PhobosAnomaly
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Perhaps it’s because I grew up with adventure puzzle games and point’n’click games, but GameFAQs was always the nuclear option for me.
I much preferred the Universal Hint System - an approach more suited to nudging you towards figuring out the answer for yourself.
There’s no denying that it was (and is) a fantastic resource though. Hell, I’ve even written a guide myself. One of the last bastions of the 90s and 2000s WWW experience.
In fairness, they had some graphics options in where you could manually set the draw distance - and thus, the tradeoff for frame rate - on a slider. Fortunately, the targeting button worked even when the draw distance was set super close and enemies were culled by the engine, so with a change of play style one could enjoy the game at a sensible pace.
I still remember mission 9 though - collecting the bombs and dropping them safely elsewhere. That was infuriating.
There’s been a pivot away from “classic” speedruns games over the last few years - I get that Doom or Sonic 2 or Goldeneye or other 90s games aren’t guaranteed a place every year, but it seems like the games that kicked off the speedrun scene are often overlooked these days.
That said, there is Quake, and there is SMB3 where I dont know who the runner is but that couch is a banger.
I was looking forward to seeing Still Wakes The Deep runs, but I find them really… unexciting, I think is the sentiment. Like the 2016 Doom onwards, the runs are technically outstanding, but there’s a lot of walking on invisible geometry with collision detection, or random tricks like railboosting in Doom that seems to break a game. I get that that is an entirely subjective opinion though, maybe I’m more suited to No Major Glitches runs!
Mouse look was revolutionary.
I tried to play Half-Life Uplink with the right directions of looking mapped to 789, 4 and 6, 123. It wasn’t very intuitive.
That said, I played Quake 1 with lookup and lookdown bound to PgUp and PgDown, and Quake II on PlayStation with lookup and lookdown mapped to L1 and R1.
Looking back, that was a wild few years.
It used to be the first thing you checked on 56k.
Hold tab for the score and stats, see if your pingtime was under 350, and crack on.
There was a certain art to playing as an HPB, especially when ISDN or leased lines were the domain of the rich and famous… and students.
These days, it seems that anything over 30 is… suboptimal, and only single digit pingtimes are good enough for competitive non-LAN play.
That said, before multiplayer was centralised, you checked the server pingtime before joining the server. Private servers seem to be a dying breed now.
Eurogamer as a website is just stuck in a tailspin now. I used to really like the site but now it’s in resale hell - thrown like a rugby ball to conglomerate after conglomerate where the only noticeable difference is more adverts on screen, and more pieces based on Twitter posts masquerading as journalism.
Thankfully, spinoffs like as Digital Foundry are still doing very very well and largely immune to whatever the fuck is going on at EG.
I don’t even know where to look for decent gaming news now if I’m honest.
Game Pass is cool and all, but the rebrands and weird omissions make it a bit of a shambles.
I still have an Xbox One, but I’ve got a chonky internet connection (at least for my area) and Cloud Gaming is a fantastic bit of kit. I was tempted to buy a cheap one-month Game Pass code and play this Black Ops 6 campaign and another game or two… but this isn’t on the Cloud Gaming service.
It’s shit like this that makes the high seas a far more attractive option. I know not every game is Cloud Gaming enabled, but one would expect that certainly all the Game Pass titles would be included.
Oh well, I just won’t play it I suppose, I’m sure I’ll find something else to do with those five or six hours!
I bought a second generation of Rift (no idea what model it was, but it was the second retail one, not including the CV1 or whatever dev build it was) - and it was fantastic. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
The moment they forced the use of a Facebook account, it stopped getting used. The visor, controllers, and sensors have been sat in a cupboard for a year or two.
I really should see if it has been jailbroken, or if there’s a way to utilise the Rift features without any Meta bollocks.
Patience is the key - I hate Denuvo, you (probably) hate Denuvo, and most devs hate Denuvo… once the magic first week or two are done, the new trend seems to be devs patching out Denuvo once their release sales have peaked so fingers crossed this will continue.
A cheaper, patched, DRM-less game a few months behind release. Winner.
or , none of the cities were equipped, trained, or willing to deal with the additional security risks or associated public order issues that it causes - so rather than cancel the game, it got moved to a neutral venue?
I’ve heard some stupid shit in my time, but moving an international game that benefits Israel by removing the home advantage and then calling it “anti-Semitic” is pretty entertaining.
I dunno man. I quite enjoy watching documentaries on how the bangbang sticks go bang, and how engineers overcame technical challenges.
I’m not a huge fan of Gravy Seals videos of people doing weird cover to cover movement and blatting off rounds at targets, but each to their own.
I guess I think there’s bigger problems faced by YouTube and this should be pretty far down the list.
I’m on the same page as you, I’m quite worried for it though.
I’ve been looking forward to it for years - I didn’t even know there was a demo, there’s been nothing in the way if hype being built for the game, and when the release date trailer came out I was caught well off guard - I thought it would be a longer run-up to launch.
I hope this low-key launch doesn’t hurt sales and fuck the developers over.
I’ve been following this for years and I’m super stoked that it has a date… and it’s within a month!
Annoyingly it clashes with my end-of-year studies, but maybe I’ll leave it for a few weeks. I picked up South of the Circle on day one and it had some bugs and glitches that took the shine off the experience, even though that was brilliant too.
Harold Halibut and Still Wakes The Deep are top of my summer list this year.
I can’t remember the last time a review embargo was placed on a game, or when major outlets didn’t get review code - and the game turned out to be okay.
It’s a tale as old as time, and particularly egregious this time round with the late-notice addition of Denuvo.
I mean, die hard fans won’t mind either way and good on them, I hope they enjoy it - but for others who pre-ordered the game, I suppose you’re only getting what you deserve.
Not sure what brings back more nostalgia in that picture to be honest. The feeling of the vastness of a game that had no right to feel so big given it’s constraints, or the GLC’s lyric “I made love to a BBC Micro”.
Right then, c’mon Wales, let’s go to Germa…
…actually, maybe let’s not bother!
Fair play to M Lechat, that is some pragmatism and understanding in the world that I would sorely be lacking. I feel sorry for the guy. I hope he comes up with a banger soon and the planets align for him.
I’m not sure if the Steam Machines announcement helped or hindered him. Yes, it sunk the chances of mass visibility on the storefront… but then I’m assuming there’d be a vastly increased number of folk logging in to Steam to see the Steam Machines news, and exposed Planet Centauri to more views by the law of averages.