Vice City is a my second, if only for the aesthetics. I miss the top down fun, it simplified the game in a way that I really enjoyed, it’s just not the same running over hare krishnas in 3D/irl.
When it was released, SA was also my favorite by far. But with time I noticed I replay VC more than SA, likely because of the vibes. But yes, SA is a correct answer, too.
The gang wars mechanic put me off SA, same as the friends in GTA IV that keep demanding you go bowling with them while you are in a car chase with the police. It felt forced and screwed with the flow of the game by forcing you to stop whatever you were enjoying at that moment or deal with the consequences.
Vice City is also my favourite, great selection of music tracks, great 80’s vibes and it wouldn’t forcefully try to pull you out of your flow at random intervals.
There’s really only 1 RC Helicopter mission in VC. And IMO the RC Plane mission is much harder. In general, there’s a lot of jank in VC, but the vibes are unbeatable. I agree, SA is the better game hands down, while VC is a better experience.
I like how it looked. And to me it was and is game with perfect sized map and story lenght.
Nothing feels like its too far to travel at any time, but the map is large enough to feel like city. But small enough that you can learn it.
With SA i always feel like im over the game when i get to the last island, but in vice city the story pacing feels so good and it never outlasts its welcome.
I feel like newer rock star games are just too large to complete fully and keep your intrests, but Vice City hit the sweet spot where you could complete the game without getting tired of it and after short break you could start a new playtrough. I loved gta 5, but after playing seemingly all content it had it took years and few rereleases for me to pick it up again, but VC was a game i played trough twice or trice a year for a long time.
Started with the first GTA on the PlayStation; I used to rank Vice City as my absolute favourite entry in the series - but as I’ve matured over time, I’ve come to find GTA IV (or more specifically, The Ballad of Gay Tony expansion) has taken over the top spot - though VC is still a close second.
If you haven’t played TBOGT in a while, I highly recommend revisiting it - there are a lot of parallels to VC in terms of overall feel and the general “fun” tone.
I kind of hated GTA IV when it came out because it was such a downgrade from SA, and I didn’t really care for the story. But I started replaying it recently and appreciate it more. I’ll eventually get to the DLCs. I liked Tony from GTAO, so that’s a good sign that I’ll enjoy them.
As a high school student I installed a pirated copy on the school network so my friend and I could play it in class. This was at a small town school where the IT specialist was usually too busy being a teacher and track coach to pay attention to what students were able to do on school computers. They removed the ability for student accounts to install software eventually, but I never got punished for what I did.
Oh I loved the days of circumventing early school IT systems. I remember we discovered that we could right click on something in the start menu and get into a shared network folder, we put Halo in it and basically the whole class played matches together but alt-tabbed when a teacher came by.
It’s a joke how easy some of those were to bypass. I still remember when the lab installed some nanny cam app so they could make sure kids weren’t playing games or looking at shit they shouldn’t. The app was so bad that I could just open task manager and kill the nanny cam software.
The librarians loved me, so I don’t think they cared enough to say anything, even when they went after kids near me doing similar shit.
Yeah… Even back then I was amazed at how little effort it took to bypass. But that was in the early 00s, and basic troubleshooting like opening task manager was considered black magic (just like opening a terminal is today to most people)
I remember figuring out how to make my account an admin account in like Windows 2k through some obscure setting that was still available. We stared with weird flash games in the library, and eventually played unreal tournament.
Yeah, so back in the day, you could replace the accessibility executable that launches when you hit shift 5 times to enable sticky keys, and is launched as a privileged process. Rename it and copy cmd to the old exe name, hit shift 5 times and you now have an admin console.
Still works today, you just have to do it offline if you’re not an admin.
One of my friends pointed out to the teacher that they shouldn’t store the grades on a shared location the students could access and got expelled. I’ll stick to Oregon Trail.
