Ultima Underworld 1 and 2. These are ancient RPG games going right back to the dawn of PC gaming. The first one was the first PC game with a true 3D world where you could look up and down and there were two slopes rather than just steps. The control scheme takes a little getting used to as it was before WSAD+mouse look had become established. Spells are made by combining runes which you find about the place. It also has things like repairable weapons and armour, the need to sleep and eat as well as the normal RPG stats and levels.
The big thing that web3(which includes the blockchain) represents to me is big tech’s magpie-like tendencies, an attraction to shiny and new things for the sake of them without any thought towards how it will bring value to the customer. Everything new has to be presented as big and inevitable as home computing was in the 80s. The problem though is that even if we give web3 the most generous bearth it is at best an iterative improvement that can only truly improve certain niches. And we’ve seen this toxic hype cycle with everything whether that be the cloud or VR/AR or even 3D Technology back in the day.
I most associate web3 with decentralization. That includes the Fediverse, IPFS, and (begrudgingly) crypto. Of these, crypto seems the most like a solution in search of a problem - Bitcoin had a problem, centralized currency, but fintech got ahold of it and treated it like a stock asset instead of a currency.
It seems a bit like the toxic hype is paralleled with true hype in a weird way, as if astroturfing was trying to draw attention towards their perversions. For instance, edge computing (true decentralization) is hyped as cloud computing (centralized services which are somewhere else). Language models (which can act as general-purpose inference engines) are hyped as chatbots which replace humans (very, very poorly). Or heck, crypto as a means to make money rather than a way to coordinate trustless actors - best use-case I’ve seen is FileCoin, which incentivizes people to host IPFS chunks, a measurable good to society which gets compensation.
I’ve got such mixed feelings about Fallout 4. Yes, the story isn’t great but tbh I was never expecting it to be very good. This game does come from the same company that in Fallout 3 wouldn’t let you send Fawkes into the water purifier because by doing so you would break the story (sorry for spoilers on a 15 year old game).
Obviously where the game really shines is in the gun play/ combat and the gameplay loop. Those two factors alone make me want to replay FO4 every so often, however whenever I do, I always find myself inexorably drawn to settlement building, each time I do a replay I try to do as little of it as I can but still end up taking ages setting it all up.
I remember when I first completed Fallout 4, feeling underwhelmed by the story, I comforted myself by thinking “They spend ages working on the creation engine for this release, I’m sure that on the next game there will be more focus on the story”. welp, 8 years since the last (single player) Fallout so it looks like that ain’t happening anytime soon.
Dead Space 2. There was an ability to slow/freeze time which I thought was silly and OP so I didn’t put any points into it. Later on there’s a boss that requires the ability to freeze time. The stupid thing is is it wasn’t even a fight, you just had to run away through a locked door but you needed the time ability to open it before it gets you which is impossible to do without frickin freezing time.
My first experience with Dark Souls 1 was a real test of patience. I hadn’t realized how helpful the roll mechanic was. So there I was, from the start to the finish of the game, either blocking attacks with a shield, or just tanking them.
Once I got to Anor Londo, I remember kitting myself out in the Giants Armor, with a paired Giants Shield, and a Black Knight Sword that had been carrying me through the rest of the game. I was at something like 99.8% equip load, just enough that if I equipped a longbow, it put me in the over-encumbered slow walk.
And that’s how I beat the game. Just tanking everything that came my way. I got up to Quelaag in NG+ before I had to call it quits.
During the run, the rooftop Gargoyles gave me enough grief that I had to put the game down for a couple weeks. Had I decided to just give up then, I imagine my opinion of the Souls-like genre would be quite different today.
I managed to get through the starting area on keyboard and mouse before a friend told me, “What the hell is wrong with you, use a controller for chrissakes.”
In the original XCOM my brother and I didn’t realise you needed to collect and research everything. We thought it was like a horde-survival game, however it could infact be completed. Learning this years after starting to play was one of my best gaming experiences - I came back to my parents for the weekend just to blow my brother’s mind!
I had a similar thing in Xcom 2 (the only one I’ve played) where I kept getting alerts that I needed more relay stations to contact the resistance, or something like that. Assuming these relays were on the ground, I kept doing missions hoping to find some. Eventually I found out I needed to clear rooms in my spaceship and build them myself. By that time I was seriously behind however.
I couldn’t imagine storming the base on Mars with only the basic starter rifles in the MicroProse version. Though apart from the Hovertanks it might be actually doable.
That said I watched a friend play the fireaxis version of XCOM2 and he never put his troops into cover, just had them standing out in the open - yet somehow managed to beat the game using this “strategy”. He blew through troops like tissues during flu season though.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I got to this part in the game where I absolutely could not beat a boss. Consulted IGN and learned that the only way to defeat her was to have some ability that was only gained at some prior point. Unfortunately I didn’t have any save points prior to that, so the only way I would be able to defeat that boss would be to completely restart. I just kind of noped the game after that.
This game is WIDELY criticized for this and has since been patched (via a new Director’s Cut version of the game) to fix the oversight. Essentially, thr boss battles were outsourced to abother company, causing them to not line up with the implementation of the rest of the game.
You could make it through most of the game as a 100% stealth/hacking build, but a single boss towards the end REQUIRED some combat abilities in the vanilla version. They’ve since added environmental aids to keep you from this exact frustration.
Source: i too got EXTREMELY stuck here before they released the Director’s Cut…
gaming
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.