Onemanarmyy

What's the reason these kind of tech-company layoffs always have to be so ruthless without giving employees a heads up a few weeks beforehand? Is it out of some fear that newly-laid off people will unleash their anger on the product in the last weeks?

Then again, wouldn't someone that hears their job is gone on the last day without a heads up, also be furious enough to fuck shit quickly up if they want to?

remember when they were all trembling in their boots for Vivendi and made Ancel come back from his start up indie studio to stand on a stage pronouncing that their cult-classic would get a sequel and the shareprice after that show rose enough for Vivendi to drop the hostile take over?

And then they actually had to put some Beyond Good & Evil stuff in it, but the threat was gone and so was Ancel so why bother.

I went into Dragon's Dogma and having a grand olde time.

Until i stumbled on this quest that's sort of a murder mystery and has you traveling to multiple spots in a certain time-span.

I became aware that it was possible to get 2 keys instead of 1, but wasn't entirely sure what the benefit was... but once i know such things, i won't leave until i end up with 2 keys.

Sadly it turned out that an auto-save can ruin your opportunity to get the 2nd key, and a load game option will keep bringing you back to that dead end save. Note that Dragon's Dogma doesn't let you choose a certain save.. You either load the last save, or you go back to the 'previous checkpoint', which is quite a nebulous word. Apparently it means when the last cutscene occurred or something.

So i grit my teeth and went to the last checkpoint, and got all the way back to the 2nd key encounter... only for the dead end auto-save to occur again right before i could get the 2nd key. I think i tried 3x without success, said fuck it and used the 1 key, and realized that the 2nd key didn't offer anything after all.

No biggie.. we're done with that.. so i continue this murder mystery quest, which lasts several days. (by this time multiple ingame days and multiple real life days :D ) I probably did some sidequest in the meantime. But eventually i ended up at a similar point where an auto-save screwed me over and had to go back to the 'previous checkpoint'. And .. yeah it turned out that even after multiple ingame days, and multiple sidequests, you still get transported back all the way to the start of the main-quest. At that point i was like.. Ugh... i'll go play something else instead.

I can't say i disliked my time with Dragon's Dogma, but the save-system can seriously stall your progress if you're the kind of person that tries to see as much as possible of the game in 1 go. I'll keep it installed and hopefully i eventually forget what happened and can go back to the game without feeling jaded. But at the same time, i feel like it's inevitable i will butt heads with this save system again and again in a 100+ hour game.

I echo the sentiment here. If you don't enjoy something, it's totally fine to walk away from a thing. And 3 episodes of a series is definitly enough of a fair attempt to try to enjoy a thing. And these series-makers know enough about the human psyche, that if they make a series that gets bogged down into establishing it's world without anything of note to happen within 3 episodes, it's a failing on their part to capture the audience.

That said, if you have some sort of friend-group that likes to discuss media with eachother and you really value that time spent together, sometimes it's worthwhile to go the extra mile just to see why your friendo is so excited about this series / film / song that you wouldn't really give a 2nd look by yourself.

Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne

The concept of online gaming was still fairly new to me and Warcraft III just did a great job making it seem to matter with ranking systems, open qualifiers for tournaments and clan support. I think the rates were cheaper in the weekends. So i would spend the week figuring out good build orders and then test it out against real opponents in the weekend.

Thought the campaigns of Warcraft 3 were great as well to be fair. This even had a Diablo-esque stand alone campaign where you were only using hero units and doing missions for Orcs. Great package.

SSX 3: Amazing game. Felt great to play, great soundtrack and the customization options and light RPG elements (upgrading stats) made it a ton of fun. This one also had those long rides where you go down the mountain in 1 go and come across all those mini-levels you played before. Always thought that was a neat concept.

GTA Double Pack:

GTA III & Vice City in 1 package in the release-year of GTA Vice City? Amazing value.

Vice City was a real level up in my eyes and probably the best game of 2003. But getting GTA III on top of that is a nice bonus because that game does have merit as well.

Shoutout to LOTR: The Two Towers.

Those games were actually a lot of fun. I especially remember the level where you're holding the castle-wall down and the Orks keep putting these ladders up for you to kick down.

Oh right eFootball..

I do have fond memories of Fifa from a decade ago, but knowing that they're all in on the online mode that i probably won't get super into, yet still have an occassional interest in playing some football.. i might check that one out.

@sparky_buzzsaw

Text adventures might as well be dead. They crop up now and then in games like Space Rangers but are by and large a dead genre

Stumbled on this game called Roadwarden that seems to stick to being mostly a text adventure, but updating it for the modern age. You still get to decide where you head towards and look at all the objects in a scene, but you no longer have to guess which inputs the game takes and which it doesn't. Might be interesting.

@dooz: That's why i originally said: `I guess you could argue that First person dungeon crawlers sort of evolved out of that genre, by giving the player actually something to do while trying to get out of the maze.`

Maze-games in these days were purely about getting a sense of the surroundings and navigating your way out of there. That was the full experience.

@bigsocrates:

Ah, no i'm not talking about the arcade top-down games, but the DOS-games that were placing you in a fully 3d maze and feature hardly any gameplay apart from... finding the exit.

This stuff was so popular that you had entire compilation CD's full of Maze-games. It was a genre by itself.

Pix The Cat is a fun game though, easy recommend.

Maze games (extremely popular in the DOS-days) are dead. I guess you could argue that First person dungeon crawlers sort of evolved out of that genre, by giving the player actually something to do while trying to get out of the maze.

There was also a fuckton of software dedicated to 'Conway's game of life', but you can argue that that's not much of a game i guess.

Snowboard games don't really happen anymore. Jetski's neither. BMX same.

God games with a decent budget behind them are gone too. Oh how we pine for the days of Godus, and the chance to rule over a game world and it's players.

@raven10

You're thinking of Stormgate