Half-life 2 will turn 20 in November so I guess the third one is coming out any day now (opens a new can of copium and grips the favourite spork)
I’m sure Portal 3 is coming soon too… right?
Sure, right after Left 4 Dead 3
If only valve could count past 2
brilliant
Black Mesa remake looks so good. I just picked it up for $4 on Steam. It was nearly 30 damn gigs lol.
Black Mesa is amazing! It’s what the already great HL1 could have been.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Portal 3 is released at some point. I’m skeptical, but I’m not outruling it. The game is whacky enough that there are probably a lot of interesting and cool things that can be implemented into a worthy successor.
I am, on the other hand, utterly convinced that HL3 is not going to happen. The previous two were groundbreaking, stretching limits of what one can do with a physics engine. I’m having a hard time imagining that it can be pulled off a 3rd time, simply because I am unable to imagine any sory of content that would all: a) fit with the series so that it still feels like a HL game
b) interesting enough to allow for the innovation that the previous two games had
c) good enough to justify a new game rather than just a tech demoI sincerely hope that my opinion on the matter is simply a matter of failure of imagine, and that a good HL successor is released at some point, but sadly I think I’m right on this one.
Half-Life: Alyx is mostly what I hoped we’d get from HL3, inasmuch as it hits your points a & b for sure, and IMHO c (though I know that’s not agreed on by everyone). It had great action and expository setpieces (avoiding spoilers), and the (albeit relatively simple) puzzles definitely added something to Half-Life that really worked for me.
Unfortunately it didn’t solve all VR issues (melee being an obvious one), and not least of which the cost. I played it on a cheap (~$100), janky old WMR headset, but not everyone can do that without vomiting, so a great PC and good headset are a hefty price, which is probably the biggest hurdle for a full-scale 3 in VR. Especially considering there just aren’t many other games worth making that investment in, IMHO. I played the hell out of Alyx, a little of a few other games…but Alyx was the pinnacle of what VR could do for me.
Alyx did what most Valve games do, it advanced the industry. It is absolutely a half life game and it fits but it isn’t HL3. It isn’t that grandiose.
For people who accuse it of being a glorified tech demo, well, that’s exactly what Half Life 1 and 2 are. The sole reason for the existence of HL2 is just to sell the source engine to devs and to push Steam forward. It is a tech demo. Its puzzles are tech demos.
What Alyx did is implement proper gunplay and looting mechanics and really showcased how possible it is to tell a story in VR without taking your POV from you. I’d argue that there still isn’t a single VR game that nails one of the foundational pillars of Alyx as much as Valve did.
you must mean half life 1.
you must mean half life 1…
…right?
Some games that came out 16 years ago:
- GTA IV
- Super Smash Bros Brawl
- Fallout 3
- Left 4 Dead
- Persona 4
Stop, stop, we’re already dead.
I am already down. Kindly refrain from kicking me.
whispers in ear: Metal Gear Solid fooooour…
I just finished my Windows XP build, and have been enjoying FO3 again the way it was meant to be played.
This hurts me. Why would you do this?
I am fueled by your fading sense of youth.
We didn’t realize we were in a golden age, did we? /old-man-noises
The golden age of gaming was the late SNES/early playstation era.
Graphics were beautiful, games were long and generally had incredible, immersive, and even heart wrenching stories.
Unlike today, where the focus on hyperrealism, generally at the expense of story and definitely performance. but hey, its only 6 hours long and you get to pay 80 dollars for it, so thats great, right?
The golden era depends on your personal preferences. What you said is true, but golden era for MMOs was early 2000s to early 2010s, and for me personally it was during that period
Went into CEX the other week, and saw PS1 games I’d bought when I was already an adult with a job, being sold second hand for more than I’d originally bought them for.
I still can’t fathom that Pikmin is past the legal drinking age in the United States.
Don’t look up when Pikmin 2 came out
Looks up when Pikmin 2 came out
Is a year earlier than I remembered
Turns into dust
Oh, there you are, Shadow of the Colossus.
2005 (PS2), 2011 (PS3 w/ Ico), and 2018 (PS4 remake)
You can emulate a PS2 on your phone these days. Bluetooth controller with a phone clip and you have a hell of a catalogue available to you.
Forget Shadow, I was there when ICO was first released. Probably even within a month (if not week) of it’s official release. At the time it looked like no other game. Very atmospheric and contemplative.
