As awesome as that is, I’d be excited for FF2. Much like Silent Hill, I think the sequel is where the series was at its best.

Good news is, in this case it seems like FF1/2 weren’t too far apart in basic engine/apperance.

Ichiban walks into the Abandoned Replacement Protagonists bar, and sits down despondently alongside Apollo Justice, Raiden, and Nero.

It’s saddest that this is a repeating pattern. We get a great sequel where the beloved protagonist gives a sendoff like “This is the new generation’s story now”. And then the next game is a remake of one of their past games.

I’ve found the same thing with survival games camera controls. The originals were made with odd camera angles in mind for scenic purposes for better or worse. Tank controls mean that your direction doesn’t change when the camera suddenly shifts.

Fatal Frame had a median scheme that was tricky to work out but useful. You move relative to the camera. If the camera changed, but you didn’t change your thumbstick direction past a few degrees, your character would keep moving in a straight line.

I’m still sad this is my one game that doesn’t run well on Proton. With development winding down, I can only hope for some modder to work out what the occasional slowdowns are.

ChatGPT, generate for me a press release that will excuse the firing of another 10,000 employees.

There’s a gacha I have a lot of fun with, thanks to some very detailed animation work and visuals, but I haven’t spent a penny on it and don’t intend to. You really do have to be acutely aware of every effort to get you to spend, and how much those efforts can inflate. Gambling fallacies, sudden power creep, etc.

I’m going to guess that decision was based on the failures of the recent 2.5D PoP games, which were well reviewed but barely advertised (and oft compared to indie games)

I appreciate that the other games, even if they’re 90% power fantasy, retain a tiny bit of that nihilism in the story of each game.

3: Jason becomes totally disconnected from society and almost feels like he can’t come back from the killing. 4: Help the rebels, and they become despots just like Pagan Min. Give up on the rebellion at the beginning of the game, and even Min admits he’s tired of the cycle. 5 I won’t even spoil, definitely a bit less of an artistic message even if it’s a huge twist.

I mean, Kleiner saying “I had expected more warning!” is a sort of mixed surprise. If he’s been gone for 20+ years, the natural reaction I might expect is “What…? That’s impossible! We all thought you were dead! Or lost in Xen forever!” Heck, even Kleiner’s reaction to the “slow teleport” you and Alyx take late in the game is much grander. “I had…given up hope of ever seeing you again!!”

That feels like a bit of a hate train on SOMA that’s not really relevant. We often dislike character idiocy, especially when it’s our player. But speaking protagonists can be done well - Dead Space 2 made the move, and even ported it back when they finally did a DS1 remake.

Perhaps the only major issue with using environmental storytelling to give City 17’s base exposition is that the game is both a sequel, and intended as an entry point. I remember as a kid playing HL2 (with very little knowledge of HL1) and as soon as I saw the aliens in gas masks corralling everyone, really wondered what sort of story I missed in the first one. Leaving people to figure things out is definitely cool, I’m just offering ways to point out clearly that you, the player, didn’t miss anything key, because in today’s media deluge, often the reason for that feeling is because a story is slapdash and poorly written - as opposed to simply hiding the details in plain sight for the player to find.

Interestingly, there are some notes in an art book where the G-Man originally gave a longer opening speech to explain what’s happened in your absence, but they removed it. Overall it was probably the right move, but I’m curious how it would have felt.

It tends not to give you enough to last an entire fight with the ammo you have on hand, but usually if you’re pushed into an arena, it will have ammo and health laying around - and not the light stuff, either. The game was coming from a Doom 3 era when ammo searching was not just a known habit, but could be done during a fight to keep you moving, so it’s perhaps an implied assumption they made from the time. But, teaching players anything while they’re under fire is going to be a very uphill battle I suppose.

Autocorrect has been extremely vicious today about anything that’s not in a 20-year-old dictionary.

I’m ambivalent on it, but definitely not negative. I hate that everyone watching big game shows is hoping to see “Ratchet & Kratos 7” or “Dark Lore 5” or “Metal Gear Sonic 11”. Especially since, as you know, every decent mid level game developer these days has been fired at least once by morons with MBAs, and so the industry must make new IPs from the scattered devs.

Its art doesn’t speak for itself, I think on multiplayer it usually doesn’t. We’ll have to see how it feels later.

I still like its facial animation more than most Danes. They had tools that even set up random NPCs to have full lipsync and expressions for minor lines, without a mocap studio. Most AAA work these days doesn’t have that, or they dedicate such animation to when you’re in a zoomed in view to receive quests.

I will say that even then, it was missing a bit of “acknowledgment”. Kleiner and Alyx don’t even question where you came from or what you should be doing now you’ve suddenly arrived.

Some of that could be as simple as, if Gordon was non-silent, have him wonder questions while wandering C17: “What the…how long have I been gone? What the hell happened to Earth?”

I think the pistol and SMG are intended to feel weak, to push you into other weapons that take more interesting use. For instance, half an SMG clip into a soldier could instead be one launch of a barrel from the gravity gun. Notably, you only see those soldiers after getting the gravity gun.

If you’re referring to the early cops, about half of them are around some tricky environmental kill, like an explosive barrel. But, I’ll grant there are times you’d desperately spend a magazine to land headshots with the pistol. So, I guess you’re not wrong.

Why is news site reporting what the rapist terrorist said? Who gives a flying fuck what threats a felon gives?

Kim Jong Un wants you not to piss in his coffee. You laugh, you don’t give it a fucking headline.

Something I just realized is that this fits exactly with the “Only happens in production” issues many coders run into.

Anyone in the studio would obviously install all the DLC, since they need to test its contents. They’d also run habitual tests without the DLC to verify it’s not necessary, and that it passes basic checks. But, they wouldn’t do that often. Same with how, say, many webapps run internally without the 80 MB of tracking scripts.

I guess this isn’t really even “news” to Linux gamers now, but once in a while it’s nice to make an article about what constant progress has happened in a certain sphere. Certainly many people staying on Windows out of inertia blinked and missed it.

My fervent hope is that, someday in the future, people can build a gaming PC and just forego Windows to save $100.

The one I’m on has a very functional “search and install” app, but I still find myself habitually opening up terminal for installation out of “fastness”. Maybe it’s a poor impulse I should correct.

Probably the biggest thing driving terminal use is opening and configuring system files. You can do that with the file explorer and an elevated text editor, but a lot of guides aiming for conciseness will give you some command to wget a long file online, then insert content into a text file by path in one line.