I did that for Control when I played that, I was just ready to be done. Im guessing by every other part of the review the person was also just ready for the game to end
What does that have to do with anything? If someone’s mentally checked out of the game so much that continuing to play through it becomes a slog, I can’t blame them for cheating just to get it over with.
If you’re not going to enjoy playing the game then you’re better off not finishing it, because by finishing it that way you’ve robbed yourself of the joy of overcoming the challenge.
What challenge? HL2 is not a particularly difficult game. And there isn’t going to be any joy in overcoming whatever challenge you’re talking about if they’re hating every second of the game. Its not like we’re talking about a souls-like where they cheated because they couldn’t defeat a boss. No, they cheated because they got bored, not because of some imaginary skill issue.
And they’re not better off quitting if they still want to know how the game ends.
Factorio: lazy bastard is not worth getting but there is no spoon is absolutely worth getting. People over estimate how much is required pre rocket and get bogged down in these over engineered designs. After finishing thre is no spoon you realise how little is actually required and its best to just go build something than try design the perfect system that lasts into the megabase era.
My first full Factorio playthrough was a Lazy Bastard run. The game is a lot more chill when turning off biter expansions & turning up trees slightly in the map gen.
Granted I think I racked up like 200hrs in that run, largely because I could leave the game running in the background whilst going off to study or do other stuff. Once you’re past the intial stage & have a mall set up, hand-crafting really doesn’t matter much.
There is no spoon was alright as a goal, but it also ends up being a definitive end to that playthrough (which, arguably, can be both good and bad).
I also play with no biters. I just dont see the point in having them enabled since i get past the rocket stag quickly and then end up working on a megabase for a few hundred hours and biters are just annoying.
Not only the author of the post frame the ineffably marvelous Ubisoft for their Assassin’s Creed only, or the people in the organization who are not even related to the case, and for literally unknown reason, but also the author of the review feels like a disrespectful bigot who has likely a bad time yet enough to make a choice to inscribe their pure hatred into someone’s effort, history, and indeed novelty. One might want to suggest them to try creating anything at least remotely marvelous to the subjects, they try speaking at, with their own hands…
Such a deep sorrow some people do not care about their actions, about anyone, including artists, developers, people in general… and ruin this world in hatred and utter, disgusting unfairness…
You do you, @Speedforce and that reviewer, and let’s hope no one will state something so awful about your work after decades, hatefully believing their word has any weight the world outside their mind of hatred.
You use AI for literally its most dangerous possible use case. And I assume you used a mediocre translator for everything else. Try DeepL, I found it has good results most of the time.
Sorry, no. And I am sorry you found LLM useful, and consider experimental/unverified data “dangerous”, likely inadequately or for the sense of hateful trolling, and it’s hard to live that way, I presume…
Watch Dogs 2 is a weird one. I absolutely understand all the criticism and see the flaws, but I still play it and the breaks between two runs only get shorter. I love its rendition of SF and the Bay Area, the game has that je-ne-sais-quoi that draws me towards it.
Thank you! I believe both titles are abs((float)$incredible)/INF… The story, characters, references, technical features, or every single bit and algorithm is perfect…
Not to mention upgraded kernels and shells, including drones and 'dgets!
Yet it all may not match the “good” you are searching for at this particular moment, or would it? How could we know!
Both titles were developed by different genius teams even, the former is Ubisoft Monreal, the latter - Ubisoft Toronto!
I.e. Even if MetaSploit and not Snyk’s or PortSwigger’s but FOSS is there… you may still find that the payload in all the exploits the solution provides you with, written by OSINT or more hopefully red… authors on the wires, is indeed a required parameter to be set upon execution/injection by you, the main host in the network! 🦋
How to not find Watch_Dogs 2 and Watch_Dogs Legion both very different and ineffably marvelous…
I uploaded a few screenshots found in some remote backups:
Yeah gameplay wise the game basically leaned a lot on novelty. But they are wrong to say that it lacks world building and lore because it’s scant on narrative. That’s like saying “the Quiet Place lacks world building because there is barely any narrative”. The game is excellent in using game mechanics to tell a story. Instead of relying on the storytelling mechanics of film.
It’s much more rare nowadays in new video games that have this style of physics or visual storytelling. It’s a game that will always be a fresh experience to me anytime I replay it.
This makes me think that the guy ran through the game instead of playing it. Just because what happened isn't spoonfed it doesn't mean it's not there.
Reminds me of all the haters of Dear Esther.
I 100% RDR and killing cougars with a knife still haunts me. It’s exactly as it sounds. Go do melee combat with a gigantic pissed off cat that almost always comes in pairs, sometimes a trio.
