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.

Instructions unclear.

Locked it behind a Discord community instead. 🤡

I’m not sure what the intent was, but the message we took was “children ruin everything”

The kid looked creepy as fuck too.

It’s not a single player game. Or did you mean Forza?

Although if you’re offline you won’t be able to make an account anyway.

Exactly. You’d have a blurb, a barcode, and some screenshots from a better looking platform than the one you had.

Sounds about right. Needing an account for third party crossplay is nothing new.

This is the back of the Split Fiction box warning about needing an EA account and a billion other things.

Gravity Gun.

Consoles are only “concurrent” when somebody is actively gaming on them, while my PC is active all day long and I might not game on it at all.

Steam (and presumably however MS count Windows gamers) will always lead on that particular metric.

Mario Bros.

Literally every gamer has played it or a game like it. Even non gamers recognise it. It’s copied and iterated on to this day.

It certainly wasn’t the first 2D platformer, but it’s success made everyone else go “that’s what we’re making now”

Depends on your hardware. I ran the benchmark tool for a laugh. I don’t think I quite meet minimum spec, but not far off I think. If you’re down that end, I’d avoid it.

https://i.imgur.com/JR1YNxE.jpeg

Lots of upscaling and frame generation options, which honestly make it look shite.

Guess we’re never getting that remaster of No One Lives Forever, huh…

There’s been a handful but nothing I could name off the top of my head and the specs meant anything more impressive than Super Meat Boy might be out of the question.

Just cheap crappy Windows 8 tablets for the most part, with controller buttons tacked on.

Making gamers pick one or the other is peak baiting, and I’m here for the inevitable fury from people who think Elon Musk is a genius.

It’s apparently pretty rough and “doesn’t represent final game quality”, so get ready for the day one patch to fix exactly none of the issues in this build, and instead just ram a bunch of pointless funbucks in there instead.

I’m not sure I’ve had a single console game where that’s the case. Everything has multiple GBs to install from disc.

Closest is the Spyro Trilogy that only had the first of the games on the disc. But what else do you expect from Activision…

Ban the games that make them enormous sums of money?

One of the ones listed is Call of Duty. Valve is not turning down 30% of that pie.

In any case, I suspect it’s now here to stay, certainly in limited amounts. You can either pay somebody to create all those assets in house, make them with AI, or outsource to a third party (who will almost certainly do it with AI).

I figure it eventually ends up like CGI or make-up. You can do it well and check it and nobody really notices it, or you do it badly and then your protagonist has a variable number of fingers in cutscenes.

The PEGI management board is people that publish games, people that make consoles and trade organisations.

None of whom want to see sales go down.

They’re behind the bonkers decision that representations of gambling are worse than actual gambling.

PEGI mainly exists to save publishers bothering with each country’s classifications boards. Before that you’d have like BBFC in the UK, and each country having to rate it. It’s industry self regulation, and like any good fox guarding the henhouse, they’re not doing a great job of it.

And that was the last time anybody disclosed their AI content generation…

The publishers own PEGI.

Whatever rating they want, they get.

Who cares what teens want?

They don’t have any money.

Every single Amazon product is a half-arsed mess off things that barely function. They’re basically just a delivery company that charges a percentage of the package value now.

Oh there wouldn’t need to be anything actually good on it.

You just need Superbowl advert money and suddenly you’ve got millions of users with no money.

I suspect the only reason this hasn’t happened already is that those millions of users are already on mobile, being flashed with garish noisy adverts every two minutes of gameplay, and moving them to PC some of the time wouldn’t really increase ad revenue…

Well you can prevent it on Steam. And I don’t think Epic really have an ad network to abuse for this either.

If you see Google launch a “free game only” store for PC, get worried. Although Google being Google, it will be deleted within two years anyway.

Mate, they practically invented them.

A good move. Nip that shit in the bud right now.

The mobile stores are fucking unusable, a sea of ad-ridden garbage.

“if someone’s going to scalp it might as well be us” seems to have been the GPU mantra since the 20x0 series.

Sounds like a fancy version of The Settlers.

Wait. The last levels are on some timed release bullshit. It launched as like half a game.

It’s barely a game anyway.

Very rare to see 30fps games on PS5 that don’t have a performance option to get to 60.

Especially action games.

These fakes have been going for years and were just scams, nothing to do with bots.

A classic back in the day was an Xbox box.

Honestly still is. Best FPS since HL2. Love the cutting tool.

I’m on PS5 so that’ll have to wait until some point this spring.

Sega have always been a few steps behind the curve.

Last I heard they were going to do their own subscription service, which is an iffy thing for most publishers, but borders on being absolutely fucking mental for Sega to try it.

I do all my gaming through Remote Procedure Calls.

Maybe don’t insist your daughters dress like that then…

Be like the guy who designed Lara Croft, who left the company when they made all the marketing for the game all “phwoar, look at that eh, fellas!”

You can’t just have principles when it suits you.

You could. But realistically how many have?