I have to agree with him, honestly. HL2 was novel for its time, but if you're playing it for the first time in 2026 then yeah, it really doesn't hold up to modern game experiences. I also dislike games that end ambiguously or on cliffhangers, and the lack of closure provided from sequel-bait endings like HL2's can be annoying to people who just want to play a complete story. I want to see it through to the end and get the feeling that my actions had any sort of consequence to the world, and HL2 really doesn't provide that.
And narratively, the fact that Gordon is a silent protagonist really doesn't make the player feel like they're a real part of that world, and rather they're just going along for an on-rails carnival ride. The player has no real agency to affect anything that isn't a part of the singular route offered by the game. This would be okay if it was a role-playing game, and the player is intended to use their imagination to fill in the blanks, but HL2 is a wholly linear game where characters just bark commands at you from start to finish.
Honestly, for being a negative review, I think he was very fair about it. It's an important part of gaming history, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a great experience for modern players.
It's not all plagiarism, though. For instance, Embark Studios uses AI to create in-game voice lines for characters in their games. They made their own models with actors hired specifically to train them.
Chronus can be detected on consoles, just not super easily. And it kinda depends on each game's developer and their ability to implement such detections. I know that Embark Studios have said that they've found ways to detect such devices in The Finals.
I believe that, while they can't detect the actual hardware plugged into the console, they're able to detect input patterns that would only be possible from M/K (such as 0ms AD-spamming). Of course, I can't imagine that's 100% foolproof on its own, either.
I'm kinda out of touch with hardware pricing these days. Let's say I wanted to buy a second PS5 for the purposes of turning into a desktop like this; would that be better or worse than just buying normal hardware and building a PC of equivalent specs?
If this is something you want to try for yourself, either buy a second PS5 and use a burner account on it, or be prepared for the possibility of losing your entire PSN account. This goes for pretty much any internet-enabled console modding.
Nintendo deactivated a 10+ year old account of mine when I tried modding a Wii a while back. It wasn't a huge deal at the time, because I still had physical copies of most of my games at that point. But these days, my library is almost entirely digital, so I keep separate fuck-around accounts so that I don't find-out with an account I've spent money on.
It's basically an infinite money glitch! All Google has to do is make sure not to have the project run by the guy who botched the Xbox 360 launch and it'll be unstoppable!
How does one even accidentally steal a texture someone else made?
One could easily apply Hanlon's Razor to this. For example:
Bob is a game artist. Bob has a folder on his desktop called "Inspirations", where he saves art pieces he finds online that he likes, and a folder called "Assets" where he saves things he's created for the game. Bob transfers to a new department in the studio, or quits, or is fired; either way, he returns his equipment to the IT office.
Dave is an IT guy at the studio. Dave takes Bob's computer after he leaves the job, and transfers all of Bob's files to the studio's shared drive. Dave isn't an art guy, and doesn't know the difference between "Inspirations" and "Assets", and dumps them all into the shared drive in a folder called "Bob's Things".
John is the studio's new artist, replacing Bob. John syncs "Bob's Things" to his computer. John assumes everything in this folder has already been cleared for use by Legal. John starts implementing the art into the game.
I used to be a pretty hardcore Destiny 2 player for several years. In that time, I've seen Bungie fuck up a lot of things. But those fuck-ups were almost entirely caused by somebody in the studio not playing close-enough attention to something, and details getting mixed up in the pipeline. I don't think anybody at Bungie knowingly put Antireal's art into the game. I think the more likely explanation is that there was a lack of oversight, and files that shouldn't have been mixed together, got mixed together.
Not to suggest that any of this excuses Bungie for multiple cases of plagiarism. Obviously, they need to have stricter standards in place when transferring files between parties. It's a colossal fuck-up, but I don't think that it was a fuck-up anybody set out to commit.