Think the last Need for Speed I played was Hot Pursuit, the PS3 one. That was alot of fun. But I also hold NFS is a bit of a negative light, because for all intents and purposes it does seem like EA basically killed the Burnout franchise because they already had NFS, and didn’t need another racing franchise in their eyes.
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Ah yes. NFS II. I have never played the game, but I know there are plenty of rare, exotic vehicles in this one (isn’t there a dinosaur car you can spawn with cheats? 
) including Ford GT90, Italdesign Calà (the car that only got licensed in this game, no one else!), etc. I’d assume it was a good time playing the game for you, though.
I get your point. It may seems like EA ditched Burnout a decade ago and only re-released Paradise Remastered, which tbh isn’t good enough to be called as a remaster. EA is notorious too with shutting down studios here and there.
But just maybe, with them buying Codemasters and continue releasing their racing titles, Perhaps EA hasn’t given up racing genre with just a single franchise. Or maybe I am just being optimistic.
Well in the end, if they don’t plan to revive the series, I will just go back to play B3: Takedown, since it’s my absolute favorite! 
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With Burnout, Criterion Games were the studio behind them, and are still going, with them doing a few NFS games, as well as other stuff, I think they are helping Battlefield 2042 right now.
Hopefully. The PS3 era seemed to be when a ton of racing franchises bit the dust, so it feels like there has been a little bit of a resurgence. Although nowadays it does feel like realistic racers are whats popular now, it doesn’t feel like there are many arcade racers right now.
Takedown, Revenge, Dominator, and Paradise are all fantastic games. I could go on about them for ages. Sortof hoping the Paradise remaster is EA testing the waters to see if they could bring back Burnout.
Also, to go back to NFS, I also got the PS2 version of Undercover when I was a teenager and didn’t have a PS3 at the time. It is a terrible broken mess but also kindof hilarious. Good video about that specific version is here. Kacey reviews a bunch of old racing games, including several Need for Speed games, and a lot of that franchises terrible port jobs.
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I still have fond memories of playing NFS: Underground 2. Whenever I hear Riders on the Storm, I think of Underground 2 
The only other NFS I played was Rivals but that was work, not pleasure 
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Underground 2 is amazing! More cars, more customization options, more race modes, an open-world city to explore… It is very likely the most favorite game across the franchise, apart from Most Wanted 05, probably. Although there’s some aspects I still prefer 1 over 2, like track design and music selection. But it’s a great and objectively superior game, I enjoy it and won’t deny!
I also never thanked you before, despite knowing you are part of the testing team. Rivals isn’t perfect. In fact, there has been so many issues with it, like locked framerate and online connection. But the game looks visually impressive, and featuring various weapons to play with. Considering the short window between its release and Most Wanted 12’s, you must have been working hard on this game. I had a good time playing Rivals, so thank you! 
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That’s okay, me along with many others just tested, we didn’t develop anything.
Although now that I think about it, I did put my soul into an issue, actually my right thumb. There was an exploit that would give you infinite EXP if you could manage to keep your car to drift without stop. I put this exploit for good use when I was a gold digger (play the game from start to finish with everything 100%), so instead of gaining EXP the correct way, I would use the exploit to cut time.
The idea was to find a large empty area (the desert area near the plane depot), do a drift and then use / rotate the right thumb stick to keep the drift going without stopping it. I did that for several days, 8 hours every day just rotating that right thumb stick. By the end of it all I caused an injury on my thumb 
We couldn’t believe it ourselves during testing but there was nothing we could do, it was from the top. It was because the engine had streaming issues so a higher frame rate would cause the game to stop loading the game world, get your car stuck in place and pretty much a soft lock. We pestered the devs for months with this issue, along with many others
A month or so before release and we were still struggling to finish races with ~16 (don’t remember the exact number) players without anyone disconnecting or the hole host migration thing. That was a nightmare that caused a lot of rage 
I joined ~August 2013, exactly when the second testing phase started for Rivals, early alpha. There were even earlier builds tested until March that year, after which EA Romania stopped QA-ing it. From my understanding there were some interesting things in those builds that were cut / changed.
Yeah, it’s not a “bad” game, it only needed more time in the oven and the folks at Criterion to take the issues reported more seriously…
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I’ve booted up Forza Horizon 4, and I’m having trouble running it. Messing around with the settings, keep lowering them, basically have the game running on medium settings with 30fps cap and even then it keeps going down to 20fps every few seconds, especially when I’m just roaming the map. Made sure to update my graphics driver, that seems to have no effect. Trying to Google a solution, not had luck so far, although it might actually be tied to the Steam version being buggy? I don’t know, I’m tired, I’ll keep trying later, but I definetly want to fix it. I just want it to run at a solid framerate.
Started the first Kingdom Hearts as part of that Story So Far… compilation. I decided to set it on hard after hearing from a couple of reviews that it does make the game a bit better, sounds like one of those RPGs were things just get easier once you get stronger. Mind you I’ve already died a few times just trying to get used to the combat controls. And since you can’t change your difficulty, I guess I’m going to find out if this was a good decision or not.
Still, kindof excited. The Kingdom Hearts story and lore maybe pretty infamous at this point for being overly complex, convoluted, and taking itself way too seriously but honestly, I kindof like that sortof thing. I mean, I am a Yu-Gi-Oh fan, and really alot of the Yu-Gi-Oh anime shows have all those kindof cheesy qualities, for better and worse.
