I’m going to contradict myself a little, because Vice City is the better game. It’s got an actual story, a great voice cast, helicopter gunships, and the finest soundtrack of any game ever made.
But it was very much built on GTA3. The mind was already blown. It wasn’t going to happen again.
I’m not sure there can ever even be a “best game ever”, but in any case mine is Grand Theft Auto 3.
Picture the scene. You’ve got your shiny PlayStation 2. You’ve got a bunch of games, but honestly, a lot of it could have been done on the PS1 with worse graphics.
And this bad boy drops, and never stops surprising you with all the absolute chaos you can cause. Not much of a story to go on, but the sheer scale of it was amazing. A whole city of driving, slightly wonky shooting and even flying (a bit). It was a game that just felt like the hardware was designed specifically for that.
We were no longer just playing games. We were living in the future. And we’ve never gone back.
The headsets have (if you can stomach Meta). Thanks to the combines efforts of Nvidia, scalpers, crypto-bros and AI-nerds, the hardware cost has been sailing into the distance and shows no sign of stopping.
It took me a long time to get used to VR locomotion.
I still really can’t handle smooth turning at all, but using VRChat a lot (where the teleport movement is terrible) made me get used to the left stick movement at least which is really all you need.
While I really enjoyed Alyx, it’s very much a game built around it’s own limitations. It’s more of a survival horror game in a way, because of the limits on ammo and deliberately mechanical reloading. There’s no melee at all, so once you’re out of bullets you’re done for.
For all the roughness of Half Life 2 VR Mod, I find myself enjoying it more because it has fewer limitations imposed by the move to VR. It doesn’t always work (and the vehicle sections in particular really push it), but as a mod of a 20 year old game, it’s really good.
And if a game did have an ending, you’d often just get “well done but the fight against crime is never over” screen and be dumped right back at the start of the game anyway.
They surrendered when they thought day one console buyers and people who liked gimmicky dance game peripherals were one and the same, and never really caught back up.
Since then they’ve been pushing Game Pass hard, but that mythical era where you’d just need a TV, internet and a gamepad just never arrived for them. Streaming games is probably fine for a lot of casual gamers, but the casual gamers are already on mobile and tend to spend very little on games. Far too little for Game Pass Ultimate to make sense for them.
And I’m really unconvinced that day one Game Pass games are sustainable. Even with their piss-poor output over the last few years.
I also don’t like that games are no longer going down much in price over time. It seems everyone is far too happy to leave things at launch price to make subscriptions and crap sales seem like better value.
Depends on your hardware. I ran the benchmark tool for a laugh. I don’t think I quite meet minimum spec, but not far off I think. If you’re down that end, I’d avoid it.
There’s been a handful but nothing I could name off the top of my head and the specs meant anything more impressive than Super Meat Boy might be out of the question.
Just cheap crappy Windows 8 tablets for the most part, with controller buttons tacked on.