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I liked 3 and 4 fine, but I loved 5. It had mediocre gameplay, but the story and missions were fun, with a lot of Easter eggs. Especially in multi player coop it was pretty fun.
I absolutely despised 6. It was bland and very broken on release. It also felt like 3 games shoved together that didn’t really fit or interact. I later found it this was because that was exactly what they did. Due to covid the people working on it didn’t really work together and the end result was a total mismatch. The story was very predictable and not worth it, even though they marketed the hell out of it. The side stories were mostly absent and not interesting at all. The game lacked any humor and wasn’t self aware like 5 was. The amounts of crashes and bugs made the game borderline unplayable when it came out. And these weren’t the funny amount of jank I enjoy kind of crashes, these were proper game breaking bugs. There was no enemy variation at all and a lot of copy paste assets. To the point that every checkpoint that needed to be liberated had the exact same layout and enemies, down to the spawn location. The weapons and enemy strength made no sense at all. You’d use a big ass gun upgraded with special armor piercing bullets, shoot a regular dude right in the head and he would just shrug it off and keep going. The AI was also a joke, with enemies not reacting at all to what you did, just milling about and shooting at random. The game would send out special forces, which would promptly give up once you rode down the street. Some random pleb enemy on a corner could however snipe you at 300m somehow. The whole game made absolutely no sense.
The only interesting part was the firework backpack, but even this one fell pretty flat. There was one that was pretty OP, so that’s the one most people used. Which is a shame, because fucking around with different packs could have been interesting. These were also broken on release, where most of the times the rockets would clip into the character model and just explode. So instead of doing damage and helping in a fight, you’d just blow yourself up.
I played a good amount of Far Cry 5, 100% completing it a couple of times. I did the story for Far Cry 6 and some of the side stuff in about 12 hours, then uninstalled the game and never played it again. I was so disappointed, Far Cry is dead to me.
By being intentionally vague, a lie by omission. They could have easily included something that made it clear a different actress has the role as compared to the previous games, but chose not to.
They also used the word “recast” to imply a change was made in the casting of The Witcher 4, whilst this isn’t the case. They simply went with a different actress as compared to the previous games, which is casting and not re-casting. I don’t know if anybody expected the same actress after such a long time between games?
They would also be well aware of the sad reactions to the trailer because the lead in a game isn’t a man. So I content they intentionally chose this title to imply some sort of a reaction in the casting in response to the trailer. And judging by the number of up votes and people saying the same thing, I don’t think I’m alone.
Well except for the exposed contacts from the holder. These types of holders are designed to be on the inside of things and not exposed. Bridging one side to the other would be a fire and explosion risk. OP needs to put a cover over it to be safe, or at least some kapton tape over the exposed contacts.
Wow you didn’t like Planet Zoldath? I loved that game. It reminded me a lot of similar games I’ve played in the 80s. Walking around a lot, puzzling, no focus on speed or combat, just trying to explore an alien ecosphere. I absolutely loved that game, especially the variety in the different (randomly generated) maps and strategies you need to use to solve them. Especially the inclusion of aliens that give hints and trade stuff is really cool I feel.
Sure the walking is slow and the two slot inventory is annoying, but I feel just like with Barbuta, that was kind of the point of it. The walking speed isn’t that slow and the map is very small. And there are strategies you can use to prevent a lot of the backtracking. The game does have the flaw of it being randomly generated, it can give you terrible (or impossible) maps. But I went and got the cherry for this game, I loved it.
Paco Gutierrez, age 9, always wanted a Nintendo console. However, due to being extremely poor living in Venezuela, it was just a distant dream. Using his creativity and with the help from his uncle, he made a cardboard Super Mario game, posted it on YouTube and the video went viral. Thanks to the video, Nintendo’s CEO Doug Bowser personally traveled to Venezuela, to give Paco a Cease and Desist order and sue his family for 200 million dollars.
Yeah this game is really annoying to play, which is a shame because it is cute as hell. It continually prompts you to do the thing. It’s like playing Mario and having someone tell you to walk right and jump all through the game. What makes it much worse is that the game fully comes to a stop to do so. Everything just pauses and the game explains what to do. Even when there is a puzzle, the game basically gives you the answer.
The approach Astro Bot uses is much better. It let’s you struggle for a bit and then gives an animation with the move you need and which button it is. Which is really handy because even if you know what move you want it’s easy to forget the right button combination for it. It’s very non intrusive and if you know the move the animation won’t even pop up. An experienced player won’t notice the mechanic at all. If you come back from not playing for a bit, the reminder about the buttons is useful. For kids who genuinely get stuck, the help prevents them from giving up.
Games that were infuriating with these kinds of mechanics were the new God of War games. At every fucking puzzle when you take 10 secs just to get oriented and look at what you need to do, some NPC (usually Boi of War) just tells you the answer. There is no way to turn this off and it made me turn off the game multiple times. If you want to put puzzles in the game, put puzzles in your game and let me figure it out. If you are going to give the answer, why are there puzzles to begin with? It doesn’t help Atreus is one of the worse characters ever written especially in the last game.
