TheMightyEthan

Stay safe dude.

Has there ever been a shooter without a shitty community? ?

I thought they were providing regular free updates? Or have they hit that point where they're just recycling stuff from last year?

I'm upgrading Deathloop to a 5/5. I've continued playing since I beat it to work on the platinum, and somehow it's managed to continue to sink its hooks deeper and deeper into me. I think part of it is that all the obscure stuff you need to do for some of them is really making clear just how intricate the world is, how many moving parts there are that fit together so well. It's pretty amazing. *Edit - I know my review up there says it's not a 10/10, it's a 9/10, and I stand by that. On my scale 5/5 is "this game is fantastic", not the "this game is near perfect" that 10/10 implies. 1/5 - I hate it 2/5 - I don't like it 3/5 - meh, it's fine 4/5 - I like it 5/5 - I love it

Deathloop This game is really good, even though I think a few of the reviews are overselling it a bit (it's not a 10, but almost nothing is). The metascore is an 88 though, and I think that's about right (or maybe slightly low). It's less roguelite-y than it sounds, and more roguelite-y than the reviews make it sound. Basically it's a roguelite where the environments and enemies and stuff aren't randomized, they're the same every time, except for reactions to things you do (ie you do X in the morning which causes an NPC to do Y in the afternoon). Don't let the time-of-day stuff freak you out though, time only passes when you leave a level, you can take as much time as you want within each level and time will never advance, so there's not a rushed feeling that games sometimes get. I think it suffers a little from the contained nature of the game, playing the same four levels (with time of day variations) over and over. You become intimately familiar with them, which is useful for the kind of game it is, but it also means they become maybe a little overly-familiar, and lose their luster a bit. On the positive side, this is the rare stealth game where if I fuck up my stealth I will actually switch to going loud rather than restarting to try again. I say that's a positive because they made both options feel viable, and if you go loud for one part of a level you're not necessarily prevented from switching back to stealth again once you've cleared out the alerted enemies (though it does depend on how loud you are, a chaingun's sound carries farther than a pistol's). Overall, I thought it was a really good game, but I wouldn't quite put it up there with Dishonored or Prey. 4/5

Both of those books rock. Leviathan Wakes is the worst book in The Expanse, and it's still really good.

AC7 needs a 4k60 patch for PS5.

"Expandalone" It's similar to Uncharted: Lost Legacy, or Halo 3: ODST.

Okay, here it is, the event you've all been waiting for: TME's Super Official Halo Rankings I have played through all of the Halo FPSs in the last year to prep for Infinite, so now I can give this official, 100% objective quality ranking list. Story: S-Tier: Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Reach, Halo 4 A-Tier: Halo, Halo 2 B-Tier: N/A C-Tier: N/A D-Tier: Halo 5 (probably D- really) Combat/Enemy Design/Encounter Design: S-Tier: Halo, Halo 3, Halo: Reach A-Tier: Halo 2, Halo 5 B-Tier: Halo 3: ODST C-Tier: Halo 4 Overall: S-Tier: Halo, Halo 3, Halo: Reach A-Tier: Halo 2, Halo 3: ODST, Halo 4 B-Tier: N/A C-Teir: Halo 5 If Halo 4 had had Halo 5's combat/enemy design/encounter design it would have been an S-Tier game, so even though 343's second attempt was worse than their first, I actually do believe Infinite could be great if they took the right lessons from 5. That is, of course, assuming they can un-fuck the place they left the story at the end of 5, which will definitely take some doing. I'm much more hopeful than I was before embarking on this journey though.

Yeah, exactly, it's good enough for a one-off here and there that you don't have the hardware to play, and it's cool that I can jump to my phone and pick up right where I left off, but I wouldn't want it to be my main way of playing.

