Pshaw. I remember when Orange Box came out. I had just finished my Master’s degree.

It really depends on what era you’re talking about. By the mid-to-late 1990s, it was relatively uncommon. It wasn’t unheard of, mind you, even in relatively high profile releases: Doom was very quickly patched to correct game balance issues, the original Fallout had a couple of serious bugs, and Bethesda has never…

I’ve honestly never understood the love for the Japanese and European console design. It’s not spectacularly ugly, but it’s not especially pretty, either. The two tone grey design looks awkward at best, the rounded corners make it look wobbly, and it just looks... flat. I will say that the four color motif is better…

To be sure, it’s multiple series: Mega Man (the original), Mega Man X, Mega Man Zero, Mega Man ZX, Mega Man .EXE/Battle Network, Mega Man Legends, etc. But I extend to you my respect for your proper use of the possessive apostrophe.

That is indeed a hot take. More power to you for it, though.

They’re really not that difficult. I mean, they’re not exactly easy by the standards of modern games, but they were pretty standard difficulty for platform games of their era. As someone who lived through their original release as part of the target demographic, they weren’t the games we talked about as truly…

Mega Man VII is a good game. It’s not one of my favorites simply because I find the art style a little too... busy for my tastes, but it’s mechanically solid and much more enjoyable than the disaster that was Mega Man 8, IMO.

It’s partially a legal issue. There’s a number of potential risks with incorporating outside work. For one, if it turns out that the person who sold you that work was (consciously or unconsciously) infringing on a third party’s copyright, you open yourself up to liability. And there’s also the everpresent question of…

It’s not that simple. The rule of thumb when dealing with derivative works is that any character that can only exist by invoking another author’s copyrighted material are not protected. Sometimes that’s clear cut. If I create an otherwise original character and make her a student at Hogwarts, then I’m infringing on…

Main menu only.

That’s the default string in the game files. It’s normally matched to a localization strings table in the game’s data directory, but you most likely have it replaced by a mod designed for an earlier version of the game, before the Creation Club-specific strings were added. I believe the old-style dialogue menu mod…

This mod is entirely pointless. I totally understand being irritated by the way Bethesda implemented the Creation Club, but this “mod” doesn’t do anything that just deleting the preloaded files would do.

The Apple IIGS was amazing. A GUI that surpassed the Mac’s (with full color, at that) and was more extensible, audio and video hardware that was legitimately impressive for the mid-1980s, and full backwards compatibility with the entire Apple II line of software? It should have killed the Mac in its infancy and…

Trying to insist that FA2 didn’t look dry and arid all over, in spite of having more plantlife than the first game, is just banging your head against wall.

Oh, and to return my original point, which was less about water per se and more about vegetation (though of course the two concepts are closely related), Fallout 4 even has rain and thunderstorms in-game. Which means that it’s that much harder to rely on lack of water as an explanation for the general lifelessness of…

And they could have had more if they felt the need for it. Since even the most fertile regions in both games are relatively arid, there was no need.

Yes, the footprint of the trees is an engine limitation, but they could have made the leafy parts as big as they liked, and just render them transparent like they do with walls, when you pass behind them.

The size of the trees is pretty clearly down to limitations of the engine. Look at Vault City: it’s canonically described as a lush oasis (and actually has the only green grass in the game). It also has the same trees as everywhere else, and, if anything, in less concentration than places like Klamath.

I honestly think you’re misremembering the game. The ground is brown in most places (probably due to the aforementioned drought), but there are trees all over the place.

They also shot those films almost universally in deserts and sandpits to keep the budget low. The sandy wasteland look is extremely common in that genre.