my local library recently introduced a library of things and they’ve hit a fucking homer. It’s all either things you need for like 2 weeks out of 5 years (like a machine for laminating paper), expensive hobby stuff you can try out before you drop your own cash on it (like sewing machines or button makers) or full-on throwing a rager equipment (like a karaoke machine). It is such a perfect mix of things to get on a library model. If I ever win the lottery or something I’m buying them a whole makerspace department with staff and all the equipment you could dream of.

Oxytocin - the nipple clamp hormone

obviously. But for the people who don’t know this, unlike me, maybe you could explainm this one

One of the first side-missions is you befriending a cop who lives in your building.

MGS: Peacewalker and V

countless shooters (and gta 5) have been attacked by the left media for grooming boys into becoming “violent” and holding values that are “toxically masculine”

These are like diametrically opposed as per real world. A lot of the left will critize games for being toxically masculine, the only real criticism that a shooter turns boys violent is niche places like here and adjacent bubbles and even then only as a second order effect of recognizing CoD after Like Modern Warfare 4 (the first one) as USAF recruitment.

The whole idea that you play CS and then go shoot up a high school was always pretty near exclusively something Jack Thompson and evangelical Mothers Against X type groups did and even they mostly stopped once CoD became a recruitment tool

I got the impression those are also real world feminist, the other option is the feminists from Postal 2 and 3

There’s a VR Mod for HL2 and while it is very well made as per vr-ifying the controls, the game itself also just adapts to VR fairly effortlessly since it was mostly physics puzzle based

I honestly found it pretty thematically fitting to the SCP-with-the-serial-number-scratched-off setting that the crossdimensional wordsalad sound that turns you evil has the achilles heel of “having a forklift launched at it”. Felt grounding.

Yeah one gets why it’s the overshadowed one even disregarding the IP ownership but the worst Remedy SP game still easily lands you at like a 8/10

I think that might just be a problem of the OG Xbox. Your usual Gamecube and PS2 titles still tend to hold up really well

If you bought the ultimate edition as OP seems to have done because that’s the only version available on Steam you don’T even have to do that anymore, that’s just in there now

Everything Viktor Antonov touches as an art director immediatly looks good forever, dude has been touched by the god of art. Half Life 2, CSS, Wolfenstein TNO, DOOM (new one), Prey (also new one) to name a few. Even the games that aren’t that good, Kingpin: Life of Crime and Falllout 4 for example, you still can’t really fault them for looking bad

After liking CONTROL a lot I’ve started to play the catalogue of Remedy that I’ve missed out on so far and what’s interesting to me is CONTROL now feels like it was in the making for 18 years, starting from Max Payne 1, and also probably the reason there isn’t a lot like it.

You get the time slowing powers at Max Payne 1 set against a backdrop of slightly pointing at the supernatural. Alan Wake modifies the time slowing powers slightly to be reactive instead of proactive and also picks up all the real otherworldly and other dimension stuff as well as great big honking set pieces and the enviroment throwing huge objects at you. American Nightmare then uses that to put it into a more action focused setting. Quantum Break carries that over more scientififically and gives you superpowers that are strikingly similar to what you have in CONTROL where they go full hog and unite the otherworldly paranatural powers with a more scientific approach á la SCP and it just really fucking clicks.

I’ve noticed this with a lot. Graphics are the obvious one, but the sound design gets better, too. It’s not like Max Payne was bad but they really nailed it in American Nightmare and just carry over from there, the Service Weapon as a pistol in CONTROL is just the sound of the 9mm Pistol from there. The superpowers in Quantum Break feel kind of clunky if you come back at it from CONTROL, this is really obvious in the dodge mechanic which is a 1:1 copy but for some reason it feels like 30% worse in Quantum Break, couldn’t even tell you why, probably reactiveness, sound and level design?

CONTROL is really polished to a mirror sheen. The Max Paynes had some gameplay clunkyness and some bullshit hard, Alan Wake 1 is really a fucking slog to play for the first two chapters before it picks up, American Nightmare definitely includes too much pointless walking despite their efforts to streamline it. Quantum Break tends to be too heavy on the story, lacking interactions and the guns feel about 20% too weak. They’re all good games, despite Quantum Break being the obvious stinker. And then in CONTROL they just nailed it 100%, start to finish

I don’t even. Every individual part of RDR2 is pretty good. It looks good, sounds good, the writing really deserves recognition for managing to keep a 100 hour plot interesting and at no point was it ever clear to me why this needed to be an interactive medium because the gameplay and all the other bits don’t really interface. Inside missions you can’t leave the very narrow developer intended path at all, your choices boil down to “what gun do I shoot this guy with”. Outside of missions you’re free to do “whatever” except whatever is also just mostly shooting guys or animals - none of which you have to do or affect anything.

The exploration is and stumbling upon odd sidequests initially is like the only part where it makes sense to be a game, because you couldn’t recreate that in another medium and some even ask of you, the player, to use your noggin to solve shit. All the rest of it though, you could basically get the same experience by watching The Sopranos and after every episode you finish a level of Quake.

Which on it’s own would be fine, a piece of art can just be a good time for a (long) while and that’s good but RDR2 ranks among there as the most expensive videogame, especially if you exclude obvious scams like Star Citizen and live service games like WoW that have just been getting content forever and everybody involved in the production was reportedly forced into insane crunch times to make the horse balls react to temperature. And for what?

RDR2 belongs in a museum because it’s so much less than its parts

I mean they could be into Killology

this is like the most reasonable explanation I’ve seen for why he thinks everybody wants to bone their mum

I was set in place to hate this because if you have no steering a recumbent bike is clearly the superior choice but alas, these folks also do off-traintracks riding

ethically it’s always correct to cheat small business tyrants out of their money. that was there when you got it.

Practically? Give it a go at least