it’s not hard to relate to their frustration either, as they are basically seeing the unintentional “flaws” they failed to iron out celebrated as “signature” characteristics of the games they created
They are signature, and that’s why they’re an aesthetic choice. I’ve heard people refer to the N64 as a “blur factory”, because it was low res with even worse textures, if it had any at all. Likewise, the PS1 looked like everything was under water. If your stealth game has a secret agent and a PS1 aesthetic, we know you’re trying to take a shot at MGS1. If your horror game has a PS1 aesthetic, we know it’s your spin on Resident Evil or Silent Hill. That signature look conveys to its target audience what kind of game they’re making, and it conveys it very quickly. As a bonus, it can often be cheaper than trying to make a modern art style with fewer “flaws”.
I imagine there would still be tons of cheaters even if it caused them physical pain every time they cheated, lol. What a great, brilliant, stupid idea for a video that masterfully weaved in his sponsor.
A one more heist story where it was clear it was never going to be just one more heist, and the band dissolved itself over a lack of real leadership. As opposed to the trope, where it’s one more heist that goes wrong. I take it back; I do have a critique of the story. Act 4, on the island, was a detour from anything that had anything to do with the main plot. Other than that though, I thought it was fantastic.
I’d definitely have a higher opinion of FTL if it didn’t feel like the entire game ended up just being about the final boss. Knights of the Old Republic is also one that I felt that, if you knew the twist ahead of time, lost a lot of its impact.
Skullgirls - Simply the best fighting game ever made. There’s so much depth in a comparatively small roster that I could basically never get bored or see every viable strategy in it.
Baldur’s Gate 3 - Tried and true RPG mechanics combined with the best version yet of Larian’s engine that encourages free form problem solving. And on top of that, they managed best in class presentation in NPC dialogue and had some of the best writing in the genre. This will be a tough act to follow, especially since I don’t think their last two Original Sin RPG systems were anywhere near as good as D&D 5e.
Elden Ring - It’s been a great couple of years for two of my favorite games of all time to come out within a year and a half of each other, but this is another one of those games where there’s just so much to see and so many ways to solve the problem in front of you. Pattern recognition for where to find your next reward is up to you; your next goal is up to you; how you conquer the bad guy in front of you is up to you.
All three of these games just respect your intelligence and are composed of systems deep enough to give you countless ways to solve their challenges.
I’m having a great time with Borderlands 3 right now. They did so much to improve the feel of those games with that one. Standards are incredibly high if that’s trash.
If we had private dedicated servers and the ability to play without anti-cheat, Linux support would be a non-issue. But because we don’t have that, anti-cheat is seen as a necessity, and we don’t have Linux support.
No, they arrived at the conclusion, for good reason, that the addressable console market isn’t growing using the old methods. So rather than hold on to exclusives with the myth that exclusives are going to drive adoption for Xbox, they’ll just port their games everywhere and make Game Pass available when possible, and Sony likely came to a similar conclusion. Even though they’re doing way better than Xbox, they also seemingly came to the conclusion that the ceiling is much higher without console exclusivity.
It did take off for a time, and now it looks like it’s an early access game that hasn’t had an update in 19 months. And I can tell you that if they don’t let me host the server myself and play via LAN, they’re not solving any problems for me over Battlefield.