Let me guess… Campaign for North Africa? Are they tracking their Pasta Points? (The Pasta Rule isnt actually a real rule)

EDIT: I knew it. Even the author says the game sucks in the game writings lol.

Project Zomboid, easily.

Elden Ring.

I played the original PC98 eroge/hentai game A Girl Who Chants Love At the Bound of This World YU-NO, and despite a very small amount of the content being the sex scenes which are totally skippable, with a few being pretty disgusting to me IMO, the rest of the game was phenomenal. If you can look past the bad parts, the good parts are so good. It took me 80 hours to beat the game without a guide, and I loved nearly every second of it. The remake ruined the art style though.

Now for some games I consider the opposite, just for a fun mention:

Starfield. The game having dialogue options that are basically all variants of “you say yes” on some dialogues or “you say no” on others kept taking me out of the immersion. It felt like I wasnt playing my own character, but one the quest writers wanted me to play. The game had plenty of other reasons that kept me out of the immersion to. I like parts of the game, but its not one I can recommend.

Need For Speed Unbound. I bought this game for $5 USD on sale and tried to refund the game after an hour. The NPCs just do not shut up in that first hour I played. They cannot stop yapping in my ear about how “police and politicians are so oppressive to us street racers.” Listen, I love cars. I love racing games. When I play a racing game, I just want it to be me and the car. I don’t want to be hearing anything about social politics in my racing game. I have to hear enough about it in real life, I don’t wanna be hearing more in my relax time. Not to mention they are illegal street racers that literally cause thousands in damages to property and usually multiple fatalities in the races. I still feel robbed. Underground 2 still holds the crown. No talking in my ear when I am driving except to tell me about where more races are, or if I unlocked something. Just the way racing games should be.

And I still think it is better.

It wasn’t only for Americans, it was for “everyone oustide of Japan/SEA.” That audience meant mostly Europeans and Americans, not only Americans.

Interestingly, Gestalt was the first to be in development, as far as the actual developed game assets go; the version featuring Papa NieR is older. They started developing the Gestalt version first before deciding to make Replicant for Japan/SEA only. Before that choice, everyone was going to get Gestalt.

The developers said they would make Gestalt DLC after hitting a certain sales goal, which was reached, but never made the DLC. Not happy about that one. Glad the mod is finally out though.

I prefer Gestalt to Replicant, but otherwise good picks.

The father/daughter story is more compelling to me than brother/sister.

Saber developed CE Anniversary’s renderer engine, which allowed you to switch graphics between old and new graphics.

I believe art was outsourced, but ultimately falls on 343 (changed their name to Halo Studios to trick customers into forgetting their horrendous reputation) because they had final approval.

The Guardian had to make up for their last article with an absolutely horrendous take, so now they put out a nothing burger word salad that is totally meaningless hoping people forget lol.

Also, shame about the last Metroid game. A peak example of what not to do. The games best parts were when it was copying from the games that came before, absolutely zero new content was even mediocre it was just straight up bad. Total waste of time and development budget.

Dead by Daylight.

I stopped playing when The Walking Dead stream “Incident” happened. The worst thing about the game is the players.

I don’t mean that they are not skilled at the game. I mean, they aren’t, and quit matches at every minor inconvenience. But the way players treat each other out of the game is horrendous. Players will go out of their way to verbally assault you for no reason in particular other than you are playing the same game as them. If youre a streamer they will go to your stream, if you’re a Steam player they will leave negative comments on your profile, or complain in the end match chat if you have a private account. They report you for just playing the game.

I have been called more names, slurs (none of which applied), received more death threats, rape threats, and whatever else in Dead by Daylight than any other game I have ever played online. Including League of Legends, Call of Duty, Halo, CounterStrike, and many more.

I don’t play it anymore. Not because I care about what other people say in an online game (words don’t change my mood because I don’t let them), but because the developers just straight up ignore when Killer Main players complain or ask for stuff. The Survivors get stuff all the time, but if youre a Killer Main the game feels like the developers hate you personally. And I was done with that. Its easy to get into High MMR as Killer, and then literally every game becomes a sweatfest. Also, multiple Killer characters have been gutted and left like that for years while Survivors just keep getting buffed. I dont need any of that.

