This feels a little bit like eating the peel off of a potato, and stating the entire potato is gross. Maybe you just don’t like the peel. If we judged games purely by their tutorials, Kingdom Hearts 2 was a giant bomb, Fallout 3 was an awful game. Skyrim was wildly unpopular, Metal Gear Solid V wasn’t worth playing at all, The Witcher 3 is a slog, etc…
Yes, the intro is slow. Nobody denies that. Even people who love the game will tell you “just trudge through the first hour until you get to Valentine. The game opens up after that.” You can even find those exact comments on the posts you said to google.
Not sure who decided the same button should be either “talk to NPC” or “shoot NPC right in the goddamned head” but that never should have passed play testing
The controls are actually pretty solid, once you realize exactly how many things they managed to map to a ~16 button controller. Sure, the controls can change depending on what you’re doing. For example, if you’re on a horse, you have different controls than if you’re on foot. But I’m not sure how you managed to shoot someone while trying to talk to them… Because those are, in fact, always two entirely separate buttons. The right trigger/LMB is basically only ever used for shooting. Out of every button you could have picked, you picked the one that is basically hard-mapped to a single action.
The only time the trigger/LMB is used for anything else is when you’re in a menu. But that’s certainly not unique to Red Dead; Games use triggers to change menu tabs all the time.
Hell, if philosophy is the driving factor for a good villain, then GladOS wouldn’t even be on your list. A villain doesn’t need to be morally grey to be a good villain. Plenty of good villains are evil just for the sake of being evil. Even GladOS would fall into that box.
The point was simply that players need an end goal to keep them focused, and having a consistently present villain acts as a moving end goal. The player is driven to chase that goal until the conclusion, because the villain is always just out of reach. If you see a goal waiting on the horizon, the march there feels like a slog. But if the goal is consistently at your fingertips as you chase it, you’ll chase it all the way to the horizon without even realizing.
Certain parts of the game haven’t aged well, but there’s no denying that Vaas was a wonderfully done villain. He’s a great test case for the “a good villain can’t be absent and mysterious” argument. Most of the memorable villains in gaming have been nearly omnipresent; Vaas, GladOS, Andrew Ryan, Handsome Jack, etc…
All of them are good villains because they are consistently present. They have enough screen time to actually develop into full fledged characters. They’re not just some dark and mysterious overlord, patiently waiting in the bottom of a dungeon for you to come fight them. They’re persistently in your face, interacting with you. Even if they’re not actively hindering your progress, the fact that they have a continued presence means their eventual downfall is that much more satisfying.
Yeah, Humble has been spiraling, and this is one of the largest symptoms. If they’re out of stock, they shouldn’t be allowed to list the game for sale. It’s particularly bad on their Humble Choice offers, where trying to claim after Day 1 often ends up with half of the keys listed as out of stock.
Cloud saves are still broken for OneDrive users, eh? Seems like it would be a simple fix, (in fact, you can even work around it relatively easily with a simple symlink) but I guess it’s not a priority.
It’s playing the game by the rules as written. If the Game Master is upset at a player for using their own rules against them, that’s the GM’s fault. I can’t begrudge a guy manipulating a mega corporation (in this case, manipulating Google/YouTube’s algorithms) for profit. He needs viewer retention to stay at the top of the algorithm, so that’s what he’s doing.
He has literally said that the MS Paint doodles aren’t meant to be super descriptive or helpful. He started doing it in his meetings at Blizzard, because he found that any visual aid was good at keeping executives’ attention. Whenever he had to do a presentation, he’d use MS Paint every few minutes to keep them focused.
And now he does the same with his viewers. He busts out MS Paint every few minutes, just to refocus the viewers and keep them engaged. It’s not to help with whatever he’s describing; it’s just to keep the viewers engaged, so he keeps making money off of them.
To his credit, at least he admits this. It’s not like he’s hiding his strategy. He just does whatever will push him to the top of the algorithms and keep viewers engaged.
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.