If you asked me to name a major gameplay innovation in the last 5 years, I literally couldn’t. Clair Obscur won a fuck load of awards for doing basically what Final Fantasy did 15 years ago, but not completely losing the plot. Hollow Knight blew everyone’s mind for making a decent Metroidvania game. Balatro made a game where you make a series of combos that people have been making for over 200 years. You don’t need fancy gimmicks anymore to be considered good, you just need to be good. Major publishers waste their time because they don’t know how to put “be good” on a spreadsheet.
I would argue Expedition 33 is a lot closer to Legend of Dragoon released 26 years ago. Its claim to fame was the active turn based system pulled right out of that game.
Metroidvanias standard was set 28 years ago in SOTN. It has n
That crazy now that you think about it.
I would not put Balatro in the same category. While it isn’t mind blowing. Nobody put the pieces together in the same way that Balatro did. I would still call it innovative.
If you look at the picture from Soulja Boy’s site, it’s clearly just the Retroid image run through an AI Image-to-image filter to make sure it’s not exactly the same. The buttons have random symbols on them, some of them seem to bend, the D-pad is misshapen and from a distance, the whole thing just looks like a slightly less detailed copy of the original Retroid image.
Girls who code are rare. There are probably more AFAB coders at my work than those who identify as female. And a hell of a lot more men.
And I’m in a progressive city in a progressive state.
I work in IT, and I think there is one woman out of 50 employees on my corner of the org chart, and that’s the CIO’s admin assistant.
I’m certain it’s culture, and it doesn’t just go for programming, it goes for almost all of STEM. There was a recent “Stuff You Should Know” episode about toy chemistry sets, and they made it a point to talk about the marketing, and how it always was with boys, for boys. My son, 8 year old kid, says “that’s just wrong! Girls can do all that stuff!”. He’s got it figured out.
No…but I am being hyperbolic. I definitely interface with more transmasc and nonbinary coders than I do with cisgender female coders. This may also be because, again, cultural reasons.
There certainly are more cisgender female coders, but they are still a minority group by a big amount, and they tend to not draw much attention to themselves.
As a welder, I’ve had a female coworker ONCE in 15 years working in the industry. My current work doesn’t even have a bathroom for women in the same building as most of the workers. If we did hire a female welder, she’d have to walk across the parking lot to the administration building to actually use a women’s bathroom.
This broad dynamic isn’t new and it isn’t unique either to gaming or to men. Every single creative volunteer community on the net is filled with assholes and drama llamas, of any and all genders. It’s just the nature of the thing. You see the same things over and over with game modding, cracking, romhacking, emulation, manga scanlation, anime fansubbing, vocaloid production, mmd modeling, fanfic, fanart, and so on and on.
People often (generally?) are willing to invest the time and energy into whatever it is that they’re going to post online at least in large part because they crave the attention they hope it will bring, and specifically, they want to be lauded for their talent and skill.
And that often runs up against the fact that an awful lot of the responses they’re going to get are going to come from self-absorbed and entitled assholes bitching because they don’t like whatever it is that they’re getting for free, and think they have to be accommodated.
And very often, the response from the creator, unsurprisingly really, is to effectively (or even literally) say, “Fine then - fuck you all. I’m done.”
And 'round and 'round it goes, and has from the start, and likely will never stop. It’s just an unfortunate but pretty much inevitable clash between a personality type that’s likely to create and share something online for free and a personality type that’s likely to comment on something somebody else created and shared with them for free.
I don’t disagree with you but I feel that it is important to recognize and call out the misogyny element in this story. The gaming community has a pervasive sexism problem that’s normalized, and that part is unique in that it all comes from men.
I have only ever played three games online. The first was Final Fantasy XI, and I was part of a group/guild with nice people. It was fun!
The next was Team Fortress 2 because my husband wanted me to play with him. The vitriol and misogyny hurled at me over voice chat after two matches made me never play again.
The last was Destiny, and I turned off voice chat completely.
I don’t want to hammer on this really, because I think you mean well, but…
You’re not condemning the specific assholes who treated you poorly - you’re condemning “men” generally. Your point and your focus isn’t that they were assholes, but that they were men, as if that’s the actual problem - as if their failure isn’t being assholes, but simply being men.
