I tried to go back... hell, it’s probably been a decade now, I think it was around when the original Mass Effect trilogy was wrapping up, and I was like ‘man, I’m still in the mood for BioWare!’. And even then, it just hadn’t aged well - both from a graphical standpoint, and from a ‘comparing it to what BioWare would…

That’s fair; I wasn’t really playing most of those genres at the time - I was mostly JRPGs and the like; didn’t really ‘do’ shooters until the Left4Dead/Borderlands era in the next generation - so it makes sense I’d sort of under weigh them.

Yeah, that’s probably fair; in general, I think there are a lot more games that run ‘long’ than there are that run short - as in, there are more games where I’m like ‘okay, I’ve kind of seen everything you have to offer, I’d like to be closing in on the end, now’ well before I actually get there.

Honestly, I was kind of relieved to see that - I feel like a lot of ‘modern’ attempts to make a game in that classic JRPG formula tend to run way longer; closer to the hundred hour mark than to thirty-forty. (Actually, in general, I think way too many games aim for 100 hour playtime rather than 30-40.) I’ve got…

I was just saying elsewhere on the thread that Dead Space 1 hasn’t really reached that point where I feel like it needs a remake to be playable; it just hasn’t aged that poorly. KOTOR is kind of a perfect example of a game I think actually ‘needs’ a remake; I’ve tried to go back once or twice in the last five or so…

Yeah, I’d say it owes as much to Silent Hill as to Resident Evil, for sure. 

You’re probably right - I mean, look at how often Hollywood churns out remakes of ongoing franchises these days, especially when they want to ‘revitalize’ the property - but, you know, it doesn’t stop me from being a bit bummed out about it. I’ve already played Dead Space 1 - multiple times! - and if I want to re-play…

I mean, I still think he retains a lot of that ‘everyman’ quality even into 2 (and 3) - yeah, he’s a bit more ‘seen this before’, but he’s still not, you know, Master Chief from Halo or Commander Shepherd from Mass Effect. He’s still John McClane to other videogame protagonists’ Arnold Schwarzenegger. (And yeah, that…

Yeah, DS2 I think is pretty clearly the highlight of the franchise - and I say that as someone who enjoyed 3, as a co-op game if nothing else (it had a really cool twist on asymmetrical co-op, as I recall). So you’re not really gonna be able to improve on DS1/DS2, to me - and part of Isaac’s appeal is his ‘everyman’…

I mean, you’re right, but that would just mean we couldn’t continue Isaac’s story, which isn’t what I would want either - give me a different Necromorph outbreak halfway across the galaxy with a different relic, give me whatever craziness is left in the wake of DS3, hell, even give me the initial catastrophe on the Ish…

This definitely looks cool, but I won’t lie, I was more hoping for a ‘new story, new character, same universe’ type reboot, where we let Isaac Clarke be done and go on to tell someone else’s story as a kind of ‘new beginning’ to the franchise. The original Dead Space just isn’t old enough/hardware hasn’t advanced…

Yeah, I did it exactly once, back in Destiny 1 (the original version of this raid, in fact), and was like ‘no, no thank you’. And that was with a group of people who knew what they were doing and were more or less carrying me!

Yeah, that’s more or less what I’m afraid of - and that’s a wide category for me as well, with everything from ‘Hollow Knight’ to the Ori games to ‘Hyper Light Drifter’ to ‘Dead Cells’. I feel like ‘throwback’ platformers, in particular, are kind of a double-edged sword, because it seems pretty easy to hang a knockout …

No matter how many times I read this sort of thing, I’m always just stunned by what a fundamentally different game Destiny is at high levels than the one I play on a semi-regular basis. I mean, I play a fair amount of Destiny - I’ve got the Season Pass up over 100, at least, every season since the thing was introduced…

Absolutely; I’ll add my own kudos, they’re well deserved. Fantastic work.

Yeah, I could see that sort of thing really not working on a smallish screen.

I won’t lie; I was really hoping Death’s Door was going to hit GamePass as well.

Yeah, my recollection from the demo was that it had the same problem a lot of ‘modern’ attempts to revisit the classic JRPG gameplay structure do: pacing. Modern effects and animations last just a little bit too long, and that extra half second per attack really, really adds up, until what should have been a thirty…

I feel like this group is almost ‘peak’ GamePass: a whole bunch of stuff I was vaguely intrigued by, but not to the point where I’d be willing to purchase any of them on my own - and in addition, most of them are in genres I don’t usually love, but every once in a while something will break through and knock my socks…

Yeah, I think that would definitely be a cool approach to take - but it’s still going to take a lot of resources that they’d probably prefer to use to make new content for everyone, rather than content just for relative newcomers. Which, I mean, I get - but at the same time, with them doing things like bringing the…