The half price games on various platforms (“Platinum” on playstation, can’t remember what they were called in other platforms) were great and made me get into consoles.
Feels like the PS4 gen when that stopped happening. Shame, because it’s not like you can magic your customers into having more money to spend. They’ll just buy fewer games.
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.