Are you cherry picking the good games out of older libraries? I find people do that a lot when remembering. It’s a survivorship bias thing. The good ones get remembered more and the bad one forgotten, so they seem like the population is better.
Changing designs due to market pressures isn’t censorship. Remember the Sonic movie, where they redid the animation due to criticism? Nobody was outraged at that change but when it’s tits, all of a sudden people care.
What “market pressure” are you talking about? The game topped charts because it seemingly wasn’t afraid to have an attractive female lead while backing that up with fun gameplay. The difference with the Sonic movie was that no one liked the original design, and the movie wasn’t patched after people bought tickets.
If you’ve ever seen isometric pixel sprites, authors often draw those first “naked” to get the shape right. If they show an in development model that’s naked, and later have added clothes, is that then “censorship”? No of course it fucking isn’t.
aside from what everyone else said, they killed the beloved Unreal Tournament series, which is a huge sour spot for older gamers who fondly remember those. Then there’s the excessive microtransaction demand inside Fortnite, a game with a large playerbase under the age of 18. That alone led to two major lawsuits that they both lost
Aside from TF2–and even that I got a bit bored with–most all of my interest in multiplayer FPS died along with Unreal Tournament. Doesn’t feel like having fun is the goal anymore.
Need for Speed: The Run, but good. Give me an uninterrupted race accoss the US (or any other continent), against 199 other drivers, with strategic decisions to make such as fuel stops, sleep breaks, multiple paths… Make it a rogue lite with unlockable vehicle classes, police chases, weather changes, racing through traffic… Bonus points for realistic physics and VR support.
Some NFS game are straight up terrible (Undercover…), but at least the good ones with similar gameplay (NFSU2, Carbon) still exist. But The Run was worse than bad; it was disappointing. It could have been good, but wasn’t, and they never tried to make another one with a similar premise.
The only good part of the game is the bonus mission in Carbon Canyon, in all its HD glory.
Honestly I loved The Run. It was a jam packed unique short game experience. It was definitely too short for it’s price, but you know at that time Blackbox was working on 3 separate games.
Too scary lol. I got it with my index and never played. Really wish valve included a less scary switch in the settings, because it’s one of the best made VR games.
The half life games are right at the limit for me in terms of scary video games. They tread the line just enough imo. I think it’s because it’s not just horror the whole time, there’s tons of non scary puzzles and gun-slinging going on to cool down.
I read some interview about how they had to “nerf” the headcrabs by making them latch on to your chest instead of actually your face because it was too intense for VR, haha
I have to agree with him, honestly. HL2 was novel for its time, but if you're playing it for the first time in 2026 then yeah, it really doesn't hold up to modern game experiences. I also dislike games that end ambiguously or on cliffhangers, and the lack of closure provided from sequel-bait endings like HL2's can be annoying to people who just want to play a complete story. I want to see it through to the end and get the feeling that my actions had any sort of consequence to the world, and HL2 really doesn't provide that.
And narratively, the fact that Gordon is a silent protagonist really doesn't make the player feel like they're a real part of that world, and rather they're just going along for an on-rails carnival ride. The player has no real agency to affect anything that isn't a part of the singular route offered by the game. This would be okay if it was a role-playing game, and the player is intended to use their imagination to fill in the blanks, but HL2 is a wholly linear game where characters just bark commands at you from start to finish.
Honestly, for being a negative review, I think he was very fair about it. It's an important part of gaming history, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a great experience for modern players.
HL2 has a ton of story, but it isn’t spelled out in cutscenes or written down in item descriptions. It’s discussed by NPCs and inferred from the environment. You experience it all in a first person frame, without third person cutscenes or by asking someone to exposit at you. You don’t even have to go out of your way with a guide on your second monitor to unlock that info, it’s right there with you, you just have to pay attention.
You’re a person in the world and nobody will be the explaining the concept of lightbulbs or the where the combine came from or how the city was built. But you can absolutely find out more about that in the game.
I will say that even then, it was missing a bit of “acknowledgment”. Kleiner and Alyx don’t even question where you came from or what you should be doing now you’ve suddenly arrived.
Some of that could be as simple as, if Gordon was non-silent, have him wonder questions while wandering C17: “What the…how long have I been gone? What the hell happened to Earth?”
