Good points and yes the rabbits at the farm are insanely hard for the very first encounters. It’s easily the hardest fights you’ll have in the entire first act.

I did appreciate the different types of dialog skills but really I think it could have been done better. Mostly because there are so many other skills to level into that by the time you’re done, you’ll probably have not even hit level 10 on your main weapon skills with some characters. I’d say you get about 2 skills that you can max out with each character and then 2 other skills you can half invest in by the end. And that’s out of close to 30 skills I think? So there’s just much more meaningful stuff to invest in.

IMO the way this should’ve been handled is through skills. So have a general speech stat that allows you to talk your way through difficult conversations and then either use items or actual skill points to get special outcomes using kiss/kick/smart ass. They also aren’t used the same amount it seems. Smart ass barely seems used in the second half of the game. Kick ass is used the moss, kiss ass somewhere in between. Just an odd choice of systems.

Good to hear. I’ve heard really great things about 3 so I’m excited to try it. Your points did bring up what I thought a lot about this game though. It feels like they had a lot of time for world building, dialog, and level design but just never put all that work to good use. Likely that was due to time and budget but what you get is a product spread too thin. Still fun but not enough meat on the bone to stay constantly engaged.

And yeah talking to people was fun with the voice actors doing a great job but I look forward to actually seeing their faces instead of a poorly rendered character portrait.

eh don’t write it off entirely, these things bothered me but I still think the game is decent especially for an old school RPG

You realize that the US has nukes inside of the EU right?

Well saying the nemesis system wouldn’t have worked well in other games is almost assuming that it wouldn’t be changed or evolved to fit other genres. People forget that the real damage some patents/copyrights do is not in their explicit existence, it’s the sphere of influence they exert on related concepts entirely. We weren’t just robbed of the nemesis system, we were robbed of anything even slightly resembling it.

And I feel like once you understand that you realize it can be adapted to greater things. Spider Man games could have used it. Assassins creed would have been an amazing place for experimentation with those ideas. Could be adapted to Star Wars games, dragons dogma, yakuza, borderlands. And it doesn’t need to be a central focus of these games like it was with the WB games. But even the concept of having enemies that kill you be leveled up in some way is now tainted.

Do the flowers also contain concentrated microplastics?

Most likely the election for midterms will be rigged or rejected if it doesn’t go their way. Or it will be otherwise delayed. It doesn’t really matter, if they start to lose power faster they actually become more dangerous.

Yep but honestly I still don’t think the benefit matches what they spend. Especially true since they often match donations or make their own large donations.

And after all, if they’re helping money go to charity by advertising it to their customers, I’m fine with them getting a little benefit in return.

It decreases your tax burden in the same way that giving away all of your money to charity decreases your tax burden.

And in case people need it cleared up: Donating at a register during checkout also does not help the company on their taxes. Its the same as you donating individually except they get the PR for it.

Luckily the party is probably on its way to being over. It’s not like Elon decreasing his public presence with the president will make sales suddenly rebound.

What everyone here is also missing is that it’s 71% profit loss with tax credits which means they saw this loss coming and scrambled to cash in some stuff so it didn’t look as bad. Without that, they would have reported a decent loss like they will next quarter.

And fundamentally how would they fix their current issue? They could distance from elon but that would be a slow burn. They can’t make new cars. Can’t discount their cars much. They can’t do much of anything except lose more money.

I mean yes but I view this stuff as deeply unserious in the US politics.

If RFK actually cared he would ban high fructose corn syrup from food. Or implement a sugar/calorie ban. Or focus on incentivizing exercise in everyday life. Or limiting/taxing fast food. Or force portion regulations to be stricter, even banning certain portions of things like soda.

There are one million billion things the US government could do to improve health and they’re doing essentially nothing by going after something that (probably) impacts us very little in comparison with the entire rest of the industry.

Call it what it is: pandering. They know that this has broad general support so they get brownie points while doing very little to actually help us.

Yeah I’m not sure why I had so much trouble doing the controller combos but they would trigger fine sometimes and other times not at all. I just think doing combos with the movement stick is awkward in general because I have to move differently to activate them and can’t go where I want for a moment.

