It also came out 7 years ago. It also came out 5 years ago. Its spinoffs came out 6 years ago, 3 years ago, and 1 year ago.

While the imagery initially seemed like it’d be a grim, story-based game with low excitement, I found myself surprised at how much environmental gameplay and cinematic setpieces the series has.

Same feeling. I hate the “eagerness” of game hate these days.

I’m disappointed in some of the time ghost decisions, but I can still praise the overall product as being a fantastic collection of work by some great artists, even if I don’t decide to play it.

I suppose a big part of it is: People don’t often finish games. Remake is obviously a very long JRPG on its own, so when Rebirth came out, maybe a lot of people thought “Oh yeah! I should finish Remake.” and then didn’t.

That does present an interesting idea to me though. Maybe I’ll just buy Revalations without playing Remake? I played the original - I already know the broad direction the story has gone. I could maybe just watch some cutscenes on YouTube to figure out whatever the hell they twisted the Temple of the Ancients story beat into.

It’s not quite what you wanted, but as someone with a lot of FF7 nostalgia, I ended up playing Trails in the Sky, another JRPG from that era, much later in life, and felt a lot of that nostalgia sense; badass characters with sensitive moments and big sinister twists. They remade that game very well, and the sequel (a bit of a necessary follow-on/conclusion) is out later this year. While it does add some brief action-combat, it’s only meant to give you an edge going into the traditional turn-based system (and bosses give you no action-combat).

Fun story; I wrote one about Ace Attorney, in relation to its premise of “If there’s a mystery with a big reveal, we build it up and resolve it in one game before the credits roll.” Instead, it made me realize I had a lot to say about Half-Life.

The series has built up a following around mysterious figures and theories. While the games themselves are fantastic, I should’ve had the confidence as a writer years ago to say no one, even at Valve, has any idea what’s going on in their stories. They very likely have no specific, well-formed plans about answering “who is the G-man”, and a certain dramatic event late in Episode 2 was very lazily shoe-horned to try to manufacture stakes, as made evident…

It’s tricky because I still love HL2 for its good, snappy character writing, use of advanced facial tech, the way it never removes the player’s presence for the sake of cutscenes, etc. But they likely shouldn’t be used as reference for overall story direction.

(He walks in, wearing an un-flattering speedo)
“Hey, babe. You ready for a good time?”
“Oh. God. Honey…please, not now, I have a splitting headache. I’ve had this stuffed up nose and it feels like I haven’t been getting enough air all day.”
“I have good news for you, and great news for me.”

I’ve been long frustrated about the time ghost branching story effort stuff, but I’m still happy they’ve managed to put finishing touches on this trilogy. Maybe I’ll play it now.

69: Fuckersville

The drawn style takes long enough that it may be too much to expect it in even normal release periods.

I might consider it on console, just to avoid Epic. I did that with Hitman 3.

I wasn’t expecting a change of protagonist, but her combat seems interesting. I’ll be interested to learn more.

It’s possible costumes could alleviate that. The first game had a variety; some of them less sexualized than others.

But yeah, I can see it causing problems when you get sick of it.

Neat. I had an account issue trying to get into GW1/2, so, uh…this might be a nice reset.

There’s a game called Moonlight Pulse that has a Castlevania whip on one character; so you get to decide whether to focus on its use. If you nail the perfect spacing with it and strike with the tip, it does a TON of damage, helping to shred bosses.

The game lampshades it a bit too. The girl who owns the whip laments that she has no natural abilities like the others, and instead relies on a crummy piece of equipment.

That last paragraph is basically how Dark Souls 1 went for me. Everyone laughs “git gud” anytime a complaint is related to difficulty, but I am adamant that drop-on-death does NOT fit exploration-based games well. It was fine in Shovel Knight because you’re making linear progress, and it’s just a dare to do better than before.

Tunic basically took it out late in development - having you drop a measly 20 gold - and Another Crab’s Treasure added multiple accessibility options to either grab your current loss or disable the system, and both games are easily my favorite Soulslikes.

I think to be fair, Dark Souls was a bit inspired by Zelda. Even at the time, Zelda was not the only exploration game that scrolled screen by screen.

We’ve seen a few games that tried to look way back to the earliest Zelda for inspiration, which is very different from modern, Disneytendo Zelda. Tunic, Dark Souls, Breath of the Wild, Mina, all took that inspiration in a different direction.

007: Last Light

I suppose it’s a little dumb that I’m thinking of buying it now if only to instill a future headline “007: Danger Speaks barely achieves half the sales of its IOI-made predecessor”, and to show support to IOI for all their work on Hitman - even though I never really bought their DLC junk

“Noeww guwwd billyuunaawws-” Freaking shut up.

I can generally agree that fires are bad. They can burn out of control, eating up precious resources. However, what I am NOT going to do is direct firefighters away from an Amazon-sized forest fire that’s been burning for decades, in order to slather foam onto a bonfire that 80 shivering people are huddled against.

Gabe Newell should have his income taxed enough that his wealth never exceeds a full billion dollars. He does NOT need a personal vendetta of pitchforks and torches to exude hate on the company he built, just because of a magic 7-digit number. Diving deeper: I hate Jeff Bezos because of his influence on US Politics, and his buying out of large newspapers, as well as his direct, documented mistreatment of workers, as well as the fact that he could use his vast wealth for better treatment of the world. I hate Elon Musk for similar reasons. There are hundreds of other billionaires that receive less attention, but could be seen as demons when receiving a full investigation.

Gabe, for all his news attention in relation to gamers, doesn’t have a long list of abuses. Gambling markets in CS:GO could count, but also haven’t caused nearly as much societal harm. I don’t even consider Gabe to be my friend; only that if he were ever an enemy, he’d be waaay down the list. I am readily at the point where I see all of the negative focus on Gabe specifically, with reminders of “Billionaires aren’t your friends (so you should specifically and only hate this particular one showing up in a headline doing a good thing)”, as part of the shilling enshittification campaign to try to buy out Valve by private equity. I invite others to join me. It’s now an easy block.

Something I want Valve to work on is a “blocklist” feature like Bluesky.

Valve themselves are libertarian and don’t want to quash any voices they don’t need to, including negative ones. However, community members could decide “We are tired of anti-woke trolls whining about inclusion, and creating their own enemies for rage farming”; and then write a blocklist of said trolls, that many players choose to subscribe to, making those posts invisible.

Could even configure a blocklist to remove any players with a Steam level of 1, just to remove factory-made bot accounts.