Not really; The emulator doesn’t use any copyrighted code, but the ROM is copyrighted. That’s just basic IP law.
What is fucked up logic is Nintendo encrypting their ROMs, then providing decryption keys on the console. So the emulator itself is legal, but actually booting a ROM requires decrypting it, which requires keys from a legitimate console. Nintendo has argued that those keys are illegal to use in an emulator, even if the user rips them directly from the console that they own. So you have the keys. You own the console they’re stored on. But it’s illegal to use those keys anywhere except on the console they came on, because Nintendo said so.
It definitely hasn’t aged well, but that’s largely because the humor was based on pop culture references. Talking about Jessica Simpson isn’t really cool anymore. But that the time, it was a sort of revolutionary thing to have games reference current pop culture. It made the games feel fresh, especially if you played them right at launch.
Were they great games? No. But from a gaming culture standpoint, they had a surprisingly large impact. Game devs learned what did and didn’t work in regards to the references and gameplay, and that alone makes them culturally important.
Also, games deserve to be preserved even if they didn’t have a massive impact on gaming. Even old Flash games have massive preservation efforts, because every single game was someone’s pet project. Imagine saying the same thing about a bad film. Sure, a modern 4k re-release may not need to exist, but that keeps it in modern formats and makes preservation easier.
The parkour handled slightly differently, and that angered a lot of the fans from the first game. They also drastically changed the way the grapple worked. The combat was also slightly different, (critics would say simplified) so it tended to be more straightforward.
The first game had you doing a lot of jumping and diving just to survive, whereas the second game gave you some more survival options to avoid getting trapped by mobs. You could absolutely still do the jumping and diving if you wanted, but it wasn’t as critical anymore.
I hated the game at first too. But I actually gave it a replay a while back and ended up loving it. Ironically, my love of FFX was holding me back from enjoying XII. Once I replayed it with a more open mind, I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are certain things I dislike about it, sure. But that’s true for any Final Fantasy game.
I think replaying it when I was older also helped. I didn’t have the patience for the politicking when I played it the first time. And the game’s story is very political. So I think the added maturity meant I was able to appreciate the story more.
Dying Light 2. It was definitely different than the first game, but I enjoyed many of the changes. My buddies and I spent a lot of time just running around killing Volatiles, and having a blast while doing so. But apparently a lot of the changes were deeply unpopular with fans of the first game.
This is the best answer tbh. You’re either playing as a girl or as an egg a future femboy a twink programmer who hides behind the pretty girl and lets her do the fighting 90% of the time.
Exactly. It’d be cool to have in a few months/years when the exploits inevitably get patched. But there’s no way for me to justify the purchase at that price point.
I agree, but mostly because I dislike roguelikes. They get too repetitive and turn into a slog, and the success of your runs is often entirely dependent on which items you find.
I’d much rather have a tight, concise game with handmade maps. IME, roguelikes just pull the old NES/SNES trick of “well we can’t fit more data on the game cart, so just make the game harder to force players to replay it over and over again. That will artificially inflate the game length.”
Bastion and Transistor don’t need sequels, but I do wish they’d stop with the roguelikes.
Glad to see Okami mentioned here. It was poorly marketed, which basically killed the development company… But it was so good.
Some people have called it the best Zelda game never made, and I believe the description is accurate. It has all of the mechanics of Zelda’s puzzlebox dungeons. It’s just a different setting, and the “tools” to solve the puzzles are your brush abilities.
My only real complaint about the game is that it was long. Like every time I expected the game to be wrapping up, it would introduce an entirely new region. But that length also meant it was able to deliver a fully self-contained story that didn’t rely on cliffhangers (sequels) to finish. Sure there were some sequels, but the original story stands on its own without them.
My buddy still regularly plays EverQuest Online. These days, it’s sort of expected that you multibox and run an entire party, instead of just one character. He usually has his bots pulling mobs in the background of whatever other game we happen to be playing.
The weird loot range issue, where if you’re not standing in juuuuust the right angle, you won’t be able to loot certain corpses or containers.
The fact that, outside of combat, controlling Geralt feels like driving a boat. Weird large turn radiuses, slow start and stop, etc… The devs did this to make his movement look more natural, but it feels like the game is constantly fighting against or trying to correct your inputs.
Combine those two things together, and you get a consistently frustrating experience outside of combat. Installing a ranged loot mod was one of the biggest quality of life upgrades. You walk near a corpse or container, and it automatically gets looted.
The combat can also get repetitive at times, and the difficulty scaling is weird too. But as long as those two things and still deliver a good story, I think players will ultimately walk away happy.
Unfortunately, the real appeal of the Borderlands series is multiplayer. The games are alright in single player mode, but multiplayer is where it really shines. And cracked copies likely won’t work with multiplayer, because they use game servers for matchmaking.