I think there were some middling games and some really great games this year, and even the ones I didn’t enjoy were just not for me, as opposed to actively being bad games. I’m not going to board the hyperbole train and say it’s the best year for games ever, but I think it was very strong and had a lot of variety which is good for everyone. Looking forward to 2024 when I get to play everyone else’s favorites in this thread :)
How did Remnant 2 compare to Remnant 1 for you if you played both? I started Remnant 1 just before the 2nd release, and I really liked the concept but everything felt too generic and started to get old really quickly. I think the biggest issue was the procedural generation made everything too similar. The worlds all felt the same with only a few enemy types.
It may not be my top game, but it’s up there! I really glad to hear you liked it that much though, I can’t wait to see what the DLCs will look like. There’s already a lot of variety, but more stuff to do is always great.
I will agree with the other poster that already replied and say it’s MUCH better in Remnant 2. Variety in stages, story, and enemies are all much better, and the bosses/mini-bosses are more fun than the first. I loved the first game as it was a really great small party game to play online, but the second is better in almost all aspects. If you have Xbox, it just went on gamepass, and I think it’s worth your time to check it out.
As a side note, I will say that the final bosses in both games are absolute bullshit. It’s the one thing that they didn’t seem to listen to as far as criticisms from the first game. If you have a party you’ll be fine, but soloing can be tough.
Elden Ring and other fromsofts have the Hud disappear unless something actively happens with it sometimes. You don't see your health or mana unless you get hit or cast a spell.
Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Leather Goddesses of Phobos.
<span style="color:#323232;">You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">There is a small mailbox here.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">>
</span>
Not new management, but they definitely changed direction. From Portal 2 to Half-Life Alyx was a dark age of live service titles and hardware. Fortunately, it seems like they’re finally getting back to their old selves?
Alyx was supposedly their re-entry into releasing games (hopeful that HLX is good), the Steam Deck caused them to go back and fix several of their titles (plus do the huge Half-Life update we just got), and while they’re not exactly making their games as open as they used to, they’re letting the community handle things like TF2 events and L4D2 patches.
So, I dunno, cautiously optimistic for their future. At least as long as Gabe is running the company.
Yep, buying a Steam Deck this Christmas. Not played one, myself, but I have been a Steam Controller user for years, and they seem to have nailed their latest offerings.
There was definitely a period in there when they felt very anticompetitive (apathy-competitive?), though.
I just bought the Steam Deck. Its amazing. More and more games keep becoming Deck Compatible and the community has uploaded so many controller configurations.
I love the Deck and Controller, just a heads up that the Deck “feels” slightly different from the Steam Controller. I’ve had a hard time adjusting to the trackpad on Deck and still haven’t quite gotten it figured out. It may just be a practice thing. Basically the way I’d describe it is it’s like the rotation setting for the Steam Controller is never quite right and the slightly smaller trackpad and different positioning maybe affects whatever muscle memory I’m trying to use or something.
As an example, I made the top community config for Monster Hunter Rise, but on Steam Deck it just isn’t quite the same and I needed to pretty heavily adjust the settings for the mouse input, even still I can’t quite get it right.
However that said, it doesn’t actually matter too much, the Steam Deck overall is awesome and I’d take it any day of the week. Luckily, Bluetooth w/ the Steam Controller feels exactly the same as it did on PC w/ dongle and it’s sooo nice.
Yeah. They got sold once around 1996 and then again to Hasbro in 1998 after they were failing IIRC. So they were kind of an amalgamation of a bunch of different companies
Dynamix’ Earthsiege was such a magical thing back then. So were Bullfrog’s Syndicate, Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper. Many, many years ago when Peter Molyneux was not a dumbass but gave us gems like Populous and Black&White.
I loved Earthsiege! IIRC I got the game with an expansion card (STI Lightning 128?), and it really was fun playing with my first flight stick, a CH Products flight stick.
I worked for Interplay back in the 90s. It was pretty great for me, launching my IT career. Working in QA did temporarily ruin my ability to play games for fun though.
Probably an obvious one, but Life is Strange was a pretty emotionally fraught game to play through. Everyone’s probably aware, but it is filled with choices that determine lots of different small outcomes as well as the main ending. So after I finished it, I spent the evening watching streamers react to the ending and sniffling along with them.
Personal story about that, a good friend passed away unexpectedly right before the pandemic, and his wife asked for my help finding some things on his computer. He was a great guy, big burly dude not known for being overly-sentimental but a wonderful imagination/DM. As I was going through stuff she was reminiscing about him. So we opened his Steam library and he had 2 games installed. Fortnite and every chapter of LiS. She had no idea what that game was, but imagining him secretly huddled over his laptop, guiding Max & Chloe along just broke me.
Another game that drew me in instantly was Hellblade: Sennua’s Sacrifice. Seeing the character’s backstory in the first couple of scenes and knowing that this was a story game dealing with mental health and loss was major, and I was immediately motivated to help her get through the healing process.
LIS holds a special place in my heart, it was the very first character focused game I played/actually paid attention to while playing. Really beautiful game.
DLC is also 100% worth it. Adds lots of depth, extra items, charectors and levels, and in level item “mutators” that completely change how important items work if you want.
Super good. Makes a fun and deep game more fun and deeper.
Yes. The bottleneck with games consoles has basically always been how fast you can get into data into memory and optical media has become a limiting factor in the last few hardware generations. I would say games started recommending installation to reduce load times in the late 360/PS3 era and have slowly started requiring it as the latest games are targeted at systems with SSDs and no optical drive at all.
I never thought I would say that but if remote/streamed gaming is a thing and it works fast, I might consider this option. Pretty sad how the media evolved.
There is basically no other choice now as optical drive speeds haven’t kept up with hard drive and SSD speeds. The PS5 for example can read blu ray discs at around 35 MB/s, compared to its internal SSD speed of 7100 MB/s. Doing the math that makes reading the disc over 200 times slower. Imagine the loading screens.
I can't imagine there's any way to make optical drives that much faster. The spin rate is already very high and the media size has been standardized. (You'd get a lot more data throughput with a laserdisc-sized drive spinning at the same speed as a CD/DVD.)
Optical drives were a major bottleneck in every gaming system that used them. They were convenient because they offered a lot of data storage for cheap, but the trade off was that games performed worse than they could. The fact that consoles have moved off of optical storage and onto fast internal storage is a boon to people that care about performance. That may be a sad situation for you, but a lot of people find it to be a good thing.
I once installed a 540MB hard drive in my 486/33, dumped the Wing Commander Privateer CD onto it, and was amazed at how fast it ran, the lack of loading wait, and just how much more smooth it was than my 4x speed CDROM. It was great for a few days until I needed the space (I didn’t buy it just for gaming).
Old farts unite! I’m right there with you, although I think my first wing commander game was 4. I think I did something similar with Myst to escape constant “hunting” on the disc drive. The noise of the cd drive revving up and down 2ft from my head is seared into my brain.
Good news: steamlink can stream your pc games to your tv and you can play with a ds4 or xbox controller. It’s the more environmentally friendly way anyway and it works well.
I don’t mind downloading stuff (ie from steam) on PC as this device is multitasking but for a gaming console aka “appliance”, I expect a plug n play approach. and when i speak about streaming, I mean, plug n play, no downloading time and minimized loading (between 5 to 10sec max).
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