And yes the secondary attack for some weapons is very different, that is true but the game oddly doesn’t make much use of the bumpers so it would have been easy to do a combo button that way.

The way I would’ve done it probably is just to make the left stick a modifier button that made it to where you could do LT+A,B,X,Y combos to heal and what not. Holding LT+Left stick direction+attack would do the katana combos. And then just use RB for the alt fire button.

I think I share a lot of your thoughts and they apply pretty cleanly to my experience on hard difficulty as well. I can’t imagine insane difficulty just because as you said it’s like walking a marathon except the marathon is longer.

That and there are many many instances of damage in this game that are just basically impossible to avoid and deal way too much for group scenarios. Like yes I’m busy fighting 15 of the low level grunts but I took a third of my health in damage from some mob pounding on the ground out of my view.

Also maybe this is just a controller thing but the combos were infuriating to activate. Most of the time they would be ignored as inputs unless I was very deliberate and they never really flowed properly.

A bizarre decision was to use combos like moving the left stick right twice and left trigger to heal. Instead of just… hold right on movement and press left trigger. That was only done because they needed two attack buttons for some reason even though holding the right trigger for a heavy attack would have worked just fine.

What’s even more funny is that the victory lap you asked for is in there. It’s just not a level, it’s the ramp up to the final boss area. And I recognized it for what it was and got pretty disappointed that I could only use the sword that this entire game has been working up to for like a total of 3 minutes on mobs. That’s insane and just plain bad design for an FPS like this. Now reflecting on it I’m not sure if I’d land at the 8 I initially said. I think it’s a 7 or maybe even a bit lower for me

What I noticed is that my favorite FPS in this genre really do a nice crescendo towards the end that the 2013 reboot game lacks.

I mean they do great on enemy variety. They need some tweaking on damage but otherwise fine. Gun play is mostly good to excellent. But what’s lacking is that thing where the arenas get more and more intense. Enemies are combined in various types to make each encounter play much differently.

Like how in the newer doom games you typically have units that snipe at your from range, ones that are highly mobile, others that can tank damage. So in higher level combat you’re just swapping weapons constantly to counter each different mob while also coming up with unique strategies for each arena.

The arenas here are mostly plain. You have almost no verticality in any arena. Your movement is beyond basic and stilted. And then when you finally get some bigger battles you realize that none of the mobs really mesh together well at all.

To put it bluntly it’s like the difference between Batman Arkham series games where each enemy makes you dance to kill them versus Skyrim fighting 50 NPCs. They don’t play off of each other, they’re all just constantly fighting for your attention versus a complex and rewarding dance. A good FPS game is mostly measured by how differently you need to approach each encounter and here it’s almost all one note unfortunately.

I think the idea of playing through the OG game is a good one, the one I played (2013) you might just play for about an hour or so and if it’s not really clicking with you at any point, you may just drop it is my advice. The game is alright enjoyable but it never evolves much until the very end so if it’s not your thing, don’t force yourself to play it

I hear your point about the last part. It’s great that this sort of old school FPS got made in 2013 but ultimately I feel it’s been outpaced by newer games like the modern DOOM games. The two newer Doom games are just FPS perfected honestly even if they aren’t for everyone. They’re fast paced, varied, and compared to something like this they make this look slow and unsatisfying. But reject that comparison and this game is still enjoyable, if buggy at times.

If you really have to drink it, drink the zero versions of most sodas. Dr Pepper in particular has some really decent flavors without the gross aftertaste. Pepsi zero is also really good. Just stop drinking regular soda. We have the technology to make diet taste good now so use it.

This is awesome! Loved reading the last one and this one has so much stuff to look into.

On windows 11: Teams does not take over my audio in a call, taskbar button works fine. And say what you will about status messages but I’d rather they be overly annoying than ignored completely. Also way better than auto-reply emails.

It’s not perfect but I’ve worked on teams with it and without it and so far I’ve preferred having it.

Do not.