I recommend the M-Mod for HL2 on PC if you ever revisit it. It’s mainly just a lot of quality of life changes that make the game more interesting with overhauled Combat Settings, new Animations, Weapons, and much more.
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MMod + Half-Life 2 Update and you get the best HL2 experience while keeping everything vanilla.
The HL2: Update also adds commentary nodes similar to the ones in the Episodes, Portal, TF2 and L4D 
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Haven’t been on Fortnite for a few weeks. What am I looking at here? Nice job tho
It’s team rumble, where two teams of 8-16 battle against each other. They respawn after dying, you can also open parachute whenever you want during the game. The first team to reach a certain number of kills wins. This match’s win number was 115.
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Ah, yeah, I know that. Don’t usually play TR though. They changed the UI for it since last I played, didn’t look familiar at all
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Good thing Half Life 3 releases in 2567.
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Valve can’t count to 3!
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shadowrun returns is done. short and pretty sweet. very much enjoyed playing as a male ork gumshoe and impressed the game really supported that in dialogue choices.
still, it’s a wee bit too basic coming off of games like pathfinder and pillars of eternity, and very short, but enjoyable enough, with a strong sense of atmosphere and place. i’m on a cyberpunk kick (yet again), so i enjoyed the world building, lore and general grittiness despite the sillier fantasy elements.
solid (edge magazine style) 6/10 from me. it’s a very good starting point for classic crpgs, if you want to dip your toe in.
moving onto dragonfall next as a female human decker. seems less detectivey compared to returns and much more heist/team focused. that’s working for me so far. i’ve heard it is a massive improvement on returns. we’ll see!
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At least he embraces the memes?
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I think he does 
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Since the PS plus update came out I’ve been binging through lots of games.
Finished Killzone Shadow Fall as never completed it back in the day. Finished Man of Medan too and loved that and now started Little Hope which seems as good.
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I’m playing Cyperpunk 2077. All in all I’m not that impressed and it mainly comes down to one pet peeve I can’t get behind. I can’t stand that a headshot doesn’t equal a instant kill, but instead it’s based on the weapons damage vs the opponents overall hp. It’s one of the main reasons I never could get behind Fallout 3 and it’s sequels.
The story is interesting, the game is gorgeous, fun side missions. The gameplay is a bit wonky, doesn’t feel as tight as the FPS that dominates the genre. Also I spend a lot of time just getting familiar with mechanics, talents/skills, hacking. There is a lot of information that you need to get a grasp on, in the early hours of the game it sucked a lot of the enjoyment out of the game. There are also small things that break the immersion, like police spawning in out of now where when you misbehave.
I end up spending a lot of time on optimising my character, weapons, builds and getting the right car. All in all I don’t really enjoy that aspect, it’s an fps. At the end of the day I just want to relax and play a compelling narrative. On the other side of the coin, make it an third person fantasy RPG like the Witcher and World of Warcraft and I’ll be sold.
In short I hate RPG elements in FPS games. Now I just want to get through it and maybe down the line I’ll pick it up again.
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Decided to get Watchdogs: Legion because it was cheap in some JB Hi-Fi bargain bin. Have to say it is actually somewhat fun, the story suffers since there is no one character you play as yet somehow it has a better story than the first one. (Again I haven’t played 2).
I have spent most of my time liberating the various boroughs of London as I slowly get better at not going into naked combat and dying and because the Borough Liberation missions are nice changes of pace from the main game like Tower Hamlets which has you hoon around in a car as a distraction or Westminster which is an Assassin’s Creed style platformer section only you are scaling Big Ben’s clockworks in a spider drone.
All in all it is an alright game, better than what I thought and better than the first one at least.
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The only good thing about Ubi open world games are the setting in which they take place, they’re always interesting to explore.
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you can get through all the dishonoreds without much in the way of aggression. the first one narratively wants you to. certain ‘boss’ encounters are mandatory, of course, but you can do them all stealthily.
and speaking of level design: crack in the slab and clockwork mansion are phenomenal. blows my mind playing through them, even now.
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It’s amazing how we all play the same game and can come to such different conclusions. I can hardly find a single fault with the entire Dishonored series: The gameplay mechanics, the story writing, and especially the map design. Obviously I’ve not played every game that exists and this is just a personal opinion, but Dishonored along with Styx, Thief, and, of course, Hitman stand out to me as having the most intelligently designed maps and stealth mechanics. Close contenders are Deus Ex and Splinter Cell.
It is rare that I want to play a story based game again, but I always looked forward to my two playthroughs of Dishonored: high and low chaos. Note that high and low chaos has nothing to do with good and evil. It’s the impact you have on the world around you. Taking a life has consequences. Someone’s mother/father, husband/wife, son/daughter is no longer in the world and the more lives taken the more lives affected. The stability of society begins to fracture and ultimately chaos reigns.
At the end of the day we have our own opinions on video games, but for me, Dishonored is one of the best series of games ever made.
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from my playthroughs, dishonored didn’t stop me from doing anything. quite the opposite. like, the level of freedom it provides is one of the reasons i like it so much! like hitman, dishonored is a space for player expression. it provides loads of different systems for players to learn and mess about with.
the difference is that dishonored pays attention to what you do; it shows the consequences of your choices. i like that about it; it’s a kinda interesting way to get players to reflect on the morality of their actions in a medium that trivialises and normalises violence; a medium that often has difficulty questioning that sort of thing (i adore hotline miami but its theme falls flat under the slightest scrutiny). it’s also a pretty clever way to subvert the easy power fantasies games provide without removing the power fantasy.
thematically, dishonored is about the corrupting nature of power. it asks “what would you do with great power?” that question is fundamental to every aspect of the first and second game. like, the outsider’s whole shtick is to find someone who is ‘powerless’ and desperate, give them power, and see what they do with it. all the significant characters - the loyalists, burrows, etc. - are there for us to see various answers and contexts to that question.
then the game asks us.
it’s a personality test, of sorts. and you know what? i think that was a bold move by the devs and it’s a shame that it didn’t quite land for some people. you see, i think the main problem with the chaos system was its opaqueness.
as i understand it, the chaos system works predominantly through the margin of kills per level. high chaos has you kill 50% of the human population per level, medium is 20%, and low is anything less than 20%, which is pretty generous imo, but difficult to parse. in-game, there is no way to know when you pass those thresholds. plus there are other factors that affect it which are difficult to understand. not being able to tell if anyone died until right at the end of the level can be frustrating (though they sorted that in the sequel) and the systemic approach could play silly buggers. for example, a poorly placed unconscious guard might slide off a roof or drown in a puddle without the player realising.
on paper? i think it’s a sound system that i wish they followed through with and iterated upon beyond the sequel.
while i understand the frustrations people have with the system, it is disheartening that the point of the game gets lost simply because of an ending cinematic; that, rather than think “shit, i killed a lot of people!”, we still expect the game to pat us on the head at the end after decimating the population of a city.
that’s the game’s fault in many ways (some outlined above), but it does feel a little like an outright dismissal of ‘uncomfortable’ gaming experiences or of games that pose questions (however shallow they might be).
lastly, i strongly disagree with the idea that all in-game morality choices should be metachoice driven. it is an absurdly limiting way of viewing games. gameplay/interactivity is what separates the medium from every other, and using gameplay as a narrative tool is where the medium can truly shine. it is the one thing it does better than anything else.
crack in the slab, maybe, but you can do clockwork mansion pretty quickly - like, 5 or 10 minutes? - when you how the level works.
there are multiple routes through each, lots of meat to them, great to traverse… i’m not sure i could ask for more in terms of level design.
in fact, no hyperbole, i’d say they’re two of the most well-designed levels i’ve played in 30+ years of gaming. they’re incredible.
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It does make sense in Dishonored though. It plays into the rat plague that brings havoc to the city. More bodies means more rats, which results in more plague victims. I fund that it added to the overall experience, that my actions had consequences. Not just key actions sprinkled out through the run time.
This way the plague wasn’t just another plot device, but world building you could affect and change for the better or worse. I wish more games with RPG elements would adopt this.
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