Hard disagree. I’m still in my starter car in Heat because the physics are 110% garbage. A stock 240 should not be able to pull off drifts like it has 800+ more hp than it has, or the fact that it forces a drift when you merely want to take a standard corner. In street tires. In a standard circuit/sprint race. Or how it’s tied to online servers, thus when the servers freak out, your single player event kicks you off. Or how there are objects that retain their lowest LOD no matter how close you are, or how long you wait. That’s just off the top of my head, it’s been a while.
I got the ‘premium’ or whatever version for $1.25 on steam a couple years ago. I played the 10 hour demo before that, reviewing it blind for a friend and then revisiting it 6 months later, each for a few hours. ‘surely, it’s been a couple years, they must have fixed it some’. Nope, not even a bit. I want my $1.25 back.
Shit, I think Unbound is a decent upgrade from Heat. And I don’t particularly like Unbound, so that’s kind of both a complement and an insult at once. The bar was so low it was touching the floor, it could have only gotten worse with DRM that opens a backdoor to my machine or something. I spent $10 for Unbound, and I don’t want my $10 back for that installment (I mean I’ll take it if they are offering but), so… Heat is baaaaad. Unbound is meh, but meh beats the hell out of baaaaad.
You mean like NFS World? I was a closed beta tester. While it was a P2W system (buy powerups, etc) it wasn’t ruined by it, and if you could beat a nfs game you can do just fine in World.
I only played for the first year or so - and haven’t played the 3rd party rebirths - but World had potential. And EA killed it, like the dumbasses they are.
I’m a huge (old) nfs fan, and I love HP '10 and MW '12. It’s no U2 but both are damn good games. I fired up MW not too long ago, just to cruise.
Burnout was the shit too. Mostly for Crash Mode. Paradise was cool with the open-world but them kneecapping crash for whatever the fuck they called ‘bounce your car endlessly down the street’ mode was fucking atrocious. EA selling the ‘ultimate box’ on the pc without the fucking island - and no way to get it - was bullshit, always been pissed of about that.
Re 2, I was and am angry about how MS handled the Xbox exclusives. They spent the 90s making games for the pc that were great, and then the Xbox drops and the pc market is ignored for years. “just buy the console” makes no sense when I have a far superior machine right here, and when multi-player is behind a subscription. I was gifted an Xbox a few years after launch, along with Midtown Madness 3, the only game I wanted - and never gave MS a cent of my own money. I stayed on Halo 1 for years, then when Halo 2 finally dropped for the pc, I got it and enjoyed my first playthrough on my computer. My first playthrough of H3, ODST, and 4 weren’t until the MCC dropped on steam. I got Forza bundled with the Xbox, but it wasn’t until Horizon 3 released on pc that I got into it.
I fucking despise the 15-year window where MS just abandoned their loyal customers on pc to milk people with their inferior box and subscription bullshit. The smartest move they have made was re-embrace the pc as a customer base. And 8 year-old me could have told those moronic C-suites in 2001. They isolated a core customer base for short-term profits, and they have earned nothing but resentment for it.
The Xbox should have always been a product for “I don’t understand computers, but I want to play games”, while the pc should have remained a “I know what I’m doing, and I don’t need a walled garden”. MS fucked up massively, and lost out on revenue trying to force their hand for a decade+. The fact that they release on both is nothing but positive, as they get customers from both camps, and they finally are undoing a bit of the hate and resentment they caused.
That very same page: click-bair links after paragraph 1, paragraph 2, a top-anchored video link after paragraph 3, and an endless list of links at the bottom of the page. And that’s with DNS ad-blocking and ublock. I’m curious what it looks like without, but I don’t want to get tech-cancer.
Don’t throw shit if you are also covered in it, Kotaku. I never really liked the site but I don’t remember it being in this sad of a state…