Coelacanth

Hum, not sure that rings a bell. It’s possible I played it before the DLCs were out, then. Sounds like maybe that was for the best!

If it works the same way as Backwards Compatibility on the Xbox consoles it will also often have support for higher resolutions, higher frame rates and HDR. And I’m hoping the official support from Microsoft will mean better performance and fewer bugs.

This is absolutely huge. Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2 are finally released from the Xbox prison? It’s enough to make a grown man weep. I know emulation exists but it has been very spotty for Xbox titles and marred with bugs and performance issues.

Will be interesting to hear about the DLCs, I actually can’t remember playing them. I wonder if a long-repressed memory will emerge or I actually never ended up playing them back in the day.

It was mentioned elsewhere but the S.T.A.L.KE.R. original trilogy and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly has pretty good AI. I guess Clear Sky has a little too much grenade spam but Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat both have good AI, though I haven’t sat down and made exact A-B testing with F.E.A.R… Anomaly has a bunch of mods too that make the AI even better.

You should spoiler tag that for H&S.

I would argue the other way around. Blood and Wine is fun and nice as a capstone to Geralt and has a lot of content if you just want to ride around and play Gwent and do the Wine Wars and play house with your vineyard or whatever. It’s a fun expansion with a lot of value for your money if that’s what you’re after.

Hearts of Stone though is the most focused, well written, cinematic and concise story and content they ever made for Witcher. Has great characters, mystery, tension, levels, cutscenes, atmosphere… For me it was by far the more impactful of the two DLCs. If anything B&W is too long, I was already burned out by the end of it.

Yes of course, I’m not suggesting any video game has any sentient actual intelligence. I’m just using the old terminology where “AI” means “whatever controls enemy and NPC behaviour in the game”.

My point is that even F.E.A.R.'s “Goal Oriented Action Planning” is much less sophisticated and complex than it first appears, thanks to excellent design and clever illusions.

Hearts of Stone is the best Witcher content they ever produced in my opinion. Highly recommend checking it out.

F.E.A.R. enemies are very good for their time period, but there’s also quite a lot of smoke and mirrors involved that make them appear much smarter than they actually are. The voice lines are a great example, making you think they’re actually much more coordinated and intelligent than they are. The combat arenas are also very deliberately designed in tandem with the AI, both to maximise the efficiency of the AI that exists, but also to give them a bunch of opportunities to do manoeuvres that were unusual for the time - again to further the illusion. Good examples are ledges they can jump over and windows they can smash. It’s a much less smart and dynamic AI than it appears, but these small interactions give the impression of a highly intelligent enemy that interacts with the environment a lot.

They still do do some cool things sometimes though, like retreat and close the door behind them and wait in ambush.

Weird nonsense and shoulder belts? I can smell Nomura in the kitchen on this one grinning over the cauldron, I’m inclined to believe it’s real based off that alone.

I was thinking Jackass but bum fights is probably more accurate. God humanity is bleak sometimes.

It’s a shame to me because it divides the modding scene, and plenty old but stable mods will never be updated to work with the remaster. But it is what it is. I guess it will be nice for console players as F:NV is practically unplayably broken without mods.

Just don’t break mods, please.

That sounds lovely! If I ever get a partner (and they’re a non-gamer that is open to getting into gaming) then that sounds like a delightful thing to do together.

Hm, I have no ideas about mods for 2, unfortunately. I only played it once, and that was back in the day. I remember absolutely loving it, and I’ve been hesitant to go back because I don’t want to sully my memory of it.

And my backlog is too long to be replaying games, anyway.

I played it like a year after launch on PS4 and didn’t have any issues. On PC there is also ACUfixes that further fixes and improves things. Honestly Unity was such an ambitious game and both the city of Paris and the crowd system in it is still unsurpassed by later titles. I remember when Mirage came out comparison videos started going viral questioning which game came out 9 years after which. The fluid and varied animations in Unity is still absolute peak, look at how satisfying high level gameplay is.

Original Xbox games are a mixed bag though, emulation development for that platform is very far behind PS2 or GCN. Sadly :(

X360 too, although bizarrely I think Xemu is sometimes worse performing than Xenia? Is it just that there aren’t enough enticing exclusives that lead to these emulators being behind? I’m not really tapped into the scene.

Unity is still underrated largely due to its reputation formed during launch with all the bugs. But I think there was also a case around then of “Assassin’s Creed fatigue”, which only amplified the negative reception. It’s actually a very interesting what if scenario, what would have happened if Unity wasn’t broken on release and was successful? It’s well documented that its failure led to the entire rejigging of the franchise into open world RPGs in Origins and beyond.

As always I love reading your reviews and articles and just writing in general. Loved the clip of the trigger clacks, they may perhaps be too loud for stealth and convenience but they have a very pleasing sound. But then I love clicky mechanical keyboards.

Unfortunately I feel like I give the same comment every time (well, every time I remember to actually comment): “this device is so cool and I want it because it looks like such a desirable and pleasing object, but I can’t possibly justify buying it when I barely play any retro games of the era this runs well”.

Maybe I’m still waiting for the moment when (if?) portable retro handhelds like this get just a few steps further more powerful. Well actually, I guess that’s just the Steam Deck, eh? Though even that is probably not quite powerful enough. I’d love the PS2/Original Xbox (even X360) era games on my lap…