are hopeless—personally, I think that rules.
No planet is a better example of this phenomenon than Malevelon Creek, a dense jungle shrouded in twilight in the Severin Sector, at the edge of deep Automaton territory. The vibes are immaculate, and they've led to some genuine mythology surrounding the planet—don't believe me? Here's proof.

And a short part three:

Palworld's devs are very sorry for deploying a patch that 'inadvertently fixed a bug'
https://www.pcgamer.com/palworlds-devs-are-very-sorry-for-deploying-a-patch-that-inadvertently-fixed-a-bug/
Botched patches are the worst. Devs spend hours, days or weeks on them, players get excited for them, but when they release they just cause tumult and upset. Ideally, they just mess up something minor, a bagatelle that very few people will notice and that you can rectify in the next patch. But sometimes it's worse. Sometimes, you accidentally fix a bug. You think it only ever happens to other people, and then it happens to you.
That's just what happened with Palworld's most recent patch, which you might remember for buffing the letter F and crashing the nail economy. Alongside all its intended patch notes, a pernicious extra fix snuck in: A bug that had allowed players "to capture the tower boss" ended up "unintentionally fixed."

Life is Strange: True Colours developer becomes the 3rd studio this week to suffer layoffs
https://www.pcgamer.com/life-is-strange-true-colours-developer-becomes-the-3rd-studio-this-week-to-suffer-layoffs/
Deck Nine Games, the studio behind Life is Strange: True Colors and Telltale's The Expanse, has announced it's laying off a fifth of its staff in the wake of "worsening market conditions." It's the third developer to announce layoffs this week, and the fourth news of industry layoffs as a whole, and it's only Wednesday.

WoW unveils 8 new hero tree previews before The War Within, one of which makes you 5% taller than everybody else at all times
https://www.pcgamer.com/wow-unveils-8-new-hero-tree-previews-before-the-war-within-one-of-which-makes-you-5-taller-than-everybody-else-at-all-times/
One of the marquee features of World of Warcraft's upcoming expansion The War Within is its hero talent trees, an extra layer of icing to Dragonflight's talent rework cake. They're flavourful, themed additions to your core abilities that are meant to be "an evergreen form of character progression". 
Blizzard's been harvesting feedback in the run-up to the system's debut, letting players discuss four trees in December last year. Now there's eight more for build-heads to get into forum arguments over—and thank the light they are. Somebody's gotta care about the numbers. Druids, Evokers, Paladins, Rogues, Warlocks and Warriors are all getting previews this time around. You can read the full trees on Blizzard's official post, but here's the cliffnotes.

Alright, which of you scurvy dogs is averaging 'over 4 hours' of daily Skull and Bones playtime?
https://www.pcgamer.com/alright-which-of-you-scurvy-dogs-is-averaging-over-4-hours-of-daily-skull-and-bones-playtime/
Skull and Bones, the official pirate simulator of the Singaporean government, is setting sail for season 1 in the wake of its release earlier this month, and Ubisoft is touting some stats to celebrate.
In a press release announcing Skull and Bones' first season, Ubisoft boasted that the game had achieved "record high player engagement since launch," which is basically a marketing-speak way of saying that its players are pouring a lot of time into it. Specifically, Ubisoft says the game's players are putting in "over four hours of average daily playtime, the second highest ever at Ubisoft" which is, I have to be honest, incredibly surprising to me.

Well, I don't know if they'll last another 4 years on the shelves, but if you feel the need to upgrade, you'll still be able to grab a 5700/5800X3D processors for a quick and noticeable upgrade in your games.

VGA was UP TO 640x480, and then only in 16 colors. If you wanted 256 colors, you had to go down to 320x200 or 320x240

SVGA, or Super Video Graphics Array for long, or simply Super VGA, is called like this because it's supposed to remove the resolution restriction of VGA, so 256 colors could be used with bigger resolutions. They also standardized the resolutions 1024x768 and 1280x1024. SVGA is used as shorthand for 800x600 because VGA standardized reolution only went to the aforementioned 640x480, and 800x600 is the next-higher resolution.

As most SVGA graphics cards were just slightly modified VGA GPUs with more VRAM, since the lack thereof was the main reason why you had to choose between high resolution or high color depth basically since CGA (CGA had monochrome 640x200, 4-color 320x200 and an undocumented 16-color 160x100 text mode; EGA had 4-color 640x200 and 16-color 320x200, plus 640x350 16-color on special enhanced EGA monitors, and a 720x350 monochrome mode. Some manufacurers made made also cards that could do higher resolutions up to 800x560 and called them Super EGA, which was incidentally where the Super VGA name later comes from). Since SVGA wasn't as standardized unlike it's predecessors, actually not all early SVGA GPUs could do 800x600.

Bolded: Not true. It's not because the Neo Geo is considered the most capable console that it also had the highest resolution, plus it had a higher resolution mode at 384x264. The TurboGrafx 16 could do 565x242 in 1987 with 482 colors out of a palette of 512 colors, the SNES 512x478 (interlaced). Heck, even the handheld PC Engine GT could do 400x270 in 1990 with the same 482 colors as the TurboGrafx it is based upon. 

Yeah, up to 640x480...for me that was what VGA meant back then, whenever I used SVGA it was always for 800x600. I don't remember ever using SVGA term for 1024 - was it XGA or something like that? - never used that one either, it was just 1024.

I don't think many games on consoles ever used those higher resolutions and honestly, not aware of any NeoGeo game that goes over 320x224, nor even that NeoGeo is capable of doing so.

We live in a world of 4K displays and you two argue about such tiny resolutions. Weirdos.

VGA 640x480 was limited to 16 colors, most games chose 320x200 with 256 colors instead.

So you needed an SVGA card for (at least) 640x400 with 256 colors. Higher resolutions and higher color depth was theoretically possible, but very taxing on the hardware, So most of the first SVGA games stayed below 800x600.

Heretic! I hated the blurry RF-modulated TV-output and loved the crisp picture of my CRT monitors (Commodore 1701 for my C128, Commodore 1084S for my Amiga and later my PC monitors).

To be fair, until DVI, HDMI and Display port displaced D-SUB, everything was generically called "VGA" anyway in casual circles, mostly in reference to the old blue Analogue plug.

The SNES though, most of it's games were 256x224 with it's 8:7 aspect or there-abouts.
The Nintendo 64 had a few high-res titles at 640x480, but was often 320x240.

So while consoles are capable of certain "higher" resolutions, it wasn't always realistic due to static and limited hardware, they aren't PC's.

I recently bought a cheap LCD panel for my games room as my "retro" consoles with HDMI are growing. I.E. Xbox 360, Playstation 3, WiiU... And connected my old SNES and N64 to it.

Let's just say that the CRT is staying... Will buy a retrotink to line double the S-Video output and see how that presents, something special about the old CRT's though, especially if you can get a quality one.

I'm guessing the first exposure is important - I grew up with C64 hooked up to TV, so going to TV with Amiga was more or less a given. My friend had Amiga hooked to monitor, and yes, if you're actually doing something on her (still feels weird calling a computer "her"), like he did, doing lot of programming, I absolutely agree, it was much better looking and easier on eyes. But for gaming - just no, those CRT TVs made colors and pixels blend, so games looked much better on them then on monitors, where low resolution pixelization and color bands were way more noticeable and devs back then actually accounted for CRT imperfections when making games.

Yeah, I still have CRT and actually looking to get another for backup, cause until there are standalone boxes that perfectly emulate CRTs on modern displays, there's really no replacement (even the best shaders out there, IMO, still fall quite short of the real thing).

I kinda find it funny that pixel-art games of modern times are not trying to emulate that CRT look (or at least have an option for that) - cause games certainly didn't look that pixelated back in days on actual hardware from those times.