There is a section in this video where he talks about game elements he thinks are “bullshit” and I don’t know if I agree about any of them. But I will also admit that playing NetHack at an early age, where

You fall into a spiked pit! The spikes were poisoned! The poison was deadly! You have died. Do you want your possessions identified?

was a completely normal and expected way to lose a run, may have warped my sense of what counts as a fair game mechanic. ^_^;;

What’s unfair about getting booped into spikes? That’s a classic video game death!

It’s a very faithful remake of MGS3. You can play with classic controls or modern controls.

If you play with the classic controls, it’s basically the same game, plus a few new collectibles. The new controls come with a modern camera system and some balance changes to accommodate the increased player freedom (the tranq gun has bullet drop in this mode, for example). You can change between control modes during the game, but doing so will reload your last checkpoint.

So it’s good, because MGS3 was good, but it’s not $80 good. And like the article says, at $80 for what is mostly a graphical upgrade you would expect to get all the bells and whistles… but some of them are conspicuously missing.

He absolutely would have sold your data if there were any buyers for it. Microsoft was still a terrible company in the Clippy era, there just were fewer opportunities to be terrible in this particular way at the time.

These lists of red flags make me feel like I must be a replicant. I wrote a comment just like that one, em dash and all, on a different site just the other day, with my own organic brain!

My first instinct was to use an em dash instead of that last comma, but it seemed too on the nose.

Oh cool, I guess I just didn’t see it!

With regard to vehicle combat, I find it very strange that the very first NPC we meet has a man-portable surface-to-air missile launcher, but there don’t seem to be any anti-vehicular weapons that players can use.

Or at least I think there aren’t; I’m not nearly as far as you are, but I looked ahead in the research tab and didn’t see any.

The videogamey parts are really funny to me. I laughed my ass off when I saw Thufir Hawat standing around in the heat outside the Leto residence in Arrakeen because I guess players have to talk to him at some point, and the interior of the residence doesn’t exist in the game, so he has to stand around under an awning in the parking lot like a valet or something.

I am about 4-ish resource tiers in out of 7-ish or so, and I don’t feel like it is especially grindy by the standards of survival crafting games. There is obviously some grinding for resources, but there is also a good amount of exploring and doing quests, during which you can pick up a lot of the things you need. Getting through the iron tier was a little bit long because you don’t have access to a large vehicle inventory yet at that point, but I also took that time to reveal a bunch of the map, clear out bandit camps, etc. so it didn’t become too monotonous. There are a good variety of secondary resources that will keep you visiting different kinds of locations (wrecked ships, old mining operations, etc.) so that even if you just want to farm resources, you won’t just be spending all your time running between ore nodes.

If your friends would be playing together, they could also do things more efficiently by sharing bases so that they don’t each have to build their own infrastructure, and eventually you get access to a mining buggy that is faster to operate with two players (a solo player has to switch between the driver and mining laser seats).

The kids are alright.

This is the one where we bully our little brother into going back to the world where he can’t walk, right? :P

Canceled Pride? Well, I canceled my sub!

The first screen is sort of a tutorial, though. If you go right first because you’ve played Super Mario Bros. or some other platformer and you think going right might be the way to win, you’re presented with a narrow passage you can’t crawl through. At this point, you’ll discover that you can also go left. There’s another rock formation with a narrow passage, but from this side you can jump on top of it to get over it, and you’ll find the Morph Ball. From the Morph Ball side, you can’t jump back over, so you have to figure out how to get through the narrow passage by pressing down to enter Morph Ball mode. Now you understand the game: find obstacles, acquire the corresponding upgrades, use them to bypass the obstacles.

IME framegen hasn’t meaningfully reduced the open-world hitching. It gets the framerate nice and smooth while standing still, fighting a bandit or whatever… until you walk a bit and the game becomes CPU-limited while streaming in new cells, at which point you noticeably hitch.

The performance in interior cells (including cities) is very good even on Ultra settings.

I suspect that this is one of the compromises they made by keeping the old engine running under the hood, because as DF notes this also happened in the original.

It’s been a long time, but it’s supposed to be coming out this year.

“If you’re a masochist who enjoys being punished for little to no reward, this game is for you,” reads another negative review.

Hot damn, they made this update just for me? I was holding off checking out POE2 but I guess I should.

What does she mean there was a “generational shift” that led to people burning CDs? Back in the floppy disk days, everyone was copying floppies—I remember when my grandfather bought a Mac to use at home, and immediately his friends at work loaded him up with copied disks. Which generation is she thinking of that wasn’t pirating a ton of software?

The cars make contact so much in this game that it feels like a missed opportunity to not have damage, at least visually. I want to see those cars crumple!

I know it’s typically because of licensing issues, though.

Any% clear!