Seduction would have been like winning the Euromillions. Extremely nice, but totally unrealistic and I know it. I just wanted a nice chat and some pocket money after trekking all this way.
Honestly, most “professional” game reviews are made by average joe gamers who happen to have a platform to broadcast their thoughts. Most of these writers are not expert players nor are they always well versed in the genre of the game they’re reviewing.
I never understand why people put so much stock into them when their opinions are no more valid than any random person on the internet.
Proton VPN is probably one of the best VPNs out there. Has open source clients, is based in Switzerland so under their strong jurisdiction for privacy and data protection, doesn’t keep logs or sell data, has good speeds, includes useful features, etc. I’d definitely recommend it, as well as Proton’s other products.
Ahhh ok. I’m using a controller at the moment for accessibility reasons, but I’ll definitely look into doing that when I can again! Maybe it’ll show if I just idle a couple seconds over the selection
Right on 🤙🏻 I figured there had to be with how accessible the controller options truly are - I haven’t been able to check since my initial response. I should get to relatively soon though! Option on the controller is: select --> enable help tools
I want to see puzzles that are implemented using the physics engine. And I don’t mean “toss the axe in the proper arc to trigger the gate” physics. I mean “stack the bricks on one end of the seesaw to balance it long enough to make the jump to the next platform”. Or “use the blue barrels’ buoyancy to raise the platform out of the water”.
Yesss and more destruction physics. I miss watching cars crumple and get torn apart like in the burnout games. There was a really old ww2 dogfighting game where the plane wings could get sawn off and you’d see this smoking plane spiralling into the ground while the wing flew off in the opposite direction before the plane exploded on the ground.
Check out Wreckfest. It’s mostly basically rallycross with plenty of damage. The physics is better than in Burnout, afaik. The sequel game was just recently either released or announced.
I think those were mind blowing when I first played hl2, just because real time physics and destruction was novel, but now I think they grind the pacing to a halt. I think they just don’t work in an action shooter IMO.
My opinion is the exact opposite. Narrative games, even action shooters, need to have high action and low action parts in balance. If high action segments are excessive, it can lead to combat fatigue. If low action parts are excessive, the player gets bored and the pacing dies.
Half-Life 2 E1, the “Low Lives” chapter, has probably the most stressful combat in the game because the player has to balance so many things. Shooting the zombies attacking Gordon versus helping Alyx fight. Helping Alyx versus keeping the flashlight charged. Firearms versus explosive props. All of that in oppressive darkness. Combat fatigue sets in. The short puzzle segments, even as simple as crawling through a vent to flip a switch, are opportunities to take a breath, absorb the environment, and prepare for the next segment – especially at the end of that particular chapter, when the player escapes the zombies and has a chance to wind down.
At the same time, puzzles, by their slower nature, are excellent for delivering narrative and player training, and to let the player absorb the atmosphere. Alyx’s first encounter with the stalkers in “Undue Alarm” wouldn’t have had the same emotional impact if the player could just pop them in the head and move on.
In contrast, most of “Highway 17” is just a prolonged vehicle-based puzzle. By the time the player reaches the large railway bridge, they might be sick of driving. I know I was. It’s a relief to finally engage in some platforming and long-range combat while traversing the bridge.
So what are the narrative values of my two examples? The cinderblock seesaw in “Route Kanal” is just player training. A show, don’t tell method to let the player know that physics puzzles will be a factor. It’s also a short break after the on-foot chase, before the encounter with the hunter chopper. In “Water Hazard”, the contraptions serve a larger narrative purpose: they’re the tools of the rebels’ refugee evacuation effort. The player utilizes them like one of the refugees would have.
The best bits of the Half-Life games are the more slow parts. Just taking in the environmental storytelling, solving simple puzzles, etc. Helps to make the more action sequences feel more impactful and intense.
When I was replaying ‘HL2’ around ten years ago, I ran around the whole map looking for where I can get outside of the plot course, especially in the slower parts of the levels. This culminated in me driving the hoverboat up a three-meter-high wooden platform, falling from that platform myself, and not being able to climb up again to get the boat. After which I had to run from the attack helicopter on foot, and swim by myself later on that level.
