The problem is that the heavier weapons like the combine rifle are only introduced in the later part of the game from what I remember (I think I stopped somewhere around the antlions last time), where as it seemed like the first half was limited to the crappy weapons, interspersed with some magnum revolver ammo as a treat. By the time I would get access to the good weapons, I’d usually have already lost my enthusiasm to continue. If I had connected more with the story I could look past all that, but since that part just wasn’t engaging with me, the combat needed to carry the experience, which it just wasn’t able to do in my particular case.

I didn’t use the gravity gun as much as standard weapons since most of the objects available to shoot with it are usually quite large which obscured the view of the target (not a problem close up, but mid range and farther I’d have trouble with it), and I found it really janky to use in tighter spaces like hallways or smaller rooms, where the object being held would get caught up on the terrain or doorways.

handrails would also deflect objects shot with it, and a lot of the times when ambushed with a combat encounter, I wasn’t scanning the area for objects to pick up while being shot at, I would just engage immediately and return fire.

It’s a cool gadget, and perhaps others got past the issues I had with using it effectively, but overall I preferred just using a standard weapon, and in that realm the ones that were fun to use had little ammo, leaving me with the very weak pistol and smg, which I didn’t find terribly fun.

As I said, I generally found there wasn’t enough ammo to really use the revolver more than a few times in my experience, hence why I cheated infinite ammo for it.

I don’t have any nostalgia for the half life games as I didn’t play them growing up, but I also don’t think their age is really a contributing factor. Personally I found Half Life 1’s combat to actually be far more fun due to the enemies feeling a little less sponge-y, and the gunplay/guns themselves feeling more punchy and overall just better to me. HL2 I consider a step down.

There are shooters older than HL2 that I would consider to have much better combat, like Blood (1998) or Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001) despite their age. I understand that HL2 was trying quite number of new things, but ultimately my gripes with the combat are mostly down to what I consider to be a poor choice of damage variables in a configuration file, but that’s just in regards to my own preferences for combat in games.

From what I recall, I didn’t really enjoy using the gravity gun all that much since bigger objects had a tendency to clip terrain if they weren’t aimed quite right, and thus miss the enemy I was aiming at, which prompted me to switch back to the other weapons to finish off a gunfight. Admittedly that might’ve been just a me problem, and others had more success using it (I know the sawblades with the gravity gun were quite accurate and easy to use in ravenholm, but I don’t think they show up much after that area).

I felt like most of the game doesn’t really give you enough ammo with the non-standard weapons to really use them outside of one or two bigger fights, then I’d be back down to the smg, pistol, or shotgun (which I also felt was a little under powered unless you used the alt fire, but that chewed through ammo too quickly to be viable most of the time).

As someone who hates open-world ubisoft style games, I’m nevertheless not much of a fan of HL2 either. I tried it multiple times at different points in my life and each time found it to feel like a slog that I end up giving up on a few hours in.

I enjoyed the 1984 aspects of the world at first, but I ultimately can’t get past how bullet spongy enemies are. Virtually every weapon feels extremely impotent except the revolver, which has very limited ammo. I began to dread every encounter with enemies because it rarely felt fun to fight them.

On my last playthrough I cheated and gave myself infinite revolver ammo, which helped me get farther than before, but even then I was struggling to push onward after a certain point, just because it felt like endless waves of enemies being thrown at me with some mildly enjoyable physics puzzles tossed in between them.

Never felt a connection with any of the characters, and without that the gameplay itself just becomes repetitive to me.

I guess I do sorta have the equivalent of a tactical nuke in my back pocket when it comes to low-spec Linux game recommendations 😅

The reviewer concludes it’s not a good sequel, didn’t enjoy most of their time in it. It’s a fairly okay detective game wrapped up in crappy action-brawler combat and a pretty lame open-world.

I assembled a rather large list of free Linux games a few years ago, and most of them are low-spec friendly. Hopefully you find something interesting from it :)

https://lemmy.world/post/14336843

Tyranny (a different RPG by obsidian) puts you in the role of a fairly high ranking judge working for a brutal expanding empire. You have the option to play a really nasty person if you wish. Not terribly funny though, usually quite a serious vibe.

If you’ve been holding off on Cyberpunk 2077, it’s in a really solid state nowadays, and has a pretty dang good main story with lots of roleplaying options, and plays well with a controller.

