ShreddieMercury

Perfect, I was just thinking about how I've been wanting to play all of the same games over and over in perpetuity and pay for the privilege each time.

Definitely not dumb, I'm the same way! I'm the same way with skill trees. If it's simple I'm okay, but once it branches out or has too many options, I just shut down.

Hitman is absolutely phenomenal, but each level is so dense and so layered that it's almost too much. And the challenges and different approaches you can take mean that you can spend tens of hours on each level alone, and I don't have that kind of time to dedicate to one game anymore. Thanks for the tips on the guns, will do!

Bought Sniper Elite 4 on sale after seeing @Bloodporne mention that it was great. I played a bit of the first level last night and it was really fun. I really like how relatively simple it is in comparison to MGS or Hitman, which tend to be overwhelming for me. There are some cool systems and it looks great and runs really well.

Saw a great review of this game on Eurogamer and thought I'd bump this thread: Save 10% on Swordship on Steam STORE.STEAMPOWERED.COM Swordship is a futuristic lightning-fast dodge’em up which flips the script on the traditional arcade shooter. Turn both the tide of battle and enemies on themselves by dodging, weaving and diving your way through an onslaught of enemies hell-bent on tearing your Swordship apart. Swordship review - this game is a marvel WWW.EUROGAMER.NET Our review of the phenomenal arcade game Swordship.

I have a sense that this will be disappointing in comparison to something like RE2make. The stuff about the Ishimura being "open" screams of empty marketing because gamers hate the phrase "linear". My guess is that it's only "open" in the sense that you maybe can take the tram back to previous levels where the "intensity director" can procedurally spawn enemies again or something. I highly doubt it's going to be something like the RE Police Station where you are continually looping around on yourself and optimizing your routes based on your inventory. I hope I'm wrong, but I would bet that this is really close to the original outside of a few specific scenes.

Well said. I'm excited about this because I think Dead Space is pretty good remake material. But this looks identical, moment-to-moment, to the original. I would love for developers to have more of a creative license to do whatever they want with the property rather than just keeping the original intact. This doesn't really look like anything but a new coat of paint. But, there were some supposedly interesting changes made structurally from what I can tell, so I'll reserve judgement until it's out.

This is the most interesting and varied list I've seen so far, I think it's my favorite. And the author going hard at how bad games are now gave me life.

Performance aside, I think that current games criticism landscape is pretty abysmal. The vast majority of outlets are not able to offer any sort of cogent or thoughtful analysis, because games are too multi-dimensional to be scored in the way that they currently are. Polygon seems to prioritize the story and themes of a game, even when these elements are trivial to the experience. Digital Foundry, while they don't explicitly review games, analyzes specific technical minutiae while also offering an opinion of the game's overall quality. And large legacy sites like IGN or Gamespot lean more heavily into the AAA space and tend to score between 7-10, seemingly blinded by a game's production value alone. And even in cases where people are very thoughtful and nuanced in their analysis, gamers typically can't be bothered to read or watch or engage with something that doesn't offer a shorthand "score". The aggregation of all criticism into one number really does a disservice to entertainment from my perspective, and it's especially pronounced with video games. I'm bummed about how this game turned out, but at the same time, with each new release I find myself more and more weary of trusting Open Critic or Metacritic to reflect a game's overall quality. I do really enjoy reading posts about games here, because people get pretty in depth and offer solid breakdowns of what they like or didn't like. And I tend to think Eurogamer/DF are pretty even and eloquent. Other than that though, woof.

But then John says, "it's an exceptionally memorable experience and one of my favorite games of 2022". Hmm.

Yikes, this is such a bummer. With the pedigree of the developers I did not expect something this broken and stale. I played the opening last night and it was impressively cinematic, but almost immediately you can see the seams, because the priority is clearly on the look of the game rather than any sort of interesting game design. It plays well, but the "one long corridor" thing is the most damning aspect to me so far.

Not sure why you are turning the difficulty down. Each death in video games teaches you, not only about the game, but about yourself. And once you've ascended the mountain of progress, you will look back at who you were, and revel in who you've become. Dark Souls.

Have you listened to the podcast? I've heard good things but I haven't checked it out yet.

