I think those games and the nemesis system were thoroughly underrated, hopefully they'll do a third. Started the first with low expectations but loved them both.
That was a really cool system, made for unique experience. And now it’ll stay unique because WB Games slapped a patent on it, ensuring that no one else can implement a similar system.
We have bad selective memories when talking about old games and bugs. From PS2 GTA's flying cars and cars with no tyres to platformers where the character just disappeared into the void or got stuck and you had to wait for a time out death. There's a name for it, I forget. Like when people say things were built better because they only see the buildings that partially survived centuries of time.
The enemies in Deathloop are literal lemmings. Half Life enemies used to flush you out, regroup etc .. And this was 1998
Sounds like you mean survivorship bias. Because yeah, you forget all the issues games released with in the past because they were rarely fixed. Famously, the original Pac Man was effectively unbeatable because of an integer overflow. Level 256 was a garbled mess that couldn’t be “completed”. An 8-bit integer was used to store the level value, but the maximum possible value for an 8-bit integer is 255.
There was a room in Jet Set Willy - Matt Smith's Manic Miner follow-up - which would kill you as soon as you entered it. The publisher claimed it was filled with "poison gas" and hinted that there was some way to survive... ...before being forced to admit it was a bug and to issue a patch. And that was no small thing back then: games were distributed physically on slow-to-duplicate and expensive cassette tapes across half a dozen different platforms. So, the "patch" was to write to a bunch of mags and get 'em to publish some POKEs to correct the bug manually... each time you loaded the game. We don't know how good we've got it these days!
I knew there was an 8-bit home micro game with an infamous bug, but I couldn’t remember it this morning - Pac-Man was all that came to mind!
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.
