Blade Runner
Yesterday the Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition was released, that is the remastered version of the adventure by Westwood Studios, but it literally ate the other restored version of the game, made with ScummVM, available for years on GOG.In what sense is eaten? Before the Enhanced Edition, a version of Blade Runner edited by a group of enthusiasts was available on GOG, which had made the game usable through ScummVM, a program for the recovery and preservation of old graphic adventures, active since 1997 and much loved by the community. Now to access this version you must necessarily buy that of Nightdive Studios, which according to many is even lower, at least on PC (on consoles the problem almost does not arise, since the game was not really there).
To express all his disappointment was madmoose, aka Thomas Fach-Pedersen, who is part of the ScummVM team. madmoose said that making the GOG version of Blade Runner required a lot of reverse engineering work from the team, which earned them ... zero. GOG gave him practically nothing.
madmoose: "Now Nightdive Studios has launched its 'Enhnced' version which in hindsight is ugly and full of bugs and offers no tangible benefits compared to ScummVM, apart from very poor console support. even forgot to credit me the subtitles that I allowed him to use. Unfortunately it is no longer possible to buy and play a digital copy of Blade Runner in ScummVM without giving money to Nightdive Studios. It saddens me to see GOG relegate our free work to a mere attachment of someone else's mediocre product. "
We actually got to try the Enhanced Edition and to say it's underwhelming is an understatement. But we'll talk about it again in the review phase.
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The Morning After: A remastered version of 1997's 'Blade Runner' game finally arrives
Yes, Juul e-cigarettes have been banned in the US, but we talked about that yesterday. But what’s like vapes? Replicants and ‘80s sci-fi? Maybe not, but anyway, Nightdive Studios has finally released Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition for Windows PCs (via Steam), PlayStation, Switch and Xbox consoles. The modernized version runs at 60 frames per second instead of the original's 15 fps, complete with updated animations and models.
At the time, Westwood's 1997 game pushed the boundaries of both graphics and gameplay. Instead of the usually fixed plot, Blade Runner changed the replicants and humans around with each playthrough while also offering branching storylines.
Rather than relying on either 2D art or crude 3D, the title used voxels (pixels with 3D attributes), giving far more visual detail for the era, including volumetric lighting. Think of it as the ray-tracing of ‘90’s gaming. This choice in graphics technology made for a challenging remaster, however, as it didn’t play well with graphics cards, and then the source code was lost in an office move. For those that played the unlicensed version, it might not look quite as good, but hey, at least it runs on your Switch.
— Mat Smith
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The company previously cut 150 jobs in May amid business woes.Netflix has laid off around 300 people in its latest round of job cuts. Most of the layoffs were in the US, according to Variety, and affected a number of departments. This is Netflix's second round of layoffs due to slowing revenue growth. It laid off 150 employees, along with many part-time workers and contractors, back in May. The company has around 11,000 employees globally. Netflix is still hiring on other fronts and has already earmarked around $17 billion to invest in content this year alone.
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