VindictiveJudge

I could not for the life of me get used to using the left pad mapped as a stick, and d-pad stuff on the stick just felt wrong. Still loved the controller, though.

Something something torment nexus something something.

Which makes sense because even 1080p streaming is garbage compared to blu-ray.

Cyberpunk also has a nudity setting in all versions.

You can also get really good at Lute Hero, but it takes longer.

The money grind in 3 is easy, too. You just need to buy a house, rent it out, use that to buy another house, etc.

And changing yourself. Frequent magic users would get old and spindly, I believe occasionally glowing. Axe swingers would get ripped. Your character would be a literal representation of your playstyle and that was cool as hell.

It was both more and less involved than that. Putting XP into the Strength stats made your character buff, Skill stats made them tall, and Will stats gave you glowing patterns on your body, except in 3 where they made your tattoos glow instead. What you actually did was irrelevant, just how you spent your XP. In Fable 1, buying levels also made your character older, but age became connected to plot in 2 and was dropped as a morph in 3. Moral alignment in all three and ethical alignment in 2 and 3 also affected character appearance, but the specifics varied a lot between games.

Vista was good eventually, but certainly not on launch. It launched with absurdly aggressive popups about for User Account Control and backwards compatibility was somewhat spotty, largely due to the security changes. By the end, though, it was actually really solid, to the point that Win7 essentially launched as Vista Service Pack 2 with a new taskbar skin.

My problem with the Forerunner stuff in Halo 4 is the same problem I have with all the aesthetic changes in 4 and 5 - it’s extremely busy. 1, 2, and 3 have a sleek and simple design language that makes it very easy to tell what’s happening in chaotic combat. The vibrant colors and shiny materials even give Halo 3 an almost heroic fantasy vibe. They deliberately went the other direction with Reach to enhance the grim tone of the game, but environments are still relatively simple so that enemies stand out. 4 and 5 put excessive lines and greeblies on absolutely everything. It’s all so packed with details that you sometimes lose enemies in the background and it can be difficult to tell what you’re looking at.

Nintendo is consistently terrible about not having solid launch titles.

I’ve also seen volume settings not kick in until you loaded a save file. Also, PS1 era Final Fantasy games that don’t acknowledge your button mappings until the save has been loaded, so that B is select and A is cancel on the main menu, but the other way in-game.

RPGs are absolutely terrible about giving you the ability to inflict status effects on enemies, but not giving random encounter enemies enough HP to justify inflicting statuses, and then also making the bosses immune to them.

And the point I’m making is that only a handful of games are keys; the vast majority are still on the cart, same as the last system.

Games aren’t “games”, they’re download keys.

Generally agree with your post, but a large majority of games really are games. If they’re a download key, it’s very clearly labelled on the box.

Er, no. A Linux program from five years ago probably won’t run on a current distro if it hasn’t been maintained in four years. A Windows program released twenty years ago and never patched has pretty good odds of running on Win10 without even needing to touch the compatibility tab.

Which they could clean up, but it would mean killing backwards compatibility, which is arguably the only selling point of Windows.

I don’t care about the fans, but having six face buttons instead of four would be huge for certain things, like emulating certain consoles.

I would love if Civilization or Crusader Kings implemented this.

Final Fantasy 9 had you learn skills from equipment.

If you’re only interested in multiplayer then those are solid options. If you like campaign then you should definitely check out 2, ODST, and Reach.