That’s probably it. I get that many people enjoy overcoming difficult bosses by mastering the tactics, but I find it boring and repetitive. At this point in my life I enjoy games with an engaging story, cozy games, or open games where I can create my own story in my mind as I play it (like The Sims or Mount & Blade…such very similar games :D).

You’re going to have so many scratched rugs and doors…and dropped cans of paint around your house soon! Well, my cats haven’t dropped any cans of paint yet, but based on my experience so far in Stray, it seem inevitable. Enjoy the new additions to your household!

I just finished replaying Life is Strange (the original). Now I’m starting Stray for a first play-through.

I always thought I despised soulslike games because they don’t let you adjust the difficulty level. I tried this game because they recognized that was bullshit and gave you the ability to easily overpower difficult bosses. Now I know I despise soulslike games for some different reason that I have figured out yet. I did not like this game.

Thanks, I’ll check it out!

I actually liked Opposing Force and Blue Shift better than HL1 back when they were still new. Recently I thought I would play through them all again, but I only made it a little way into the original before I quit. Going back to old mechanics is not generally enjoyable for me. Or maybe I should have just skipped HL1 and gone directly to the ones I liked better. To be fair, I skipped ahead to HL2 and am still struggling to enjoy the dated mechanics.

I don’t think the loading screens are the failure, the fast travel system is. Depending on where you are and where you’re going, you have different fast travel options. Sometimes you can pick your end destination directly (sort of). Other times you have to pick your planet (loading screen), land (loading screen), either run to your destination or pick a fast travel location on the local map (loading screen), enter a building (loading screen), take an elevator (loading screen) and now you’ve arrived. This is about the worst case I can think of with 5 loading screens.

Even in a best case scenario, like having the option to directly travel back to the lodge, you still have travel to the outside of the lodge (loading screen) and enter the lodge (loading screen). So, in most cases you’ll have between 2 and 5 loading screens unless you’re just traveling between outdoor locations on the same planet.

Which I guess takes us a step further and suggests that the pointless spaceflight feature of the game (or the pointless smuggling) is the real culprit. If you didn’t need to scan ships for contraband, they could have built a more robust map system that allowed better point to point fast travel. You’d still run into issues of indoor/outdoor, or indoors with multiple areas, but it would have been much better.

The bicycle, otherwise all that fast food is going to catch up with you quick.

I think they’ll go full terminal mode on the next iteration. You’ll download a 100MB launcher and then just do cloud gaming from there.

Deus Ex. When I first played it I was amazed by the graphics and I specifically remember being impressed that your character was reflected in mirrors. I’ve been replaying it recently and the graphics are obviously very dated, but it also doesn’t run smoothly on modern hardware. My PC gets louder and louder as I play it and eventually the game starts to stutter and I have to restart it.

I thought the original was far better than the second and the Undead Nightmare was a surprisingly good extension of the game. The story was better, the characters were better. Obviously the graphics were worse, I don’t know if the new release updates those in a meaningful way or not.

I know RDR2 was wildly popular, but I thought it really dragged. I managed to “finish” the story and then…it just kept going, so I finally quit. I don’t know how much was left, but I mostly regret not having quit much earlier.

Its an OK game. I got it on sale and don’t regret the time spent playing it, but the controls are awkward and there wasn’t much nuance to the story. There appear to be lots of potential story-line elements based on your decisions, but it was too slow and cumbersome to be worth a replay for me.

By comparison, I quit Heavy Rain pretty early, I seem to recall walking around yelling for my child for an extended period of time and that was the last I ever played it. IMO, Detroit is a much better game than that.

It looks like Steam has it on sale for $12 at the moment, which is less than I paid for it. I played it one time through for 12 hours, so $1 per hour of entertainment isn’t terrible. Not a glowing endorsement, I guess.

Thanks, I’m guessing the benefit of subscribing is to create that persistent relationship. The free version from MS that I’m using times out after a while. I definitely get the problem of it making up experience for me when it encounters something in a job description that isn’t referenced anywhere in my info. Honestly, I’d probably get more interviews if I just let it make up stuff, but I’m guessing that might become a problem for me later. :)

Can you share a bit about how you used it? I’ve used Copilot a bit to try the same thing, but it makes so many errors that I spend too much time editing and fixing them. Also, after running quite a few cover letters, I found that the text was repetitive and unnatural in a way that made it really obvious that it was an LLM writing the letter and not a person.

Wish listed! Also bought Be a Rock, I look forward to being a rock later tonight, it sounds fantastic!