I've always had a soft spot for Duke Nukem Forever despite it's many flaws.
It's just a very unique and interesting game imo, and especially love the non-combat sections where you're just fucking around in a strip club or whatever.
About once a year I get a strange urge to suddenly play The Sims for 10 hours straight and then drop it until the following year.
Do that at the start of lockdown in March and then realise it's almost Christmas and you're still trying to work out how to make roofs look good?
Far Cry 5. Shit sucks but it's pretty and I like to shoot evangelicals.
Far Cry Primal was dope, the same basic formula but with return to monke theme
You have to play it on the survival mode or whatever it's called though, makes it way better
I remember enjoying it but dropping it even quicker than previous entries. It just seemed like such a missed opportunity. In a way I'd have liked it more if it was worse, but there's little flashes of story that never get their due that just made me more frustrated for all the things it wasn't.
Also most of the writing makes me want to die.
I'll always have a special place in my heart dedicated to hating WoW for taking a potential Warcraft 4 RTS away.
oh man, whenever I think about how they took us back to faction war instead of developing the class halls more i just shake my head in disappointment. Also the whole Nathanos Blightcaller Gary Stu bullshit. At least we are kinda doing new stuff in Shadowlands.
Always did have a soft spot for Fallout 4
The story is shit, the game mechanics are a mess and I honestly can't stand the settlement mechanic but at least once a year I install it and 60gb of mods and play for a week or four
It really does, and all the flaws people criticize 4 for (except for the voiced PC) were not just present but worse in 3
true, true. even crafting with junk items was technically there lol
I love playing it as a legit shooter with RPG elements. With mods, it actually feels responsive and fun.
I bought a console this year for the first time and have been playing a bunch of old games that no one cares about anymore, and I'm in Fallout 4 now. So many buggy quests which I can't do anything about because I can't open the cheat console on PS4, but it's fun to roam around in nonetheless.
Ngl I've come to really love Fallout 4 over time. I still liked it on release but at some point it really clicked for me.
The survival mode also changes it into a completely different game with far more depth and it's way better for it. Mechanics that didn't really matter that much before are suddenly being used, such as vertibirds for safe travelling (fast travel is disabled) and settlements are no longer just for fun, they're now bases where you feel safe and can eat, drink and sleep (saves the game as well). Hotels in the game now serve a purpose because sometimes you actually really do need a bed to sleep in. No fast travel means you actually have to plan out your routes every time you set out to do anything.
And honestly, I never really understood the "this story is bad" thing either. It's completely serviceable and about on par with most games anyway. There's even more going on than in Fallout 2 where the story is just a pale imitation of the previous game's.
But I also like 76 so that puts me out of lockstep with most gamers tbh lol
Re: the plot. I feel like the first two acts were just serviceable and the third act was surprisingly good. I like the four major factions' quests intersecting and the way you juggle loyalties. I like that you infiltrate the Institute and have an actually good reason for not being able to just destroy them immediately (at least if you're Railroad, I don't actually know about the Minutemen and BOS), rather than "the main NPCs are essential and you are not allowed to kill them yet for no in-universe reason". And as dumb as the Institute is, I like that when you meet them, they're just extremely cloistered and operating off the assumptions they absolutely need to never examine. Why are they so certain that Synths have no real consciousness despite all the very obvious proof otherwise right in front of them? Because they need to believe that or else they're monsters. It feels like shockingly human writing for Bethesda.
I feel like a lot of the "this is bad writing" crowd expects everyone to be logical. I've seen people complain that the Insitute is badly written because even though it's obvious synths have some form of free will they act like they don't. They behave like that because their way of life would collapse if they had to confront this fact. Same reason they just fuck around above ground, they consider the world above to be a lost cause so any damage done to it in service of their lives is justifiable. Every single atrocity is acceptable because it's out of sight and its purpose is to create a literal utopia. The phrase "Mankind Redefined" is not in reference to synthetic beings, but about their entire way of life changing. The food supplements, labour done by "robots", near-limitless energy etc.
I really think that a lot of people just didn't get it. Not that 4 is a deep game or anything but it's just not really looked at in any way. I've seen people complain that you can't call a truce between the Railroad and the Brotherhood so I tend to ignore a lot of what people say tbh. I've seen people complain that Father never explains why the Institute do what they do but they seem to miss the fact that he does "explain" it. He doesn't go on a long speech or anything, he just invites you to look around. The Institute is the justification for everything so he doesn't need a speech, he simply states;
I'm glad you can appreciate what we've accomplished. None of it has been easy. Ultimately, all of our knowledge and resources are focused on a single goal. That goal is best summarized by our motto: Mankind - redefined.