I don’t know if that’s your actual view, but that is the way it comes across. And broadly, that view is part of the problem, since it alienates men who deserve no blame and diverts attention from those who do. And that’s exactly what I meant when I said that countering misogyny with misandry is a poor strategy.
yes you’re right this is a lawsuit about too much profit and it will directly set a precedent where companies aren’t allowed to have too much profit.
Pretty smart, as a leftist maybe I’ll sue every corporation for being privately owned, this is a whole new avenue for systemic change. You opened my eyes
I talk about wealth then I talk about income, compare both, then I compare wealth to net worth (which is how you measure wealth)
If you have enough wealth, it’s used to get money as your wealth is used as collateral, you don’t need to be rich to do that, you just need to own stuff that is paid for. I know people who only own a house that isn’t worth a fortune, the got a mortgage on it when the rates were down to 1% to invest it at a higher interest rate, their not rich, they just have wealth that can be used as collateral to get money.
I saw some stats the other day that if you remove the top 1000 incomes in the united states the average drops to around 35k. So that average of 75k is bullshit.
It’s funny and true; I have no desire to continue playing and yet I am still excited to get my hands on the toolkit and make my own shit because all I see are missed opportunities everywhere. Honestly, I kinda wonder how into sci-fi the devs actually are, because everything is surface-level and misses the mark on a lot of referencial material so often.
Piracy is free. If you’re charging 70usd for a game, then I’d rather just spend the time and pirate it. If it’s 10 bucks, Im just lazy to do a Google search and pay you for it.
Oh fuuuuuck the DRM. I purchased CIV5 for my phone and it requires an active internet connection or it boots you out. I only play on an airplane. So I ended up downloading the pirated version so I can play the game I purchased.
I really tried to enjoy RDR2. It’s got some great qualities, and the acting, writing, and cutscenes are phenomenal. But… The gameplay… I’m all for slowburn walking simulator type games (e.g. I loved Detroit Become Human, among others).
But with RDR2, the world is so massive and yet there was no sense of excitement when finding stuff. You get just about all your upgrades fairly early in the game. There’s no sense of character gameplay progression. And after just a few hours of traveling around, it felt like I quickly had seen all the random event variations on the roads/trails (e.g. stop bandits hijacking a wagon, robberies, etc). I don’t know, it just felt like a hyper realistic GTA5: Western, but without all the plethora of goofy shenanigans that game has.
I to have tried getting into it without success. Maybe I will be able to return to it someday.
A similar thing happened with Cyberpunk. I revisited it after stopping just after the first act and had the most fun I have had with a game in a long time.
I dont know, I have heard valid complaints but the western setting doesnt allow for much other than bandit themed random encounters and favours. There are other more out there ones that hint to larger things like time travel etc.
You make some very good points. I loved RDR2, but felt like two-thirds of the way through the game it became main story and nothing else. I thought the side quest content was really good, but there needed to be a lot more of it. The “random” events were awesome, but when they were eventually all completed, it made the world feel somewhat empty in comparison. That said, it’s still one of my favorite games. I’m on a playthrough right now where I mostly just mess around in the world. I like how slow-paced it is. You can just do whatever. Eat, drink, fish, sleep, fight, hunt, cook, ride, shoot… There’s no end to the number of personal side quests you can make up.
If you have physical media there are ways to rip them using a commodity DVD/Bluray drive so you can back them up, load them in the emulator, and prevent data rot on the actual disks.
If you’re asking for a direct way to play straight from an XBOX handheld (native play) that’s unlikely to happen for the 360 because of it’s unique architecture, and the Xbox One and beyond I believe have some significant departures from the standard x86 architecture that would make it impractical (it would be more logical to give you steam codes instead lol).
I kind hated whenever i was looking at solutions to running pc game pass games on my steam deck, everyone was like: “install edge it works on Linux, that will let you stream the game.”
Like, that was not what I was looking for. It also required you to go to a higher tier of sub.
Man I don’t know how the board of directors is going to feel about the CEO telling people to refund their game. That seems like it would be on the list of things you don’t want your CEO telling people.
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