The RNG circle is still there in 1, but it might be slightly better.

Shields deplete slightly quicker but recharge much faster as opposed to the old game that could take like ten minutes.

You can use zoom aim with any weapon rather than just hipfire before you’ve put lots of points into it.

The improvement of aim and weapon handling is better balanced as you put points into them and there’s less extreme weapon sway.

I’m not sure, but the sound mix on the guns might have been punched up too. Either that or they just sounded real fucking good to start with.

I agree that’s plausible, but there’s also no actual mention of that.

So while that would make more sense, it’s definitely not established by the writers.

I finally finished my replay of Mass Effect 1 and really enjoyed it. So naturally I jumped straight into Mass Effect 2, which I absolutely adored when it was new and has long been in my mental top 10 games for a long time.

And fuck me, it suuuuucks. Admittedly I’m only like 3 hours in, but honestly it’s kind of stunlocked me how wrong I was / how much my perspective had changed.

The gameplay is so telegraphed and 101-brown-cover shooter of the era it’s painful. The combat is worse than (the admittedly improved in the Legendary edition) first game, with annoying abstracted difficulty, artificial limitations, and a shit simplified cooldown system for powers that doesn’t feel like you’re a squad but one character in three places. The accuracy is annoyingly imprecise, camera and reticle movement so sway-y it’s motion sickness inducing, and the weapon sounds lack any and all punch or feel.

The RPG elements have been streamlined into near irrelevancy and despite the fact that the locations are richer and fuller visually, the world feels more lifeless because your squadmates don’t really say anything or interact with it. In the first game, at any time you can turn to any squadmate, hit the interact button, and they’ll comment on where you are or what’s happening. Sure they only have a few comments for each place / bit of timeline, but it makes them feel like real characters and the three of you like a real squad. Your choices of who to bring on missions rarely matters, with anyone not key to the mission plots standing silently staring off into space in cutscenes as if they’re bored by the whole thing.

In the first game, it hides loading screens between areas with longer walks through areas that reveal vistas and do dramatic scene setting when you arrive in new locations. Or uses elevator rides as opportunities for unique, often funny or insightful conversations between the different makeups of your squad that flesh out the world and the characters. In this one, everything is just a loading screen, making all the locations, worlds, ships etc feel completely disconnected from each other and often you’re just dumped on a planet with little or no context for it.

Speaking of planets, the galaxy map is a mess and having to prebuy fuel (which doesn’t burn at a predictable or internally logical rate) to travel certain areas of the map really sucks. Get 99.9% of the way to your destination and have the fuel number hit zero, too bad, doesn’t matter if you literally have momentum to carry you the rest of the way, game takes over and flies you all the way back to where you started to refuel. Motherfucker, if I’m totally out of fuel how the fuck are you turning around a spaceship travelling at near light speed and sending it lightyears back the way I came instead of the next ten seconds of flight time with the momentum from previous thrust in the vaccum of space! Yeah, and the surveying and abstracted, multiple resource currency extraction fucking sucks too.

It really is like they stripped back everything that actually added depth to the world, the characters, your choices when building their stats and abilities etc. And then just layered on boring, accountancy bollocks mechanics and internal currencies over the top instead.

The returning to where you started fuel thing might seem like a minor but annoying thing, but it’s unfortunately a symptom of a much much bigger problem. The first one built a unique and interesting universe with a truly amazing amount of lore, politics, internal logic, technological detail, and thematic depth. Honestly is shocking how well and deeply crafted it is right off the bat in the first game. And then the second game repeatedly goes fuck that! in order to make it more like the most generic slop imaginable from the time. Really cool gun technology that is based on a microcosm of the same mass accelerator tech as propelled all these cultures into the cosmos and is a major plot point and part of the lore? Nah, ignore that because we want a generic reload system like other games. A Star Trek/DS9 type thematic throughline about the difficulty but essential need to overcome differences, historical hate/war, and personal issues to succeed and survive? Nah, fuck that, everyone is a cool self-centred libertarian asshole who spends every conversation complaining about red tape and diplomacy and how’s it’s much more fun and cool to just torture dudes or whatever. That evil little splinter group that were constantly fucking up and getting themselves killed by running experiments to breed face-eating-space-leopards? Oh now you work for them, no you don’t get a choice, and they’ve somehow become a massive intergalactic shadow government with more knowledge, technology, and resources than everyone else in the space of two years.