I fucking hate how if certain animals come at you at a particular angle, there’s literally nothing you can do. Sure they give you the button-mash prompt, but it does literally nothing, and you still get mailed to death. Every. Single. Time.
That’s nice but for me if a software is also available as a Flatpak it’s an advantage for people that use Flatpak. If it’s available only as a Flatpak (which this one is) it’s a disadvantage for all the people that don’t use it. 2GB for one app is insane. Duckstation is ~80MB
Regarding collectables-based challenges, in my experience, all collectables that don’t unlock content or aren’t some kind of upgrade are a waste of time.
I remember collecting all the figments in Psychonauts 1, how frustrating and time consuming it was and how it was near useless to the regression of the game. I love Psychonauts and I would like to play it again over and over, but I would not collect those pesky figments ever again.
If the collectibles aren't satisfying to obtain on their own, I don't think putting an unlock behind them makes them retroactively better.
A good collectible is something like Strawberries in Celeste, each one requires you to take a more difficult path or do an additional screen. They're fun to go for, and I think it actually would've detracted if some unlock made them feel like a required task rather than a bonus challenge.
Thank you. I’ve been just buying whatever is in the first hat stand in the store, but the last few days I’ve missed closing so I’m stuck with the Sombrero. It’s kind of grown on me so I might keep it
Not to play the devils advocate but they do have an argument. Not in the physics point because physics haven’t been done to death so that part of Half-life 2 IMO is still fresh. But the rest of Half-life 2 can be dull and boring and nonsensical if played today. Half-life 2 was such a cultural shift that everything great about it has been dissected, analyzed and improved upon wherever possible.
Much like Half-life 1 the things that made the game great are industry standard now. You’re used to the greatness so all you see are the flaws. The boat section is too long, the car section is poorly paced, the story is too cryptic, the list probably goes on. But anyone who played it at launch knows how fucking sick the game is because there was nothing else like it.
Friends of mine who played at two different points far after launch still found it to be just as great, even if the physics and facial animations were no longer best in class.
I personally played it some time after Portal 2, probably 2015 or so. I found it great, particularly as far as lore and pacing are concerned. Sure, there are bits that drag, characters that aren’t well written, and plot/lore details that are too ambiguous, but I’d much rather that than hand-holdy, surface-level plot of most similar shooters, or plot told through YouTube videos and flavor text like many modern shooters. IMO, its still one of the best at what it does, and its still a personal favorite for that reason.
I still like its facial animation more than most Danes. They had tools that even set up random NPCs to have full lipsync and expressions for minor lines, without a mocap studio. Most AAA work these days doesn’t have that, or they dedicate such animation to when you’re in a zoomed in view to receive quests.
I tend to agree with this. I had given up on PC gaming by 2004 so did not play HL2 until the Orange Box on Xbox in 2007 and my reaction was “Jesus this is boring!”
I’ve tried to replay it a couple of times since then, most recently on Steam Deck, but it just doesn’t click with me and I give up around the Canals.
That’s an insane claim to me. HL2 set the bar for worldbuilding. From the guy muttering “don’t drink the water” in the train station, to the people and vortigaunts building homes in the sewers, to the stick legged stalkers waddling around the citadel, HL2 took “show don’t tell” to heart. It was the most immersive experience anyone had played in a video game up to that point, or for years after.
I’ll grant you that other games have learned a lot from it, but I would say the vast majority haven’t. Games still come out today where everything needs to be spoonfed to the player literally for them to stop and process what they’re looking at, instead of just running and gunning mindlessly.
When you say HL2 can be boring and nonsensical if played today, the first thing that comes to mind are all the people who turn movie subtitles on, and then for 75% of the runtime their eyes are in the bottom 1/3 of the screen, not taking in any of the visual information the filmmaker is putting in front of them. Like, yeah, HL2 is quite boring when you’re not looking at it.
As someone who hates open-world ubisoft style games, I’m nevertheless not much of a fan of HL2 either. I tried it multiple times at different points in my life and each time found it to feel like a slog that I end up giving up on a few hours in.
I enjoyed the 1984 aspects of the world at first, but I ultimately can’t get past how bullet spongy enemies are. Virtually every weapon feels extremely impotent except the revolver, which has very limited ammo. I began to dread every encounter with enemies because it rarely felt fun to fight them.
On my last playthrough I cheated and gave myself infinite revolver ammo, which helped me get farther than before, but even then I was struggling to push onward after a certain point, just because it felt like endless waves of enemies being thrown at me with some mildly enjoyable physics puzzles tossed in between them.
Never felt a connection with any of the characters, and without that the gameplay itself just becomes repetitive to me.
