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.

I feel this is true about much of what you see online currently. Videos that could have been an short how-to, articles that contain mostly AI generated filler. Also, if you want support on that you better join our discord.

I have genuine gratitude to people who share their in depth knowledge online using old fashion HTML.

Nah, I have nothing to do with this, only a happy gamer.

I was lazy and just copy/pasted the Steam page blurb.

TIL. Thank you.

You maybe high, but you are right nonetheless.

“Oh. It’s you.”

Such a loveable heap of junk.

And you get two great soundtracks in the deal. I’d call that a triumph.

I’m still playing Doom, the original!

Gimme!

Honest question: if the story doesn’t matter that much to you, what do you value in a game?

If it is clear that the topic is Impressionist art, I would not go. If I buy the ticket to see Expressionism and get Impressionism instead, I would fell upset.

(Actually, I’d go either way, I love art)

Regarding difficulty: I’ve lived through the 80’s, where difficulty was ramped up to make the game last longer, as you only had precious few kilobytes to fill with content. I’ve grown to hate difficult games.

It is your right as creator to go that way if you wish, but it is my right as player to hate your guts if I buy your game and it kills me over and over again in the first minutes.

One factor they don’t seem to consider is that they are competing for a finite resource: consumer attention.

There has never been so much content to consume: not only games, movies, series, music, books, podcasts, and even old games.

New games have to compete with and stand above all that content to justify the price.

As others have said, purchase power is down, people subscribe to more services (net, mobile, streaming music and video), all that bites into the available budget to buy games.

Bottom line: it’s getting hard to justify spending that amount on a game you don’t have time to play.

Only nerds and dweebs and losers play single player games.

Some people actively avoid multiplayer games to avoid obnoxious, entitled kids.

Thank you, I’ll give it another try.

I stopped playing because it is a bit too hard for me. I keep getting killed by spiders. Maybe I’ll give it another go.

I was very happy with The Print Shop. You could print huge signs and banners by stitching smaller pages together. Fun times.

To me it is the inverse of socializing. It’s an escape to a world where I don’t have to deal with people.

Faraway 1, 2 and 3.

Really chill first person puzzle game.

There was the Homebrew Channel back then, but it seemed to have gone offline. I assumed people just lost interest and moved on.

Based on what you said I did a quick search and found that there’s still an active community around the console, so thank you!

I’m updating my Homebrew Browser to see what’s new.