• 1 Post
  • 22 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle


  • No, it was inaccurate, even at the time. The Famicom was built to cost and and mainly used cheap off-the-shelf components that were already obsolete when the system first released in 1983. The NES released in North America the same year as the Commodore Amiga, a system that actually was cutting edge, and represented a big leap forward in what home computers could do graphically. By the time Mega Man released, the Amiga was on it’s second revision and other home computers were rapidly catching up to it’s capabilities.
    While Mega Man was one of the best games on the NES, it ran at the same resolution as every other game on the system, and was stuck working within the same limited color palette and low sprite limit that were more than five years behind the curve when it released.




  • Hard to say. Linus has always made it sound like his investment in Framework is a personal one, not one made by LMG. If that’s the case, then I think any potential issues could be largely sidestepped by just having someone else do all the laptop reviews.

    If that’s not the case and LMG is directly involved with Framework, then it gets a bit tricky. To their credit, they’ve done a good job of disclosing the Framework investment whenever the company is brought up, but I don’t watch most of LTT’s review content, so I’m not sure if it’s being mentioned in the context of other laptop reviews. If not, it needs to be.
    The whole point of having that kind of disclosure though is so people know that the information being presented is potentially biased. At a certain point, it’s on the audience to take that bias into account and cross reference other sources before making any purchasing decisions. I’m not sure there’s anything LMG can really do to alleviate the perceived conflict of interest, unless they just stop reviewing laptops altogether. Whether or not it’s ethical to continue reviewing laptops in that context, even with a full disclosure, is a question I don’t have a good answer to.



  • Second this. Just today, I was moving a couple terabytes from my work PC to my media server at gigabit speeds, and the transfer was absolutely hammering the poor quad core i5 I’ve got in it. Surfing the web was less than pleasant for an a hour to two there.

    Edit: I didn’t see OP’s reply to this comment when I first wrote it. I agree decompression is the most likely culprit, as it can be CPU intensive and compression ratios vary quite a lot from game to game.


  • I like it, but it’s not as good as the original Soul Reaver or Defiance.
    The biggest issue this game has is the save system. In the first game where you could save pretty much anywhere and just had to navigate back to the last area you were in after loading. In Soul Reaver 2 you can only save at preset points which can be few and far between. There are sections of the game that take multiple hours to complete on a first playthrough, where you don’t have access to a save point and quitting means losing your progress.
    The world design has also been downgraded somewhat IMO. The environments look much nicer and there’s a wider variety of them, but the world as a whole is much less interconnected. The first game was a pseudo metroidvania, where completing an area would unlock shortcuts and everything linked back to a central hub. Soul Reaver 2 is much more linear, and the parts where you do have to backtrack are more tedious as a result.



  • I’m the exact opposite. I love metroidvainas, and will usually tear through them in a few sittings.
    A well designed metroidvaina world acts like a single interconnected puzzle box, and unrevealing them is majorly addicting. I go out of my way to backtrack through previous areas whenever I can in order to get every item and find every secret. I very rarely get lost in these games and when I do, figuring out where to go next is usually a simple process of elimination. The real challenge / frustration tends to be figuring out where the last few secrets are hidden after already exploring the whole map map multiple times over.

    I absolutely hated Metriod Dread for how linear and hand-holdy is was, and was shocked to find that people actually enjoyed it. Outside of the combat, I had a terrible time with that game. I felt like I was fighting against the level design up until the last 15% or so when it finally opens up and becomes an actual Metroidvaina, albeit not a very good one due to the aggressively linear map structure. Personally, I want to see more games like Dark Souls and Hollow Knight, who’s worlds are so massive and convoluted that I can’t easily intuit exactly where to go and have huge areas that I managed to completely miss on my first play-through.