sweetz

I wish I saw what other people saw in Breath of the Wild. To me it's a 3 star game.

I found it to be a mostly empty open world populated with not much beyond too many lame korok seed challenges, 120 relatively short and visually drab physics puzzle shrines, and a weapon degradation system that totally ruined any sense of reward or player equipment progression.

I wish there were more people in the world. Honestly, as much of a trope that it is, I rather come upon some NPC that wants me to go kill 10 Chuchus, instead of "spot the difference in these 3 trees" or "shoot the balloons" minigame. I never found the sense of discovery that other people say they got from that game. I just thought, boy this is lot of boring walking through pretty empty environments to get to the next shrine, and boy I wish this cool weapon I just found wasn't going to break in 5 hits.

So yeah, there are people out there that share Vinny and Jeff's opinions of that game.

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Horizon: Zero Dawn (which is a game I enjoyed many times more than BOTW) not even making the top 10 that year remains the biggest GOTY tragedy, with God of War (which is easily my game of the decade) not winning in 2018 being a close second.

@av_gamer@sethmode: Sorry but I just don't believe that some innocent kid plays CoD or whatever, hears someone say the N-word without repercussion, and comes out the other side a white supremacist. I believe that kid would have always become a white supremacist, because of how they were raised, where they were raised, hell their very genetics, and them being a gamer is incidental because gaming is simply an ubiquitous hobby among young people now.

However, I do believe that the internet has provided an avenue for people would have previously been isolated asshole extremists in their local town, find each other, group up, and become emboldened by the knowledge each other's existence. Easy global anonymous communication is bad in some ways, and I don't think we are ready for it; gaming is one among many avenues for that, just a particularly popular one.

People so easily ignore history and always think the current generation's problems are unique to the current generation's interests, when then simple fact of the matter is that this is hardly unique. Hate groups have risen to prominence many, many, many times in the past across many, many different cultures, including several times in US (and usually to much worse and bloodier end than what the current crop has accomplished so far). "Gamer culture" is responsible for jack squat, it's just something enjoyed by this generation's bullies, along with everyone else.

Gaming culture doesn't have a problem. People have a problem. Many people are now gamers. That's all, but people want their neat and clean boogeyman to blame for the current ills of society, instead of acknowledging the depressing truth that you're never going to rid the world of hateful people and some of those hateful people will show up doing things that you like too.

I find that to be a little ridiculous. Everyone plays games now. Some people, who would have always been the type of person inclined to extremism, are going to also happen to be gamers, simply by nature of how prevalent it is as an entertainment medium now.

I'm pretty sure there's a crossover between every archetype of person and "gamers", well except maybe the Amish and wilderness survivalists.

If there's a "gamer to fascist" pipeline, there are also gamer to doctor and gamer to engineer pipelines.

Let's stop treating gaming like it's some niche thing only done by anti-social rejects. Some gamers will be bad, most won't, and let's not take the actions of what is reality a tiny minority to be representative of a majority.

@majkiboy said:

The game has a hunger mechanic. Every time tick increases hunger and food is limited. If you rest in place up to full health after every fight, you are very likely to run out of food and end up starving to death anyway.

@vinny I actually worked on adding widescreen support to Kotor ages and ages ago.

This is the first developed, and most brute force method of getting the game in widescreen: https://www.wsgf.org/article/star-wars-knights-old-republic

This modifies the hardcoded list of supported resolutions in the executable using a hex edit, hence you can't use the Steam executable, which is encrypted (but you can just download an old no-cd executable and then use that with the Steam content files). The updated huds are simple file overrides via the game's built-in method for supporting mods.

New tools have come along since then using code injection and other methods to make things easier on the user, but I'm willing to bet they're a little bit more "sensitive" to system changes than this old method.

Probably too deep in for Ben to see this, but here's a less obvious nuance of the game:

Staves and wands have a limited number of uses, typically between 3-7, which you can only see by using an identify scroll on them. When they are used up, they are not removed from inventory, they just stop working. This is why your Wand of Polymorphism stopped working.

Zelda 2 is ruined by the blocking enemies. There's no pattern, they block faster than you can move the only way to reliably kill them is if you do the obnoxious jump thing. Would have been a good game if not for them.

The game is out on PS4 and PC too. Also it's $25 on both platforms or free to PS+ members on PS5.

It's a quirky indie game, not a AAA release and it's not priced like one. The only kind of mistake with this game was showing it during a PS5 event, because it's not really much of a "PS5 game" as you say.

Oh, also the most expensive models of both consoles are $500, not $600, unless you're Canadian.

I mean the game looks kind of boring for an adult, but I gotta say calling the devs of Bugsnax "scam artists" is definitely among the more ridiculous hot takes I've ever seen.

The biggest question I had after Brad's unfinished is whether the "snackification" of the people (Grumpuses, whatever) had any bearing on the gameplay or story development. Seems like it doesn't affect anything other than appearance and it's purely a creative outlet/just for fun kind of thing. That's somewhat disappointing, I thought it would be a more central element of the game.

@brad mentioned on the Astro Bot Cooling Springs video that he has a problem with his capture setup that causes it to randomly drop frames and yet on a video where people would be very interested in performance he doesn't think it warrants noting this :\

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I put an SSD in my PS4 and replayed through Horizon Zero Dawn a few months ago. The load times here seemed a little faster, but not by much. I wonder if too fast load times can actually break games and they throttle the loading speed for stability.

They should have tried Jedi: Fallen Order, as that game in particular was hampered by loading/content streaming issues. With an SSD in a PS4 Pro I really didn't have all the issues that other people had with that game. I did still see some texture pops every now again, but no failures to load level geometry.