Halo 4 This game was actually much better than I remembered, I think my opinion of Halo 5 tainted (see below). It does have some issues with the gameplay, mainly that the Promethean Knights aren't fun to fight and there are too many of them. They don't have any weak points, and their shields recharge too fast, so there's no real strategy involved, just pouring fire on them, so on anything higher than Normal they're just a pain in the ass. They use them like Elites, or even Jackals, but they're as hard to kill as Hunters. The gunplay itself feels good, but the enemies suck. The music isn't great either, which is a bigger detraction than I would have thought. The story though is actually pretty great (a fairly major retcon notwithstanding), it had me really invested in it and wanting to keep playing, so overall I came away feeling pretty positive about it. 4/5 Halo 5 This game is the opposite of Halo 4 in so many ways. First off, they fixed the problems with the combat. The Knights now have weak points for you to target for extra damage, and I don't think they have shields at all. So that's nice. They also introduced a new Promethean enemy called a Soldier, which is easier to kill and also have weak-points. Soldiers are somewhere between a Jackal and an Elite in terms of threat and resiliency, and they're used accordingly, making up the bulk of Promethean forces. Knights are now used as the heavy enemies they are, with most fights not having any, and only a few when they do show up. The gunplay still feels great too* (the one positive aspect of 4 that they kept). The music is also way better, making it feel much more like a Halo game in that respect. The major thing 4 did well though, the story, is completely shit in this one. Cortana's face-heel turn is completely unearned, with no lead-up whatsoever. I think it could have been done well, if they'd used this game to set it up, had her turn at the end, and then led into a Halo 6 with a conflict more like the one in this game. That's not what they did though, instead they just started this game with "oh, Cortana, that chick who sacrificed herself at the end of 4 to save Chief? she's now a power-hungry megalomaniac who's going to take over the galaxy." It's completely awful, and I honestly didn't care at all about the characters' motivations or what they were doing because it just all felt so forced and, again, unearned. That's not the only thing, it's like they looked at all the things people didn't like about Halo 2 and said "Yeah, let's do that stuff again!" Boss battles that aren't in any other Halo? Check. Spending most of the game playing as a character antagonistic to Chief? Check. What could possibly go wrong?! Oh right, people didn't like that stuff before cause it was bad, and it's still bad here. The boss battles are stupid, and they're made more stupid by the fact that it's the same boss every time, the only change being how many of him there are. And then there's Locke. The whole conflict with "bring Chief in" also feels so forced, and it makes me disconnected from his parts of the game (which are the huge majority, at least 2/3 of the game is you playing as Locke) because I don't want him to succeed. I want to be back to Chief's part of the story. All the times where I did feel some connection to the game, and some interest in seeing it through, was when I was playing as Chief, because even though the conflict feels forced I do actually care about him and Cortana. So yeah, this game deserves all the hate it gets. 2/5 This exercise has given me some hope for 343 though. Between 4 and 5 there are all the components of a great Halo game, they just need to put them all together. Hopefully they take the right lessons from those games. *It's especially impressive to me that 5 felt good to play considering I was playing via xCloud, since 5 isn't on PC. I could slightly feel the input latency, but it wasn't even as bad as my old TV was. The image quality wasn't great, but it was serviceable. Overall I'm super impressed with the tech.

I thought you weren't supposed to have to use disk cleanup in win 10 because it does all that stuff on its own in the background?

Yeah, it was really off-putting to me.

Lol, I meant "new" in like, larger human civilization terms.

Being cut is really a new thing, look at strong men in movies from like the 70's and earlier, they're big but they don't look muscular the way people now do. I feel like Andre the Giant is the epitome of that:

Oh, I assumed you meant the FH4 Series port, because that's the only recent one. It was brought to PC day and date with the console version, years ago, so that port has nothing to do with the fact that FH5 is coming soon now.

No, I don't think Halo 5 is ever coming to PC, they would prefer to pretend that game doesn't exist. They ported the multiplayer to PC years ago, if they were gonna do the campaign they'd have done it then. The FH4 Series patch isn't really a full port, it's just a patch to enable some of the PC features on console.

So I've been playing through the mainline Halo games in preparation for Infinite, and since Halo 5 isn't on PC I've just started it via xCloud on PC, and I'm seriously impressed. Image quality isn't amazing, with artifacts/blocking when the view changes quickly (though interestingly this doesn't happen on the prerendered cutscenes, which makes me wonder if for those it's not capturing and re-encoding them like the gameplay but actually just sending the video file itself), but it's serviceable. The thing I'm really impressed with though is the responsiveness. I was worried there'd be too much input latency for a shooter to work, but honestly I can't even feel the delay. I can tell it's there, because my accuracy isn't as good as when I was playing the other games locally, but it's not bad at all. My old TV had more input latency than this. I wouldn't want to play PvP this way, but for campaign it's good enough. So yeah, xCloud isn't there yet as a real replacement for console, but as a way to play a game here or there that you don't have the hardware for it's a great option.

I've heard that game is supremely satisfying.

Here's a real one, plat #90 even:

Yeah, of the 12 claims Epic lost on 11 of them. Sure the one they won on will be big for other devs, but Epic won't get the benefit. Some nuance a lot of articles are missing: the judge ruled Apple has to let devs link to outside websites from within their apps, even if those websites allow transactions, but Apple does not have to allow 3rd party transactions within the app itself. Because Epic put the transactions in Fortnite itself, not just a link to an outside website, they violated even the lesser restrictions Apple is allowed to keep, which is why Apple doesn't have to let them back on. I'll be interested to see if Apple will let Epic back on if they change Fortnite to comply with the new restrictions.

I liked that game until I encountered the androids, fighting enemies was just not what I wanted from it.

No, I'd be too scared to try it.

Halo 3 Despite my backlog, this is what I'm playing. No joke, this might honestly be the best shooter campaign of all time. The gunplay feels amazing, the level design is superb while changing it up enough to keep feeling fresh. Everything about it just comes together so well. My plan was to play all the Halos leading up to Infinite, but I'm gonna need a pallet cleanser after this just so it's not so fresh in my memory when I play 4, which does not benefit from the comparison.

Headphones yes, but not surround sound. If you turn off surround sound and use the game's built-in 3d audio it's on a whole other level. With surround sound the voices are all around you, yes, but with 3d audio they're right in your ears