Gaming

How to do the first hour of a game, compliments of BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks Inception (1988)

SummaryIn BattleTech, you're a student living on campus in an elite school and go about your day-to-day businessYou go through progressively more difficult mechwarrior training missions until you get surprise attacked by an enemy house during a (random) training mission, and you can lose your mech or die during this encounterIt's shocking, it's organic and it works as an intro to the gameCompare this to Deus Ex: Invisible War, where the scene is almost the same (student at an elite academy and academy gets attacked) but a whole bunch of things just happen to you all at once, and you're just like "oh"I like to think that old games brought a lot more imagination to game design, since resources were so limited back then. Developers made do with what they had, whether that was 16 colors, "PC Honker" sound, or 2 MB of memory.There was a game I played back in the late '80s called BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks Inception. I've got a pretty hazy memory of most of the game, but the beginning and the end were memorable in quite opposite ways. The endgame was awful (sorry, spoilers) because instead of a boss fight/climax, there was this huge, idiotic puzzle where you had to grab keycards that could only open a specific door, and you could only carry three at one time. So you had to spend hours going back and forth between doors and figure out which cards opened which doors. Trial and error. That's not fun for anyone.As for the beginning, we'll get to that in a sec. For now...Some short historyBattleTech is (was?) a large franchise that started back in the 1980s and revolved around big robots (mechs) fighting each other amid a bunch of political houses backstabbing each other throughout the galaxy.In BattleTech: The Crescent…

June 11, 2020 – E3 Day 1: Sony Playstation [PS5] Announcements

Summary Today's the first day of E3, COVID-19 Edition, Sony PS5 Edition New PS5 looks like a router Interesting games for me: Horizon 2, Resident Evil 8, Stray, Deathloop, Little Devil Inside, Spider-Man, Gran Turismo 7 Today was the first day of E3's livestreaming event. The big news was Sony's PS5 router console along with a good number of upcoming game announcements. One thing I can get behind is that all of the trailers were available on Youtube in 4k (amazing). It makes sense, but man - environments look insanely detailed and mind-blowingly realistic, and yet...it feels like rendered people still have that slight uncanny valley look. Below is a list of all the PS5 games announced (with one PS4 outlier, not sure how that got there) along with my own usually-uninformed takes. Exciting Horizon: Forbidden West - Sequel to the PS4 launch title Horizon: Zero Dawn. If this announcement means nothing to you - and you enjoy open-world titles - get a goddamn PS4 and play this game now. It's that good. This is some of the best worldbuilding you'll find in an open-world and the kind of combat you'd always imagined against huge robotic animals. Not sure why Aloy sounds like a 90 year-old lady who smoked five packs of cigarettes every day though. Village: Resident Evil - I'm an on-again, off-again Resident Evil fan. The last mainline Resident Evil game I played was 5, and you might as well have titled that one Resident Evil: Wrestling Simulator 5. Now we've got 8 in some Victorian-looking "village" looking creepy as ever and featuring fan favorite Chris Redfield as a possible bad guy (but probably not). I'm onboard, but I would REALLY like to have this on SteamVR, as unlikely as that is. Stray - Sold. The trailer revealed…

Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003) review: just how bad is it?

I recently picked up Deus Ex: Invisible War on Steam for the Walmart-bargain-bin-special price of 97 cents. Just how bad is it, anyway?

System Shock Remake Demo (2020) review: thank God Deus Ex 1 exists

I’ve spent the last four hours wrangling through System Shock Remake demo’s empty blue corridors, feeling as clueless as The Tourist (2010) when it comes to figuring out what I’m supposed to be doing or how half the mechanics in this game even work.

Half-Life: Alyx (2020) review by Some Guy Who Isn’t Even a Half-Life Fan

Half-Life: Alyx is the best goddamn experience that you'll find in VR.

Final Fantasy VII Remake 13-Hour Initial Impressions: Well, it’s better than FFXIII and FFXV at least

At what point does "fleshing out the game world" become "filling up the place with pointless new areas and empty side quests"?