1999 was such an amazing year in my gaming life. Rollercoaster Tycoon, Mechwarrior 3, Battlezone II, and Unreal Tournament. So, so many hours of my life spent in those. That was like, 5 years ago, right?
MechCommander came out in 99, too, didnt it?
That was my introduction to battletech. Fuck I loved that game, I played it SO much.
I know MechWarrior gets all the praise and hype, but I genuinely love this specific title. It’s peak isometric turn-based strategy and I love it.
Although that may have something to do with scoring that MadCat in the first or second level. I think it’s supposed to give your Commando mechs a bad time, but I lit up the oil refinery next to it and lucked into getting the pilot to eject. The thing was completely salvageable and I absolutely dominated the first half of the game with it. Good times.
That MadCat was such a gamebreaker if you could capture it. I had all my mechs just do cockpit aims since blowing the oil tanks carried a solid risk of outright destroying the mech.
and it was not nearly as easy as I’m making it sound, it involved lots of running my lance around in circles and whiffed shots (And some reloads) before i ever landed a shot on its cockpit.
Honestly Yakety Sax should have been playing the entire time while i was doing it, lol.
I love that Fallout is now thought of as a first-person game, but it started as a turn-based isometric team RPG in 1997 which was, itself, a near-remake of a 1988 game, which I spent hours playing as a kid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_(video_game)
And then a few years ago, Wasteland was also revived in the style of the first two Fallout games.
Yes, I know I’m old.
I still want to go back and play the first 2 fallout games. I wasn’t aware of them when they came out, so I wasn’t introduced to the series until 3.
They’re amazing. I highly recommend it if you like games in that style. The first two Baldur’s Gates were also like that (I haven’t played the latest).
I do! Although I do think I prefer BG3’s turn-based combat vs real time w/ pause.
They are turn-based, not real time with pause. I prefer the former too.
Oh good! That’s awesome to hear. I think I might even own them from some bundle in steam, but I just haven’t gotten around to playing them.
Doom came out in 1993 Dec 10
So yeah just over 30 years ago
Thanks, I’ll just be over here browsing the AARP webpage.
World of Warcraft hits 20 this year. I was there (via private servers), starting in 2006.
This made me remember that NFS Underground 2 is 20 years old now, and it’s still the peak for the series.
cue Riders On The Storm …
Unpopular opinion: I fucking hate the open world premise of NFSU2 and I just quitted playing after a while, but I’ve completed NSFU several times.
Wanna feel old? This September marks the 28th anniversary of the release of the N64
I was well into adulthood when that came out. If you want to make me feel old, remind me that the Atari 5200 came out 42 years ago. And almost no one bought it. And the people who did regretted it. And now it’s only old people like me who remember it even existed.
Weird. Old games sell better than new ones. I wonder why that could be?
Don’t think that’s actually true, though. Edit: top selling games of 2023. Pretty sure the idea that “old games were higher quality” is a example of a cognitive bias, too. I say this as someone that’s been gaming since the 80s.
I think it’s like old songs, you remember the good ones, discuss them with people, and preserve them. The crap from then is mostly forgotten, so it only appears that they were all great.
Those are new games, right? Okay I actually looked. That article is probably bullshit.
They’re only counting triple-A games and they’re including sports games. Who the hell is actually buying sports games? It’s the same game every year with nothing new really.
I don’t believe that games like Elden ring, mario kart or Jedi survivor aren’t on the top of every chart either.
I just kinds skimmed the article, did they count steam sales? mom-and-pop game stores that sell older games?
Games people say they want: new IPs, platformers, indy games, local multiplayer.
Games people actually pay for: franchise games, annualized games, live service shooters, online multiplayer.
I’m replaying a few games that are older than my daughter and she’s at college right now.
Here’s one:
Tactics Ogre Reborn came out in late 2022 for Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, and PC.
That game is a remaster of another title called Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, which came out for the PSP in November 2010 in Japan. This puts it 12 years before Reborn.
But the PSP game was itself is a remake of a game with the same name that came out originally for the Super Famicom in October 1995, 15 years before its remake and 27 years before the remaster of that remake.
I’ve missed it until the Reborn remake, which I still need to finish. By the time I get back to it though, they might have put it out a 4th time!
Pong can’t be that old, can it?
It could start withdrawing from a retirement account without penalty in about 6 years.