Coelacanth

For how great Fallout 2 is, it’s amazing how horrible the first hour or two is. It’s such a shame as it has filtered more than one first playthrough. Hell, I’ve given up on replaying the game one or two times myself midway through that opening bit.

Mine as well. The intersection of detective work and historical knowledge paying off hit me just in the right spot.

Damn I didn’t see this coming, hit unexpectedly hard. I just played through all the Ninja Gaiden games just recently as well as his Samurai Jack game and was so pumped for both his next project as well as NG4. He was a legendary character and whatever you think of him he was a colourful figure on the scene and will be missed for that if nothing else.

First person driving at night in Cyberpunk was one of my absolute favourite things. Especially in the rain! Such a vibe.

I’m finally playing Alan Wake 2 again this week, playing through the Final Draft before doing the DLCs for the first time. Sadly something seems to have gotten borked when I moved PCs and transferred my save manually - only some of the stuff that’s supposed to carry over to NG+ actually carried over. Very strange. I had looked forward to having Saga’s whole arsenal from the start but oh well.

Game is great. Having waited for so long to return to it has only made the experience better, absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that. Having a significantly better PC than last time also only makes the visual splendour more impressive, although I still can’t even come close to playing it maxed out. It’s a gorgeous game, beautiful HDR implementation and just perfect art direction.

I don’t have much to say as I’ve not only already played it, but also just love it. I guess the collectibles are a little unnecessary, grindy and annoying if you want to 100% it. Also the case board stuff is a little tedious on subsequent playthroughs as a lot of it is unskippable. That’s it for notes. Play it if you haven’t already, it’s wonderful. Try playing some previous Remedy games first if you can, the Remedyverse is cool.

I remember Game Makers Toolkit raving about some text-based interactions in the game The Shivah in an old video about detective games.

Another somewhat similar story is WolfeyVCG and Perish Song in competitive Pokémon.

It was probably poorly phrased but I feel like I remember there was a group of various instance admins at the time discussing ways to deal with it, so it was more of a reference to maybe they figured something out.

You’re right that they used tiny instances with no oversight and open registrations to ban evade for a long time even before this debacle when it was just normal Nicole spam.

A copycat spammer started sending gore pictures to people using the same Nicole copypasta text. A lot of people got upset and there was a flurry of discussion over like a 24h period. Some people seemed to think it was a serial killer and Nicole had been doxxed and killed. In reality if I recall right the picture was from a morgue somewhere in China.

Anyway the whole thing led to a general “okay maybe the joke has run its course and we shouldn’t encourage this” type of moment and the sub was shut down. Presumably the spammer stopped spamming once they no longer received attention, but maybe the admins found and IP banned them or something. I have no idea.

The Witcher 3 is just an RPG minigame you can play between rounds of Gwent.

Like the other commenter said: intense gunfights versus one up to a handful gunmen at most would have been the perfect match for the storytelling instead of the super wacky over the top arcadey shooting galleries we have instead.

I know it’s a dead horse by now as I keep beating it whenever I get a chance to bring it up, but Disco Elysium is full of examples of ludonarrative consonance. Especially the Thought Cabinet (the game’s perk/trait system) has many examples of it, my favourite perhaps being the thought “White Mourning”. This deals with the protagonist dissociating and attempting to distance himself from heartbreak and trauma, and what is the game mechanical benefit? Greater zoom-out distance. The thought cabinet is full of little things like that.

But there is much more as well throughout the game, including

Also after committing literal genocide of O’Driscolls and even sheriffs every main mission and tallying up a kill count in the literal thousands you snap back into camp post mission and “you’re a good man, Arthur Morgan”.