We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I took advantage of the fact that this semester is over to finish off Half-Life for the first time. (Not HL: Source, since that one doesn’t have an Mac port just yet and I wanted to take it on the road.) Some observations:

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Spoiler- 3D graphics do not age gracefully.
- Audio engines do age. The ambient sounds coming from out of nowhere and hearing monsters through walls is so odd.
- Music and art ages gracefully, but most of this stuff isn’t really my bag.
- FPS is not my bag.
- Horror-like anything is definitely not my bag. I don’t even turn into some blubbering idiot, I usually just go save and quit, straight into the catatonic shutdown phase. Outside observers have often mistaken mistaken this for stoicism.
- So yeah, I played this in short bursts. That can’t have been terribly entertaining for anyone who saw the Steam notifications....
- The music, by the way, doesn’t feel like it’s placed well, no matter how awesome it is. It just transitions into existence and nonexistence, over before you know it. I don’t think this style of game has done it very well since, either. Since you’re sprinting in and out of places, you can be in a completely different place long before music gets a chance to really get pumping. Dynamically mixed music fares a little bit better, but not necessarily that much, plus a lot of games just don’t do it. Maybe one day we can find a way around these issues.
- Even the easy difficulty is hard and I am not even afraid to admit that I godmoded most of it rather than turn it into the authentic quicksave-fest of the 90s (and of course there will surely be someone who reads this and immediately moves to deny its difficulty/scariness and to you Internet badasses I award a pat on the head, ruffled hair, and a giant lollipop, though on this forum I guess you might need to register first). Most of the difficulty, no matter how good your FPS skills, lies in the first-person platforming.
- The number and locations of those

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Spoilerdead bodies in HEV suits strewn throughout Xen is hard evidence that action movie hero caliber scientists are a dime a dozen at Black Mesa.

Seriously, what. I seriously look forward to seeing how Freeman’s Mind is going to handle that. Like, maybe complain that he knows five mutually exclusive explanations for this that can each be summed up in the title of a movie.
- Speaking of Freeman’s Mind, you should watch it! It’s hilarious to see someone look a little too closely at the world and pick it apart, including the brain of the main character himself.
- Other than the

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Spoilerslimy/brown aesthetic and swarms of enemies that’ll make you think you’ve died and gone to Quake, the near unworkable first-person platforming, and the incredibly restrictive ammo scarcity of Xen,

I don’t see why all sorts of people who get that far think it’s so different from the rest of the game. It seems paced pretty well when you godmode and noclip and impulse 101 everywhere
- This game has certainly left its mark on later games. The scripted set pieces, atmospheric NPC actions, almost-seamless transitions between levels (they were less almost-seamless in the 90s, I’m afraid), and memorable story elements delivered in-engine is what so many games now try to be, particularly in the first-person genre. Sadly, not that many live up to its quality, much less surpass it.
- It’s convinced me to get to HL2 sooner rather than later (I’ve had almost every single-player Valve game spoiled heavily albeit piecemeal in real life; not sure why, I guess people just feel comfortable playing these games in public, especially in the circles I’ve run in? Especially when the guy over whose shoulder I saw the ending of HL2 does these sorts of things for the whole Internet to see?). People have argued back and forth about which is better, but I’m a lot more comfortable thinking of these things as parts of the same story, willing to overlook the incongruities in gameplay and graphics. Seeing the escalation in scope and scale from HL to HL2 makes me appreciate why Valve might be reticent to top it for now. Nothing short of Lord of the Freaking Rings scale war will match that bump.
- All the crates being around really doesn’t make sense. The crowbar does, given all the crates. Then again, I never saw a crate for real until I started my current job working with lab equipment.
- I actually got stuck in geometry a few times. An unwelcome blast from the past!

e: Whoa, that looked smaller in the quick-reply.

hahhhhh I still need to play the half-life games.

but
but my friend showed me Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon on PC and jfc dat gameplay

(I am secretly actually pretty good at everything but RTS and flight sims/mech games and I'm bad at those because I can never remember all the shortcuts/keep track of all my units/etc)

I could probably learn to play DOTA but I can't figure out where the bloody tutorial is

not having to actually CONTROL my entire army manually I can do, it's <remembering to not focus only on what I'm currently controlling in real time> that's the problem.