I have it preloaded on Xbox SX, looking forward to playing for a bit when it unlocks tonight!

I have barely played any games from this year or last. The ones I played and enjoyed: Rollerdrome (3.5/5) Bayonetta 3 (5/5) The only newer game that I bought and did not enjoy was The Quarry. I thought it was an extremely boring mess, which is surprising because I really loved Until Dawn! I couldn't even finish it. I started Sonic Frontiers which I really enjoy so far, but I haven't made much progress. Prodeus I liked but it wore thin extremely quickly. Dusk remains the best retro shooter. I'm trying to adjust for recency bias so I can't say definitively that Bayonetta 3 is my favorite action game I've ever played, but it sure seems like it is.

I agree, I find all his videos really insightful and I do think he's a very likable and intelligent guy. And not to dismiss the crunch issues, but I found his original tweets to be more out-of-touch than malicious. It was more just "we love making games and we're working as hard as we can to make this good", but the wording ended up illuminating concerning labor practices and feeding into the broader discussion about the toll of game development. It helps that he took full accountability for what he said and treated it very seriously, which you tend not to see in lots of similar cases. Cory Barlog came off much worse in a similar situation I recall. Sounds amazing.

DF has an article about this: Evil West tech review: a smooth, blurry 60fps or a clean but stuttering 30fps - it's your choice WWW.EUROGAMER.NET The Evil West Digital Foundry tech review - third-person action, but do low resolution counts spoil an attractive game? Oliver Mackenzie investigates. "Evil West is a remarkably direct take on third-person action, a linear and propulsive combat game with no open-world diversions, no loot, no crafting, and no side quests." = Instant buy.

I enjoyed Titanfall 2, but I find that it has circled around to being a bit overrated at this point. It has some neat ideas, but they are extremely short lived, to the point that the campaign feels like a hodge podge of throwaway mechanics that were never meaningfully fleshed out (and the behind the scenes discussion about development confirms this). The most celebrated level, "Effect and Cause", never actually does anything with the new mechanic that it introduces. There is a brief platforming challenge, you can trick some guards... and that's it really. Don't get me wrong, it's a super fun campaign in an era where we have been starved of meaningful FPS adventures. But I was a bit let down because it promises more than it can meaningfully deliver in my opinion.

Top 5 FPS campaigns, go

I have a very good feeling about this one. Something tells me they're gonna deliver something pretty fantastic here. The unfortunate crunch does indicate that it might be a little rough around the edges at launch, but this is day one for me thanks to our generous Commissar. I feel the need to support a brand new, non-open-world, single player action horror game as a matter of principle.

I'm being cheeky, I truly doubt it would be. The satire somehow wasn't even recognized by viewers or critics at the time of the movie's release from my recollection, despite it being blindingly obvious. And fans of the original novel were angry that Verhoeven treated Heinlein's ideas farcically. And then the DTV sequels just immediately abandoned the point of the film anyway and went straight to "hell yeah kill bugs!!!". Amazing movie though.

Surely they will nail the satirical anti-imperialist/fascist tone of the movie, right? Where the main characters turn out to be Nazis? "According to Offworld Industries, players will work together in squads of four to complete objectives, acquire resources, build up and defend a base, and fight to extract from the planet in one piece." Ahh okay, of course not. Video games.

Are we ranking, or just a general top ten with no specific order? I thought about this for a bit, and I think my top 10 all time (so far) would be: Mario Galaxy 1 + 2 Jet Set Radio Shenmue Perfect Dark Halo Burnout 3 SSX 3 Left 4 Dead Outer Wilds Zelda: Breath of the Wild It's tough, because a few of these games really don't hold up well given modern sensibilities (Perfect Dark and Shenmue being the prime examples I think), while others are just as sharp and fun as they were upon release. There is also stuff I'd love to fit in, like an RE game (either 4 or the remake of 2), or Wii Sports. I may revise as I think about it more, or if we are supposed to rank them.

Whoa! Could I do Callisto Protocol on Xbox Series X (not sure what the smart delivery situation is with this one). Thank you!! Also, there is a D1P discord?

Thankful for this community. Happy holidays to all!