Yeah but publishing is still work though. It’s become much easier to self publish on Steam as a small developer, but there is still value in having a professional publisher. It’s hard to say how much value and sometimes the publisher takes up more than their fair share, but it’s not like zero value either.
Rendering a 3D scene is much more intensive and complicated than a simple scaler. The scaler isn’t advanced at all, it’s actually very simple. And it can’t be compared with running a large model locally. These are expert systems, not large models. They are very good at one thing and can do only that thing.
Like I said the cost is fixed, so if the scaler can handle 1080p at 120fps to upscale to 2K, then it can always handle that. It doesn’t matter how complex or simple the image is, it will always use the same amount of power. It reads the image, does the calculation and outputs the resulting image.
Rendering a 3D scene is much much more complex and power intensive. The amount of power highly depends on the complexity of the scene and there is a lot more involved. It needs the gpu, cpu, memory and even sometimes storage, plus all the bandwidth and latency in between.
Upscaling isn’t like that, it’s a lot more simple. So if the hardware is there, like the AI cores on a gpu or the dedicated upscaler chip, it will always work. And since that hardware will normally not be heavily used, the rest of the components are still available for the game. A dedicated scaler is the most efficient, but the cores on the gpu aren’t bad either. That’s why something like DLSS doesn’t just work on any hardware, it needs specialized components. And different generations and parts have different limitations.
Say your system can render a game at 1080p at a good solid 120fps. But you have a 2K monitor, so you want the game to run at 2K. This requires a lot more from the system, so the computer struggles to run the game at 60 fps and has annoying dips in demanding parts. With upscaling you run the game at 1080p at 120fps and the upscaler takes that image stream and converts it into 2K at a smooth 120fps. Now the scaler may not get all the details right, like running native 2K and it may make some small mistakes. But our eyes are pretty bad and if we’re playing games our brains aren’t looking for those details, but are instead focused on gameplay. So the output is probably pretty good and unless you were to compare it with 2K native side by side, probably you won’t even notice the difference. So it’s a way of having that excellent performance, without shelling out a 1000 bucks for better hardware.
There are limitations of course. Not all games conform to what the scaler is good at. It usually does well with realistic scenes, but can struggle with more abstract stuff. It can get annoying halos and weird artifacts. There are also limitations to what bandwidth it can push, so for example not all gpus can do 4K at a high framerate. If the game uses the AI cores as well for other stuff, that can become an issue. If the difference in resolution is too much, that becomes very noticeable and unplayable. Often there’s also the option to use previous frames to generate intermediate frames, to boost the framerate with little cost. In my experience this doesn’t work well and just makes the game feel like it’s ghosting and smearing.
But when used properly, it can give a nice boost basically for free. I have even seen it used where the game could be run at a lower quality at the native resolution and high framerate, but looked better at a lower resolution with a higher quality setting and then upscaled. The extra effects outweighed the small loss of fidelity.
The game is rendered at a lower resolution, this saves a lot of resources. This isn’t a linear thing, lowering the resolution reduces the performance needed by a lot more than you would think. Not just in processing power but also bandwidth and memory requirements. Then dedicated AI cores or even special AI scaler chips get used to upscale the image back to the requested resolution. This is a fixed cost and can be done with little power since the components are designed to do this task.
My TV for example has an AI scaler chip which is pretty nice (especially after tuning) for showing old content on a large high res screen. For games applying AI up scaling to old textures also does wonders.
Now even though this gets the AI label slapped on, this is nothing like the LMMs such as chat GPT. These are expert systems trained and designed to do exactly one thing. This is the good kind of AI that’s actually useful instead of the BS AI like LLMs. Now these systems have their limitations, but for games the trade off between details and framerate can be worth it. Especially if our bad eyes and mediocre screens wouldn’t really show the difference anyways.
I’ve played this in the past because of the unique co-op feature. You can team up with another player and play the game. You both do a battle and if you win, your units can go over to the other fight to help your buddy out. It’s super fun and I played it a good number of hours with my brother. The biggest issue however was the camera, you can’t hardly zoom out. That means in co-op you can only see your own battle, you can go look at your buddy’s battle, but that means you can’t see your own battle. This sucked really bad, because you couldn’t see what worked and what didn’t and how it was going overall. For us this kinda ruined the co-op game mode, it was just like playing the game solo and sometimes you would get help randomly. We submitted it as feedback to the devs, saying in co-op you need to be able to see both battles at the same time, but I don’t think they ever did anything about it. So we’ve stopped playing it, maybe we’ll give it another go sometimes.
Please note this article is 100% BS. The DLC currently has a Mostly Positive rating on Steam with 87% of the people leaving a positive review.
