I agree that Bethesda’s RPG writing is amateur at best, and I can’t dispute that there can be some good points in Dishonored. But at least for me, a mark of bad writing is that I find myself unable to care about the outcome for any of the characters in a story, and in Dishonored, I personally didn’t care much about any of the character’s struggles or personalities, as they were all pretty one-note. I can’t recall a single character’s name from Dishonored except for Corvo, since I found it novel to hear Stephen Russell as a main character again (big Thief fan, which incidentally I would point to as a game with excellent writing).

There was one instance in the main base/hub of dishonored 1, where there’s a short excerpt of a story about a whaler in a book, I think in the room where Emily was supposed to chill out in. I thought the writing of that little short story was so compelling, I sat back in my chair after I finished it and thought “Why isn’t this game about that?”, because I felt it highlighted how boilerplate the actual game’s story was in comparison. So in that way you’re right, the micro-writing, the world building, the atmosphere, is all top notch. I just wish the characters and plot were able to match it, as then it would be a masterpiece.

I should mention that I’m pretty difficult to impress with writing in video games, as I don’t think most of them can compare to the quality of writing available in books except for a handful of examples such as Thief, Gemini Rue, Mafia, and the original Deus Ex.

I wouldn’t say the writing for dishonored is terribly strong. The first game has a pretty bog standard plot, and the set up for the second was quite contrived. The gameplay and world are their strengths.

He posted this update a few months ago, it seems to be progressing well!

That description of your process reminds me of this video on consciousness, and how the creator describes how he has no inner monolog, or even conscious thought of some of his actions, and instead it’s like a black box that he can query. Is your experience similar to that?

You’d probably enjoy his normal content then! He makes great stuff.

If you’re not sure what StopKillingGames is about, the creator of the campaign, Ross Scott (of Freeman’s Mind fame) made this short video to give the rundown.

Looks like I was duped by this article, which claims its using Godot. I can’t find anything on the web about them switching away from Unity besides that, so I think you’re right.

Cheers for the info! I saw someone in the comments of a video on this bundle that someone mentioned Zenva’s youtube channel has a 4 hour Godot course for free, so probably best to just hit that instead.

Hollow Knight: Silksong and Slay the Spire II are being made in Godot, along with a bunch of other indie games. So far it hasn’t been used for a AAA or AA game yet, AFAIK. They have a showcase on their website.

Personally, I’m excited for Road to Vostok, which was ported to Godot after the Unity debacle.

Anyone have any experience with Zenva courses?

I slightly prefer Joe’s brand of humor, and I think he’s doing well on his own, but the two had great chemistry, and complemented each others style.

A while back I put together a pretty big list of free Linux games, along with their license info. A good amount of them are FPS games, hopefully one of them interests you 🙂

I guess for tactical shooters, Urban Terror might qualify?

That was a fun review, I like the style you went for with it!

I played this back in the day on the 360, which didn’t seem to have the bugs you encountered. I recall having a pretty good time with it, and it was short enough not to overstay its welcome. The jumping mechanics and training for it were unique at the time, and I thought it was a nice twist on the WWII formula.

The lacking narrative (or at least, I don’t remember one, or any characters) hurt it, as it felt sort of like I was playing a multiplayer game alone at times.

I also thought it was neat how the sniper rifles were more accurate/less wobbly if you slowly squuezed the analog trigger, I’m not sure I’ve seen that elsewhere.

But yeah, good review, I’d honestly enjoy reading more from you.

Ah, that’s unfortunate. As an alternative, I have seen some online games name their bots with a random name generator that’s designed to sound somewhat real, like AnnoyingPidgen or WrecklessRaptor. If the voting account naming system was more like that, it would be easier to notice voting patterns/manipulation while still being anonymous.

Rock’n’roll racing got a pretty solid GBA port, it’s a fantastic little isometric battle racer from the 90’s

Regarding the voting account having no name, does that mean it will be a random string of letters and numbers? I get that it will still be possible to discover vote manipulation or mass downvoting with that, but I suspect it would be more difficult to detect initially or without some deeper analysis, since it’s harder to recognize or remember a random string compared to a human made username.

It’s extremely difficult for me to enjoy most 8-bit games, as there’s very little there to intrigue my tastes. However, there are a few standouts that I still play to this day on an emulator handheld, like H.E.R.O. or Mr. Do!

The good ones generally have a really solid little gameplay loop that’s quick to get into, with tight controls that let you get into a flow-state easily, and a difficulty curve that isn’t infuriating (something far too common from that era). The story heavy games from that era usually had mediocre or terrible writing paired with repetitive grinding gameplay, so the classics like Final Fantasy are sadly off limits for me.

H.E.R.O. is one of my favorites since it has somewhat uncommon gameplay where you control a man with a helicopter pack in a mine, avoiding various hazards to rescue a trapped miner at the end of each level. It rewards memorization, which is a knock against it, but even though I’ve played it heavily, I keep coming back to it as I never can quite remember the layouts of the later levels, and once control of the backpack is mastered, it just feels good to zip around all of these creatures and caverns of instant death without nicking yourself. I’m not sure how someone who has never played it before would feel about it, since it can take a while to get the hang of the controls, but I think it holds up pretty well from that era.

It also received a pretty massive number of ports to various consoles and home computers. The original Atari 2600 version is good, but personally I found the MSX port to be the most polished, and it adds some nice additional graphics as well.

What I saw over there was a large portion of his community pleading with him to delegate administrative tasks to the community, as it became increasingly clear the website was becoming too much for a single guy to manage (he was the only moderator of like 30+ communities that were full to bursting with spam, as well as the sole site admin). He never approved the many applications to help moderate, and said he was extremely slow to trust others, so never appointed a second admin, and instead just continued to silently work on the codebase as the site became unusable from spam.

I think his extreme distrust and desire to do everything himself combined with his medical issues led to extreme burnout, and ultimately its downfall.

The remake has much better gunplay and graphics, and overall has been ‘smoothed out’, but personally I think the new casting choices were unbelievably bad, and take all of the soul out of the game.

If you can get past the jank of the original (and get the community patch to add the old music back in), I personally think the original is the better game by far, but I was a huge fan of the original, so I’m biased.

The Eternity Dev has returned, and released a new update for it. Last I checked the update hasn’t released on f-droid due to the build failing, but it is available on aurora or play store.