I know that the OG Pacman arcade game would begin listing its source code on the left half of the screen once you passed a score of ~3,250,000.
Manic Miner.... /*twitch twitch*/ Still get flashbacks from having to be pixel perfect in your jump timing to get through that. Pretty sure I still have an original Spectrum cassette for it somewhere.
OK, I'm on my fourth playthrough of Dark Descent, and Cyberpunk is an ongoing journey so I'm thinking about a new game and I have to ask: Is Starfield just Skyrim in space, or is it worth it in it's own right?
If you’re unsure, I’d say get it on game pass. If you’ve played Bethesda games before then a lot of mechanics are going to feel very familiar. Personally I was a little underwhelmed with the ship-building and space combat stuff, it didn’t feel like much of a challenge and felt very “arcade-like”. But that isn’t what the game is about, so you're barking up the wrong tree if you want Elite/Star Citizen style gameplay there. The main story was enjoyable enough, but it didn’t really blow my frock up. Exploration & base building felt very under-utilised. Felt like there was no point setting up mining outposts and the like when I can just buy what I need, and planets felt mostly barren with just a handful of interesting areas. I get the feeling that a lot of content in that area was cut. The available party members came across as very wooden and uninteresting; felt like I was only doing their quests because “gotta catch ‘em all”, rather than because they were engaging characters that I might actually give a crap about. That might be engine limitations though, characters didn’t seem very expressive when compared to Baldur’s Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2077. I sound like I’m being very negative, but I did enjoy it. Although I’d have felt mugged if I’d paid full price.
While I agree with those examples you mentioned it doesn't really change that the average enemy / companion in games has the same room temperature iq as a zombie. Hell, if you took the average game enemy and animated them with the trademark zombie gait you couldn't even tell most of them are supposed to be living breathing beings. I think thats simply down to us remembering the memorable stuff while the bland and boring mediocre stuff gets forgotten. Also important to note that I was focusing on AAA games and not the gaming market as a whole with my comments about the baseline of quality having been higher in the olden days.
I finally killed enough ships to rank Piloting to max, so I can do one more big upgrade with all the C parts. Then I realised the other skill I want to upgrade that increases your crew (Leadership?) is bugged and you need to use a default ship. So all those kills to upgrade Piloting were wasted on that. I'm going to have to completely dismantle and upgrade the Frontier and use that now, losing the unique Fleet misson equipment I attached to my real main ship.
It's no hassle since I was going to buy all the best parts anyway, it's just probably gonna be a long wait to rank it up because I don't grind or farm. But yes I want a big, bustling ship of crew. The posh bird, the serial killer, the adoring fan roaming around.
Case in point: I’ve spent most of the ~25hrs or so of my current CP2077 playthrough completing all of the NCPD scanner missions. There are roughly 150; they have no impact on the main story line and are purely side content. That’s pretty much pure “grind”, but I really enjoy this game so I don’t mind doing it. Besides, it’s about time I got all the achievements for this game
I think what'll happen with my situation is I'll just upgrade the Frontier with C parts, like I was gonna do my main ship that has the unique comspike etc. I'll play with the Frontier to get the skill upgraded. Then plan to upgrade my main ship once I've maxed out the skill, and return to it... but in reality never bother because my Frontier will be tearing ships apart anyway I'm sure.
I've done the main story after 200+ hours. That's just the missions, no exploring really. Now I'm just gonna fly to all the systems and see if there's anything else left. It has many faults, but is also the space game of the dreams of a kid in the 90s/00s playing X: Beyond The Frontier or Freelancer, or even earlier with Elite, and imagining games in the future where you could land on any planet, walk around your ship with a crew, do missions or just walk around cities, build your own ship. 9/10. Here's my final ship, I chose the cosiest interiors and window-est cockpit. It's probably an acquired taste:
