Counterpoint: A prospective The Wheel of Dubious FPSes Season 2 demands blood and I will inevitably buy this when it is $5. Sometimes these out of nowhere remasters are even surprises! PowerSlave Exhumed is actually pretty dope, and if you've never checked out Chasm: The Rift, it's a bizarre little thing out of Ukraine that actually also manages to be "pretty neat." Is PO'ed in that ballpark? Probably fucking not! But given how quickly games go on sale these days, I'm fine waiting.
It's also probably because we've run out of the good, obvious, and easily licensed old FPS games to give the KEX engine treatment to (well, until they try to crack the nut that is Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight and its weird proprietary engine) and you can just assume that NOLF is never happening. What is left are the PO'ed and Killing Times of the world, which exist entirely for me to stream and go "haha this is terrible." It's not a bad problem to have, even if what's left is the dregs or the "We had to talk to numerous people in multiple rooms to make this happen so you'd better goddamn buy it" stuff like that Digital Eclipse remaster of Wizardry 1.
I'm also probably the worst person to have this discussion with because I've also been vocally demanding that GOG put out a re-release of Descent to Undermountain for "historical preservation purposes." I would pay exactly $10 for that. You may say "why would they release such an infamously disastrous title?" and to that I say "they also put out all those shitty Dragonlance side-scrollers and DeathKeep, it's fine"
Regarding Starfield, this Hard-drive.net article seems to hit the mark. What a ridiculous thing that it won the Steam award for "innovative gameplay." Yeah, sure, OK.
I do think that steam award is best seen as irony-poisoned internet people controlling the voting process. I know this because I absolutely voted for Starfield and I'm an irony-poisoned internet man.
Fun list! I wish I could appreciate Fire Emblem Engage as much as you. I found the story and characters so dull, which in turn made the whole game feel pretty unmemorable to me. As you say, the combat and tactics are strong, and maybe that should be enough. But maybe this is where I learn that, for myself, I need Fire Emblem (a series I generally love) to be solid on both narrative and mechanical fronts.
Please look forward to the inevitable Genealogy of the Holy War remake. Will a new, wider audience be down with that game's incredibly large maps and horse-centric gameplay? I have no idea. What I do know is I'm very excited to see how people respond to the story of that thing.
A good list, ArbitraryWaterman, but WINNERS turn on JA3's hit percentages. Winners and manly men with manly beards who smell like the ocean and pine tar. Men of character and worth.
Sounds like the anxious words of a mealy mouthed coward to me. Or maybe a man of character and worth. Not sure.
Good stuff. Our lists have Remnant 2 and RE4 in common, but I literally haven't played anything else on your list. I'd probably like a lot of it if I had the money and the time, particularly Alan Wake II and Lies of P.
I also had Wo Long on my list, but put it last because it was definitely somewhat disappointing. E.g., the loot system is terrible and morale felt really half-baked. I did finish the game, but had no urge to play the subsequent DLCs even though I'd already paid for them.
The breadth of this list has a lot to do with being unemployed and out of school for half the year. That's my excuse and I'm sticking with it. Honestly a shorter list is probably a better indicator of my well-being.
Hey bud... great list and always look forward to reading your stuff. Can't say much about the games as I was stuck playing other "greats." Just based on feeling I'll probably but BG3 higher on my list, but I'll be coming to it after all the patches.
I mean, you played Operation Darkness, so arguably you're living the dubious lifestyle far better than I could. Have you seen how expensive secondhand copies of that thing are? That's far more dedication than I warranted in 2023.
As someone who has played and streamed a lot of Resident Evil clones, The New Nightmare pretty comfortably sits in the lower third of my informal rankings. It's pretty boring at the best of times, there's no real flow to exploring the environment or solving puzzles, and the last third just kind of gives up. It's not "funny bad" in the same way something like Countdown Vampires is, nor is it shockingly competent like a Carrier or just fucking bananas crazy like a Blue Stinger.
At the very least, when I played this one, I beat it in one four-hour sitting while only occasionally glancing at a walkthrough. I did not return to play as the other character. It also has the weird distinction of requiring absolutely no work on my end to play nicely with OBS, which is a rarity for any stream of any game older than the DirectX 9 era
That said, the GBC version of this game is at the very least a fascinating technical curiosity. It's kind of what the GBC version of the original Resident Evil would've been, inasmuch as they tried to cram an entire survival horror game onto a tiny-ass 8mb cart.
Anyway have fun with Operation Darkness. If that thing wasn't locked to the 360 and prohibitively expensive on the resale market, I'd probably have taken a look at it myself. It seems fucking bad!
hello young man I have important corrections to make regarding the edition status of Dungeons and Dragons. Actually there are at least a few versions of D&D that predate AD&D, including Basic/Expert (which was concurrent) and at least a few different revisions of that original 1974 box set. It was mostly called "Advanced D&D" so Gary Gygax didn't have to pay Dave Arneson any royalties because he claimed it was an entirely different game and therefore not worthy of co-credit. Gary Gygax was kind of a dick.
Slayer is based on the second edition of AD&D, which mostly just cleaned up some stuff and made great pains to call Demons "Tana'ri" and Devils "Baatezu" to avoid offending sensitive book burner types. Looking forward to your DeathKeep stream. It's, uh, a winner.
I fully believe that WayForward does a lot of the mercenary work they do for other companies entirely so they can make more video games with beautifully animated busty girls with bare midriffs. I have no proof of this, but it feels true in my heart. Someone somewhere has a balance sheet where they're allowed to make a new Shantae every time they make four Mummy Demastered-s.
You might not explicitly endorse piracy, but I do. If a game is old enough to easily emulate than it's old enough to play for free. If FromSoft doesn't care about making these AC games readily playable than they're fair game for however you want to get hands on them.
Baldur's Gate is for nerds, do a thing on FromSoft's terrible old survival horror games. Let's keep this train rolling off the rails.
don't worry I have all of the EchoKnight games as well as Kuon ready to go for any horror related streams I'm sure they'll be great.
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