I am in my 50s and I’ve missed a couple of decades of games - stopped gaming in the days of vice city and just started again recently when I got a steam deck. There’s a pretty big backlog of stuff that people highly recommend, but remasters and remakes offer me the opportunity to play these games with modern graphics. For someone who grew up with 8 bit graphics the stuff we can do these days is amazing and I want to enjoy games that are also good to look at. Recently finished bioshock remaster, enjoyed it immensely. So yeah, while it’s probably better for studios to focus on creating new stuff, there are people who enjoy the old stuff updated.
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Vice city has a cheat code that makes cars fly. Although it’s more like leapfrog because you need to accelerate in order for the game to push you up to fly.
So when I was a kid I used to get the tank and turn the gun around and shoot it and use it as a propeller for infinite flying.
“Dodo cheat”, at least according to the little cheat book I had back in the day. It gave cars the same mechanics as the dodo (which I think was the little sea plane). Using the tank like a rocket and aiming for a ramp was the best.
I’ve always really loved mechanics that encourage players to manage risk, especially where it relates to HP systems.
One that I enjoyed, in Cosmic Star Heroine; when your characters’ HP reaches 0, they remain on their feet for their next turn. If their HP is healed to a positive number that turn, they can continue, but their healing is halved to make that difficult. On the other hand, while in negative HP, they can also perform an attack that deals double damage - after which they’ll be KO’d.
Fatal Frame has an item that will automatically revive and full-heal you one time when you would otherwise die. However, you can only hold one of these at a time. So, if you’re playing with heavy use of healing items, burning through all your film (ammo), you might find a second one, which will make you wish you’d leaned on the first one a bit more by not bothering to heal quite so often.
Another random example: You’re in a JRPG, and going against a boss enemy that has a brutal spell that reduces people’s HP by 3/4ths. However, they have pretty limited options for actually finishing you off. At some point, players will realize their advantage, and stop spending so much time healing people to full. A similar example is a boss in Final Fantasy X. It habitually casts Zombie on your party members, meaning healing spells will damage them, and revival spells will kill them. She then frequently casts “Revive-All” on your party. If everyone’s a zombie, that means you die in one turn. However, if you stop healing, and let party members die to basic attacks, she may accidentally bring them back to life for you - and no longer zombified.
Niche mechanics are my jam. My favorites usually revolve around unique economies or structures that create their own depth of play.
I love genre benders and sandboxy stuff. I’d like to see something like Chaos Seed (SNES) built on or re-imagined, dwarf fortress is great for tinker-ability, and I always liked how Nethack has some deeply designed interactions even if they can seem superficial or esoteric. FFXII with the gambit and realtime-ish combat systems was always a standout too.
I do remember SR1 or 2 having a similar ability. But Driv3r was funnier and had more ridiculously good results when playing it. They should make a new Driver game
It’s not unknown, but I think it’s an underrated mechanic: in God Hand, the better you do, the more the difficulty increases. If it gets too much and you want to lower it back down, you can grovel and beg enemies to go easier on you.
I wish more developers tied difficulty change to in-game actions like that.
Apparently it’s more common than I realized. Most games doing it apparently don’t tell you it’s happening. For example I played RE4 when it was new and had no idea it had dynamic difficulty.
Yeah. Back during the pandemic Abby Russell played RE4 on Giant Bomb and chat was pretty much constantly losing it over how much ammo she was using. But the game’s drop tables accounted for that and she basically was just playing Gears of War for all intents and purposes.
Was fascinating since basically everyone who has ever played that game focused on headshots and conservation rather than just unloading.
But it also speaks to how this is usually implemented. It is more about making every playstyle viable rather than actively getting the hammer and nails if it sees you are getting a bit too excited during a combat sequence.
Hmm, I remember from one of the developer commentaries that only future levels should get tuned, not the one player is currently on. Maybe the intro level was an exception.
The video starts by showing a side by side of original Arkham Asylum and Return to Arkham Asylum, talking about how the remaster ruined the art style. At first, they’re unlabeled, and I thought, “Oh yeah, that sucks, that is a bit worse.” Then they labeled them, and the one I thought looked better was the remaster. What’s more is I’ve only ever played the original PC release of Arkham Asylum, one of my favorite games, and the remaster looks the way I remember Arkham Asylum looking.
I’m gonna go on record and defend the Deus Ex remaster. There’s no way to play it on modern hardware. The only game console that can run it is the PS2, and not even then. The PS2 version was a whole other game because DX1 was too powerful for consoles. So it was basically DX1 dumbed down. Maps were smaller, everything was reduced… it was like a “de-make”.
You can run it on Windows PCs with some tweaking, but if you don’t have a computer with spyware, you can jump through bigger hoops. Linux has Proton. On my Macs I can do it with Whisky. It’s really not hard, but I did need a third party tool called Deus Exe because the original DeusEx.exe was a complete no-go. I think it was made for Windows 98? Anyway, once I got Deus Exe up and running, I was even able to run Shifter, which was a mod for DX1 that tightened a few things up and added “legendary” versions of each weapon to various places around the world. I actually ran a mod of the mod, one I made myself that had more hacks to the game, like you could update your cyber link to rifle range, i.e. to use computers from across the room. Like V can do in Cyberpunk. Except DX1 wasn’t made for that so it was kinda game breaking. But fun. I mean the game was never hard.
Anyway, they’re bringing DX1 to Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch. And PC, of course. Hopefully Mac — the developer, Aspyr, has done Mac ports, but they were doing Mac ports of Xbox 360 games when Macs and Xbox 360s used the same PowerPC architecture, so that’s kinda cheating. That said, anybody porting to Switch is a stone’s throw away from porting to Mac since they’re both ARM64, and that’s part of why we even have Cyberpunk on the Mac now.
I haven’t checked Deus Ex specifically but my general experience is that Wine actually makes older games easier to run. In large part because you aren’t having Windows 10 use compatibility mode to Windows 8’s Vista’s 98 compatibility mode and are instead just tricking it into thinking those libraries are just there.
That said, I have no issue with the remaster. If it is good? Awesome. I’m willing to throw another 20 bucks down the hole if I want to replay that without needing to google for unofficial patches. And if it is crap? I don’t buy it.
I recently played Final Fantasy XIII on Xbox Series X. I was amazed at how great it looked when output at modern 4K with 60fps and 16x anisotropic filtering. The gameplay was still crap, but amazing to look at given it was on 360 originally.
Because of that experience, I am a little more forgiving for 360/PS3 generation. Those games were mostly running 720p frame buffers (or worse) and seriously gain a lot when given some shine.
(This completely ignores the fact that PC would naturally have these abilities without an additional purchase)
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