I plan to! I usually get Prime for one month per year, around Christmas shopping season, so I’ll check it out then, along with Fallout season 2 and Reacher season 3.

Oh, my player character was definitely on the list of asshole characters that made the game grating. And even if his actions before the story began precipitated everyone else being an asshole, it didn’t make the game less annoying to experience it fresh as the player.

The video evidence in that essay will do more justice than any of my anecdotes, but even things that seemed like possible ways to handle a story mission were not what the developers intended and resulted in a mission failed, like trying to take the high ground in a valley, or trying to sneak in through a window instead of entering from the ground floor.

It’s an all-timer as far as video game stories and production value, but the railroading that they did to players did irk a great deal of us, as chronicled in that Nakey Jakey video. They set up so many dynamic systems for the player to interact with and then basically dictated that you couldn’t get creative with them during the story missions. Deviating even slightly from the intended path would be a mission failed.

Halo 5 makes the whole story worthless

It really did.

Half of Halo 4 was the best story they ever put in a Halo game. The other half was embarrassingly formulaic sci-fi.

Because they were. Maybe not the first 6 people verbatim, but of the characters you have a significant amount of dialogue with, the only one who didn’t give me this impression was your partner. You run into the asshole kid, the other cops over the radio are assholes, the guy on the wall to the docks is an asshole, and beyond that, I didn’t take notes, but it annoyed the hell out of me.

They’re just going to roll people onto servers slowly to make sure they can handle the capacity. And it’s only on PlayStation because they fear the piracy that happened with fighting game betas in the past.

I mostly just hated that the story was largely delivered via info dump and nearly every character was a terrible person to the point of being grating. I don’t have to enjoy every video game, but I wish I at least understood why this one got this much acclaim.

I don’t think the Windows license factors into the math much at all, but otherwise agreed.

That’s surely what they’re planning, especially since the architecture won’t be very different this time around, but that still pales in comparison to the value you’d get from a PC handheld for what will likely be an extremely similar price.

I’m playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance II right now, and it’s excellent. Baldur’s Gate 3 took 6 years, though they attribute a good portion of that to an Eastern European war and a pandemic. Given other side projects, it’s a bit nebulous exactly how long Indiana Jones and Great Circle took that team to make, but it was somewhere between 5 and 7 years, and I loved it. I’m not exactly a fan of Nintendo lately, but people sure do love Donkey Kong Bananza, and that team had been working on that game more or less since Mario Odyssey’s release in 2017.

I don’t see how this thing possibly competes with a handheld PC. It’ll play the same games approximately just as well but with a tiny fraction of the library, and unless something changes, online play won’t even be free.

There have been some great games with development times that long. But for crying out loud, if you’re not making a surefire success, make a smaller game so it’s less risky.

They all take seven years to make, so there aren’t as many of them.

Correct me if I’m wrong: they all complied because action from the payment processors was imminent, and GOG and Itch have both made public statements about next steps that Valve hasn’t, which doesn’t mean that Valve isn’t taking next steps. Did I miss anything?

Nah, this isn’t a memorization type of game, or at least not so much based on the other games this developer has made. You’re basically just going to press Light then Medium then Heavy, or you can just mash on any one of those three buttons in order to do a combo. And largely, everyone has pretty similar reaction times when you’re familiar enough with a game to know what might be coming; in general, you mostly just want to hold down-back until your opponent does a big slow move.

My then-girlfriend-now-wife and I went to a temporary video game exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image. A lot of the mainstays you’d expect were there, particularly from the arcade era, including ground-breaking titles like Dragon’s Lair (which is fascinatingly beautiful and a bad video game at the same time). At one point, one of the signs mentioned moving on from vector graphics, which my wife had no idea what that meant, so I immediately looked around for an Asteroids machine. You don’t really get how one of those games looks unless you’re playing on the genuine article. That’s the kind of thing that probably ought to be in a museum most.

I recently went to Galloping Ghost in Illinois, which is now the world’s largest arcade. It’s got nearly every arcade game you can think of, and they do a good job fixing them up. They have an F-Zero AX machine. I’ve always wanted to play one of those. I went to Galloping Ghost two years in a row, and it was broken both times. Turns out they’re having trouble sourcing the displays. As you go around the place, most machines are working, but even only a year later, more of them had display problems. I imagine even just getting regular old CRTs is going to make this kind of thing way harder as time goes on, and a good CRT does affect how these old games look, because they were designed for them. This is the kind of burden I’d expect a museum to take on.

Quality of Life Improvements

• Battle Retry Prompt: A new pop-up window appears after defeat, giving you the option to quickly retry the battle.

I haven’t tested the patch out yet, but boy this would have come in handy the last two times I played.

I imagine Silksong gets a release date announced for all platforms during Microsoft’s Gamescom things, but there are a number of third party games with no release dates that could feasibly show up here. I’m hoping for the likes of Mouse: P.I. for Hire. Plus there will probably be a bunch of games that are old news on PC and other consoles but get release dates for Switch 2 now that Nintendo has a platform that can handle them.