“What the…how long have I been gone? What the hell happened to Earth?”
But, you KNOW what happened to the Earth. What would spelling it out add to the story, except replacing the wonder and accomplishment with a boring bit of exposition.
Having Gordon be a silent protagonist adds hugely to the first person experience of the game. Sure, you can add dialog and questions and elaborate, but that would detract from the experience. Picasso could have also added pointers to each of the characters in Guernica to explain how they relate to the bombing of the city, and it would make the painting a lot clearer… and a lot worse.
I want to compare Half-Life with SOMA here (so spoilers for both). They’re both great experiences, but Gordon is silent while Simon won’t shut up. Simon needs to asks questions because the story requires you to understand some things, and some people need very basic explanations. When I played SOMA, I kept waiting for there to be a secret plottwist that Simon was copied incorrectly and was thus either braindamaged, or modified not to recognise reality for a specific purpose. No, that didn’t happen, Simon is instead an absolute moron who completely fails to realize that everyone constantly being copied means that he too will be copied instead of having his mind relocated. The game treats this as some kind of big realization, when it was in fact absolutely blatantly obvious to anyone paying attention. It’s literally the core of the game. Simon, being a moron, then takes this out on the person helping him, because he’s a moron.
Not only is the main character an idiot, I’m being railroaded into taking decisions that are stupid, which are then reacted to as if I couldn’t possibly have foreseen this, implying I (the player) am probably really stupid too. That was a huge detraction in SOMA. Simon is an idiot for the sole purpose of getting the information to you, the player, because apparently you need to be informed like you’re some kind of idiot too.
On the other hand, Gordon doesn’t talk. That’s a BIG restriction, but it also means you don’t even have to option to ask questions. On the other hand, you don’t need to; all the reasonable questions you might have are answered in the game by environmental storytelling. Who are the combine? Well, we see them beating up random humans, speaking a weird garbled message, we hear speeches by Breen, we see the combine raid random apartments. It’s very clear who they are without Gordon needing to ask about it. It’s like starting a book in medias res, which is quite common in writing.
Half-Life 2 assumes you can make connections, and you need to do so because Gordon doesn’t talk. SOMA assumes you’re an idiot, and reinforces that constantly by Simon talking to people like an idiot.
That feels like a bit of a hate train on SOMA that’s not really relevant. We often dislike character idiocy, especially when it’s our player. But speaking protagonists can be done well - Dead Space 2 made the move, and even ported it back when they finally did a DS1 remake.
Perhaps the only major issue with using environmental storytelling to give City 17’s base exposition is that the game is both a sequel, and intended as an entry point. I remember as a kid playing HL2 (with very little knowledge of HL1) and as soon as I saw the aliens in gas masks corralling everyone, really wondered what sort of story I missed in the first one. Leaving people to figure things out is definitely cool, I’m just offering ways to point out clearly that you, the player, didn’t miss anything key, because in today’s media deluge, often the reason for that feeling is because a story is slapdash and poorly written - as opposed to simply hiding the details in plain sight for the player to find.
Interestingly, there are some notes in an art book where the G-Man originally gave a longer opening speech to explain what’s happened in your absence, but they removed it. Overall it was probably the right move, but I’m curious how it would have felt.
That feels like a bit of a hate train on SOMA that’s not really relevant. We often dislike character idiocy, especially when it’s our player. But speaking protagonists can be done well - Dead Space 2 made the move, and even ported it back when they finally did a DS1 remake.
Yeah, the DS1 remake had Isaac talking, and they did it pretty decently because he’s not constantly surrounded by people who have answers to questions that Isaac has. The game is still about finding out what happened, and nobody can answer that, so you can’t talk about it. You’re discovering it with Isaac AND the other survivors. In DS2 you can’t really ask all that many questions about unitology, because people don’t really know the answers either.
But it would ruin all the interesting stuff about HL2’s history discovery. If someone just tells you “Oh yeah, the combine conquered the earth, and now they’re using these hybrid soldiers to suppress humanity after their military conquest, and their citadel is slowly expanding an ever more repressed population in this city” that’s not nearly as interesting as finding it out. But if Gordon asks, anyone would know the info, because they lived through it. By having a silent protagonist, people can just assume Gordon’s been around and knows this stuff, and not magically kidnapped by a supernatural magic guy in a suit who keeps mysteriously following him around. Half the fun in HL2 is figuring out the world, it’s a core concept of the game. You learn something for yourself, you figure it out by putting it togehter. Having G-Man spell it out would remove the fun. And having Gordon spell it out for the player would definitely detract from the game too. HL2 really hit that level of natural discovery, and making it optional to the game enjoyment.
