i also don’t love the new default of unskippable animations for trivial things. no, i don’t want to see the same animation every time i go to pick up a plant, craft an item, skin an animal, etc. i’m going to skip the activities if i can’t skip the animations.

i have a similar disdain for inventory/shop menus that don’t let you sell/move/craft things in bulk

To be fair, the first 3 hours of Indigo Prophecy are absolute kino.

I like the Borderlands approach where clicking interact would put it in your inventory, holding interact would either equip the item if it was equippable, or else pick up all the pickups around you if it wasn't.

While I mostly agreed another good application would be survival/crafting games with limited inventory. Or even games like Skyrim where you can put almost every object into your inventory.

But yeah it's overused.

I recently replayed Arkham Knight and the way you're handling those toxic containers, requiring you tu be very slow and careful while everything explodes around you is a perfect example of this done right. Such a great game. Shame there wasn't a spin-off sequel to that.

For me, that is a very fun fact. I can hear that "SEGA" in my head. Now it seems obvious, but little kid me didn't understand why we had such amazing graphics and sound, but so few spoken words.

The video game goddesses "sega" and the dude gods "rise from the grave" are probably the earliest I remember.

"Finish Him" from Mortal Kombat was also genesis no? "Round 1, FIGHT!" I think was street fighter, but for me at least sf2 on SNES was my intro to that series..

Anywhoots I'm less mad now about balders gate 3 asking me to pick a voice for my character that it (so far, for me) uses for literally none of the dialog options.

To be fair we had no idea how to pronounce it before that.

blame Nintendo and Microsoft, you have to do that to be certified for their platforms.

Actually, this isn't the worst idea. It can be hard to tell what kind of input device the player's using, especially on PC. Are you using kb+m, xbox controller, psx controller, generic bargain bin controller, etc? Also you can't just assume that because a controller's connected the player is going to use it (and lots of games do... much to my dismay since they make me go disconnect the controller). Once the player presses at least one button you can tailor all the inputs to that thing.

Bethesda titles...

Big Elden Ring energy

Oh, oh, and: the volume setting for background music only applies once you load into a level so you get blasted with loud music while you wait.

I've stopped buying EA games when they turned Battlefield 2 into a pay-to-win game

Battlefield Play-for-Free. Horribly cut down and butchered version of a great game.

Love to spend $70 on a game and then spend another thirty minutes to an hour learning how to hotwire it to start in a timely manner.

I'm pretty sure the unskippable videos are hiding the loading portions of the initial game.

Multithreading will be covered in Game Development 201.

First website I go to before booting up a game: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com

For immersion.

You were crossing the border, right?

I hated those opening logos on older games because the game always waited for all the openings to finish before starting its initialization process. So those 30 seconds spent on the openings could have half the game initialized by then.