The gameplay is genuinely fun, when you don’t get a 4 man SWF or Bully Squad, but the times the game is like that when you get to High MMR as Killer is basically zero. So the tradeoff isn’t worth it.

I mean, I am pretty sure this is Xbox’s first major outage this year.

By comparison, PSNs outage like 2 weeks ago was their 6th outage in just 4 months.

Anything after ProStreet may as well not exist IMO. And I didn’t like ProStreet as much as previous entries. Still better than anything by Criterion though. Their racing games were fine as their own thing, BurnOut was a fun series, but they should never have been allowed to touch Need for Speed in the first place.

Thats like having Psygnosis, the Wipeout developer, work on a new Gran Turismo. Or having Treyarch make the next Battlefield. Its going to feel wrong unless the developers are skilled at replicating the previous studios feeling, or they dont have employees that feel the need to touch everything that already worked and was loved.

I bought Unbound for only $5 and I feel robbed.

Ignoring the political yapping in my ear for the first like 45 minutes about “police and politicians are oppressing street racers” (that literally cause thousands in damages and definitely cause multiple fatalities every race),all of Criterion’s NFS games have bad driving models compared to Black Box, which is literally the most important part of a racing game. IMO, the gameplay peaked with Underground 2, and the story was best with Most Wanted. I didn’t like MW or Carbons driving model changes from U2, but they are miles better than anything Criterion made. Heck, even NFS The Run feels like a proper NFS game, and that game was BlackBox’s worst NFS game.

I wanted to like Unbound, and even liked its art style, but it gave me too many reasons to not like it. Uninstalled in under an hour, couldn’t get a refund because I didn’t buy it on Steam.

Does it matter? It starts with the mobile games, but that’s how these big publishers boil the frog. Always gotta start with low heat and ramp it up slowly until-

Oops, no more disk drives! Don’t like it? Too bad! Buy our new product!

Is this an attempt to temporarily artifically inflate unique account activity metrics for self-congratulation and shareholder ego stroking?

(This month X millions players logged in to play games, which is a significant increase from before!)

Thats a question for the Sony executives, not me lol

I would imagine stopping used games resale is priority number one for this happening.

This is what happens when a company feels like they have zero competition.

So what prevents a game developer from making a free game that you have to pay money for characters to even play the game? I mean, I would like to think “people wouldn’t play it” but that is overestimating some of the idiots alive on the planet right now.

Would really appreciate if this also applied to free games. Any game with a required online component, free or not, should be required to make an update at EoS to make the game playable offline. Any kind of exemption in regulations is going to be instantly abused as a loophole.

Its bad that the trademark and branded logos match again?

Just slapping the Silent Hill name on a game doesn’t make it a Silent Hill game. Or even having the same music composer.

Silent Hill f doesn’t take place in Silent Hill, and places greater focus on combat than entries in the series prior to Homecoming. Also, Silent Hill is not “trauma exploration: the game series.” That was Silent Hill 2, and potentially the original plans for Silent Hill 3 before Konami forced major story rewrites. Silent Hill 1 and 4 do not have those themes at all, and instead they focus on the town itself, its history and events that took place there. Both Harry Mason and Henry Townshend are completely innocent protagonists with no inherent or implied trauma that is explored in the games narratives. Every Silent Hill game since Homecoming came out has tried to copy Silent Hill 2 2001, including its own remake, and failed by placing too much focus on combat due to the camera system and a shift in how the combat works.

Silent Hill f, if it didn’t have the name, would be easily called anything else. It isn’t a game that without the name is still clearly Silent Hill. Even Homecoming at least had the town of Silent Hill as the setting. f has nothing to connect it to the series except for the potentially white claudia reference, and just surface level similarities. Lake Haven on Steam isn’t a Silent Hill game just because it has fog, fixed camera controls, and a trauma exploring narrative. Even if it was called Silent Hill: Lake Haven.

I think Silent Hill f is okay as a game on its own. But its not a Silent Hill game. Silent Hill f is like calling Kuon (the FromSoftware survival horror game) “Resident Evil: Heian Period Japan Edition.” Or like calling Call of Duty Infinite “Halo.” There may be similarities, but the name does not apply.

Silent Hill f wasn’t a Silent Hill game.

Wilhelm scream.