I also liked it. It feels like the goal was to just generally reorient you into playing Halo before throwing you into something completely new. It has been like 6 years, after all, so it seems warranted to me. I do agree, however, that the cold open with a bunch of story I don’t remember or know if I’m supposed to…

I am really enjoying these sorts of accessibility upgrades to games lately, though the outlines aren’t always as clear as I might like depending on what color scheme the player has gone with (and I know my friend did that on purpose). Then again, maybe I could mess with the outline settings and it would be fine.…

I wonder if some of the logic behind not just rewarding victory is that you can't just aimbot your way up the XP ladder, you actually have to complete specific tasks that cheating doesn't necessarily help with. Perhaps they could then compare your XP to your ranked matches win/loss ratio to determine your ranked…

I feel like I’m the one weirdo who prefers the PlayStation UI. I mean, it’s annoying to get to the things I want sometimes, but the Xbox UI is so cluttered and it feels like there are ads everywhere. Why do they icons need to take up half the screen? This article criticizes the PS5 for only showing 8 icons on the home…

The button mapping was terrible on Wii and Wii U, too, so that’s not really surprising. Really, the only thing exciting about the new releases is that they also offer a wireless N64 controller. $50 is a bit outrageous, but it’s also the first official, good way to actually play N64 games on modern hardware. Hook it up…

Shortly after you get the ability to climb up the blue walls, there’s this platform you’re supposed to hang off of to get it to lower so you can progress. I spent at least an hour wandering around the entire rest of the map shooting every inch of wall, floor, and ceiling before finally having to look it up. It was…

Yes and no. BotW has plenty of things you can’t do without certain items or stamina upgrades or whatever, it’s just that outside of needing the glider to get off the plateau, almost none of those things are required to beat the game. So if you’re the sort who, like me, feels compelled to collect every item in…

I am (mostly) with you, but I loved BotW. To me, it’s one of the best examples of how to do an open world well. The map is large but not overwhelming. There’s not 80 billion quest markers all over it. The world feels empty, but intentionally so. When you enter a town, not only the town but every NPC in it has their…

Not even a mention of Pathfinder? Fake fan! I kid, though honestly it is still a great choice for people who like D&D in theory but just want more. I really hated 2nd edition at first, but as I've explored it more, I've come to understand it better and it makes more sense. There's still a lot of unnecessary…

This is addressed in the article, though not with any particular science.

I am of a similar mind. I have long been a fan of physical media, but I started realizing last generation that disc versions are honestly more hassle than digital ones. Gotta go to my shelf, figure out what I want to play, pop the disc in, then wait for it to install before I can actually play. And that last point is…

Seems to me that a more useful “How can you prevent this?” tip would be to just lock your doors. I think this is more of a risk for offices than home users, in which case it’s unlikely you’d have admin privileges to disable your USB ports in the first place.

That’s fair, to a point. I wouldn’t say that they are boring (for me, anyway), they just aren’t a big, huge deal, which, as you say, makes them feel like bigger regular enemies instead of bosses (at least how we have been trained to think of bosses). That just didn’t bother me because I care more about the exploration…

The bosses being skippable was an intentional accessibility choice. He said he did not want people to miss out on the rest of the game just because they got stuck on a boss. If you, like me, feel like you need to beat them out of a sense of completion, you can come back later and beat them if you don’t beat them…

Depends what you are looking for. I rank SotN and Super Metroid as some of my top games of all time and for me, Axiom Verge 2 was a really enjoyable experience. More so than the first one. However, as the review says, if combat is your main thing, you’ll be disappointed. The final fight is possibly the least difficult…

The biggest issue with the Microsoft option is that it’s only 1 TB. It’s not outrageously priced for what it is, really, but it’s just a pain being stuck with one size option. And yeah, it’s easier to install, but... how often are you going to take it out? It’s like 5 extra minutes of work once and then never again on…

Having upgraded the storage on my PS3, it’s actually far easier now. You pop off the side (which doesn’t require any tools), unscrew the SSD cover, screw in the hard drive, and reassemble. Since it’s an additional hard drive, the console should handle the rest from there. It’s as easy as adding a hard drive to any…

Hope this means they’ll (Double Fine) do away with separate achievements for each difficulty. I totally understand the desire to reward players for finishing the game on the hardest difficulty, but it also locks people out of 100% achievements if they can’t and that is its own sort of gatekeeping.

I was looking into this out of curiosity and for CoD in particular, it has historically been a console game (for tournaments, at least), so the players are likely more used to controllers. On top of that, it has (apparently) pretty aggressive aim assist, so it’s probably actually easier to aim with a controller than…

I cannot imagine it is that hard to convert the saves. I remember back in the 360 era, I got tired of Oblivion crashing all the time and... well, you can literally just copy the save file off a 360 memory card, stick it in your PC saves folder, and it works. I don’t think I even had to rename it.