If the bandit had a wedding ring in their inventory, that’s no indication that they are the original owner. You have good odds of avenging the death of whoever they took it off of.
Desert Bus was released as a protest game. In the 90s video games were demonized for being nothing more than violence simulators. Penn & Teller took that as a challenge and had some developers make the most non-violent game they could think of.
Probably Duke Nukem 3D, introduced by way of my uncle’s at the time high end computer.
I’d seen arcade games and things, but an actual interactive 3D world I could walk around in was wild. It was also a much bloodier and more “adult” game than anything I’d seen before.
Later that year, 1997, I got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas along with Goldeneye and StarFox64. Those two games became mainstays for me at home.
Abrams writes mystery box stories where everything hinges on resolving the box and ends up with an ultimately lackluster resolution.
Kojima stories are confusing webs within webs throughout. They exist on theme and vibe, while being simultaneously incredibly well researched, intentionally absurd, and with ill advised choices that surely mean something when they were made.
Good video, although the “polymer melts causing inaccuracy” bit is still disputed. As far as I know in the German military lawsuit against HK, there was no testing provided showing that, and HK provided the initial adoption results and standards in its defense.
The melting is essentially a supposition that has been treated as fact.
I’ve found that mods like iHUD, removing the cash register sound for XP, directional pipboy light, flashlights, darker nights, and storms (these can be set to be just visual rather that radiation inducing) all help make the game more immersive without dramatically changing the difficulty.
I do enjoy the health rebalancer which removes scaling health and instead makes some enemies baseline tougher and some weaker. IIRC it also makes headshots on humans instant death. No more blasting away at some scaled raider as they just keep attacking.
Recostuming the Minute Men in something closer to surplus military clothes makes them instantly less lame.
Also replacing all the pipe guns with weapon packs of real world handguns and machinepistols is for me nessesary, as I do not at all enjoy the FO4 pipegun designs.
Finally, the backyard bunkers mod allows a bomb shelter with a hatch you can place inside a settlement. Going inside moves you to a private space. NPCs won’t barge in and it’s a safe place to store extra gear.
We’ve also reached a point where the novelty of ultra realism has worn off. People expect certain AAA games to look realistic, but nobody is wowed by it anymore.
(Anecdote time: Personally the last time I was wowed by realistic graphics was Battlefield 3. The Frostbite 2 engine was a noticeable and impressive step up, but ever since then I haven’t felt a sense of visceral awe even if I know graphics keep getting better).
In my mind the graphics themselves barely matter as much as aspect ratio, controls (for some genres), and stability on modern hardware when it comes to judging if a game is “hopeless outdated”.
Since this comment chain started with Half-Life, I admit there’s no way around it looking dated, but it doesn’t hurt my eyes or confuse me as some really old games do (Goldeneye 64 sadly falls into this category). I understand what the game is showing me, and the gameplay, art direction, and tone hold it up for me.
The late 90s and early 2000s were a time of rapid increases in game graphics.
We went from DOOM in 1993 with sprite enemies, abstract textures, and technical limits like not even being able to have second story rooms on top of each other to Half Life in 1998 with full 3D characters and objects, physics, and much higher resolution textures.
Jumps in graphics back then could be huge. As graphics get better though, improvements on them become diminishing returns. It stops being going from 2D to 3D or going from block head models with textures pasted on to modeled faces, and starts becoming things like subcutaneous light scattering. Things will keep looking better and better but we’ve long ago hit a baseline with graphics.
Mass Effect was made on Unreal 3. While we are currently on Unreal 5, there have been lots of games released in the intervening years that either used Unreal 3 or a modified version of it.