Honestly the game play is very dated but nostalgia would go a long way to grease the wheels of this game to make it more entertaining. But I wouldn’t recommend playing on the harder difficulties and I wouldn’t play it on PC period unless you’re okay with some bad glitches. Either way they’re both short games so you’re really not wasting too much time to play them again even if they’re disappointing somewhat. It’s also still very fun to fling people around in both but especially the first game.

I actually think both games look really good for when they were released. Even now, TFU2 looks really decent with facial animations. The graphics are a shining moment in both games but the PC port is absolutely broken and ruins the visuals of both. Plus being stuck at 30fps in an action game unless you use mods (that break some aspects of the game btw) is kind of disappointing. I wish EA would’ve given us a proper port or remaster by now

There are several sections like that actually in both games where you’re stuck in sequences for way too long. Both games have a habit of having you sit there mashing a button for 20-30 seconds before anything interesting happens on screen and it’s just not great when games nowadays have moved on from anything like this.

Does the Wii version use motion controls? I’m assuming it does. If so, that would make way more sense and I can definitely see how it’d be way more fun to experience that way.

I don’t think that’s true. He was especially bad for the first bit of it but throughout he was stumbling over words, mumbling, he was hoarse. And then he got worse at the tail end too and forgot what he was even saying during his closing. Also what’s up with the listing things in numbers over and over and over? The whole thing was really awful to listen to and I’ve never heard him sound older honestly.

Older God of war games are a really good comparison, especially with the QTEs.

Not sure if my brain just works differently but I’ve always felt isolated by the laugh track. It’s always made me very uncomfortable to watch a show that isn’t funny and hear people that aren’t me laughing and clapping constantly. Makes me feel like I’m being manipulated by aliens into feeling fake joy or something, I hate it.

That is assuming that our universe is flat in the 4th dimension…

I mean, that’s partly true. From my keeping up with politics, some of the candidates actions are their own but about 80% of the job is what you described. Your party recommends actions to you and congress sets you up for most of your actions. Vetoing things is only common when the opposition holds congress.

I’ll highlight though that lately the presidents have seized more and more power and continue to do so. It started with Bush basically declaring war without congress and lately it’s been Biden doing things like canceling student loans and blocking the border up. Which I get that’s all power they’ve always had, but they’ve been reluctant to use it improperly because it’s so abusable. Now those robes are off and so trump will come into office and immediately write laws by himself basically

My prediction is that one of them doesn’t make it to Inauguration Day and the country panics as a result. Is likely? No. But on this timeline it makes the most sense

Aren’t the brand new LCDs still in stock an 15% off? Still a decent deal

I can’t say I share those feelings. While I think the 2D sections are just okay, they’re very short. I also think as far as pacing and traveling between fights, they did about all they could without distracting from the point of the game in my eyes.

Like yes you can make better platforming or exploration, but that’s not what the overall level is there for. It’s there for scale, setting, NPC conversations, etc. Add too much and you distract from the next fight, add too little and you might as well have a boss rush type game. Fine balance here and this is honestly the best I’ve ever seen a game like this pull off filler time.

That’s a whole conversation about filler in games but I think it’s harder than people realize to get this right.

From what I’ve read, the money goes to Microsoft. I got my copy via humble bundle subscription (a really good deal btw) so I got lucky. If it were me, I’d be looking for other ways to play it probably

That means a lot, thanks!

That’s totally fair and I don’t think you’re necessarily missing anything here if you bounce off of the combat. Still, it’s worth a shot even if you don’t typically like rhythm games. I wasn’t super thrilled about the combat initially but it grew on me pretty quickly once I found that beat.

I really wanted to prove myself wrong because you sound like you know what you’re talking about. So I went and looked it up, turns out I was right to say what I said. Most of the major games out there report that more than half of their revenue comes from whales and those whales make up around 5% of their paying playerbase, sometimes more sometimes less. And in some games, that revenue is 60-70% of the total.

So that’s why there are 17,000 levels which that vast majority of players wont ever see. It’s because they’re chasing 5% or less of their audience.

But when it comes to games that are much smaller, I wasn’t really exaggerating to say that a small handful of players can outspend everyone else. When you have a player base in the hundreds and there’s like 20 people spending 50% or more in revenue for you, it’s going to affect your road map. In a larger game though, that percent will still mean tens of thousands of whale players.

And maybe your experience was different, maybe the games you worked on didn’t operate that way. But the industry absolutely does. It doesn’t mean you can ignore the 50% of revenue coming from regular players by the way, I’m just saying that the percent that spends enormously has almost the same weight in changing the games road map as the majority of players sometimes. Which is crazy to me.

Here’s the relevant Reddit post that was one of the sources I found.

Candy Crush Saga now has nearly 17,000 levels in it, so you’d be very wrong about that. Your average player might get into the hundreds, above average maybe thousands, but 17,000? They’re fishing for whales and not even that many of them.

This problem is way worse than people think and most mobile games on the store have the sole entire purpose of only hooking a small handful of whales. Then once they do, they mold entire games around just a few people. These companies that run apps like Candy Crush actively change the price of lives per player and watch the statistics of what they’re buying and when. It’s so sinister and the entire industry survives off of gaming addictions and whaling.

Solar power, as great as it is, is only available during the day and wind is also not a constant source of electricity either. Solar panels are also made through slave labor in China. The cobalt needed for a lot of our batteries to store renewables also comes from slave labor, though we’re working on that part. And almost all of the renewable sources don’t have parts recycled and instead put their heavy metals into landfills.

They’re still a lot better than fossil fuels but they’re by no means perfect. That’s why we need at least some nuclear to help with those issues

Minecraft believe it or not. Every few years I come back and install a mod pack and it’s like an entirely new game almost. Plus I love the factory and automation mods. The game just never seems to die.

I loved the PS2 era of gaming a lot. This may be a controversial take, but the PS2 era did not last long enough.

Everything about the aesthetics of the games that the PS2 produced were excellent. In my opinion, this is the point when low fidelity and high quality assets overlapped just enough to make games more comprehensible to their players. That enabled a lot of innovation that the PS3/360 era handled entirely differently. Forget an era, the PS2 is the last part of an entire age of gaming that delineates what I’m referring to.

The PS2 was a huge turning point in what games were and could be in 3D. Prior to this, many games were abstract and the characters were a lump of polygons. With the PS2, this began to change. So we began to get games that our minds had to do a lot of interpreting but could see reality through. Nowadays, I’d argue that your mind does less interpreting and so the resulting picture has glaring inaccuracies.

It also helped that ps2 was primarily played on CRTs or at least plasma which helped the picture look better in plenty of scenes than a PS3. Not to mention the color palette of games after the PS2 turned to muck.