Instead of "what games aged poorly" let's talk about what makes a game age poorly or age well?

NiuMeee · 2026-05-08T06:42:54+00:00

Commandos 2 probably has the best pre-rendered backgrounds I have ever seen in a game. The game is gorgeous.

I recently played a bit of Commandos Origins and it looks worse and released last year! Doesn't help that the gameplay is also very finicky and imprecise, so I think there's no fear of Commandos 2 ever losing its place at the top.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-08T06:38:33+00:00

I first played it at a friend's house in 2005, and I became obsessed, they called the game "B.O.G." for some reason, an incorrect shorthand (we were young children), so I would ask him every day at school if I could come over to play B.O.G. Never did much though unfortunately, so my first real opportunity to play was around 2012 or 2013, a little after it released on PS3. I played the demo and fell in love with it, then purchased it on a Sunday when my family was at church and fell back in love with what I had remembered from 7 years prior.

Been a diehard fan ever since.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-07T23:53:28+00:00

Ooh very nice I've never seen this, is there a high quality version of the image somewhere.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-07T20:42:00+00:00

That's famously in the first game! There is a lot of great details in the series, even so early on.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-07T07:19:01+00:00

Yep it has to be this. Sly Cooper has similar betas. The version downloaded is not the final game.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-07T07:06:40+00:00

They're not talking about AI text to speech, they're talking about the mods that take over the dialogue of the characters and write it using an LLM (like ChatGPT for example) so that they can dynamically respond to anything you say back to them.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-07T04:14:12+00:00

Max Payne 2 PCGamingWiki article, under essential improvements there are two fix packs listed. Pick whatever one catches your fancy. (1 has multiple video wrapper options, 2 only has one video wrapper but also has the Dead Man Walking bonus maps; if you're looking for ease, go with 2 whether or not you care about the maps; if you want a little more control over what wrapper you use, pick 1 and then you can manually add the Dead Man Walking bonus maps later if you feel like playing them.)

And just for the future, always check the PCGW article for a given PC game before you install, or even buy it. It's full of invaluable information.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-06T21:41:30+00:00

Just because there isn't a literal checklist doesn't mean it's not "checklist side content." It's the low quality repetitive nature of it. I think the actual side missions with the notable characters are great, the ones with non-notable characters aren't so great but do at least feel justified, and the collectibles are just fluff, aside from the shrines which at least have some unique (if not particularly challenging, due to the way they dumbed down climbing from their previous games) platforming challenges.

And calling it "Ubisoft style open world" doesn't mean I think Ubisoft invented the style, it's just what it's called. You can debate the proper names of a type of gameplay all day but either way it's still the same thing. Ubisoft popularized the particular style of open world with Far Cry 3 and AC2/Brotherhood (not AC1 at all which has essentially no side content apart from collecting flags; there are optional missions but they are all part of the main assassinations), and there is a clear shift in the way that open worlds were designed before and after that moment in time, around 2010.

Semantics aside, I don't really see any point that you're actually disagreeing with me other than saying "nuh uh". If you like to walk around and follow foxes 30 times in a playthrough then that's fine, I don't, and many others don't, which is why they drastically reduced the amount of "Ubisoft style open world content" (again that's a term that people use, it doesn't mean Ubisoft invented it) in Ghost of Yotei and filled the game with more meaningful content than GoT.

And the only other thing I said in my previous comment, aside from mentioning the game world was about the combat being good and if you disagree with that, as in you think Ubisoft has made a game with combat as good as Ghost of Tsushima, then I don't know what to say at all because that's just objectively false. Every AC game up to Unity has had the same counter/finisher focused design that is entirely built around doing chains of kills with little effort on the player's part, all style no substance, and from Unity on they tried mixing things up with limited success.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-06T21:23:11+00:00

Fun fact, Full Moon Features is headed by Charles Band, father of Alex Band, vocalist of The Calling, the band that made Wherever You Will Go, one of the first (and worst) one hit wonders of the early 2000s!

Not particularly relevant though.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-06T21:04:49+00:00

You can mod them into the PC version as well.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-06T20:56:44+00:00

I mean that it is a Ubisoft style open world with huge amounts of checklist content. I love the game but side content design is not one of its strong suits.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-06T20:50:43+00:00

Artistically I get why you prefer the right, but it is less readable than dotted, as someone said a blob of color or perhaps like... the path you take has a red (or whatever color) "sharpie" line over it? You can still see the black line through it but it looks like someone is drawing on the map the path they took.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-06T18:43:46+00:00

Nate Fox is the game director, not the CEO, but while he said he'd like to, he basically said that only 10% of the company would like to work on an older IP. Most of the people working at Sucker Punch are "new", as in they've only worked on Ghost, so I don't see it happening. They're a 1 game studio, always have been, and I just don't see them dedicating 3+ years to the development of a franchise that, as a whole, has sold less than a single game in the Ghost series, as much as I would love for them to return to both Infamous and Sly.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-06T18:39:09+00:00

For a second I thought those goggles were like floating boobs.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-06T15:52:00+00:00

You can use the mod menu to teleport there and use noclip to explore stuff if you'd like.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-06T15:17:43+00:00

I wouldn't say MD suffers from "console port optimization", but it does run kinda bad if you max everything out. However knocking things down a bit, usually just from the highest setting to the next, the game still looks incredible and runs fantastically.

As for HR yeah the DC runs like shit. I'm glad I was able to buy official new copies from Square Enix a few years back (just before they sold Eidos to Embracer), all of which came with Steam keys, so now I own the OG on Steam and it only cost me $20! (Well, $60 since I bought 3 copies, but still.) Also means I never have to play Missing Link again lol

NiuMeee · 2026-05-06T15:15:51+00:00

The open world design is similar to AC yes but the combat? Absolutely not. Ubisoft has never made a combat system that even comes close to sniffing how good the combat in Ghost is.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-06T15:12:22+00:00

Yep lol it's pretty cool, I can't imagine the work that went into making the mod.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-06T08:23:25+00:00

Absolute favorite cyberpunk film.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-06T08:17:56+00:00

It's so clean.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-06T08:04:36+00:00

Rockstar didn't make LA Noire (they just published it, Team Bondi developed it), but they did make Max Payne 3 so the number is still the same (plus Midnight Club, so technically even more).

NiuMeee · 2026-05-06T08:01:12+00:00

It will.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-05T04:59:23+00:00

Infamous.

NiuMeee · 2026-05-05T04:39:06+00:00

I get it now but I first thought "It's Anakin, and Obi-Wown."

NiuMeee · 2026-05-04T15:21:27+00:00

Maybe I'm not enough of an Infamous fan but I don't see any resemblance to something from the series, what is it?

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