Terra Nil is a cool relaxing solarpunk strategy/builder game about restoring the environment. Not sure how complete controller support is, but its rated playable for the steam deck (could be hit or miss).

The Mass Effect series supports controller, and they’re pretty fun sci-fi RPG’s with good characters.

Disco Elysium is a more text heavy RPG. I personally bounced off it due to its theme, but it’s pretty unique, worth a shot if you click with it.

I was so surprised how weirdly cast male V was, he always sounded like someone doing a kinda cringy 1930’s mobster impression.

Switched to female V, and it was night and day.

It says on the article it can take SD cards up to 1tb, and according to a reddit comment from someone who daily drives one, it has a removable back panel and battery.

They had agreed to plug stoplillinggames in their newsletter, then pulled out last minute, likely because they were worried it would piss off the publishers who sell on their platform.

Gemini Rue is a great point’n’click with a wonderfully somber and dark atmosphere, and a tremendously good story.

I’d also recommend Night in the Woods, and Sally Face.

The first two Thief games are also very dark (literally), and are some of the finest stealth games ever made, with good stories to boot.

There’s a pretty massive item market for this game to use real money for in-game items, where the seller will meet you in a match and drop the gear. So there’s a big financial incentive for people from third world countries to hack so they can quickly acquire valuable items to sell on that market.

Ah! My bad, it’d been a while since I saw that video.

The cheating problem is off the charts. There was a really good video of someone who investigated how bad it was, and found that about 50% of players were using wallhacks. of matches will have a hacker.

I played it for a couple months. The gunplay was pretty impressive, but the cheaters made it incredibly frustrating, and after seeing that video, I uninstalled and never looked back.

EDIT: The video in question.

I feel the sane way. It had very uninspired, well trodden gameplay (with some aspects quite poorly done) along with a passable story.

The highlight for me was just taking in the scenery in the jungle section, almost felt like virtual tourism. But I was hoping for something more original, since I enjoyed the first wolfenstein game from machine games quite a lot.

Overall I didn’t feel it was worth the price, even on sale.

There are very few dedicated passenger liners left in the world that aren’t luxury travel cruises. The only one I’m aware of that has a US route only goes across the atlantic from NY to the UK.

The only sea based options to get to China from the US would be to try to get passage on a cargo ship going the same way, or charter a small vessel for the voyage, which would likely cost thousands.

It would be nice to tax plane travel heavily, and then subsidize sail travel to make that more viable, along with mandatory consecutive monthly vacation time for all jobs, like the EU has.

It’s mostly underwhelming, IMHO. Pick it up on sale only, if you can. And make sure you have at least 8gb of vram, or it’ll cease working after you get to Italy.

This campaign is not asking to take away IP from devs or publishers, they would still retain it.

Legally speaking, a game sold for a single payment and without clear stipulation of an end of service would be considered a Good under EU law. Tjis means you’re purchasing a perpetual license to your specific copy of the game, but not to the IP or copyright.

Ross, the creator of the SKG campaign, goes into extreme detail on this very topic of goods vs services, and how the game industry is committing fraud by destroying a customer’s ability to access the content their perpetual license allows.

I did build the big ship, but I don’t think I used the planters effectively. I just remember needing to frequently recharge it and repair it.

I also wasn’t a fan, mainly due to how often you need to resupply to stay alive. You get a very small window of opportunity to do actual exploration before you need to go find more food and water, on top of gathering a bunch of other materials.

I liked parts of it, but ultimately just got frustrated with the tedious parts and bailed.

M-discs don’t rot, theoretically they’re one of the best consumer long term storage mediums. I think the practical issue with them on a super long timescale is keeping a functional reader if blurays fall out of fashion.

I didn’t mind the RPG elements of the gunplay either, it was how lame all the guns felt to use even with higher skill levels.

The shotguns take way too many rounds to down people, the smgs are pea shooters, and pistols can work ‘okay’ with headshots, but still just feel meh. I assume the sniper rifle is more effective, but I never used it much.

I wish they had made it to where low skill makes reloading and accuracy suffer greatly, but if you do manage to score a hit, it hits hard. That would make shotguns in the early game super valuable, but they could’ve still encouraged stealth and more thoughtful tactics by limiting ammo availability.

Basically the RPG and story elements combined with Tarkov style gunplay and thief-style stealth would be heaven for me.

I’d be curious of your thoughts on revision, if you ever feel like coming back to this comment section by the time you finish it!

