Do robots and aliens count as mystical? If so, Killroy Was Here and The Grand Illusion by Styx.

Edit: You said mythical not mystical… 🤦‍♂️

If the cow’s tongue tastes as good while the cow is still alive as it does when it’s been cooked into taco meat, I wouldn’t mind kissing a cow. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Before EA, Bioware’s RPGs had some personality and took risks trying new shit. Since Mass Effect, they’ve been especially formulaic, toned down, and sanitized for a larger audience.

EA makes good looking, (usually) well polished games meant to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible, and when you have spent years playing games with a distinct style you can very easily see this shift once EA acquires a studio. Either you’re never going to see those games again, or they will become the most watered-down, generic version of the studio’s greatest IPs.

The one thing I can recall where it was known that EA had little to no involvement in development of one of their own games was when DICE made the first Mirror’s Edge. It was merely a AA game and the execs didn’t think much about it one way or the other during development; and then it became a huge hit so they started getting involved with the sequel. Which was shit.

Damn you really held out.

I gave up on Bioware the minute they announced they were purchased by EA all those years ago.

This is like when your parents would take away the power cable to your games for a few days because you and your sibling got into a fight.

I’m glad that when I made my high school for Counter-Strike, it was back in 1.6 and not more recently. Heard about a kid who did the same for CSGO just a few years ago and he got expelled and I think he was arrested because they saw it like “terrorist planning” or some bullshit…

I remember finally getting my hands on the editor for the Build engine after a few years of making maps in Doom and Heretic and had thought 3D level design was only something super geniuses could do… Until Hammer showed it was just the garbage UI/UX of Build lol

I feel like I didn’t get this experience because most of the parties I went to were hosted by dudes in bands, so when the guy(s) who played guitar played guitar, they fucking rocked it along with the guy(s) that played drums and the guy(s) that played bass.

I also finally completed the full story finally this year. I had always gone about 3 days in and started over trying completely different options lol

The only difference I see between this and the only other non-official way of verifying age on Discord is that Discord itself will have your face and not just the mod team of the room you’re joining.

I wasn’t gonna send a picture of my ID to some rando; I sure as fuck won’t give it to a corporate entity.

If you included modded companions, Inigo would be at a tier above the top tier. The vanilla companions are absolute trash by comparison. They don’t even do everything an NPC can do in the game; but Inigo does. Can literally comment on any item you see or touch, interact with other NPCs, has a schedule he follows when not actively following you, follows his wants and needs… The dude who made him went all out with it and puts the actual developers to shame, since most of these features are simple check boxes in the editor.

The fryers at all the McDonald’s locations I work at are on wheels. You can detach the gas line. I have to regularly pull them out to clean spilled oil and shit from under and behind them (and all the other big appliances as well, which are the same). It sucks worse than cleaning the bathrooms.

I have not been let down by Ssethtzeentach on YouTube. He only seems to cover super deep, complex games; most of which ends up being indie games. How I found out about Kenshi and that Earth Defense Force is way deeper than it looks.

Since they count DLC in the mix, it’ll probably be Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree.

Even the small print on a physical disk’s packaging said that.

There used to be a couple… Back when the default skin for Steam was just that ugly green shit? There was a couple different 3rd party clients that offered customizing the look before they added that function officially.

The only one I think might still be relevant is the one centered around filtering shovelware from the store. And I don’t know if you download that, or if it’s just a web client, since it is focused on the store and not much else (I also never used it personally).

Elden Ring is still a stuttery mess on PC and barely hits 60 fps on consoles, even the $700 one, yet it’s beloved.

I have an old ass PC and a PS5 with the game on both and they run smooth as shit unless you’re using raytracing, which literally doesn’t even change the visuals in the game; it just makes it slower.

Stalker 2 is a busted mess. The performance issues have been fixed mostly after 3 patches, but the game itself shits itself once you get to a certain story mission. Literally nothing works beyond that point. The A-Life system does not work, scripted events are all jacked up, IDK if anyone else is getting this but every now and then I have my secondary weapon replaced with a random other weapon that I didn’t even have in my inventory, sound effects don’t play properly, the hud completely disappears, and so many more things that make me glad I’m only playing through GamePass and didn’t actually buy the game. There’s a good game under the mess, somewhere. But they should have just bit the bullet and delayed it another month or two instead of releasing what they did for the holidays.

The reason they sold so many copies though, is because pre-ordering. People bought them before they ever saw the game in action. And games like Stalker 2 are the reason why you shouldn’t pre-order. Because the chances of getting burned by busted-ass shit like this is increasingly more common. Again, because people pre-order the fuck out of games.

I definitely don’t see a fixation of performance lol

The reliance on AI upscaling and frame generation, while the entire game takes up half or your entire SSD shows that optimization is an after thought. These solutions make everything look pretty and smooth, at the cost of how it actually feels to play (input lag up the fucking ass that makes the game feel way worse). Couple that with the myriad of performance issues the majority of AAA games have at launch.

The focus is entirely on making something visually good looking that will sell millions in pre-orders alone.

Riiight… The streamers are the toxic ones and not just every player of the game.

I miss that game… And real arcades. All the “arcades” around here have nothing bullshit mobile games you can literally download and play for free on your phone, and they want like $1-2 per play at the cabinet now. I ain’t paying any money to play Angry Birds or Flappy Bird.

At least they still have skeeball and the basketball things…

As for light gun games on PC, the only things I’ve ever seen are emulated. Either arcade games like that Terminator one with the machine guns that actually have kick to them, or NES/SNES games using the zapper/super scope 6. The emulators do support the actual hardware if you have it and a way to connect it, and there used to be light guns made for PC, but I don’t know if they would be USB or serial port (they were from the 80’s and 90’s).