Give me Strategy and give me Real Time action, but ask me to send individual commands to multiple groups of units simultaneously? haha no

To put it another way I kick ass at normal chess, not speed chess

seperate note: TWEWY is fun, but it's sort of a bitch to 100%; also honestly the control scheme turned out meh - 95% of the time, you can either leave the partner on auto or just mash one direction the whole fight, and once you get strong enough attacks and equips most fights become a joke.

almost everything in the game is definitely non-traditional tho

i played it when i was in the summer after eighth grade

Jesus christ, I feel old

and i'm old enough to buy land now

(I am secretly actually pretty good at everything but RTS and flight sims/mech games and I'm bad at those because I can never remember all the shortcuts/keep track of all my units/etc)

I have a couple of friends who play MWO quite a bit (they are in one of the older Merc Corps...). I got a little overwhelmed by the strangeness of it all, but still managed to get a few decent rounds.

Try it. Then instead of trying to manage your whole team, you’ll can just get annoyed by randoms you get teamed with not doing anything smart!

If you have issues with the graphics and such BRPXQZME, I'd recommend trying black mesa instead.
HD remake is good remake, and free to boot!

I looked at it before starting, but figured I’ll do Black Mesa some other time. Maybe when they’ve finished the whole thing / gone completely linkdead / been added to Steam (/ required my services [!?]). The goal here is to be fully familiar with the mythos as I have half an eye on keeping half an eye on Valve Software.

For now, I’ve just about had it with HL1 and will be doing the spinoffs.

e: In a crazy coincidence, tomorrow is supposed to be the 2013 minus “200-”-th anniversary of the Black Mesa Incident.

https://operationrainfall.com/press-rele...for-zelda/

Ok so this thing is loaded with notes that say "These aren't promises" and "It's just an idea" but the article was sent to them by Nintendo

and
what I wouldn't give for a Wind Waker with the triforce sailing part removed and the cut dungeons put back in

It would also mean doing extra work, which is something i doubt they're willing to do.

And I would be perfectly fine with that (EDIT: The redesigning a third of the game bit)

I'm pretty okay with the idea that you need to collect money in a game with at least a secondary focus on treasure hunting, which is the main purpose of the Tingle Fuckyou Quest, but there's literally nothing non-tedious about the whole thing and really drags down the game. When a map leads to another map, its not called fun, its called National Treasure.

A part of that tediousness could have been alleviated simply with the inclusion of a BANK though, with some item incentive to keep some Rupees in there long-term, so that a player who blew all his coin on gardening everything in sight has some kicked back so he don't gotta flip every couch in Ocean Hyrule to pay the bastard. That actually isn't my experience, I'm a serial money hoarder, but I'm not everybody.

For some reason I feel like protecting the useless islands is opposite to creating a better Wind Waker. Another problem I had with the game was the 1:1 Island to Map Space ratio that they clung to so steadfastly. Would it kill them to have a more natural feeling landscape? Are we expected to be so lacking in brain power that a 5-foot island needs 10 miles of space to its namesake? Outside of the Triangle Islands+Tower of the Gods, there really isn't a point to it outside of being clean and neat, and there's no rule against keeping the the Triangle Islands+Tower of Gods as is and also drastically changing the rest of the oceanscape.

I mean why not have a Fairy Seashell Summer Home a bit off the coast of Windfall, why not have Crescent Island off the edge of one of the dumb dice reef things, why not put the Cannon game a bit closer to Mother and Child Isle?

Again, like every other time the words HD Remix are posted on this thread, i must say i'd very much prefer to see a sequel or a similar game with the unused ideas implemented instead of slapping them on an already finished product. It sounds a lot more plausible.

Me, I'd be fully on-board on just a complete redo of Wind Waker. Its a great game in spite of crippling flaws that exist at its base, so I would certainly like to see it (And not a sequel or carbon copy) with those flaws fixed.