I’ve made multiple attempts to finish Deus Ex over the years after giving up each time due to aspects of the gameplay. I would normally never give a game so many shots, but I love so many aspects of Deus Ex, I want to finish it, but I just can’t push myself to continue at certain points.

I think the biggest blockers for me is I love stealth games (thief 1 & 2 are all time favorites), and since Deus Ex does have a stealth system (though primitive), I tried to play it like a stealth game. a vanilla install means that tranq darts make enemies run around like headless chickens for a minute, and knocking people out with the baton is unreliable. Combined, stealthing is both visually comical, and realistically very frustrating to play.

I could deal with that, and I’ve tried switching it up by going more guns blazing, but the gunplay of Deus Ex is just as clunky, with slow firing weapons that deal little damage on fairly bullet spongy enemies. Combat just doesn’t feel good.

I tried mods and overhauls to see if I could rectify either of those points, which do sorta work as a bandaid. GMDX makes stealth WAY more fun by making headshots with darts work instantly, and baton-ing more reliable. With it, I was able to get all the way to France without quitting, but I think due to GMDX, I hit a massive difficulty spike where my stealth build became much less viable, and it once again just became frustrating. Perhaps a gun-build with GMDX would’ve been the winning combo.

I think my best experience was with the Revision overhaul, but by then I had started the game over so many times over so many years, I just didn’t have the appetite to get all the way back to France.

It’s a truly spectacular game in terms of story and open-ended level design, but the mechanics really are a turn-off. I wish my first playthrough had been with the Revision overhaul (though I wish it didn’t radically change the level design so much), but even still, I think it would benefit from a Nightdive style remake.

I don’t believe it, or rather, I think Warren Spector and Ricardo Bare really didn’t intend for it to be political, as both of them were far more focused on the game parts of Deus Ex; the mechanics, the balancing, the level design, etc, and are seemingly oblivious to how the writers took those puzzle pieces and made it political. Though the extent that Spector is completely unaware of that fact seems unlikely, and instead he almost appears to be whitewashing what the writers intended? Based on his stance that only movies and books can be political (which is a wild take, since games actually seem the most ripe medium for that), he may be trying to frame Deus Ex as A-political because of that.

It’s very odd that this article didn’t interview the lead writer of Deus Ex, Sheldon Pacotti, for an article about the politics of the game. Sheldon absolutely intended for it to be political, and in an old interview even goes into how capital is used to exploit and suppress the working class, which is what leads to radical terrorist groups, such as the NSF. He mentions in the first part of that interview series how the designers would create the levels without any concept for a story (citing the blown up statue of liberty as an example, which the level designer just thought would be an arresting sight to the player, but didn’t consider how it would tie into a wider narrative).

I think Ross’s Game Dungeon on Deus Ex really shows how Pacotti was able to make Deus Ex realistically political by tackling real societal problems that we all now face, and very few games dare touch, which continues to set it apart it decades later.

Also @[email protected] & @[email protected]

It gathered 160k signatutes in 3 days thanks to all the new press, hopefully we can keep up the momentum.

Pretty sure it’s just EU citizens. If you can’t vote in elections there, you probably can’t sign this.

Yes! They’ll also be plugging it on their main channel soon.

Helping spread the word is still an option, and would be greatly appreciated! :D

Sorry to hear that they were so nasty. :(

I think it’s been very hard for us to spread awareness into countries where a majority don’t also speak English, as the organizer and much of the coverage is only in English.

If you know of any big Italian gaming YouTubers or streamers that might be receptive to helping or talking about the campaign, could you reach out to them about it with a comment?

Thank you for your help! :D

No worries, I’ll edit it to try to make it more clear.

Just to clarify, this isn’t a normal toothless petition, this is an official EU mechanism that allows citizens to bring problems to the attention of the European Commission, and force them to pass judgement on it legally. You can read more about it here.

It’s good to be skeptical of anything asking for that personal info, but I’d suggest researching into it to confirm that it is indeed legit.

Thank you for signing the UK one :)

Already included at the bottom of the text body of the post (though it’s to the StopKillingGames page on it, I’ll swap it to the direct link)

Thank you so much for contributing! :D

Absolute legend.

I suspect they would’ve brushed it off regardless, they didn’t want to deal with it. There’s another 100k UK petition (The one linked to at the bottom of the OP text) that would force them to re-look at it with more depth which is also ending quite soon.