Of course, launching it today removes a lot of the fun too, since there will just be 5000 youtubers repeating eachother about the game.
It doesn’t exactly need to be a secret plottwist, given the game literally starts with Simon’s brain damage, but there is also a bit of optional exposition about half way through about the gen 1 brainscans being primitive. Admittedly, it being consistent with the plot didn’t make Simon any less infuriating, at least for me.
I mean, Kleiner saying “I had expected more warning!” is a sort of mixed surprise. If he’s been gone for 20+ years, the natural reaction I might expect is “What…? That’s impossible! We all thought you were dead! Or lost in Xen forever!” Heck, even Kleiner’s reaction to the “slow teleport” you and Alyx take late in the game is much grander. “I had…given up hope of ever seeing you again!!”
Yeah, that’s probably because Kleiner knew the G-Man was involved in the interdimensional shit and had Gordon in stasis (or whatever), and he expected more warning when Gordon was on his way back, not just have him dropped on the doorstep, whereas the slow teleport was entirely experimental, accidental, and unexpected.
I feel the same with modern games. But some of the retro achievements point you to hidden places and secrets, and challenges to complete.
So it’s a little different.
I kinda agree with you. I don’t use retro achievements because I’m an obsessed completionist. That means that I’d keep playing one game well beyond the point it stopped being fun just to tick all those boxes.
Currently enjoying emberward. I really liked dungeon defenders and I played hundreds of hours of that. Kingdom rush. There’s a more mobile-like game islet defender or something. Gemcraft? I didn’t like bloons or plants vs zombies… Oh well, those are the ones I liked and if you have any recommendations glad to hear em.
Gemcraft is pretty crazy. Once you learn that combining gems in different order change how they upgrade. Had to use a small program to optimize that. It is so much fun but forever since I played so… I would suck now.
I have BG3 and I’ve played through a handful of times…I can’t bring myself to finish. I keep going back. I recently bought Divinity. I’ll add the rest to my list. =)
Yeah! 1000%. That sounds like a blast. Now I have motivation to work on a computer that can handle it. A lot of my little sim games aren’t very taxing. BG3 makes it overheat.
You can undervolt and TDP limit CPUs and GPUs to get that!
On GPUs, you can often get 90% of the FPS for like 60% of the power consumption, since AMD/Nvidia push clocks so hard. Download MSI afterburner, run its “OC curve” utility for an easy but optimal and safe undervolt, and then cap the max power at like 75% of whatever it normally is. Or cap the max clocks, which is what I usually do.
Unhide the “Processor Performance Boost Mode”, and set it to enabled or disabled (instead of the default aggressive).
Let me emphasize that this is safe, and not an overclock.
Basically all modern CPUs and GPUs overclock themselves, boosting higher and higher until they operate at like 80C+ steady state. It’s kinda stupid. Hence, all these tweaks do is get them to stop boosting so hard, so they run at efficient clocks that don’t overheat your machine.
Cool! reply/PM or whatever if you have questions, possibly multiple times since Lemmy sometimes misses notifications, heh.
And I don’t mean to shoot down the possibility of new parts! This is just a good workaround for overheating, far beyond what FPS limiting will net you. And it’s honestly a good thing to do on any hardware you may have, as it saves power and extends its life.
Yeah for sure. This is a new thing for me to learn. If it can extend the life of this computer I can use it for work/experiment with alternative operating systems xD. And be able to use it again for gaming? Win/win.
*I do feel like I play BG3 wrong and that’s why I can’t finish it. I’ve never formed a single relationship with any of the party members XD
Yeah, relationships were weird on my one run. I think I accidentally turned Will down after accidentally pursuing him, and never got the door to any of the others?
Divinity shows you why Wizards of the Coast went with Larian. At the time I played it popped as a game that had a lot of developer love, after seeing a lot of decline within the industry.
Oh, x_x…well…that would be another reason. Sure. Or accidentally going left instead of right and losing the optimal route with the power-ups. Or my eyes played a trick and the ghost is gonna eat me and now I’m running and they’re all chasing me!
