I saw the trailer. I’m down for some sword fighting, horse riding, dragon riding. What throws me off is the train. Why is there a train there?

Dishonored.

I’m having a lot of fun sneaking around.

Dishonored.

I’m having a lot of fun sneaking around.

You’re clearly upset with the leadership of your country. How does piracy change anything?

When you live in society, you should obey the laws OR fight to change them. Pirating stuff is a weak form of protest.

1. There’s always a risk, especially with such a desirable bait. If you have no problem with having your system be part of a botnet (or worse), go right ahead.
2. I care. When you are responsible for other people, getting hit with a large fine or jail time is not an option.
3. Part of the price goes to the developers. Not as much as in indies, but that’s life. That does not justify pirating stuff.
4. At least we agree on something.

Not my cup of tea, for a number of reasons:

1. from a security standpoint, I would have a very high probability of downloading something nasty;
2. from a legal standpoint, authorities frown upon such behaviour;
3. from a moral standpoint, people who produce games should be payed;
4. from a personal standpoint, I don’t like any of their games.

Everytime this dirt bag speaks, I wish I had more Epic accounts to cancel.

I do hope there’s a special place in hell for people like this, where they are spanked for all eternity with a soup spoon.

Same, fun but crashed a lot.

A prompt driven etch-a-sketch would actually be awesome, and I think it could be built with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and a couple of stepper motors, so pretty cheap.

You never forget your first successful docking procedure.

Elite - a huge 3D vector universe to explore.

Tetris - adictiveness distilled.

Driller - oh wow, filled 3D graphics on a 3.5MHz 8 bit micro?

Wolfenstein 3D - shooting nazis is fun.

Doom - incredible, improved graphics and more fun.

Quake - full 3D now, but not as fun as Doom.

Half-Life - oh yeah, now we’re talking. Great storytelling and gripping fun.

Portal - fun, engaging and funny.

Bioshock Infinite - I guess I enjoy riding the skylines.

Torchlight - There’s something cozy about those dungeons, I dunno.

Skyrim - how did I lose 900 hours of my life?

Seconded. This is what I value in a game. You can do great storytelling and/or addictive gameplay with low poly, low res, low color palette.

In fact, I’d argue that hardware limitations sharpen creativity.

Thanks, I’ll give it another try.

Alright, if you promise me highways and zip lines I’ll give it another shot.

I’ve played more hours of Doom and Doom II (plus lots of mods) than I care to admit. None of the recent versions grab me like the originals. They are simple and fun, can be hard and devious.

Doom 3 is to dark with horror and jumpscares. Not fun. Doom 2016 forces you to melee and glory kill. I’d like to choose how I play. Not fun.

Death Stranding. Felt like controlling a drunk Uber Eats pizza delivery guy with a bottled foetus. Can’t see the point.

Same here. Some of my favorite games have silent characters (Half-Life, Skyrim). Some have speaking characters (Serious Sam, Duke Nukem, Max Payne). But Geralt is just annoying.

You missed the memo. Windows is now the Linux gaming subsystem.

Resistance is futile.

Half-Life 3.

I’m still waiting, Gabe. No pressure. You do your thing.

I think of this practice as a tax on herds.

You want to belong in a trendy group, you board the hype train and pay the tax to belong in the herd.

It’s not hard. I loathe hard games, we used to have them in the 80s because, well, how much can you pack in 48 kilobytes? You had to kill the player over and over to get longer engagement time.

Nowadays, with the amount of storage we have available, it makes no sense to make the game hard unless you are targeting the masochisticcompetitive crowd. You can use it to tell a good story, or pull the player into an immersive reality.

It depends on your tastes in games, of course. It’s quite linear, it’s got some puzzle element, some boss fighting, but what it makes it good is the storytelling. Good characters, lovely scenarios, compelling writing.

Feels a bit like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, or the Amnesia series: there’s a story there, and some gaming elements thrown in to keep you going. I’m quite liking it, I want to know what happens next.

A Plague Tale, Alien Breed, Hellslave. Quite the mix, huh?

I always know it’s Halo when I look at the screenshot and take a moment to understand what the hell is supposed to be pictured.

Don’t follow me for advice, I know nothing about this stuff other than “line is down - buy, line is high - sell”

Good. Time to buy.

When you can’t compete, sue.

I can get immersed in incredibly simple games, like Baba Is You. I have simple rules to follow and a world that conforms to those rules. I can tune out reality and immerse fully in the game.

The main thing is that I don’t need hi-res realistic 120 fps graphics for this to work, I don’t know if this is because the way my brain is wired or because I was raised in the 8 bit era and imagination was a significant part of that immersion.

I bought the collection a few years ago and played nearly all the titles.

There’s something about these games that makes them feel “off” for me and I can’t quite put my finger on it.

I mean, there’s guns and aliens to shoot, huge buildings and large terrains to cross with cool vehicles. Yet, it never clicked with me. It feels like the games have no soul.

It’s a weird feeling that I could never explain properly.

Yes, everything you like about the original is there. The storytelling, the philosophical undertones, the brain wracking puzzles. Except that everything is way larger, with much to explore, new gadgets to master and characters to interact. They dropped some of the stuff that annoyed me in the original, like the machine guns and mines.

The puzzle difficulty is spot on, so if you played the through the original you’ll find the first puzzles easy but then they ramp up.

I’ve finished the main story and now I’m going back to get the 100% stars, as one does. I’m sure I’ll buy the DLC for this one as well, as I did for the original. Its is that good.

Soma may be my favorite Frictional game, even though I played nearly all the Amnesia series.

I think I’ll install it again after I’m done with Talos Principle II.

I’m finally playing The Talos Principle II. It has been in my waiting list for a long time. I’m a big fan of the original and I’m currently hooked on the sequel. It has everything I love about the first one, only in a much larger scale. The storytelling is spot on, the puzzle difficulty is tweaked to make it easy for beginners to get the hang of things but gets quite challenging later on even for hardened players. There’s lots of new artifacts and mechanics to learn and some of the old classics like the laser connectors.

If you loved Portal and Portal II, this is for you.

Started playing Amnesia: rebirth.

Kept me hooked for way longer than I planned for the day.

Bingo.

Right there with you.

Mark it up as an advantage of getting old. You get to sit and eat popcorn while people debate issues you’ve already debated.

I still want to buy one, mind you.

I have the opposite opinion. I avoided it for years because of the hype (and not having proper hardware to run it).

Now I have almost 900 hours in it, and sometimes I jump in just to walk around and revisit some places.

Portal and Portal 2 are packed with passive aggressive remarks. One of my favorites:

Well done. Here are the test results: You are a horrible person. I’m serious, that’s what it says: “A horrible person.” We weren’t even testing for that. Don’t let that horrible-person thing discourage you. It’s just a data point. If it makes you feel any better, science has now validated your birth mother’s decision to abandon you on a doorstep.