You shut your mouth; Unreal Tournament’99 and 2004 were both legitimately epic in their day!

Now get off my lawn… *damn kids today*

I’m sure there would be a few, surely? Multi-million dollar lottery win; finding an old USB key with a bunch of bitcoin; discovering an oil/gas reserve on your property; finding a suspicious unattended briefcase filled with unmarked bills; an unexpected inheritance from a previously unknown great-aunt, provided you spend a night in her haunted manor…

…yoy know, just those usual circumstances that happen to all of us!

I swear I played D2 at 800x600 - was that enabled in the expansion pack?

Yup; RIP to Billie Jean as the first song you hear when you jump into a car for the first time in Vice City.

Yikes; whatever I expected from the remasters - this ain’t it.

The original C&C remaster did a similar graphics upscale, but they at least managed to at least mostly pull it off.

Given they could have potentially rasterised WOW assets to provide a cohesive feel to players, this is just a total ball-drop.

I’ve been mulling over this the past few years, having finally kicked the WoW habit in the second year of Shadowlands (approaching ~3 years now)…

…but how often are quests/missions/objectives etc. just a combination of go to x, collect x of y, kill x of y? At a certain point, all of these become generic - right?

Understatement of the decade, IMO!

I’ve barely touched my Steam games library as it is, have just dived headfirst into emulating my retro game collection (PS1, 2, 3 & Portable); along with SNES predominantly - because fuck Nintendo.

It’s not xenophobia, it’s a matter of national security for every single western nation. Without Intel, x86 processor manufacturing would be limited to TSMC in Taiwan, and would only serve to further incentivise Chinese aggression over the island.

So yes, paranoia - but sometimes that can be a good thing.

I doing think it was an one thing, but more-so a build-up over time - a death of a thousand cuts, if you will:

It was a cultural moment generally, just think back to all of those celebrity commercials (“I’m Mr. T and I’m a Night Elf Mohawk”). All cultural moments pass eventually.

The third expansion (Cataclysm) was quite weak to begin with; coupled with a lack of content in the tail-end of the second (Wrath of the Lich King), which itself was incredible - narratively wrapped up the story that began all the way back in Warcraft 3.

So a lot of people chose that time to bow out of the game, as it required a fair bit of time dedication and seemed like an appropriate time to do so - given the narrative pay-off.

Lastly, the introduction of a number of game tools to automate the group composition process meant that the impact of player reputation on servers was severely diminished. Before then, there players who were toxic (stealing items, intentionally killing the group, failing quests) were infamous on a server.

Once this tool was further opened up to allow for groups to form across multiple servers - the sense of community was shattered as you would have no way to know if the person from another server was good/bad etc. it stopped being about bringing in the individual player, and just getting a body in to fill a role.

As someone who was lucky enough to get to experience those first ~6 years; it truly was lightning in a bottle.

20 years on, I am still friends with a number of those I met in WOW - and an in contact with a few more beyond that!

Unfortunately, it does feel like that sense of community those early years fostered are long gone, save perhaps a blip when Classic first launched.

Who knows when the next game will come along, which will be able to foster such relationships.

If it’s within your budget, grab a Steam Deck and use it in docked Desktop mode. It’s a pretty great introduction into Linux IMO, especially due to the fact that Valve themselves are maintaining the OS, and since it’s running on a fixed hardware platform - most online solutions should be applicable to any problems you may encounter.

Worst case, you don’t like it you can always eBay it off to recoup most of your costs?

Need to leave some features out intentionally, to add later to the PS6 as a selling point and incentivise customers to upgrade!

It was called Kurushi here in our neck of the woods; and I’m glad I’m not the only person who still intensely remembers that game from a demo disc.

I ended up picking up a mint copy to add to my collection; well worth it IMO.

Ill give you this; it was so bad that it looped all the way around and ended up good despite literally everything.

I definitely enjoyed the hell out of it as a kid, but let’s not pretend that it was anything approaching a faithful adaptation.

It really depends on where you draw the line e in the sand, I suppose?

If you’re not too heavily invested in the game series (so you’re willing to accept retcons/story divergence), and are able to switch your brain off for ~100 minutes you’ve got a decent enough chance that you probably won’t hate it.

More than anything, it just has a lot more in common with the ‘bad old days’ of video game adaptations (live action Mario Bros., anything Uwe Boll touched), than the newer crop of more faithful/reverent adaptations (Sonic, animated Mario etc.).