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Given up on Forza Horizon 4. Tried a bunch of things, just can’t get rid of the micro stutter. From doing a bunch of Googling, it really does seem to be game side from what I can tell though. It’s noticable how the stuttering is far more noticable when it is in the open world and whenever you are driving near these “driver profiles” of other cars in the open world.
Don’t know. I’m giving up on it. Guess it’ll be one of the first games I try whenever I get a new PC in a few years time and see if it runs any better on that.
Few hours into Kingdom Hearts. Still not sure if setting the difficulty to hard was a good idea. Saying that though, once you get Donald and Goofy as party members, who also give you the ability to start using basic magic spells as well, things definetly get easier with them chipping in for support. Really it’s only the boss fights that are giving me trouble, although half of that is that boss fights I’m never sure if I’m doing damage. I Googled it and apparently the ability to see enemy HP is something you have to unlock as an ability, so will hopefully make things alot clearer when I hit the neccesary level to unlock that.
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Has anyone been playing Mafia series lately? I’ve bought a trilogy of Steam, and for some reason, games run absolutely dreadful, despite the fact that demo version run without problems, and when I previously played remaster of original, it also run well.
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Anyone buy Flight Simulator yet?
I’m currently going through my second playthrough of Ghost of Tsushima, and it’s still one of my favourite games this generation, second only to the likes of RDR2, TW3, GOW4 and Hitman 3
I’m very excited to get into the new content next month!
Have you played Ghost of Tsushima?
- Yes
- No
0 voters
Will you be returning for the expansion?
- Yes
- No
0 voters
I recently finished Last Stop, which is best described as a supernatural adventure game. It is mainly story driven with mini-games and interactive dialogue. It is available on all major platforms. I really enjoyed it.
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Oh for the love of God, don’t bother with the Remaster version of Mafia 2 since it’s more or less borken on every platform. If you can, stick to the original release 
If I’m not mistaken, when you buy the Remaster version, you also get the original (Classic) version. On Steam at least, I think GOG still sells the original release as the Director’s Cut.
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Was it broken? I managed to play through it with no real issues. On the plus side Mafia III isn’t broken like it was at release, I recommend it if it is on sale.
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Yep, 100% borken
I also had a bad time playing it
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0 out of ten “Let the Good Times Roll” isn’t playing through the whole thing. Still I didn’t get anything that bad on my play through, maybe I am just lucky? Or maybe I got a different version of the game.
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Finally got Disco Elysium. I’m only a few hours in but I think I’m in love. 
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I recently, finally, finished the final game in the main Professor Layton Saga (“The Azran Legacy”, final game in the Prequel trilogy)
It’s actually a pretty different style of game compared to the other titles, at least in terms of the pacing. The ending is still bonkers wild, yet fun to see.
Some of it is okay, but some of it is just… not good.
This entry is more of a globe-trotting adventure. The middle of the game is about going to 5 distinct areas of the world to find 5 special items. Each offers their own mini-story and mystery to unravel and each looks and sounds different. There’s a windy village in the north of England, a bright, sunny, coastal Mediterranean-type town, a Eastern-inspired desert town, among others. It’s pretty cool to see such a good variety of locales here.
In terms of the story itself, it’s… Okay. Although, I’d say that part of this is because it’s been years since I played the last entry.
You and this other archeologist professor find a young woman frozen in ice, presumably for 1000 years, and must find 5 artifacts relating to a long-lost civilization to uncover their secret.
The main story itself though is paced so heavily towards the last quarter of the game. You spend 2 hours finding the frozen girl, 6 hours finding the artefacts, then 2 hours getting to and solving the Azran Legacy. Add on another hour or two for finding and solving hidden puzzles in there, but overall it didn’t feel balanced.
The side-stories in each of the locations don’t connect at all with solving the main mystery, and by the time you get the last artefact, the game prompts you with the ‘If you go past this point, you will be locked from going back to find hidden puzzles until you finish the game’ and it felt undeserved, since the main vilian had not been revealed or the climax had not yet started.
Then, comes the twists. Every Layton game has them. They’re all insane, but in a crazily believable way. But for this entry? It felt like twists for the sake of twists.
- Emmy betrays the Professor, takes Luke hostage. She was a double agent for this evil organization the whole time… We didn’t even know there was a secret organization in the last two games!
- Descole is Layton’s brother. Also Layton isn’t even his name. He took Descole’s.
- Bronev (main baddie in this game) is Layton’s father. You can’t just dump that on me with no foreshadowing or build-up.
- The Azran’s secret was a bunch of advanced robots that turned on humans and wanted to destroy civilization.
Again, it might be because I haven’t visited this series in a long while (only recently found a cheap copy of this on ebay), but a lot of this just felt forced. I didn’t need to know any of this, and most of these revelations all happen within 20 minutes. It might have been better had there been more seeds of foreshadowing earlier in the game, rather than cramming it all in at the end.
Pretty good title, though the ending is shaky. 7/10.
I think I’ll check out the second Phoenix Wright game again, as I never finished it in the Trilogy collection.
I also want to revisit the Layton/Wright crossover game, as it’s been a while since I last finished it. I remember it being a great title with some impressive graphics and merging of the two gameplay styles.
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it is with great shame i announce i have fallen back into the genshin impact hole
please never play this game friends
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Sheesh, I know some people who used to play that.
From what I can tell, its just a massive time, and potentially money sink. I pray you can one day escape the hole 
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