And I think that's pretty good writing. I'm sure there are plenty of people in the US right now who think the exact same thing about all the suffering around the world.
As for destroying the Institute for the BoS and Minutemen. You can technically do it the second you reach Father. You can fucking blast him the moment he walks in. No one in the Institute, BoS or Railroad are tagged as essential. Killing a named character also spawns a couple of synths that will attack you as well. Wiping out the Insititute on your own will create a rather daunting sight if you're not prepared to fight your way out.
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. And I found all of that so effective- I HATED the Institute in a way that I never did the Enclave in 3. The Enclave didn't make me feel anything, they were just enemies in a shooting gallery. But the Institute were human in a way that makes me deeply uncomfortable. They're the US in microcosm.
EDIT: Though I did dislike that you couldn't make the PC comment on ANY of this. Even when Shaun is on his deathbed and asks you why you're destroying the Institute, all you can say is a nonspecific "this is all wrong". It would be nice to be able to use that moment to actually express the contempt I felt for that character and for the whole Institute. I had this whole speech in my head where I was like "I want you to know, all this time pretending to think the Institute was great, and bonding with you? I hated every minute of it, you're monsters."
Oh shit, also! I forgot the DLC. Far Harbor was not perfect by any means, but the writing was, again, shockingly good for Bethesda. Having to juggle the three factions, especially knowing what Arcadia had done in the past, was really interesting. And the fact that they raise the idea that the PC could be a Synth because they don't remember anything before the start of the game became my new headcanon, it was such a good piece of meta writing.
I should say though, my one time through Far Harbor I didn't realize that you're apparently supposed to bring Nick Valentine with you, so I might have missed some stuff.
Yeah, fallout 4 has way better writing than Bethesda are given credit for, especially considering how hollow fallout 3's main quest line was.
I'm a huge fan of survival in FO4, although I had to finally give up and install a quicksave mod. I just discipline myself to only use it when I'm completely done with combat, not before combat.
The game just instant CTD's too much, and it generally does it when I travel back to town and it loads a new area.
That's entirely fair tbh.
I'm probably gonna do a new playthrough soon and I'll probably have it only as a safety save.
I like the idea of losing progress if you fuck up though. I wonder if I can trust myself to use it properly though.
Yeah survival makes it so much higher stakes, and it also makes you feel like you're really in the world, because you have to navigate it intelligently and pay attention to everything, even down to traps on the ground.
Kind of like how Breath of the Wild makes you actually know the landscape and get observe all the little details, in two ways: first the physical traversal of the landscape, and second, korok seeds. Many koroks are completely obscure until you notice how rocks or trees are aligned to each other, and some koroks are like, under a rock at the highest or lowest point in an area, etc.
Same for me with Skyrim. The base game is a little more solid than FO4 but it's still about as shallow as a pothole, but I replay it with mods every couple of months.
Same here, I have a copy that is always on my harddrive and once every few months I will spend hours tinkering with the modlist, until it's just right and then play it until the saves become irreparably unstable, leave it to play something that doesn't crash every ten minutes and then repeat in a few months time.
I mean its not very pro communist thats for sure, but I honestly feels like compared to a lot of games out there it gets a fairer shake than most. Communist faction demands are for healthcare, income equality and housing, which is pretty reasonable in general. In one of the games the campaign has one of the villains be the CEO of the United Fruit Company as well as hinting their connection with the CIA (who are also portrayed as meddlesome dicks). Privatization always seems like a bad strategy. Also Comrade Vasquez is the best advisor, hands down.
It is a fun game though, real solid small-scale city builder. The existence of political factions in the populace makes it more interesting, though they feel rather easy to please sometimes.
In five the demands of the fascist and capitalist factions basically overlap to the point of being indistinguishable too which gave me a dark chuckle.
Lego games. I bought the Lego Harry Potter games earlier this year and I couldn’t put them down.
hell yeah. Fuck the lego games when the characters started talking though. Give me "mmmm mmmmm mmmmmmhs" or nothing
I loved the Lego games when I was a child. A few years ago I bought a bunch of the star wars ones to see if they still held up, holy shit is 'Lego star wars - the force awakens' bad.