I think the pistol and SMG are intended to feel weak, to push you into other weapons that take more interesting use. For instance, half an SMG clip into a soldier could instead be one launch of a barrel from the gravity gun. Notably, you only see those soldiers after getting the gravity gun.
If you’re referring to the early cops, about half of them are around some tricky environmental kill, like an explosive barrel. But, I’ll grant there are times you’d desperately spend a magazine to land headshots with the pistol. So, I guess you’re not wrong.
From what I recall, I didn’t really enjoy using the gravity gun all that much since bigger objects had a tendency to clip terrain if they weren’t aimed quite right, and thus miss the enemy I was aiming at, which prompted me to switch back to the other weapons to finish off a gunfight. Admittedly that might’ve been just a me problem, and others had more success using it (I know the sawblades with the gravity gun were quite accurate and easy to use in ravenholm, but I don’t think they show up much after that area).
I felt like most of the game doesn’t really give you enough ammo with the non-standard weapons to really use them outside of one or two bigger fights, then I’d be back down to the smg, pistol, or shotgun (which I also felt was a little under powered unless you used the alt fire, but that chewed through ammo too quickly to be viable most of the time).
It tends not to give you enough to last an entire fight with the ammo you have on hand, but usually if you’re pushed into an arena, it will have ammo and health laying around - and not the light stuff, either. The game was coming from a Doom 3 era when ammo searching was not just a known habit, but could be done during a fight to keep you moving, so it’s perhaps an implied assumption they made from the time. But, teaching players anything while they’re under fire is going to be a very uphill battle I suppose.
The problem is that the heavier weapons like the combine rifle are only introduced in the later part of the game from what I remember (I think I stopped somewhere around the antlions last time), where as it seemed like the first half was limited to the crappy weapons, interspersed with some magnum revolver ammo as a treat. By the time I would get access to the good weapons, I’d usually have already lost my enthusiasm to continue. If I had connected more with the story I could look past all that, but since that part just wasn’t engaging with me, the combat needed to carry the experience, which it just wasn’t able to do in my particular case.
The revolver’s first shot is dead center. Use your suit zoom and you can snipe a headshot.
Other than that, use the appropriate weapon. Soften them up or flush them out with grenades. Pop around a corner and hit them with both barrels of the shotgun. And don’t be afraid to use the quicksaves liberally.
HL and HL2 definitely aren’t polished AAAA game experiences, they’re experimental games from people trying to push the limits, so it’s natural that they don’t hold up to modern games. The modern games are standing on the shoulders of Half-Life (which stands on the shoulders of Quake, Doom, and Wolfenstein).
As I said, there was never enough ammo to really use the revolver more than a few times in my experience, hence why I cheated infinite ammo for it.
I don’t have any nostalgia for the half life games as I didn’t play them growing up, but I also don’t think their age is really a contributing factor. Personally I found Half Life 1’s combat to actually be far more fun due to the enemies feeling a little less sponge-y, and the gunplay/guns themselves feeling more punchy and overall just better to me. HL2 I consider a step down.
There are shooters older than HL2 that I would consider to have much better combat, like Blood (1998) or Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001) despite their age. I understand that HL2 was trying quite number of new things, but ultimately my gripes with the combat are mostly down to what I consider to be a poor choice of damage variables, but that’s just in regards to my own preferences for combat in games.
I didn’t use the gravity gun as much as standard weapons since most of the objects available to shoot with it are usually quite large which obscured the view of the target (not a problem close up, but mid range and farther I’d have trouble with it), and I found it really janky to use in tighter spaces like hallways or smaller rooms, where the object being held would get caught up on the terrain or doorways.
handrails would also deflect objects shot with it, and a lot of the times when ambushed with a combat encounter, I wasn’t scanning the area for objects to pick up while being shot at, I would just engage immediately and return fire.
It’s a cool gadget, and perhaps others got past the issues I had with using it effectively, but overall I preferred just using a standard weapon, and in that realm the ones that were fun to use had little ammo, leaving me with the very weak pistol and smg, which I didn’t find terribly fun.
I really don’t see the point of the whole pixelated aesthetic. I mean, it’s nostalgia, but for what? For a time when we wished we had more pixels? If you want that kind of nostalgia, why not also have a loading screen showing a cassette tape going round… for 15 fucking minutes. Hell, it isn’t even accurate nostalgia, because pixelation on a hi res smartphone or monitor looks totally different from the blurry pixelation you get on a shitty CRT TV. If you can see the corners on your pixels, you’re doing it wrong.
