Not much to say but this is the usual comment to thank you for your wonderful posts.

Enjoy Rome! Be sure to try our Carbonara at some point! :P

A subscription seems like the exact opposite of what GoG stands for. I buy a game, I own it forever. How does a subscription improve that?

I’m not well versed in finance. Is this good news for Ubisoft or bad news?

Yeah, community-made Pokemon games really hit some heights in recent years. Too bad Nintendo is so opposed to the homebrew scene.

I had lots of fun with Pokémon Odyssey last year, patiently waiting for the final update that should come this year as well. As I said, 2025 is packed!

Between this update, the new Digimon Story game and LumenTale, looks like this year will be packed for monster collector enthusiasts.

And Pokémon, I guess, but I lost interest in that franchise years ago.

So sad about GoG’s revenue drop. It’s my store of choice and I genuinely find it more unintrusive than Steam, but if it keeps going like this, I wonder how long it will exist. Hopefully they manage to turn things around.

I really liked GI and i was saddened by their closure. Quality journalism (gaming and elsewhere) is dying, substituted by AI slop, paid influencers and clickbait articles.

Hopefully a few of the good ones remain. This is a step in the right direction.

That’s sad to hear. I was aware of some of them MTX-heavy, but I thought it was compensated by the base game being more feature-rich than their predecessors.

I appreciate the correction, I really am ignorant when it comes to this genre.

Unfortunately, I haven’t! I didn’t have a PS2 growing up, I went straight from the PS1 to the X360, so I missed on a lot of titles from the sixth gen. I eventually got back to play some of them (.hack games, Ace Combat titles, and a few more), but I don’t have as much free time as I did when I was a kid and I’m still missing a ton of stuff.

That being said, the CTR remake did have all the Nitro Kart levels in it and they were a true joy to play. I liked them even more than the original’s levels, which I certainly did non expect as I had a lot of nostalgia for the OG. Let me tell you, if the remake had been released on PC with cross-play, me and my brother would still be playing it to this day lol

Having grown up with the PS1, it’s been fun revisiting old classics and see what has aged well and what hasn’t.

Platformers like Spyro, Crash, Rayman, Abe’s Oddysee and Ape Escape have aged like fine wine (although Crash 1 is a lot more janky than the others). But that back into the past, some games also showed no signs of proper playtesting aimed at kids, which means overly difficult levels, annoying completions and such - I remember spending months playing Tarzan, The Emperor’s New Groove, Croc 2, Kingley’s Adventure and others to 100% them, and some of them I could never finish. I only recently 100% Croc 2 for the first time, for example, and yeah, it wasn’t really that good.

Some JRPGs are also as great today as they were the day they were released (Final Fantasy IX, Xenogears, Chrono Cross, Star Ocean and even lesser known ones such as Legend of Legaia, Threads of Fate and Wild Arms), and are arguably better than many of their contemporary competitors. But you sometimes have to stomach one too many random encounter, overly distracting old/early PS1-era graphics, bad translations, or all of the above (I’ve never been an omega-fan of FFVII, and let me tell you, revisiting it in the pandemic really didn’t improve my opinion of that game).

The slow gameplay afforded by the console really allows action-horror games such as Resident Evil, Dino Crisis and Silent Hill to shine, but those that attempted to be more action-oriented, such as Siphon Filter, really show the signs of age. Dino Crisis 2 is the exception here, being very action-heavy, but also distinctly “modern” in many of its design choices.

Stealth games such as Metal Gear Solid and Tenchu are also great, although very limited in scope by today’s standards, and the latter’s low render distance is something that may annoy players accustomed to modern gaming.

FPS games (Medal of Honour being the biggest title) really have no place in any contemporary gamer’s playlist. The same can be said about Race/driving games, unless you like revisiting the catchy tunes of the Gran Turismo 2 soundtrack. For example, I found CTR - Crash Team Racing quite dull and too easy even at max difficulty, but had a blast collecting all achievements in the remake (shame it never got released on PC - I wonder why).