The people complaining are mostly about stuff like crashes, bad net code and poor fps. This is not a dlc thing, but a base game thing. The pc port simply has some issues, for most people it’s totally fine. For others it’s unplayable. With the amount of different systems out there, there is always going to be a group of people with issues. I feel like this is a very vocal minority though.
It has difficulty options. Where the previous FromSoft games would just lock you in a closet with a boss, whilst flicking you in the balls and laughing at you “Git gud son”, Elden Ring has a lot of stuff to make things more manageable. For example there is summons, in the form of NPC (often with interesting quest lines to get them), other players via online and your personal spirit summons. The game is also completely open. So when you get stuck on a boss, you can just leave and go do something else. Explore the world, go level up, go find weapons, armor and other items to help you. Overleveling is not hard and the world is huge and a lot of fun to explore. The game also almost never locks content behind a boss. You can do a lot in the game without beating any of the hard bosses. If with all that the game is still to hard, then maybe the game isn’t for you. Hard games have a place in the world imho. And if you just want to enjoy the world for the fun of it, I would suggest one of the mods out there to make the game as easy as you want it to be.
Sure Elden Ring is a tough game to get the hang of, but it isn’t hard at all and provides plenty of difficulty adjustments. There’s also a lot of people that adjust the difficulty in the other direction. For example people that do RL1 runs or limit themselves to a certain kind of weapon. I think it’s cool the game has so many options to enjoy it.
The online for seamless coop isn’t actual online, it’s limited to the functionality of the mod and doesn’t use the official servers. You can in principle get cheaters on that, but most people have it setup to only connect to friends. And when you are using mods you are probably just having fun and playing for the memes instead of being a hardcore PvP player.
I personally love seamless coop, I had hoped FromSoft would have made the coop like that from the beginning. So happy mod makers are putting in the time to make it work. I’ve played over 100 hours with my brother and had so much fun. I can recommend mods like The Convergence as well, combined with seamless it’s so much fun.
The thing is, once the userbase dies the game is non-playable. Maybe they’ll update it so you can do stuff without the whole online bit, but I doubt it.
I regularly play games like SMB3 or LTTP, in my opinion masterpieces of gaming which still hold up today. Imagine being a kid today and wanting to replay a game from your childhood later in life. Too bad son, without the live services the game simply isn’t playable.
So I feel the argument can be made for live services being an addition to the game and not the core mechanic.
Half Life was always about pushing the boundaries of gaming. The first Half Life with their combination of story telling in a 3D shooter environment was absolutely at the sharp end of the field at that time. If you’ve seen the Black Mesa documentary you’ll know why HL2 was such a hit and how it was revolutionary at that time. After that they did some DLC, but Valve wasn’t happy with what they were doing. It wasn’t groundbreaking, it was just creating content for the sake of content. As they didn’t need any more money from creating games, they opted to not create HL3. It wasn’t till VR became more mainstream they again tried to do something at the sharp end of the field, by creating HL Alyx.
I don’t know what would prompt them to ever make a HL3 if such a thing even exists.
Duke Nukem Forever was the victim of this (among other issues). Expectations were so high, by the time it finally released it couldn’t do anything but be an absolute failure. It still sold well, because of the hype, but the game was total trash and ruined any chances of a new Duke Nukem for a long time. Part of it is also internal, the game gets delayed, people get hyped up and voice their expectations. The devs hear those expectations and see their game doesn’t live up to it and delay the game to make it better. It’s an endless race you can’t ever win.
I had my old Athlon 800 running at 1200mhz, that old Thunderbird ran a bit hot but super fast. Big ass heatsink right on the bare die (which was the style at the time), it creaked any time you wanted to mount the heatsink.
AMD ruled back then, when Athlon 64 came out it blew my mind. When Socket 754 came out it was like the big boy CPU but affordable. My friends with Pentium 4 Preshotts were jealous, those things ran slow and hot, I was zooming. It wasn’t till Phenom AMD started falling off.
If you’re using Office365 it tends to auto update and happily forget you don’t want to have OneDrive on your machine, so it reinstalls it.
It kinda annoying because OneDrive is a piece of shit in general, but saving directly to SharePoint from Office apps is useful. As with many Microsoft services, OneDrive is just SharePoint in disguise. But I really would like the SharePoint bit without the OneDrive bit.
I also don’t like the whole cloud first thing, pushing everything to Microsoft services. But I understand why they did it, for regular dumb users storing shit on a cloud service is probably better than on the computer. I’ve had multiple co-workers send me Word docs with a list of linked documents (why is this a feature and why do people use it?), which all linked to the local Documents folder. They said they checked all the links before mailing the Word docs, so it must be me who is mistaken.
If you haven’t seen it, I would highly recommend the docu on YouTube about Black Mesa. Super interesting stuff.
All of the Kirby games are really fun for kids, especially the 2D ones. I recommend Kirby Star Allies, I played it a lot with my nephew when he was 5