The second one suffered from being extremely rushed. Much asset reuse. It also made the game more “action-y” because I assume some souless suit said that kids don’t want tactics they want biff bam ACTION.

It also made every encounter consist of multiple waves, with enemy reinforcements popping into existence inside your party and rendering positioning nearly useless. It’s like they were going down a checklist of ways to make combat less tactical.

I hope they bring back spells like Virulent Walking Bomb from the first games. That one would poison an enemy and make them explode when they died, and if any enemy nearby died to the explosion or within the next few seconds they’d explode too, and so on.

It wasn’t the best spell, but it fit the “mages are one misstep away from becoming eldritch abominations” narrative and damn did it make you feel powerful when the secondaries went off and it turned an entire room full of enemies into mist.

Ellison.

What are you talking about? Dragon Age already had two sequels.

They just called them Pillars of Eternity I and II for some reason…

There’s a Half-Life mod that brings it to PC, along with one that ports the Decay co-op expansion.

Who else is better equipped? In my view it would solely depend on the lawyers that internet archive hires, and money plays a big factor in that.

The EFF. This kind of thing is why they exist.

The Archive making themselves an easier target was a huge misstep IMO. All it takes is one overreaching judge telling them they need to purge all copyrighted data (a common judgment in lawsuits like this) and the world becomes a worse place.

Spec Ops actually did have choices where you could be good (or at least less bad), but ironically people missed them because they didn’t think being good would work.

For example, at one point you’re being harassed by an angry mob of locals. A lot of players simply shot them because a lifetime of experience with shooters told them that no other input would be recognized. But in actuality, if you fired warning shots at the ground or over their heads the civilians would flee without incident.

Honestly, as glad as this article makes me, I’d still like to see a perfect birth control for women. Periods seem like they must be the worst part of being a woman (biologically, not socially). Having a temporary, reversible way to stop ovulation without fucking up a dozen related systems and causing physical and mental anguish would be nice.

Do a review of the movie and act confused when they keep sending you mail.

You may enjoy Dungeon Keeper.

I liked how SimCopter actually used the same systems as SimCity 2000, with cop cars coming from police stations and fire trucks from the firefighters. Well thought out SimCity maps actually made your life easier, rather than being window dressing.

I wish someone would bring back the concept. There was a SimCopter mod for Cities: Skylines back when it first released, though I think it was abandoned. That would be the perfect game for it, since half of SimCopter was dealing with traffic and Skylines had an amazing traffic simulation.

Mostly, I just liked the Apache helicopter you could use to blow everything up

Until you hit a nuclear power plant and it wiped out half the city (and probably fried your copter too) once it burned down.

UFOs would also start spawning when an Apache was present on the map and start abducting civilians and blowing up buildings until you shot them down. I think that was the only other disaster the game simulated?

Both can be played on modern Windows with Krimsky’s patches. They’d probably work in Wine, but I’ve never tested them.

I believe the last pre-Paradox build is still available under Steam Betas.

It’s a damn shame what Paradox did to the game. It turned from a near-perfect sim with excellent optimization and stability into a laggy, buggy mess with loads of DLCs that both fixed and introduced more bugs. So the usual Paradox product, where stability is completely random based on which DLCs you own.

Hey, I just wanted to say I bought Lunacid right after your comment and finally got around to playing it. I’m only at the Catacombs, but so far it’s excellent and a great throwback to Kings Field (though I miss having armor; with only weapons and rings there’s far less exciting loot).

Thanks for the recommendation, my friend!

For anyone wondering, it’s controlled by the existing top-level Send Technical And Interaction Data toggle in the privacy menu that’s been there for ages, so most users who care about privacy have probably already opted out.

Just take the first panel, but the end of the parchment goes into a shredder.

Due to all the registry and group policy changes I’ve made to decrapify Windows, I’m legitimately worried that every major update will brick my install. Luckily so far they’ve only make it worse in the ways that Microsoft intended.

Apparently Rockstar paid around $5-10k per track for GTA IV, so it wouldn’t take much of a boost in sales to be more significant than the licensing fee income.

Music licensing for games is so dumb. You’d think the studios would remember the Guitar Hero effect, where having your back catalog featured in a game introduces it to a new generation and brings sales and new fans.

If anything, they should pay the devs for the exposure rather than the other way around. It’s not like I bought Hi-Fi Rush for the music, but I ended up enjoying and seeking out a few tracks due to it.