pr1mus

This.

The choices matter because they inform your decision. All the relationships you can build and all the people you can help or not, sometimes something as simple as listening to them and comforting them when they need it, doing everything you can and succeeding or failing in saving Kate and plenty of other things like that throughout the game makes a huge difference in how you approach that final decision.

It's unrealistic to expect every or even just the major choices to all create alternate endings. And even if it was possible it would only dilute the story and i'd be worst for it. Choices in games like these are all about the thought process of making that last choice. If i went through the entire game without ever talking to anyone, never helping anyone that i didn't need to to progress the story, didn't take the time to go through more dialogue options with the main cast and so on, letting the town get destroyed would have been an easy choice because who fucking cares. That's not what happened when i faced that choice though.

It's the best game i've played in years. I finished it a week ago and i can't stop thinking about it and there are times i wished i never played it and others when i wish i could play it again for the first time.

Game don't affect me, movies don't affect me... and yet this game hit me pretty hard. I'm in a pretty bad place right now, have been for a while and i didn't really know what i was getting myself into when i started. But then i got hooked and just had to keep playing and see things through. Some scenes hit pretty close to home in a way i was not prepared to deal with.

The episodic nature might have been frustrating, especially with the massive cliffhangers of EP 3 and 4 but on the flip side playing it all in one go meant having to take in a LOT in a very short period of time. This game hurts and yet i love it.

This game did remind me that i shouldn't wait 5 years to see some friends though and tonight i spoke to one for the first time in a long while and i'll see her sometimes soon after about 2 years so there's that. She's playing it too at the moment.

@clagnaught: It's a picture you find in episode 1 in Max's drawer in her dorm room. I put it there at the end to leave on a happy note.

550 in total that i'm sharing with everyone.

This collection depicts my own path through this beautiful and tragic story, my own choices, the good and the bad.

I bought the game this summer but ended up waiting until last week to play it. I took 4 days to beat it and a couple more days going through it again in collectibles mode to create this collection of screenshot, making the same choices I made the first time, staying true to my version of the story and not conveniently correct "mistakes" I made.

There are of course some heavy spoilers within so open with care.

Here's the entire collection.

I added one last picture I took in episode 1 at the end of episode 5's album. Something I and probably many others needed to see again once the dust has settled.

If you want to use any of those as wallpapers go ahead, feel free to take as many as you want.

I pre-ordered Legacy of the Void so i could play Artanis a week early in Heroes of the Storm. Turns out Artanis is crap and i've since given up on Heroes entirely...

But it's not like i wasn't going to play the game day one anyway so nothing was lost.

Otherwise i don't really ever pre-order games.

OP writes a long post about 2016 games he's hyped for to hopefully foster a conversation about said games.

Almost everyone ignores the entirety of the post and proceed to call him insane for not liking 2015.

Sigh...

In any case, of the games listed i'm highly interested in Persona 5 and Xcom 2. Most of the bigger long established franchises don't do much for me anymore but there will probably be plenty of smaller and/or unexpected game i've never heard about that i fall in love with as has been the case this year with Life is Strange and Cities: Skylines.

Also The Last Guardian is still totally not coming out next year. It would threaten the very fabric of space and time.

I played the entire game this week. I bought it this summer but constantly put off playing it and at some point figured i might as well wait until all episodes are out.

I think i'll write a proper blog about it at some point. For now i'll just give my own take on the ending.

I sacrificed Chloe.

I don't think there's really any other choice that would work, be it to sacrifice Arcadia Bay or any other hypothetical choices they could have come up with. That's because despite being presented with choices this is not a roleplaying game. Max is a pretty defined character. You can deviate from this from time to time with trivial things like making fun of Victoria after dropping the paint on her. Max wouldn't do that normally but maybe she's having a bad day, we all have and sometimes you just choose to be a dick. But that doesn't matter. Max is who she is and she wouldn't destroy everything she cares for, not even for Chloe.

I think the whole point of the game repeatedly killing Chloe, or asking you to let her go is to make both Max and the player understand and come to terms with the fact that this is the only way this can end.

When you go through the alternate timeline in which Chloe is paralyzed and slowly dying of respiratory failure and she asks you to help her end her life i starred at the screen for several minutes, eventually choosing the cop out answer of "I don't know" because i didn't understand yet. For all the philosophical bullcrap in the Matrix i really like the line from the oracle when she says "We can never see past the choices we don't understand". I hadn't come to terms yet with the fact that this game was never about saving Chloe. The game doesn't let go though. You still have to make that choice, accept or refuse. Again i starred at the screen for several more minutes. I refused and hated that choice. I'm sure i would hate the other choice equally.

But the last choice was not hard to make. When Chloe lays it all there in front of you this is where both Max and me finally understood. I didn't like doing it but it was not a difficult decision. I think there is more to the storm than just the very basic symbols of a butterfly flapping its wings creating a hurricane on the other side of the planet. That storm represents Chloe. She's an incredibly destructive person and has been on a path of self-destruction ever since her father died. That destruction if the price to pay to save her. The "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" ending is ambiguous as too who exactly dies in the storm but i think it is decidedly not a happy ending where they ride into the sunset and live happily ever after. I think the implication is that everyone whose life ever came in contact with Chloe dies in the storm.

I love the ending.

And i love this game. It's the cliche of "I wish i could rewind time and play it again for the first time".

There's some interesting things that never occurred to me before regarding the more action oriented and faster gameplay as well as the story in RE3 when played like this in story order for the first time.

The pacing and amount of action when going from RE1 to RE3 directly might have felt a lot more jarring then when played in release order. The action and pacing was increased in RE2 a bit and continues to increase in RE3 but when played in release order it all felt pretty natural given the gradual changes over 3 games.

Likewise, the story missing some needed exposition at the beginning of RE3 wasn't so much an issue when played in release order since all that exposition was in RE2.

This is a good read. I haven't read the previous entries yet but i will do that. I had the same idea a couple years ago but it all fell through after playing only Resident Evil 0. I wrote a blog about it too (shameless plug). I'm interested in seeing how our thoughts on it compare!

I'm gonna give them the benefit of a doubt and say it's an honest mistake. They did migrate their payment system recently.

It's still a major problem though. I only found out because i was curious when my subscription was supposed to end since i expected it to end after Mother's day since i subbed last year during the Mother's Day promotion. I got lucky because it was going to renew in 3 days.

I don't come to the site anymore and likely wouldn't have found out about the yearly charge until the next time i looked at my credit card statement which might not have been for another month since i never use the thing anyway. I can imagine it being difficult to have a yearly subscription cancelled and refunded after a month has passed...

My current premium subscription was set to expire (i cancelled it right after subscribing so it wouldn't renew automatically) and everything was in order until the recent changes to the subscription service.

After the week or two not being able to extend/renew/whatever while the engineers were working out some issues (before the Big Live) it now seems like subscriptions that were previously set to expire are now flagged for automatic renewal.

Heads up for anyone who has a subscription that they don't want to renew and had previously cancelled, you may want to double check to make sure it's still set to expire.