I know there is a lot to be nostalgic for, it’s just that the lack of pixels isn’t one of those things. Some things have simply gotten better, more pixels is one of those things. Pixelation is just a way of making a game graphically less clear and less pleasant to look at. /rant
Don’t get me wrong, I love the creativity that comes from having such a limitation. And back when it was a necessity, and you could count the color palette on your fingers, some pixel art was amazing. But it was largely about trying to transcend those limitations. For example, it was very common to use antialiasing as much as possible, because you’re trying to make things look good despite the pixellation. Whereas the aesthetic of modern pixel art tends to be about making things as clunky and jaggy as can be, so you can really check out those pixels, or showcase that crappy color palette. Conspicuous pixellation is untrue to its origins. It also makes game objects less recognizable, sacrificing utility for an aesthetic. I know there are people who like it, which is fine, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be criticized, and so far I have seen no counterpoints to the criticisms I have raised.
I was wondering how pixelation actually adds utility to the game. But I’ve looked at a few screenshots and Rimworld doesn’t seem particularly pixelated to me. Maybe we’re talking at cross purposes here, because Rimworld does have “pixel art” in the sense that it’s drawn pixel by pixel, and it does have the simplistic style that’s common in pixelated games. But it’s displayed at reasonably high resolution so it’s not noticeably pixelated.
What I’m bitching about is games like Stardew Valley where they have committed to fewer pixels on screen. The simplistic style with higher resolution in Rimworld is clear and functional. What I’m saying is that pixelated games would be better if they did the same.
Just because you personally dislike certain art style doesn’t make it objectively bad. I’m a zoomer, I don’t have nostalgia for pixel graphics and yet I enjoy pixel art. I can’t stand CRT filters on pixel games (modern or emulated) btw.
I’ve dealt with enough people who think their preferences are absolute that I just couldn’t be sure whether you’re one of them or not. I’m glad we agree that art is subjective.
it’s not even about “worse” it’s that we’ve always been more impressed by stylish graphics than high fidelity graphics. probably the most frustrating franchise to have forgotten this lessons is borderlands
Sometime in the past 15 years or so AAA became even more business and shareholder beholden.
Fuck off with this.
It’s a lazy excuse to accept worse overall quality in a medium that desperately needs life breathed into it again from AAA studios. My nostalgia days were from the N64 but even those giants of AAA games were worse than what came after objectively. If AAA studios had fractions of the artistic integrity they had before, they’d be stomping indie games into obscurity. The only reason why indies are given a seat at the table is because AAA has priced out many and diluted what was once a rich hobby.
N64 games were worse than what came after, because the technology of 3D graphics was new.
But when I say “Games should be shorter and look worse” I’m referring to the ways older games had to work within certain constraints in order to get made, and those constraints bred so much creativity.
There’s no reason why games need to be these unoptimized 200GB behemoths with photorealistic graphics. Especially when the gameplay itself is often so derivative
Yeah just get it now! The map is randomly generated but the new biome updates populate in the undiscovered areas of your own game. Once the game is full released you can just pick up where you last left.
I got Valheim before they added the mistlands and it was still a more complete and full game than anything a AAA studio has made this decade. Grab it on sale, get your friends, your family, your pets a copy. Frankly, comming from someone who will pirate everything, I will gladly pay full price a second time for the quality of work they’ve put in.
Playing it with my friends was one of the things that kept me sane during lockdown. It’s an incredible game. Decently fun single player too, but it really shines when playing with other people.
I really liked mining and foraging, so I’d go out and build super barebones outposts in various biomes, occasionally bringing back a heckton of ore for new weapons and tools. I also liked being the first one to get dibs on a new pickaxe when the new tier of tools was unlocked
Same! For me it was the outposts and buildings. By the time we stopped playing I’d paved half our discovered area with roads, built way stations so you could sleep while traveling, and had a base and dock on every important island or biome.
My crowning achievement was called The Sky Vault. I’d lifted 4 pillars to the maximum terrain hight on a tiny plains island, then built a building supported by them that could only be accessed via portal. There I had a long table and thrones for each of us and a collection of all the treasures, cool trophies, and artifacts from out time in play. Covered the room in piles of gold, little chests, cool weapons that we didn’t end up using. The finishing touch was that the gate to our settlement stood between two of the pillars, so you got to walk under it get into the town.
I bought it ages ago and am now waiting for it to be done before I pick it back up again. But I’m getting the urge to pick it back up anyway, sailing out into a storm to go serpent hunting is such a vibe!
I’m personally waiting for the 1.0 / Deep North update to go back to playing it. But even when I stopped playing because of just getting bored with it, 2 years ago according to Steam, it’s a good game already with complete mechanics. And there are quality of life mods you can add on top of the configs you can do in the base game when setting up a world.
Even solo, as someone that usually gets bored with open world survival games, it has enough draw for me to have 1 - 2 hours gaming sessions for a month straight.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne