racketboy.com

Gucci wrote:I’d imagine some of the RPGs of the time were the heavy hitters of “time to beat” which is something that continues to this day.

How Long to Beat pegs the two Lufia games on the SNES at nearly 30 hours with story + extras. Mario RPG is at nearly 20 hours.

Regardless, as we all know, time does not equal quality all the time. I had a wonderful time with the 10 to 11 hours I spent on South Park: the Stick of Truth, which was probably the shortest time I spent on an Obsidian game from New Vegas and onward.

I'm in the middle of playing indie game G String, which is basically a Half Life 2 reskin. But all the levels feel about twice as long as they should be and honestly thematically should be split into two levels each (so far each one has had a point where it feels like you're in a new thematic level but it's still the same episode). I think they got combined because it's already 15 episodes long and splitting it into 30 would scare people away or something.

While the name isn't great, I have had G String on my Steam wishlist for a while. Is it worth the price?

I'm four stages in and right now I'm leaning towards no. It starts off as a Half Life 2 reskin (all the same mechanics, weapons, most enemies), but then there's just a lot that shows the developers are on the amateur end of things. Enemies are a bit more bullet spongey and more importantly do not make a lot of noise, so you tend to start off taking damage (and they reduced the feedback on damage). As mentioned, levels are too long. The game likes environment damage but has lots of spots where it isn't obvious for a given level where the environmental damage is. A water of this texture is fine in one level and bad in another, or fine in this section of the level but bad in another section. It uses the HL2 physics puzzles, but they tend to be less obvious that they exist (most egregiously, there's one level with a novel physics puzzle for HL2 and almost no one realizes it's there and it's required to progress).

Ack wrote:While the name isn't great, I have had G String on my Steam wishlist for a while. Is it worth the price?

What's wrong with the name. It's an important string for instruments, and unofficially part of the name of Air on G-String by a Bach, a most lovely piece.

The logo is a DNA molecule, so it's like a genome string.

Then the updates have been the "B Cup update" and the "C Cup update", even though there is so far a single female player model, and it's your character model. There are vending machines that sell used bras and pantyhose, but it seems to be part of that cyberpunkish dystopic aesthetic.

Seems like people are starting to notice something, off, about Take-Two Interactive.

A while back they have filed a DMCA takedown notice on Github for various reverse engineered versions of 2 GTA games. I have been told that it's tough to play on modern PCs, even on steam, so I assume that's one of the things they are doing. It's pretty much a patchwork as well, like widescreen and controller support, updated HUD, etc.

There was an update recently. It looks like Take-Two Interactive has now filed a lawsuit against them: https://twitter.com/videotech_/status/1 ... 9186306049

This might be the beginning of the end for them. I can see this starting a big shitstorm.

Someone did a hilarious response showing how the reactions are for most of these companies... they usually end up hiring the people that do this onto their future projects.

https://twitter.com/Arvydas_B/status/14 ... 3088005125

Rumor since August is that Take Two and Rockstar are working on a remaster of the GTA3 games for modern consoles. Modding efforts getting them running on modern hardware could be perceived as a threat to that market.

I could definitely see their way of thinking with that, but

a) this doesn't really promote piracy
b) this only affects PC players and not console players
c) doing this will REALLY hurt their reputation now, especially amongst said PC players

EDIT: I also learned that 2 years they sent goons investigators, to a youtuber's house.

If you can mod your existing copy then you would be less inclined to purchase the new version. That's the threat.

I just think that this act of tarnishing their reputation is gonna hurt more than the "but muh sales" approach