Just finished Dead Space remake and have begun playing Dead Space 2. The remake is really phenomenal. It’s proper horror, with amazing ambient sounds that keep you on your toes, and clever ammo system that kept me switching to weapons that I didn’t care about. The metroidvania touch is a great change from the original, making revisiting older sections rewarding as you progressed in the game.
DS2 on the other hand feels pretty life less after playing the remake. I’m aware it’s a well regarded sequel, but it’s much less scary and almost a different genre of a game. I think I’m half way through and I don’t think I’m able to immerse much into it. It’s probably a great game from its era and seems less exciting in front of the remake.
Funny, I miss that exactly. The feeling of spring\summer air and the fragrance of jasmine\lilac\linden\freshly mowed grass and the clouds, and ICQ animations with cats scratching your screen and “hasta la vista baby” and all that, and the Web when it was actually hypertext on hundreds of pages hand-crafted all with real people.
And yeah, going to friends to play Tekken, and them coming to play SW: RotS. Watching “A Nightmare on Elm Street” in a summer camp. Older girls watching “Charmed”.
Is that the edgy vibes that you miss, or just generic childhood nostalgia?
Everyone has it, me included. I miss playing Tekken with my brother, and comparing our progress in Sacred, and generally speaking, nerding together. We are both adults and employed, and he’s got two kids as well, now. We barely have time for a brief phone call to check on each other over the weekend :(
Danger in that world was on the sidewalks and unintended. Danger in this world is on the main pathways the most, and intended by its administrators.
Edgy vibes of that time seemed more like when you reinforce your right to call a president of your country a little bitch. Or like how it wasn’t traditionally welcomed to physically punish kids in many cultures in the Caucasus - because teaching fear of punishment also piggybacks teaching fear of enemy. BTW, this was also a principle in Dragomirov’s writings on how teaching should be done in the military ; his approaches to actual warfare were kinda archaic even in his own time (basically “straight at them” bayonet shock attacks), but the parts on didactics are good.
There is only one magazine video game advertisement I really remember from seeing in the wild in an actual magazine, and that was the Quake 3 Arena one of a computer in a crusty-as-fuck basement bathroom in front of a toilet with just a super dirty setup.
Wow this is incredible, thanks for sharing. I find it funny that Nintendo fostered their famiy friendly appeal seemingly right after the GameCube and GameBoy Advance. Those particular ads are saucy.
Natural Selection and then Natural Selection 2 - no games or communities like it. Before there time both of them and very much under appreciated. Felt like NS2 never really found it’s rhythm but Unknown World kept it going longer than most games.
Me too! Did in person LAN events and managed servers for Multiplay. No game will ever come close to the engaged community. Fusion X was my clan from start to end.
Let me preface by saying NS/NS2 are my all-time favorite games
NS2 had a terrible launch.* It was unstable, terrible performance, limited to no tutorials, and no match matching system. The game has an intense learning curve, and players who had thousands of hours from NS1 / Early Access. It’s also a game where cooperative play was imperative, so the matches really stink for everyone when teams are unbalanced / one guy curbstomps the other team.
It did eventually address those things, but much of it came too late. I so desperately want NS3 to bring it new life… but that doesn’t ever seem to be coming. I want more games where I get to be the alien/creature/monster!
My desperation hit an all-time high when I started making a game in Godot… ;-;
*To be fair, they also needed to launch ASAP because they needed the money to stay afoat
I feel the same way - both take the top spot as my all-time best games.
I will say - It was a mistake building their own game engine for NS2. I realise options were limited but they bit off more than they could chew and that came out in the launch and first 3 years or so, as you say. Yeah the co-op and commander concept was both what made it awesome and contributed to its downfall. They tried to make it easier by making it so Gorges became a support role rather than critical to the alien comm but was too little, too late.
I would 100% back a crowdunded NS3, as I did with NS2. The eSports scene is far more mature now, it could work.
The whole ordeal with the game engine is so… ironic. They opt’d for it because they wanted the infestation to spread dynamically and it wouldnt work with existing engines… so one whole custom game engine later… the infestation feature they desperately wanted was scrapped anyways.
At least it benefited from being easy to mod… the modders are the real MVPs. Kept the game alive with everything from performance, to matchmaking, to balancing.
I’d absolutely support a crowdfunded "“NS3"”… but I don’t know if that’s feasible without the official company’s sign off? Like it couldn’t just copy the core gameloop/aliens because of copyright? I can’t imagine it feeling the same without Skulks, Gorges, Lerks, Fades, Onos. The way they traverse the map and fill a niche would be hard to beat.
Yeah, the modding community rallied around both versions. The NS community is really dedicated. I admit to stopping playing NS2 when they made the announcement, have they allowed the community to keep it going in any form?
Surely they would approve of some community crowdfunding? Perhaps the original creators but not the parent company is it is now, if the recent issues around Subnautica are to be believed. NS belongs to the community.
I haven’t played in ~a year, but afaik yes! The benefits of selfhosted servers. I think there were 3-4 servers going strong on the weekends. Unfortunately, a lot of those players were the… worst kind. Hyper competitive, 10k hours, surrender the second something goes wrong types. (Edit- this might have been because my own ELO was super high, so different levels might vary)
Still amazing to see any activity this long!
My understanding of the situation was one of the creators/founders/idk said they don’t want to do anything more with guns. Hence why subnautica has no “real” weapons and no NS3. This was a long time ago with some old tweet(?). I don’t know if a community-funded thing would get support from the original creators.
They had bizarre TV adverts as well. You could never accuse early 2000s Sony of not getting weird with it.
I don’t know if any of it really helped. It rode in on the already wildly successful PS1. It had a DVD player in it back when a DVD player was quite expensive. It had SSX and Tekken Tag at UK launch. It could play all your PS1 games and “upscale” them. The only competition it had at launch was the Dreamcast. It was going to sell anyway.
It also looked so cool and, a rumor had it, could run Linux (it could, but only the fat models and with a hard drive sold separately as part of a kit, and only a specific kind of Linux with Sony’s patches, and slowly as hell, but)
I think that was the PS3. They took it out later though, and had to give a paltry amount of money back to people who were using it.
It’d be nice to see homebrew coding return to consoles. Something like Godot ported to it and installed, kind of like Dreams but less limited.
I first got into programming via Basic on the ZX Spectrum, and I do worry how future generations will get into it now they’ve all gone back to phones instead of PCs.
No, the kit was for PS2, PS3 could run distributions intended for it without modifications, I think (maybe with some firmware changes), but those were by enthusiasts, while the PS2 Linux was provided by Sony.
I first got into programming via Basic on the ZX Spectrum, and I do worry how future generations will get into it now they’ve all gone back to phones instead of PCs.
Maybe the future generations will realize the difference between “can” and “should”, and there’ll arrive a niche for simpler PCs. I hope.
man those Tribal GBA SPs. yeah I remember when Nintendos advertising in the US was way more edgy. like when the GameBoy Pocket and GameBoy Color came out the commercials for those were dark.
It strikes me that I have no point of reference because I haven’t seen any ads for 20 years. If they stopped doing y2k edgy-style ads, what are they like now?
This is the purple shade of the GCN, and its one of the ‘hero’ size images available to use, on SteamGridDB. I just liked to grab one image in that size to separate each ‘section’ in this post.
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