Mafia I was a linear, story-driven game and that worked really, really well. It did have an optional open-world mode you could unlock, which I get the impression was shoehorned in at the publisher’s insistence to compete with GTA3. Mafia II should have been the same thing, but by that point they really wanted to…

I think they added that in a patch (along with a direct “reduce difficulty” option just for that one mission). I’m pretty sure it wasn’t in the original, which I bought the first week it was out. 

Mafia 1 has been rebuilt from the ground up in a newer engine (presumably Mafia III’s). The game is way too old (18 years, somehow) for them to do anything else. It must have been quite expensive, compared to Mafia II’s much more modest texture upgrade and probably not much at all being done to Mafia III.

I’ve been playing Fallout 76 as a solo game and it’s a very odd experience. When you’re in an abandoned power station full of ghouls and you’re trying to fight your way through to achieve an objective, picking up loot along the way, it feels like any of the last three games (until you need to pause the game to go to…

Fallout 4 is a good game, I’m just not sure it’s a good Fallout game. It’s the Alien 3 of its franchise in that respect: the ingredients are there and the execution is competent, but you feel like you’re treading over ground already very well-trodden, and nothing new is being added to the franchise. In fact, quite a…

He isn’t alive, or at least that is not proven. We - and apparently Aerith - see a cut scene set just Zack is gunned down in the original FF7 and it ends before that happens. So whilst it isn’t confirmed that Zack is dead in this timeline, it’s certainly not confirmed that he is still alive either.

Yeah, I have no idea why people are taking it as read that Zack survived. The ending of FF7R does not confirm that in the slightest. I did see a couple of people who thought the guy who woke up in the bed was Zack and didn’t realise it was Biggs, as they do kind of look alike.

It is somewhat amusing that Russia itself has recently done the same thing with the T-14 Armata, which is probably the most cutting-edge, jaw-dropping tank in the world, an absolutely killer machine which is so ruinously expensive they can’t actually afford to build it and have effectively dropped it in favour of…

If a country commits atrocities against you, you committing atrocities against them afterwards doesn’t stop them from still being atrocities. We didn’t murder 6 million Germans in concentration camps in retribution for the Holocaust, did we?

It’s a tribute to the vagueness of the ending that people have walked away with completely different takes on what happened.

A couple of weeks ago in some territories.

Later editions of Axis & Allies have tried to make the Chinese faction more nuanced, but it seems to be too problematic within the rules. If you treated them like a regular faction, China’s manpower and location would make it too easy to defeat Japan and even support Russia against Germany, but the various fudges over…

Something of an over-simplification. The Russians were not completely incompetent during WWII, they actually rallied in the battle for Moscow and did score some victories before that thanks to superior technology (particularly the T-34 which made mincemeat of Panzer IVs but was not deployed in effective tank armies,…

CoH2 did lean a bit far into some stereotypes, especially the NKVD officers shooting retreating men. That certainly happened, but probably not on the scale that games and movies depict, mainly because NKVD officers were also smart enough to know they might be relying on their men for survival further down the line in…

The United States had not won the war when it deployed the nuclear bomb. The calculation was that the invasion of the Japanese islands would cost upwards of one million lives (possibly far more than one million) and that using the nuclear bomb would force Japan to surrender at 1/10th the cost. That calculation is…

It’s long-winded to install but works. This is a reasonable guide. I’m not a huge modder by any means, but by following the steps one at a time I got it working.

One can inform the other. Once Square confirmed the public demand for an FF7 Remake and realised it was going to sell tens of millions of copies regardless of how they approached it, it gave them the commercial freedom to be as egotistical as they wanted on the project.

I’ve played FF7 through several times and each time it took about 5-6 hours to get out of Midgar. The fastest I’ve ever beaten the game in full is 32 hours. Some online studies have put the average completion time at 40 hours, so Midgar can be around 1/8th of the game. So...no, the average player will not spend 1/3 of…

I’d say the ideal way of playing Final Fantasy VII now is to get it on PC and then install the Remako mod. It massively upgrades all of the graphics to something that is quite acceptable today.

Oh yes.