Nah - Doom (DOS): and Doom Eternal are on there, as are Baldur’s Gates 2 and 3.

Well; you could use that engine to produce something well-written, deep and interesting like New Vegas, but that still got dinged for being an absurdly bug-ridden release with serious performance issues. It was great despite the engine, not because.

There’s some slightly-shonky open world engines that support some really impressive RPGs (eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Divinity engine - looks great but performance is arseholes) and some very impressive open-world engines that support some lightweight RPGs (eg. Horizon Forbidden West on the Decima engine - looks great and smooth as butter). And then you’ve got the Creation engine, which looks terrible and has terrible performance, and which runs bugs and glitches in a way that combines into (usually) very shallow RPGs.

Annoys me that “less” is always correct, which makes “fewer” completely redundant, and yet it’s a short word that could be valuable in conversation if opened up and reused for something everyday that has a long name.

“Before I leave the house, I always check that I’ve got my keys, phone, and fure in my pockets.”

Yeah, it’s always had really strong art direction - still holds up, and you don’t notice missing shadows so much in the middle of a frenetic sequence anyway.

Good to see ray tracing coming along. You could get the same shadows and lighting in a modern rasterising engine now as demonstrated in the RTX version, but at the cost of much more development time. Graphics like that being available to smaller studios and larger games being feasible for bigger studios would be great. HL2 is massive compared to modern shooters, and not having to spend forever tweaking each scene helps with that.

I know you jest, but I’m going to guess it’s for the same reason that the RPCS3 developers didn’t just concentrate on the ‘popular’ games. If they know that all the janky broken games work properly, then they’ll have confidence that there’s no subtle issues hiding in the nearly-perfect ones. A rising tide lifts all boats.

Seems fair both ways to me. That doesn’t seem an unreasonable amount of pay for a day’s work, as even if the ‘final product’ is only a minute, it will still have stopped him from doing much other work that day. Contrariwise, if he’d been asking for any more, the client would have been able to find someone else to do it just as well at the original price, since the requirement is basically ‘clearly spoken’. Wouldn’t make sense to get Ian McKellen in to interpret this bit of acting work.

Such a fan that you’ve gone with the username, too? Good stuff.

Same problem as the old Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide adventure, I think. They’d prioritised making ‘Discworld’ puzzles over puzzles that were fun, interesting or made any sense. The animation, voice acting still make it an entertaining game if you’ve got a guide next to you, and it’s great seeing how they’ve interpreted what’s in the books onto the screen. The design hasn’t aged well, though?

They didn’t pull DMC2 just out of principle? Foolishness, Dante, foolishness.

Yeah; I’ve a 6700XT, and it appears to be a pretty even match for a 7600XT, looking at Phoronix’ graphs. Makes a pretty good job of 60 Hz / 1440p on recent games, maybe turn down a setting or two, and can usually do 144Hz / 1440p on games that are a few years old. If you can get one of those for substantially cheaper than one of these, I’d say go for it.

That’s almost exactly the problem. English uses helper words exclusively for future tense, and indeed, helper words like ‘to’ to form an infinitive. ‘Will’ is the helper word to show that something is a fact, that it is definite - grammatically, it is indicative. (The sun will rise tomorrow.) ‘Would’ is the helper word to show that something is an opinion, or dependent on something else - grammatically, it is subjunctive. (If you push that, it would fall; if it was cheaper, I would buy it.)

Spanish has both helper words for future tense (conjugations of ‘ir’, analogous to ‘going to’, often used in speech) and straight-up conjugations for future tense (doesn’t exist in English; often used in writing). It also conjugates verbs differently if they’re indicative, subjunctive, or imperative (asking or telling someone to do something). This is how Spanish manages to have fifty-odd ways to conjugate every verb, which is very confusing to English speakers who make do with three ways and helper words.

Translating a ‘future tense sentence’ for Duolingo requires you to have psychic powers about whether something is fact or opinion, which helper words are wanted, and so on, and it usually comes down to guessing between multiple ‘correct’ answers, which Duo will reject all but one of.