I use about the same approach in the original ‘Deus Ex’, which I’ve been replaying recently: investigating every nook and cranny, being 100% stealthy, trying to go where the game shouldn’t allow me to be. I actually found an exit from a scripted part of a level where only one path is normally possible — though there was nothing to do outside of that part. The game also gives experience points for getting into some remote or secret places.
They can’t sell them at a loss without a locked-down ecosystem. Sony learned that the hard way with the OtherOS support for the PS3 that lead to a ton of them being purchased to build cheap supercomputer ls and never spending a dime on games or software to cover the loss.
I think that was overstated. Sure there were some “fun” projects for fun or publicity.
However supercomputer clusters require higher performance interconnect than PS3 could do. At that time it would have been DDR infiniband (about 20 Gbps) or 10 g myrinet.
Sure gigabit was prevalent, but generally at places that would also have little tolerance for something as “weird” as the cell processor.
OtherOS was squashed out of fear of the larger jailbreak surface.
I think that one was also significantly a publicity thing, they made videos and announced it as a neat story about the air force doing something “neat” and connecting relatable gaming platform to supercomputing. I’m sure some work was actually done, but I think they wouldn’t have bothered if the same sort of device was not so “cool”
There were a handful of such efforts that pushed a few thousand units. Given PS3 volumes were over 80 million, I doubt Sony lost any sleep over those. I recall if anything Sony using those as marketing collateral to say how awesome their platform was. The losses from those efforts being well with the marketing collateral.
IIRC, the Deck, at launch, had a limit per Steam account, and it had certain requirements. There’s no reason they couldn’t do something like that here. Sure, it makes it harder to convert console players if they do the same technique, but it could be restricted sales based on something.
There is a spot in Space Quest 6 where you can skip a puzzle and go to the solution immediately… If you already know what to look for. I tried that once, since it was not my first run and I remembered the last step.
At first the narrator wonders how you did that, then he assumes you’ve been using a walkthrough. He shames you and punishes you by slowly draining your score counter… Before reverting it and telling you not to do it again.
I also just installed pop os on my 2021 laptop that was struggling with windows 11. It breathed new life into it. The computer is now as snappy as when I first got it
I’m gonna have to “upgrade” at work soon and it’s going to suck
I got a new computer with win11 a year or so ago. I made them buy me a win10 license because I couldn’t do my job anymore. fucking file explorer doesn’t even work on win11. astounding
That understand gamers about as much as you understand marketing. It’s about percentages. If they get some small percentage to buy the subscription, it’s a win. It matters absolutely nothing how many people are irritated by the ad.
There’s a bit where she has to kill somebody in self defence and then breaks down over it, before spending the entire rest of the game plonking arrows through people’s skulls.
Buying late also has the advantage that if the game is a technical disaster at first, you can wait some months until most of the bugs have been fixed and then still buy it and enjoy it anyways. Then you don’t have to go through the frustrating experience of trying to play a game that crashes or locks your progress due to bugs every half an hour.
Especially if it’s a console game. If it’s PC I can typically manually edit things to fix them, but consoles are locked down. I still remember Fallout 3 when I finished the Operation Anchorage DLC it also marked some other random quest I never started as complete. Realizing I could fix that bug with a console command on PC (ironic lol) made me not wanna play on consoles unless I really have to.
This applies even when the game isn’t a technical disaster. All games have bugs, and many will not be found until they’re released to the public. And then most games have quirks that you as a player don’t agree are good things, and mostly there will be mods to fix those. So waiting is always a good idea, no matter the state of the game at launch.
Yeah, basically nobody does actual beta testing anymore, been like that for at least a decade.
They say they do, but they’re either lying or lauguably incompetent at it, my rule of thumb is bare minimum 3 months for ‘day one’ patches, more realistically, 6 months for them to actually finish the last 10 or 20% of the game they initially rushed out the door not including.
The patient thing also sadly/hilariously allows you to avoid the increasingly more common multiplayer game that just fucking sucks actually and more or less tanks 95% of its player count before the 6 month mark, or has some massive controversial (in terms of actual game features or lack thereof) thing going on.
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