It’s probably the same about fighting games: modern entries are much more fluid and dynamic, have better AI and allow for a greater skill ceiling. I say “probably” because I suck at fighting games and I’ve never played them extensively, aside from a few sparring matches with my brother on Tekken 3.

There are other cases where I found the original game “good enough, but not worth your time over the most recent entries”. For example, as a kid I spent countless hours crossing the skies of Ace Combat 2, but all the titles that came after it are just better. If I had to chose only one game for this post, AC2 would probably be it. I loved it and I still do, and its soundtrack is bonkers (seriously, it’s really good), but yeah, I’d take 4, Zero and 6, or even Project Wingman, over it any day.

The answer to that question depends on your tastes, your current situation (amount of free time, mood, etc…) and many more. There’s no such thing as the “best” when it comes to a subjective piece of media.

I can’t even decide on my favourite game, because what I like and what I want to play depends on the aforementioned factors. I may be interested in a strong narrative today, on puzzles tomorrow, and on a crazy platformer game next. Different games resonate with me differently depending on when I play them.

Games that really stayed with me are (in no particular order) Xenogears, Metal Gear Solid, CrossCode, Digimon World, Oddworld Abe’s Odyssey, Ace Combat 4-6, The Talos Principle, Ori and the Blind Forest, Threads of Fate, and I also spent a crazy amount of hours on Stronghold, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin and Medieval II Total War. There’s, like, at least half a dozen different genres in that list and all those games are very different from one another, but all had different qualities that resonated with me for one reason or the other.

I don’t think I agree. I feel like the game is so short and incomplete that you can see everything it has to offer by playing it for 10 minutes - or watching a YT gameplay.

The game has one map, no collisions, no AI. I think I remember it having different playable “rigs” but they are mechanically the same, so there’s no point.

At least with a game like Oblivion you could play it for 20 years and still find new ones. Big Rigs doesn’t have near the same “energy”.

Fun fact, Ace Combat 5 has a similar “going at ludicrous speed” bug (We have to go faster, We have to go even faster), but it also has an entire (actually good) playable game attached to it.

This feels like the Morbius re-release. Big Rigs is (in)famous for being one of the worst/most broken games ever made, who in their right mind would pay for it?

To be fair, I don’t think any of the MS releases ever suffered from bugs at launch. At least from my experience, they always worked pretty consistently on release, aside from maybe a few exceptions - I remember ReCore having excruciatingly long respawn times, Redfall suffering from stuttering and inconsistent framerate, and Ori 2 not being as fluid as the predecessor on console when it released, but all these were still perfectly playable at launch.

I feel like their problem is always the quality and quantity of the content. I wonder if the middling reception of Avowed convinced them that the game requires a bit more work to compete in the crowded and very competitive landscape of open world RPGs.

How many years of development has this game had? I wonder if it’s another case of Microsoft Mismanagement™ or if it’s actually so huge and detailed that it’s actually worth all of this time spent in the works.

Quite the big step for gaming rights in the EU. In the last page, the document also mentions “whales” as “vulnerable people”, adding that a game targeting them specifically may run afoul of EU legislation when precaution are not taken to protect them from their impulses.

This may have a gigantic ripple effect in the industry – or it may not, if the industry decides that targeting whales in the US and China is more profitable than bowing to the EU.

It’s always a brighter day when I can wake up and read your gaming rants :)

The soundtrack is fine. It works very well in its context and I still hum some of its tones every now and then, but that’s mostly it imo. The end credits song is one of the best end themes I’ve ever heard in a videogame, though.

Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross and Xenogears are the holy trinity of JRPGs for me. Every fan of the genre should play them at least once in their lives.

2025 is the year of the X360. First the decomp tools, now this. Maybe we can even expect a serious attempt at emulating the system on PC? Xenia is still not good, unfortunately.