Fallout 2 is absolutely stellar. I get the arguments some old-heads levy against in when they prefer Fallout 1, but I think I just played FO2 at the perfect time. The wackiness and pop culture references and humour hit with me when I first played it. It is sprawly, but it is also amazing for how big it is and how much there is to do in it.
Did you ever play it modded? The Restoration Project, Updated has two amazing addons that add more talking heads and more voice acting and they’re both of phenomenal, basically seamless quality. It’s really like putting on a fresh coat of paint on the old thing.
Like I said, the game itself on its store page claims to be a “detective game RPG” while in reality I would argue it’s barely any of those things. So a lot of people probably come into it with the wrong expectations. It’s more like a novel about love and loss, about addiction, depression and the past looming over the present like a grey ghost. It’s a story about finding hope in the midst of overwhelming nihilism. As someone who has struggled with all those things it hit incredibly close to home, and was the most meaningful experience I’ve ever had playing a video game.
It’s a difficult question to answer. I personally barely consider Disco Elysium to be a game, more like an interactive story that uses certain game mechanics as grammar elements and punctuation in its storytelling. It’s a novel masquerading as a game. It’s three novels in a trenchcoat. But if we do count it then it is my pick, by a landslide.
Otherwise it’s probably Baldur’s Gate 2. It’s the story game I’ve replayed the most over the years and it was absolutely fundamental in my journey as a gamer, the definition of a formative experience. Even though parts of it are dated now (some clunk is to be expected from a 25-year-old game) I still prefer it to BG3. It’s got a great story, great companions and an all-time great villain. David Warner put in an incredible performance and even all these years later there aren’t many video game villains who have surpassed Irenicus in sheer aura.
I love Woolsey but have never played Chrono Trigger. Is there a mashup “best of both worlds” version out there that adds the best Woolsey-isms to the longer script version, like the Woolsey Uncensored for FF VI?
Reading this makes me feel slightly better about my obsessive and paranoid habit of keeping unnecessarily extensive backup save slots at milestones through any game I play, despite basically never using them.
Everyone is a little in the wrong, I think. But Argo is one of the good guys, and for me one of the biggest takeaways I was left with after deep diving onto this whole mess is a deep sadness over the friendship between Kurvitz and Argo falling apart.
Damn Martin Luiga is involved with Longdue now? I’ve only heard negative things about that studio before and I also thought he was already a part of Red Info with Kurvitz and Rostov. The Disco Elysium drama vortex just keeps on churning it seems.
Finished Skald: Against the Black Priory, and it was a lovely experience overall. It’s one of those games that knows exactly what it attempts to do, and is very good at limiting its scope and not biting off more than it can chew. I might have liked a bit more agency and player choice - it is very linear for an RPG - but I can see how that would have been a challenge for a small studio and could well have ended up hurting the quality of the experience. As is it’s a very enjoyable ride, full of retro charm, nostalgic music and pretty pixel art but without retro clunk like memory limitations or poor controls and UX. I liked the story and found the writing solid, with a great gloomy atmosphere and some nice cosmic horror touches. The combat and character customization could have been a touch more elaborate, but at around 20 hours the game isn’t long enough that it really becomes a problem.
I’d give it somewhere around an 8 to 8.5/10 and definitely recommend it, especially to anyone who enjoys retro RPGs. It’s quite cheap too, even at full price.
I’ve said before that I genuinely think FarmVille is in with a shout. The trends it started in terms of monetisation, user retention mechanics and analytics driven intrusive big data player behaviour analysis and behaviour prediction was extremely far-reaching, not just in the context of gaming. Not to mention how it got a whole new demographic into video games and showed corporations that games are not necessarily only for gamers. It is very much possible to reach your grandma’s wallet too. It heralded things like Candy Crush.
It’s as if two completely different studios made these games, and the one behind Syndicate had no idea what made Unity great.
Funny you say that. Unity was developed by Ubisoft Montreal, the primary Ubisoft studio who are responsible for much of the good work they’ve done (think Splinter Cell, Far Cry and AC: Black Flag). Syndicate was developed by Ubisoft Quebec, and it was also that developer’s first AC game.
I’m sorry. The attention span comment wasn’t directed at you personally, it was reflecting on your point that people would find it too slow and boring with fewer kills. It wasn’t meant as a jab at all.
I think it sounds like we’re mostly in agreement. And yeah, the O’Driscolls spawning in and popping up like whack-a-moles is another great example!
I don’t really disagree with you about the nature of the story, and I don’t have anything against the overall narrative. I just personally think the story could have been told with fewer bloodbaths and outright massacres and still be compelling. In fact, for me every innocent you kill would feel more impactful morally and narratively if there were fewer of them.
But maybe I’m out of touch with the attention span of the modern mind.