I sort of get it, but also “Half Life game ends with G Man time-freeze BS and a random abrupt cliffhanger that will not be resolved for years, if ever” isn’t exactly an unexpected outcome for anyone who’s interested in Half Life.
You may as well just watch a Youtube LP of Alyx anyway, since I imagine the majority of players do not have the equipment to play it themselves.
If the cliffhanger at the end of HL:2 Episode 2 annoyed you, the one at the end of Half Life: Alyx will annoy you even more because it not only returns to that moment but the G Man uses reality warping shenanigans to overwrite what happens in it, and replaces it with a different cliffhanger.
Son of a bitch and his unforeseen consequences, indeed.
On the bright side, this also circumvents the need for the original events of Half Life 3 to happen, since Valve has consistently said they were not willing to make it as it was originally drafted (especially now since Marc Laidlaw leaked/released the entire plot online). So now I guess they’re free to do something new with the story direction… Whatever that might be.
People also lost their shit over the PSP Go being digital distro only in a physical handheld console, and lost their shit so hard that Sony of all people walked it back with the Vita and built cartridges back into the spec. (And it became retroactively excusable once it was discovered how easily the PSP/Go could be hacked, and suddenly the Go was the desirable model for emulation and, er, backups. But that’s neither here nor there. Under its intended use, within its original lifespan, it was a stupid idea.)
If you ask me the entire point of a game console is to be a dedicated platform that you stick games in and it always works. If I wanted to fuck around with downloadable only content, games that are only keycodes, patches, day 1 DLC, always-online DRM, and the inevitable day the servers all go dark I’d just game on PC. Which, come to think of it, in these modern times is exactly what I do anyway. I have game systems dating all the way back to the Atari VCS which I can to this very day if I feel like it slap a cartridge or disk in and they play. To me, there is immense value in that. Without that, there’s really no need for the “real hardware experience” for me. I can just emulate if any title comes out that I truly give enough of a shit about that I must play it. Anything else is just selling you a rental, but at full price. I find that immensely distasteful.
So I have zero interest in the Switch 2, and thus it will be the first Nintendo console in history I don’t own, or aim to own (I do not have a Virtual Boy, much to my shame and embarrassment.) I imagine I’m not the only one. Nintendo’s been trying very hard to lose the plot, which for a company as profitable and famous as they are takes a real concerted effort. Congratulations to them, then, if that’s the goal – What we are witnessing here is very possibly the beginning of the end for big N.
It’s a great trio of games (Legends 1 and 2, and the Misadventures of Tron Bonne) with quite a bit of depth and if you ask me a fantastic art direction for their time. The one thing I will say is that the controls did not age very well. You get used to it after a while. These games predate modern dual-stick movement and aiming and use the shoulder buttons for strafing. I think the Playstation versions are superior due to the increased number of buttons available on the controller.
It was part of the Valve Orange Box and that was a big deal at the time. There was also a huge deal of whining from people who paid for it when Valve announced they were changing it to a free to play model.
To be fair, they haven’t managed to put out a whole hell of a lot that’s actually compelling in the intervening years that weren’t rereleases. “Hey guys, DAE remember Resident Evil 4? The good one? We just re-re-re-released it. And some old Megaman games you already have. Full price!”
Definitely not. Test Drive Unlimited 2 leaps to mind, which while it certainly had racing events and racing related content in it, you could also just drive around doing nothing in particular as much as you wanted.
There are several other racing oriented games that nevertheless had open worlds and you’re never actually forced to race anybody in any of them, albeit usually at the expense of sacrificing any game progression and thus having a rather limited vehicle selection. Need For Speed Underground 2 and Forza Horizon, for instance.
Minecraft has a long and storied history of cribbing features from modders and integrating them into the official base game. This includes hoppers, light senors, pistons, slime blocks, several of the types of trees, armor stands, displaying maps in frames, quite a few mobs, several of the current biome types, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I can’t remember offhand.
So yeah, stealing the idea (even if not the outright code) from shader mods would be completely on brand, and not at all unexpected. It’s up to the player base to decide how they feel about this, but honestly it seems nothing short of kidnapping babies and setting them on fire would get any significant portion of people to turn away from Microsoft’s stewardship of the game, given how hard they’ve tried to screw it up post-acquisition and yet it continues to print them money.
Getting the full experience from Chrono Trigger specifically, unlike most other similar games, is getting all of the endings. The New Game+ mode will help there.
Chrono Trigger has 18 endings, if I recall correctly, including various permutations. Plus one additional one in the rereleases from the DS version forward. Some of them are only very subtly different from each other depending on which combination of character side quests you fully completed, and they all vary depending at which point your manage to defeat the final boss in the main story sequence. Several of them are significantly different interpretations of the future (or the past) post the defeat of the final boss with various for-want-of-a-nail factors causing huge changes to the outcome.
You have quite a few opportunities to fight the final boss up to and including immediately after discovering the first time gate all the way back at the beginning of the game. (Do that in New Game+ with an overpowered Crono, though, unless you want to get steamrolled instantly…)
But Ted Woolsey’s original SNES translation is gold for what it is. Remember that he did the whole thing basically by himself and had to get extremely creative to cram the script into the ROM space since English text takes up more characters than Japanese, while also avoiding NoA’s insane censorship rules at the time.
I will add that Sheila Broflovski (a.k.a. Kyle’s Mom) through her sheer incessant nagging (and also blame shifting away from herself and the other parents as spelled out in “Blame Canada”) misses the mark so far that she manages to incite a hot war with Canada that gets enough people killed to spill sufficient blood to fulfill an ancient evil prophecy that literally incarnates both Satan himself and Saddam Hussein’s revenant form back onto the face of the Earth.
Note that this not only predated Saddam’s actual real world death, but Matt and Trey also successfully predicted the eruption of the Karen trend, probably a good decade or so before it’d risen to the height – or sunk to the depths – it’s achieved today. Although senseless moral panics were well known and quite popular in the '80’s and '90’s already, to the extent that they not only managed to accurately predict the response to their own movie, but also parody it within the same movie.