Because instead of the usual triple a studio promising the moon for sales then delivering a pebble and not giving a shit, it was a guy who got caught up in the hype and handled it badly, and then him and his small studio worked their asses off to make the game justify the price charged. I know it’s hard to drop the cynicism living in the modern world has instilled in us, but I genuinely think it was a collosal fuckup and not malicious, and they ACTUALLY put the time and effort in to deliver the promises they could and a fuckload more atuff that wasn’t. In a day and age of companies lying on purpose for profit and not giving a shit, it’s a breath of fresh air.
That I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt, but the mythology of redemption through free update is part of being a beta tester for LNF, that’s pragmatism on HG’s part shift their burden to the fans, not a colossal fuck-up as you claimed.
I have yet to play half life 2 (waiting on my son to get the motivation to help me beat decay, I’ve beat the other expansions)
But I can’t imagine that half life 2 doesn’t hold up when the first game is a masterpiece that holds up better than pretty much any FPS released after it
Unfortunately several parts do not hold up when you remove the novelty and temporal context. The whole game was mind blowing when it was new; I very much enjoyed it then. On a subsequent playthrough years later, there were definitely parts that just did not hold up. I used the console liberally at times because I couldn’t be bothered to do them for real.
I think it’s the consequence of bringing a truly revolutionary game to market with limited resources. There are clearly portions that exist to showcase the cool shit they could do rather than to drive the narrative or be genuinely fun.
Beg to differ on the Pokemon example, but then again I am a completionist so that type of challenge gives me lots of self satisfaction (plus now I have achievements through RetroAchevements so a little bragging rights). Frankly, things like that should have internal motivation, so literally no reward is fine by me. I’m literally doing a professor oak challenge right now, which is significantly worse, lol.
Where I draw the line is mostly challenges that I just don’t see myself being able to accomplish in a given lifetime. Like the Balatro golden chip on every joker is way too RNG and time consuming for me. I also generally prefer not to have to do a speed run, but that’s mostly because I have kids now and setting something down without worrying about time is ideal.
It’s mostly awful for the first two badges, but playing with fast forward I beat my first badge in White 2 with in game time around 65 hours (so probably around 15 hours). It’s insanely tedious, but I enjoy it late game.
I was debating saying beating Consort Radahn. It took me about a day of grinding to learn patterns, figure out strategies, find all the upgrades, and simply have the best RNG.
I didn’t want to respect and just cheese him either. I will never attempt to beat him again, but I do feel satisfied that I beat him.
I was going to say Soul Level 1 playthrough of Dark Souls is one of my favorite gaming experiences. Absolutely worth it for me. Helped me through some depression. Do not recommend to anyone however.
Dark Souls 3 is a great game to play at SL1. You’ve got quite a selection of weapons and armour that you can equip, plus one spell, so it’s a bit of a puzzler to find optimum combinations of stuff to beat all the bosses.
Dark Souls 1 is okay to play at SL1. You’re limited to being a pyromancer and have a good selection of flame spells that you can cast, but you’re limited to weapons with fairly boring movesets, and you’ll be doing a lot of running back to Blightown to get pyromancies and level up your flame.
Dark Souls 2 is goddamned brutal to play at SL1. Your dodging is tied to your agility, which means you’re a sitting duck until you get some stat boosting gear. Start the game by murdering Cale for his hat of +3 dexterity, grab the work hook and the ladle to swap out in your off-hand for their small stat boosts, and get yourself to Tseldora to grind the peasant set for its small adaptability bonus. I hope you’re good at beating end-game bosses with a rapier, no shield, and bad rolls - maximum four in a row due to your low stamina, which makes throne watcher / defender hellish.
Scholar obviously has all of the pain of 2, plus you can’t rush into the DLC areas for their high-powered rings. By the time you get the ring of the embedded for its massive SL1 stat boost, you’ll have most certainly earned it.
Yes, I did play through all four at SL1 in preparation for the release of Elden Ring. DS3 is fun at SL1, but I also do not recommend the others to anyone. Elden Ring is quite good at RL1 - it still allows some quite varied builds, and it forces you to learn the bosses rather than just “DPS race” them like you do normally.
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.
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Aktywne