Truly one of the best games ever, especially in the context of when it came out. Perfect timing of the well-executed slowmo gunplay mechanics right as the matrix popularized bullet time. Story and storytelling way better than they had any right to be. Really good pacing and length. Acts broken up by genre-bending dream sequences. Great voice acting.
I think the graphics might have been the only thing about this game that wasn’t ahead of its time. They still got the job done though.
Hopefully this game gets a remake as faithful as Demons’s Souls.
“I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding 😎”
Indie games are kind of this, but it’s hard to make the “paid more” work consistently at scale. Largely because there’s a shitload of people making really good indie games and I can only play so many of them.
and the funny thing is that these games launch in such a bad state because the publisher paid for the marketing push to happen on a specific date, so come hell or high water, the game is gonna ship by that date
don’t get me wrong, deadlines are extemely important or your project will just end up with infinite scope creep, but games are a massive artistic and technical endeavour, which are two things that can be extremely difficult to estimate
there’s gotta be a better way
The game has a ton of subtle mechanics that it doesn’t really go out of its way to tell you about. So there’s a degree of mastery and cross-polination of strategy and builds that take advantage of those mechanics between groups, which adds a lot of fun for me. I respect how that’s not for everyone though.
Although I have my grievences with Valve for other reasons I do have to commend them for their efforts to make linux a way more viable gaming platform than I ever could have imagined. I think a full 2/3rds of my steam library is playable on linux, which is pretty good considering that’s not something I considered when buying them.
even if the games suck they can still be an important social connection
my parents never let me watch any of the “bad” tv that all the other kids were watching and this made it even harder for me to connect and make friends
and it also meant I never got the opportunity to decide to understand and experience for myself why these shows were bad
same can probably be said for the shitty mobile games tbh
maybe they’re more predatory than all that advertising directed at kids via tv back in my day but idk by how much really if you’re actively teaching your kids about what predatory practices look like
they have to learn, better for them to understand how to fight this stuff when they’re younger rather than when they get in over their heads gambling on counterstrike skins as teenagers