I have the same feeling after watching this, as I did the Mario movie and the Angry Birds before that…

I’m going to remain skeptical, but somewhat optimistic that this will be relatively watchable and hopefully not a complete dumpster fire like Borderlands…

Have Samsung & Google actually delivered 7 years yet - or is that still just a promise on paper to continue supporting existing products?

Apple for all its faults has at least delivered on this premise.

I’d love to see a modern take on Cannon Fodder, as well as another entry in the Desert/Urban/Soviet/Nuclear Strike series.

Lastly, there was a very fun demo/mod to Sensible Soccer for the Amiga that set the match between UK and Germany, and replaced the ball with a bomb that would periodically explode and eliminate any nearby players. I’d live to see a modern-day version of this, honestly - just some goofy fun!

…and yes, I am fully aware of just how old this makes me all sound.

In a similar vein to another commenter wanting a pre-Paradise style Burnout; I’d like another NFS:U entry, but honestly am so over ‘open world’ racing games… give me a good ol’ fashioned menu any day of the week!

I liked the ending of FC5, and think that it lead rather well into the subsequent New Dawn expansion pack.

On the other hand, while I also loved FC3 - I couldn’t get into FC4 at all…

I guess we can conclude that Far Cry is just a very strange series that seems to alienate its fans just about as often as it attracts them!

RTS are inherently limited to PC.

I agree with everything else you said, bar this. I first got into RTS’s on the PS1.

To me, RTS’s peaked around Red Alert 2 (pre-Yuri’s Revenge); I just wish I could find more voxel-based 2d RTS’s with that same ‘arcade-y’ feel.

It’s because most game devs are owned by publicly traded companies; shareholders searching for constantly improved earnings man’s that games are rushed out the door, incomplete and packed to the gills with monetisation.

Balder’s Gate 3 is a perfect counter-point to this mindset; games can only launch once - so launch it properly.

As an aside; I do wish that there was a millennial billionaire who grew up playing some Konami classic titles, and were in a position to take over the company, take it private and focus on restoring it to its former glory. But there is no such thing as a benevolent billionaire, so it’s just a pipe dream.

Yes, over 2.5 years of heavy use; Including ~8hrs of spreadsheets and SQL (Mon - Fri), in addition to waaay too many hours of WOW (fixed HUD) than I’d care to admit.

Consider also then, that Wulff Den ran an OLED Switch for 18,000 hours (two years straight) at max brightness, on a relatively “cheap-quality” (his words) panel: YT link

Additional point: My iPhone Xs was my daily driver until 18 months ago, and now has been relegated to a baby monitor duty (static video for ~18hrs a day) and also does not have any burn-in visible. The brightness on it isn’t cranked all the way to 100%, but neither I would your desktop.

LG and Samsung (the key W-OLED & QD-OLED manufacturers) have implemented firmware-level optimisations to ensure that burn-in is minimised, if not outright eliminated in real-world situations. Again, refer to the Wulff Den video for the amount of effort he had to go to in order to cause the burn-in he did.

All I’m advocating for is not taking “the Internet says” as gospel, as a LOT of the OLED information is either outdated or irrelevant (cheaper/seconds OLED panels from tertiary manufacturers who omit maintenance cycles from their firmware).

It’s a C1; I got it in November ‘21.

This year they’re releasing the C4s, and the C3s are going on heavy discount.

I’m using an LG C1 48in OLED as my primary work/play display (8+ hours use per day), and it has no sign of burn-in.

The general fear over burn-in is over-exaggerated, and the technology has improved leaps and bounds over those early generations.

To steal a term bandied about when talking about AI; this is the worst it’ll ever be again.

Yes, it’s an absolute mess - but with a passionate enough community, someone will develop a front-end to automate and streamline this process.

Getting the data was the biggest challenge.

It saddens me to know that if everyone who went out and kept blindly pre-ordering games from Konami, Blizzard (or any formerly great studio that is now just trading on their name and pushing out the jankiest titles); instead put that money towards shares of that company - they’d have enough of a voice to dictate that companies future, and have them produce something other than the microtransaction ridden, poorly thought out, barely put together, live service garbage we’ve been getting for the past 2+ console generations.

Super Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger, I think strike a good balance regarding random encounters.

On the other end of the spectrum would be something like the Front Mission or Final Fantasy Tactics series - where the narrative is all handled through set battles.