And if you know anything about what he’s talking about, you quickly realize that in fact he does not know it all.
Can I be a big time Twitch celebrity too if I doodle a series of completely nondescriptive boxes and link them with little lines in MS Paint as I talk?
They’ll release a “New!” version in a year with an improved screen as one of its bullet points, in a bid to get you to buy it again. And people will. See also:
Pretty much all of those are characters from franchises that quickly jumped to consoles, or had the intention of multiplatform releases from the very start. I’m not sure any of them are very fitting.
So on that note, the least nonsensical mascot for PC gaming in particular I can think of is that dwarf, whoever he is, from the box art of World of Warcraft. Or possibly the orc from the alternate version. WoW is earth-shatteringly popular and has basically defined the entire private lives of a depressing number of people, not to mention it’s the sole and singular thing even non-gamers think of when you mention MMORPGs. And it has only appeared on home computers. Never consoles. Other Warcraft properties have, but not WoW.
Define “long.” I disagree with the Doomguy proposal explicitly, because Doom appeared on the Sega 32x in November of 1994 which was barely a year after the initial PC release. One of the defining aspects of gaming in the mid '90s was the monumentally cynical gold rush of trying to cram Doom onto any damn fool console as fast as possible, in a vain attempt to capture part of the lightning and make those sales. And until the Playstation and arguably the N64, every attempt failed spectacularly in various ways.
The definitive Doom experience remaining locked to the PC for those few years was absolutely not for a lack of trying. Every greedy video game exec on the planet wanted Doom on their system. id themselves assisted with several of these ports in various ways and they had absolutely no intention of leaving Doom only on PC, either, if they could help it.
I’ve held multiple times before that it possibly would have been better off if it were a more focused, linear experience possibly akin to how the newer Deus Ex games worked. Within those you had the freedom to screw around in the area/mission you were in and given a wide latitude to complete things as you saw fit, but it definitely excised the wannabe GTA filler in the middle.
2077 had an excellent series of incredibly well-directed moments, both within the main story missions as well as several notable side missions, but the stuff in between made little sense especially given the story framework of V living on borrowed time with a ticking bomb in their head. But sure, let’s save up and buy nine apartments, collect all the gold class weapons, stock your garage with all the cars, traipse all over down finding all of Delamain’s rogue taxis, do a sidequest for this random chump, see a concert, check all these cyberpsychos off our list…
There is incredible detail in the world if – but only if – you stop to search for it. There are a lot of things most players will probably miss unless they’re specifically pointed out, and while that’s certainly neat it also means that the lack of discoverability means the time spent on many of those details ultimately turns out to be wasted. 2077 is thus a weird hybrid of a linear and open world game and as a result feels both too constrained and to unfocused at the same time. It’s all to easy to get derailed, and alas to some extent you have to let yourself get derailed to accrue enough XP and equipment so you don’t get your ass handed to you if you just try to stick to the main storyline, even though that storyline is written as if it’s supposed to be a single linear narrative.
Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed the game. I just would have presented it much differently if I were in charge.
I thought at first you guys were thinking of this, and I was puzzled. Then I looked it up.
Crivens, it’s like a combination of Tempest and Flappy Bird, but since it’s a Terry Cavanagh game it’s also been whacked over the head soundly with VVVVVV.
Journey is indeed absolutely fantastic. It finally got a PC port a while ago after languishing on the PS3 for quite some years, and its hardware requirements are probably low enough in the modern era that practically anybody should be able to experience it.
My only gripe is that online randos seem not to understand the meditation achievement, and get antsy when you try to entice them to sit there with you until the achievement pops. And since you can’t type at them you can’t communicate to them what’s going on.
I got the trophy on PS3 back in the day but I haven’t successfully wrangled anybody into helping me get the Steam achievement for that yet…
Historically a masterpiece has been a (or the) work that demonstrates an artist is capable of utilizing their medium to its fullest extent, i.e. it has been mastered. Per ye olde Wiki:
Historically, a “masterpiece” was a work of a very high standard produced by an apprentice to obtain full membership, as a “master”, of a guild or academy in various areas of the visual arts and crafts.
In that light, I’d say the best qualified would be games that completely utilized the capabilities of the platform they were designed for or, perhaps of interest to more people, expanded what everyone thought could be done with those systems. Games which were furthermore well polished and complete, and did not have much room for improvement taking into account the constraints they had to work with at the time. (For instance: No duh we could make Mario 64 run at a higher framerate and have better textures to look nicer on hardware now. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t arguably a masterpiece of its time, on the system it was on.) This doesn’t just have to be technical stuff – It could be the way the game used storytelling, its gameplay mechanics, or anything else.
Bethesda ought to just let the Doom IP go and give it to someone who actually cares.
I will never give a single red cent to Bethesda ever again and I sure as hell ain’t doing it for this. Whatever this is has no business claiming to be a Doom game. They probably would have had slightly better luck if they slapped the veneer of some other IP over it rather than Doom.
IIRC all of the past ones have worked over LAN, including over a private VPN if you so desire. I definitely played pirated copies of 1 and 2 with my mates. I had no real desire to get very deep into 3 because the campaign storyline was so stupid, but I don’t doubt you could.
It’s only online matchmaking with randos that you’ll be blocked from, which if you ask me is not really that much of a detriment.
I kind of get the thing about the map even without seeing the world design of the new game, because even Borderlands 1-3 (especially 3) already had a lot of vertical aspects to many of their maps. The prevalence of paths looping over other paths, hills, tunnels, holes, inexplicably impassable ditches dividing the map, and generally the entire path to anywhere being designed like the queue at an amusement park ride made using the 2D minimap to actually navigate anywhere basically impossible. (And the main full screen map wasn’t much better.) Showing your local terrain, such as it even did, was not really very helpful because even if you tried to use it to proceed in a straight line to your target you would inevitably find yourself blocked by an invisible wall surrounding waist high pile of rubble, and that the actual way to get there required looping all the way around the map anticlockwise, with nine switchbacks, four gates, and a one-way cliff jump in between.
At the end of the day it’s a fancy radar only useful to help you snout out nearby enemies, especially in the ever-so-many instances where your current mission objective outright requires you to find where each and every one of those stupid red diamonds is hiding so you can murder them all to proceed.
So I hope there is at least still a local enemy radar. They need to either make their map usable and 3D (like e.g. Doom 2016 did) or fix their level pathing so it’s not like a tornado just tore through the spaghetti factory.
I sort of get it, but also “Half Life game ends with G Man time-freeze BS and a random abrupt cliffhanger that will not be resolved for years, if ever” isn’t exactly an unexpected outcome for anyone who’s interested in Half Life.
You may as well just watch a Youtube LP of Alyx anyway, since I imagine the majority of players do not have the equipment to play it themselves.