Can I get one last ghost before the power-up runs out? Oh no I have one more corner because I messed up…why does the music sound like a heart attack?
Credit where credit’s due, but it seems like great pains have been taken to hide the fact that this was a tournament of 4 players.
Looks like she also had a 1st place finish in this tournament, which had over triple the entrants (14), and she did it while 7 months pregnant—that’s much more impressive, imo.
As someone who is sitting next to his newborn who he just brought home yesterday - the fact she did literally anything besides sleep is much more impressive
Classic Dexerto, making a headline that gives a wildly inaccurate impression of reality.
The headline made it seem like she won a tournament on the likes of EVO, not some small local tournament that could have just been among family members. Its cool she did this, but the author is REALLY trying hard to live up to their name (Virgina Glaze ).
I find it funny that a lot of the fediverse is anti-cryptocurrency, yet this is a perfect example of a problem cryptocurrency can solve. No one can stop you from transacting on a number of blockchains.
In theory, crypto could be good for this, but crypto is used (and designed) more as an investment than a transaction tool.
Also, the issue here is not centralized currency under a government, it’s centralized payment processing under monopolistic private companies. Crypto is not required to solve that, all that is needed is an alternative payment processor (in an ideal world, probably a public one run by that government, since in a modern world that seems like an essential service to me).
It’s a good point, but a payment processor run by the government would also be under pressure (from voters) to wield its power to suppress marginal content.
Imagine a US-government-run payment processor right now - it would be blocking anyone that sells anything “woke” or “DEI”.
I am a strong believer in democracy. I don’t think that the answer to a bad government is to reduce the power of the government, because that power will inevitably go to undemocratic institutions. Only the government is accountable to the people. So even when the government is currently controlled by people I dislike, I still want more things to be brought under the power of the government rather than privatized.
The answer to bad government actions, in my view, is to fight for a more democratic government, and zealously advocate for good ideas among the voting population.
Yeah, that’s a good point. I guess in light of that what I would say is that, if you are going to have a state-run payment processor, you need to build in a) pluralism (enable and encourage multiple processors) and b) legal protections (legally guarantee that the payment processor has a limited remit in terms of allowing all payments unless instructed to block them by a court order) which would help mitigate or slow down anti-democratic backsliding.
Honestly, I am OK with payment processors being privatized, they always have been. What needs to happen is regulatory legislation that restricts the grounds on which a financial institution can reject a transaction to strictly what violates interstate commerce law.
Just because they always have been doesn’t mean it’s good. It’s definitely not good for private companies to have monopoly power like that. That power will only be used for their gain (and our collective loss).
Fair enough. I guess I am just so used to the way things are I struggle to see how a government payment processor works without running the risk of police overreach. I do understand that long standing agencies like the IRS and DoE do a good job of fending off advances of police trying to illegally obtain private info, but a new agency or new power for an agency wherein they have access to the exact purchase data of every transaction done using anything other than cash gives me strong pause. It would be trivial to put it under the executive branch and put in there that if someone uses it they waive their 4th Amendment rights in such a way that it is not unconstitutional. The police state already wants to push us towards a cashless society because getting the information is already borderline too easy and there are privacy laws in place to supposedly protect us from such intrusion. Taking out the middle man means I have to trust some department head who is probably a political appointee, and we all see how well that can go.
True, but crypto is used very successfully all the time to purchase things online. Now just because most of those transactions are for drugs doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, steam should start accepting monero, the only truly secure and private crypto currency.
In theory, crypto could be good for this, but crypto is used (and designed) more as an investment than a transaction tool.
I would argue that while crypto is as investment now, it was initially designed and intended to be used for transactions.
Out of curiosity though, why do you think this situation would be any different if it were government controlled? Especially considering that you sometimes have administrations like Trump’s, which would do anything no matter how corrupt.
If it were government controlled, it would be accountable to the people, to the extent that the government is democratic (ideally, much more than it is now), and would also be run as a service rather than for profit.
I mean you can use it as currency, and I do sometimes. I have bought plenty of steam games with Bitcoin. I’ve also bought a bunch of stuff on Newegg, and other places online.
It has exactly as much protection from scams and fraud as cash does, that’s essentially what it is.
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