I could literally not live without them anymore. It’s great even for browsing/desktop use with some extra common actions, and pretty much every single game plays smoother with a few thumb-bound hotkeys.

No, not in a long time. I just find it’s very nice to have, you can do actions without lifting your fingers off WASD. Or use the PC one handed in some cases and have a coffee.

I also switched to Logitech, to a G604 though. Six thumb buttons is perfect for me.

Same, although more than just the scroll wheel broke. And I think I was on three in a row breaking within a year before I gave up. It’s a shame because feature-wise I like some of their stuff, but it’s just impossible to buy products with this level of QC.

Sid Meier’s Pirates! was remade twice - once in '93 and once in '04. Probably the first title that springs to mind for me. I have unfortunately only played the 2004 version, although I know the older ones are considered all time classics. Maybe one day.

I already own it, still haven’t finished it though. If you love parrying and Soulslike Metroidvanias and don’t hate backtracking and platforming this is for you. Really cool graphics and art direction, too. World building is interesting. It’s a good game. Maybe one day I’ll finish it.

You’re definitely right, although I grew up in Sweden and not Australia. But the same general cultural and societal trends applied. Growing up in the 90s/early 00s video games were still absolutely stigmatised and associated with nerds and social pariahs. It’s not that there weren’t games or gamers, but they were not really socially acceptable outside of the nerd subcultures and subgroups.

It wasn’t anything at all like how it is today, where everyone and their aunt is playing games and every kid from every social strata is playing some kind of video game.

Hum, not sure that rings a bell. It’s possible I played it before the DLCs were out, then. Sounds like maybe that was for the best!

If it works the same way as Backwards Compatibility on the Xbox consoles it will also often have support for higher resolutions, higher frame rates and HDR. And I’m hoping the official support from Microsoft will mean better performance and fewer bugs.

This is absolutely huge. Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2 are finally released from the Xbox prison? It’s enough to make a grown man weep. I know emulation exists but it has been very spotty for Xbox titles and marred with bugs and performance issues.

Will be interesting to hear about the DLCs, I actually can’t remember playing them. I wonder if a long-repressed memory will emerge or I actually never ended up playing them back in the day.

It was mentioned elsewhere but the S.T.A.L.KE.R. original trilogy and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly has pretty good AI. I guess Clear Sky has a little too much grenade spam but Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat both have good AI, though I haven’t sat down and made exact A-B testing with F.E.A.R… Anomaly has a bunch of mods too that make the AI even better.

You should spoiler tag that for H&S.

I would argue the other way around. Blood and Wine is fun and nice as a capstone to Geralt and has a lot of content if you just want to ride around and play Gwent and do the Wine Wars and play house with your vineyard or whatever. It’s a fun expansion with a lot of value for your money if that’s what you’re after.

Hearts of Stone though is the most focused, well written, cinematic and concise story and content they ever made for Witcher. Has great characters, mystery, tension, levels, cutscenes, atmosphere… For me it was by far the more impactful of the two DLCs. If anything B&W is too long, I was already burned out by the end of it.

Yes of course, I’m not suggesting any video game has any sentient actual intelligence. I’m just using the old terminology where “AI” means “whatever controls enemy and NPC behaviour in the game”.

My point is that even F.E.A.R.'s “Goal Oriented Action Planning” is much less sophisticated and complex than it first appears, thanks to excellent design and clever illusions.

Hearts of Stone is the best Witcher content they ever produced in my opinion. Highly recommend checking it out.

F.E.A.R. enemies are very good for their time period, but there’s also quite a lot of smoke and mirrors involved that make them appear much smarter than they actually are. The voice lines are a great example, making you think they’re actually much more coordinated and intelligent than they are. The combat arenas are also very deliberately designed in tandem with the AI, both to maximise the efficiency of the AI that exists, but also to give them a bunch of opportunities to do manoeuvres that were unusual for the time - again to further the illusion. Good examples are ledges they can jump over and windows they can smash. It’s a much less smart and dynamic AI than it appears, but these small interactions give the impression of a highly intelligent enemy that interacts with the environment a lot.

They still do do some cool things sometimes though, like retreat and close the door behind them and wait in ambush.

Weird nonsense and shoulder belts? I can smell Nomura in the kitchen on this one grinning over the cauldron, I’m inclined to believe it’s real based off that alone.

It’s a shame to me because it divides the modding scene, and plenty old but stable mods will never be updated to work with the remaster. But it is what it is. I guess it will be nice for console players as F:NV is practically unplayably broken without mods.

Just don’t break mods, please.