As opposed to say, Skyward Sword, which I would hope they just do a straight sequel if they want to revisit it because of its crippling flaws at pretty much every level. Or say, Link's Awakening, which pretty much nailed its ceiling on the first try, whatever your opinion of its ceiling happens to be.

IIRC, the triforce pieces are all underwater and reached by crane or something, right? If you want to add minidungeons, just replace the crane with a diving suit and have Link enter floating dungeons or ones on the ocean floor.

Oxygen tube length, or oxygen tank capacity, or needing a way to be able to conveniently leave the bottom the ocean. Hell, not even the bottom of the ocean! The normal islands are probably parts of mountain ranges whose less-impossible-to-scale mountains contain ancient sunken monasteries too. Hell, the submerged Deku Tree probably has a buttload of aquatic flora growing in that could be (in)conveniently puzzletastic.

They'd figure out a way to do it if they wanted to. Which they probably don't. But they could.

Now I beat Half-Life: Opposing Force. Hey, nothing says de-stressing like a genre that involves more adrenaline than you can handle! Less need for cheats in this one; it is a bit easier and there is far less platforming to screw up speedrunning your way out of a bad sitch (and practically no platforming while fighting off swarms of things).

Might be weaker than the first in plenty of respects, and surely they would have a hard time bringing back very much from it in the future, but it was a decent gaiden-type story that adequately explained the goings-on at Black Mesa after

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SpoilerGordon Freeman left for another dimension, and what the Marines must have thought about that stinker of a mission, though it seems to gloss over their overt cruelty on display in the first game.

I certainly don’t blame anyone who likes this one more than the first; there are plenty of things to like more (cool weapons! the idle animation where Shephard pets the Spore Launcher is both heartwarming and disturbing).

While much has already been said about the similarity between the final boss of this game and that of a certain more recent Gearbox offering, I just discovered it for myself.

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SpoilerNeither one was built up to well, though I guess the Gene Worm was slightly less disappointing since you could see a little bit about the Race X invasion that needs to be stopped. Still, it came out of nowhere; you only get notified of its existence right before you go fight it.

As far as expansion packs go, this one of the better ones I’ve played. It’s more of the same with enough difference to keep it from being pointlessly the same. In fact, it’s pretty much a whole new game; it just shares a lot of assets with the first. Not that anyone would be making a decision based on this, but I have to prattle about something, I just do.

I honestly don't understand the point in making an HD version of the most well aged game in the series.

They ported a game released less than three years ago to 3DS, so really, is it that surprising?

and they ported a DS game to the ipad even though they had to fundamentally change the gameplay which was largely based on the philosophy presented by the game

circle of life baby

remember when they preceded that announcement with a big week-long countdown that every single gaming journalist in the industry predicted was a sequel

good times.

the funny part was when other companies did that AFTER they did it even though it was immediately proven to be a terrible idea

like watching the news networks spread a trend ripple

I never heard about this. huh

why would you do that tho

hmmm

hey
hey what if Nintendo did like
a package deal 3ds Metroid remake collection

put Zero Mission, II, Super Metroid, and Fusion - all remade with flashy graphic/classic graphic options - all together on one cartridge. Of course it'll never happen because nintendo won't let me throw money at them

no don't touch Fusion's graphics they're already perfect
Or Zero Mission for that matter

to be honest Super Metroid doesn't need much changing on top of that, sprites after a certain point don't really age unless they've been upscaled when they didn't need to be?

the four games chronologically between 1 and 2 are prime and that shitty one by team ninja I thought

tho really just give me zero mission and fusion or even just a portable super metroid and I'll take it

I mean, I did buy MMZ collection

actually hell just straightport the graphics like with MMZ collection, they're already glorious

I just haven't seen any of the three in so long I keep forgetting how good the sprites still look

prime and other m/fusion are separate canons IIRC

no? Fusion is the last one chronologically, Primes are supposedly before Super Metroid, and Other M is directly linked to Fusion in that "commander Adam" or w/e his name is is the computer on Samus's ship from Fusion

E: misread the Other M thing but I did once see a canon timeline thingy and supposedly Prime games were somehow between Metroid II and Super Metroid...