I thought that was a surprisingly interesting and nuanced read. Also, Cyberpunk 2077 could have actually been way more sexploitative if it would be true to its setting. Especially stuff like ads, which I found overall rather tame all things considered.

Also:

Hung, who works largely on sex games

nominative determinism strikes again!

IIRC the old XRay engine is open source (or the source leaked and the devs gave the okay for modders to improve it), so here’s hoping someone can reverse engineer and backport any major improvements this edition adds to the originals.

It was indeed leaked and given their blessing. That’s what spawned the OpenXray engine which is coincidentally what Anomaly uses. So the release of these remasters will have zero impact on Anomaly, thankfully.

However, there were many excellent regular mods for the original trilogy (Gunslinger comes to mind) that will probably break…

Well needed to be honest. I love the original trilogy but they could do with a fresh coat of paint. I wish they’d touched up the animations too, the gunplay of the originals can feel quite… early 00’s.

Not sure this is the ideal long term solution but anything that combats Discord’s status of being an absolute information black hole is good.

Man, reading that old 2005 PC Gamer article really brings me back to older, better and happier times of gaming journalism too. It even mentions the bundled DVD with demos, mods and goodies you’d get each month. Those really were the days.

I think there is some memorable side content, and I don’t think there are too many main story sequences that are that bad. However, I agree with you that a fundamental problem no patch could fix is that the story CDPR wanted to tell marries really poorly with an open-world RPG. It’s often immersion breaking and it frequently messes up the pacing.

It almost feels like they felt pressured into including an open world from outside expectations when what they really wanted to make was a linear, cinematic action game.

Yes, plenty. This mod is what you want, but make sure to go into the comments and check the pinned posts. A user there has made an incredible compilation of essentially all the mods out there that makes the game harder and gritter. Just pick the ones that sound appealing from that list.

There are so many amazing mods that it’s easy to sink probably the equivalent of an entire playthroughs worth of hours into setting up a modlist. I have like 250 mods going or something like that.

Highly recommend it.

Boost is nice but I can’t deal with the lack of swipe gesture actions at this point in time. No other app has been a perfect substitute for Sync but after trying basically all of them I find Summit to be both the best right now but more importantly - the most promising for the future. Very active dev who is responsive and accommodating user requests.

I wish the keeper of many fond childhood memories wasn’t a company I fervently wish would die in a fire.

Interesting article. I especially liked this paragraph:

There’s plenty that can be said about the recent trailer, but if I had to sum up my own misgivings with it, it’s that it has an air less of “look at this cool thing we made, we can’t wait to share it with you”, more dick-swinging swagger, a cocksure sense of, well, you’re going to buy this anyway, here’s some absurdly good-looking beer to tide you piggies over.

A little late to the party this? But it’s an absolute amazing game. This year looks absolutely ridiculous for quality game releases. I was hoping this would be in for a shout of GOTY, but Clair Obscur is already giving it a run for its money and Death Stranding 2 and Silksong are on the horizon.

Regardless, if you enjoy puzzles and lore and piecing together a narrative from scraps Blue Prince is simply one of the best games ever made. You should seriously play it.

And customizable automation can be a fun optimisation game in itself. I played through Dragon Age: Origins with the Even More Advanced Tactics mod and took great pleasure in setting up the tactics to be completely automated like a self-playing piano.

I hope we’ll see him do some GT3 racing when he quits F1. Has to be in the cards along with Le Mans, surely?

And these are the days that remind me being an older gamer with limited time can kind suck.

I am definitely very often on the border between frustration and enjoyment when playing this game. And that’s even just playing on Normal difficulty.

It’s definitely a game that is split in three parts: one part roguelite resource management and house-building, one part puzzles and one part detective game about putting together the narrative and lore. And I can absolutely see how it is frustrating if you don’t enjoy all three aspects. Which is a shame because some of the puzzles are really great puzzles.

Conservatory can only be drafted on the corners of the manor, and it’s an Unusual room I believe. Helps trying to put stuff like Solarium and Greenhouse on the board before opening a corner room to maximise your chances.

But in the end if you’re not having fun then you’re not having fun. Better play something else then.

Well, it looks like you have a pretty solid list of tasks to work on. Have you been back to room 46? That should be on your list as well.

You do get RNG control eventually, but like everything in Blue Prince it’s locked behind a puzzle. Well, that and certain room upgrades like taking any upgrade that gives you +2 Dice.

It takes some time, but you have tools to mould the house however you want. However, RNG is definitely a factor there is no denying that. In the beginning though I didn’t mind so much as there are so many mysteries to investigate that no run ever feels “dead” - you always learn something or progress somewhere. It’s mostly towards the end where it can get frustrating as you’re looking for for example specific room combinations, but as I said - by then you have the tools to control it somewhat.

I also never really got frustrated because there is no time limit and no penalty to calling it a day. If a run doesn’t work out it’s so quick and easy to just go again.

It’ll be all over the Game Awards this year, I think. It’s sold 2 million copies for a reason. Absolutely gorgeous music too. Heavily recommended!