I don't really feel guilty about it, but i like the dynasty warriors games, especially the spin offs like the gundam ones.
The gameplay loop is just x x x y, x x x y, x x x y, x x x y, over and over again until everything is dead, but it's still fun for meI go weak in the knees for Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Utterly trash story and graphics. But the combat. Ooooh god, the combat.
Kinda Come is a big on for me. I loved almost everything about it, the potions, the setting, especially the combat.
I’m a huge history nerd so I live for that shit.
But it was absolutely made by CHUDs, I think the lead dev is a straight up white nationalist.
I refunded Kingdom Come Deliverance after the first choice is gives you.
Some guy is talking shit about the king, your boys overhear it. Your two possible choices are:
"LET'S FUCK HIM UP."
or
"Yeah, fuck that guy but I got shit to do."
Also it ran like dogshit on my PC.
I honestly didn't expect to run into anyone else on this site who liked mount & blade, cringe fanbase aside, the 'Caldaric Campaign' thing that the mount & blade subreddit used to do, (don't know if they still do it, I haven't checked back there in a while), was quite cool.
Mount and Blade is the shit.
Mount and Blade 2 also the shit, I'm gonna be getting into that more as they build out the alpha more. Just in the last couple of months they have finally built out the majority of perk trees, although you still gotta check www.bannerlordperks.com to make sure you aren't picking a deactivated perk.
There's nothing like it - it's basically an RPG RTS with realistic controls - meaning yelling at your army to do stuff - and it's a full simulation.
Also the combat is hard, and at first it could be confusing but it comes naturally to me now. I think Mordhau actually taught me to play Mount and Blade better, because they are surprisingly similar systems.
Your weapons actually make physical contact with the enemy, and damage and blocks are dependent on the actual physical location of the weapon during the swing. So you can turn your body to slow down or speed up a swing, and make contact with an enemy. You also have to swing the weapon in the correct direction to not be blocked by their weapon or shield.
I bought bannerlord on release day of the early access only to discover that I had misread the system specs and don't have a computer fast enough to properly run it.
Fucking love warband though, back when I was doing my A-levels I would play it pretty much every night to help deal with exam stress.
Fable 1-3. Really shallow combat, especially once you get to 3, and the stories aren't anything novel or with deep themes. Not to mention 3's story is lib/monarchist as fuck, especially toward the end. Still get a kick out of the power fantasy, funny dialogue, and being able to play a game where the dog companion isn't terrible.
Tropico 5. There's a ton of debate in the Tropico fanbase over which Tropico game was the worst but 5 seems to really have a low opinion among Tropico fans but honestly it was one of my favorites. It was incredibly streamlined compared to the clunkier aspects of Tropico 3/4 and made a lot of the urban planning so much easier. I REALLY enjoyed knowing exactly how many churches/hospitals/entertainment buildings that I needed took out a ton of the rough guess work and really let me micromanage shit, even though it did make the gameplay a whole lot less deep
Five is the only one I've played and stuck with. I pretty much only play the sandbox mode though and stopped when I kept bumping up against the hidden/artificial city size population limit.
Ace Combat 4. Man, it is soft imperialist as shit and glorifies war, but when fucking Comona plays during Shattered Skies and the guitars are all like weaoh weaaooh weaaaaaaoh and I'm flying around in my spaceship plane it is so fucking cool
too be fuckin fair, Erusia was imperialist too. Hell, the entire strangereal earth is just if the entire planet was americans.
Also, check out project wingman, its an indie ace combat-like that came out recently. Hits a lot of the notes of AC, especially 4 with aircraft handling
Project Wingman looks cool as shit, unfortunately my old as dust laptop probably can't run it
World in Conflict. It's objectively a fantastic rts and in my biased opinion the best 'modern' (80's) combat game out there.
But it's based on pretty hokey 80's cold war tropes and part of the fun is utterly obliterating battlefields with munitions up to and including nukes. Like these beautifully detailed, destructible maps you play on are almost all cities and towns which would be full of civilians & you just level that shit.
I liked the Tales of Monkey Island game even though it looks like ass and is objectively lame. I just like how freaking dumb, stupid saturday morning cartoon it is.
Oh, I know the original three are. I mean specifically the one made by Telltale though, I don't know many people who played that one.