Absolutely this. I’d have argued that ‘every day’ is a more idiomatic translation than ‘daily’, and what native speakers would say, but that’s irrelevant. English tends to emphasise the end of sentences as the most important part, so all these translations are correct depending on the nuance that you intend:

• Daily in Hamburg, many ships arrive (as opposed to eg. cars, or few ships)
• Daily, many ships arrive in Hamburg / Many ships arrive daily in Hamburg (as opposed to eg. Bremen)
• Many ships arrive in Hamburg daily (as opposed to eg. weekly)

Wouldn’t question any of those constructions as a native speaker. In fact, original responders’ example was why I gave up on Duolingo myself originally, some years ago. Translating ‘future tense’ sentences from Spanish into English or back again is always going to be a matter of opinion, since English doesn’t have the verb conjugations that Spanish does. Guessing the ‘sanctified answer’ is tedious, when a lot of the time it’s not even the most natural form of a sentence.

Previous Dark Souls DLC have required you to complete “about half the game”, and then generally warp you off somewhere. There’s not really a lot of dead space on the map for adding to it. I’m expecting something like a new object in the battlefield outside Leyndell, which when you examine it turns out to be Miquella’s memories and warps you off to another region to play through them.

DS1 and 2 required you to fetch an object and take it somewhere to access the DLC; DS3 just needed you to get to the right place. I’m expecting the ‘right place’ thing to continue. ER did have the three special blue daggers for the bell towers, so they might do a fetch quest, never know.

Well; setting aside the small reference pool of modern gaming journalism, I’m not sure that it is such a big step from HL to CoD, just a bit of a step down. HL is as much of a ‘corridor shooter’ as you could ever hope to find - there’s one path through it, and I doubt that many people deviate from it all that much on a playthrough. The difference is, that HL is super imaginatively dressed up on that one path. The levels have a real sense of place. Like you say, the puzzles are never all that difficult, but they’re extremely well-integrated into the design; they feel like the kind of obstacles that you might have to overcome in a top-secret research facility when disaster has struck. And they’re mainly new puzzles; nothing hackneyed or tropey here.

From the article:

In many ways, Half-Life can be seen as an indictment of the video game industry: how can a 25 year-old game be better than almost every shooter that has followed it? Why has its ambition only ever been exceeded only by its own sequel? It paints a picture of a stagnated industry still playing with toys from the 1990s.

I think there’s two problems here; one is that it’s safer to play follow-the-leader, and one is learning the wrong lesson from the leader. Kind of hard to believe now, but HL was considered a graphic powerhouse when it came out, requiring some of the top class machines of the day. But I think that the kind of ‘immersive feeling of wonder’ that HL has via its design conjuring up a real place is mostly due to its environmental storytelling and the novelty of not knowing what to expect around each corner. The imitators saw the twisty-but-linear game, and decided that the most important thing to copy was to have as much graphics as possible. Can’t copy the imaginativeness and the care, so yeah, perpetually taking control away from you for a shooting gallery setpiece, when in fact that only draws you in in a superficial way.

I wouldn’t mind other games copying HL if what they wanted to copy was inventiveness, experimentation, and non-stop gameplay. Copying the things that were new about HL is the complete wrong thing to copy, though.

With reading the article:

• console discs have 60 GB of space, might as well export your assets at a quality which fills it

Your sight-unseen summary is far too detailed in comparison.

Release notes, innit? For a very technical new feature; that seems enough. If it was a bug, then maybe a line about how we missed it; if it’s user facing, what new functionality it enables. You can always go look at the PR if you want the real detail.

Hey, just because 95% of them are worthless, doesn’t mean the other 5% aren’t too.

Annoying - the demo was really good, and ran great on Linux using Proton. Guess I’m going to be holding off on buying till it’s removed and on sale, then - there’s no point in buying a game early and it running like shit.

I was bewildered by this myself. The developers who were famous for their walking simulators but who fired all their staff a few years back (keeping the studio founders) have taken over a project where the original developers were dismissed amid some damaging-sounding rumours and budget overruns. Hardsuit Labs presumably had completed most of the initial writing work and concept art - their ‘tech demos’ looked pretty convincing, even though that kind of thing is very carefully managed - but must have still been a long way from anything that could be released. A mystery. See how it goes - still a year away, anyway.

Nice. We always used to get simultaneous releases in the pre-Steam days, and since the front-end is now the cross-platform SDL, hopefully we’ll be back up to complete parity again. Might need to wait a while to get Dwarf Therapist and DFHack back working again; the new UI still isn’t quite there as your forts get bigger.