The whole game seems designed to limit your sense of choice, not just being forced to work for Cerberus. There’s a million different upgrades and items to buy, but the economy is artificially tight so you can’t afford to experiment. Same with the inability to easily or cheaply respec your character. Worse still is the Paragon/Renegade ‘morality’ system. For all its faults in the first game it worked thematically and allowed you to approach different situations with different reactions and attitudes. Because special dialogue choices/checks are now wholly tied to these morality points instead of putting stat points into charm/intimidate, the second game basically forces you to pick a binary ‘good’ or ‘bad’ right from the start and then pick those dialogue choices exclusively in order to have enough points to pass said checks. Any contrary choice cancels out previous ones so any nuance leaves you in a limbo where soon you can’t pick either.

And the writing, oh god the writing. Conversations in the dialogue tree often don’t flow at all. Sometimes asking one option before another will inexplicably remove to option to ask the other as a follow up. Other times you can choose multiple options after one another but they give the same info or even exact same voice line anyway. It also has a terrible case of meta-scriptitus. Characters know things they couldn’t know, assert things that go against character, just because it’s needed to advance the plot. The plot that’s also a fucking mess. Even in just the first few hours, if you actually read or listen to some logs & extra dialogue, you realise that the entire plot setup doesn’t make any fucking sense…

Just nonsense. I could go on, but like with the game, I’m finding it hard to summon the will to continue.

I believe he was involved in arranging one of the freedom flotillas, which is cool of him.

Rock solid.

Then I drop the mic like I’m Charlie Kirk is a brilliantly simple hook.

I’ve been banging on this drum here and elsewhere since the first game came out. There’s definitely some people on the Hitman writing team with at least a good understanding of parapolitical history and likely actual leftist politics.

There’s plenty of main characters and mission plots that relate to real events like the one you mentioned. Dalias Margolis is pretty much straight up Ghislaine Maxwell - they just made her father and actual Israeli general instead of a newspaper owning Mossad spy. Dawood Rangan is almost certainly supposed to be Dawood Ibrahim with his links to terrorism, massive public ego, history of cricket fixing and lower level Mumbai gangster history. Jordan Cross is pretty clearly Jared Leto in looks, personality, and weird nepo-baby intelligence connections through his father. And so on…

By the time you get into the non-target characters and all the little schemes, controversies, and historical backgrounds of characters that NPCs in the crowds talk about the knowledge and references run really deep.

Great games.

I’m replaying the Mass Effect Trilogy as it’s been about 10 years since I last did. Still working my way through the ME1 portion at the moment and it shows its age with pop up text boxes instead of showing some quest outcomes & repeated planet instillations, but it is about to be a 20 year old game (!). It is still absolutely amazing the way they managed to create such a vivid, deep, and fleshed out world & set of characters first time though. The seems in the dialogue system are clunky by today’s standards but a good amount of the writing remains amazing for the time & better than a lot of what you get today. The music and art direction still rocks too.

When I haven’t had time to sit down and sink a lot of time into a game I’ve been playing Into The Breach. I really like FTL & still boot it up now and then, but when I bought Into The Breach years ago I just couldn’t get into it. For whatever reason though, this time it’s really starting to click for me (albeit on Easy for now) especially as I start to discover more of what you can do with movement/attack cancelling etc rather than always trying to clear the board like in other strategy games I play.

This looks so fucking rad. I’m catching up on the livestream but so far the preshow is better than the mainone between JetSetTrainDriftingGame and the super over the top trucker game.

I like Wasteland 3 because you drive what’s basically the Spectrum SPV from Captain Scarlet through the snow and the AI Reagan bit is rad.

I got…

When entertainment was the blues Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads for continued success.

Now that it’s video games you have to let Kojima scan your feet.

Bob Vylan have been sound as fuck for almost a decade. All of it’s worth it. Go back to “Frontline” for that Vylan foundation. Maybe the best live band post Covid too, despite me being an earlier and still Bad Breeding obsessive.

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I genuinely think there’s a case to be made that RCT1+2 are some of the best games ever made. They’re absolutely two of my top favourites of all time.

Congratulations on getting shitcanned in part because of our AI bullshit! Now you have the exciting opportunity to become a customer for our AI bullshit!

Yeah, I just meant part of the reason I haven’t checked out the new ones is I keep just being satisfied dipping into the originals.

I had a similar experience and even at the end I love the fact that you can just go back to the ‘point of no return’ so easily and make different decisions to play them out.

I haven’t to be honest. I came to Monster Train kind of late and find myself going back to Steamworld Heist every year or so and it still feeling satisfying and fresh so when I’ve had time I’ve experimented with the other Steamworld games. Haven’t found one that’s stuck for me like heist though.

I love all things mushrooms so once I’ve (finally) had my full of the first one I’ll check it out.

I absolutely adored the sequel and I wasn’t expecting it to live up to the first since it’s one of the best and most effecting games I’ve ever played.