Stepos Venzny

My favorite ME1 build is Infiltrator. The damage output of a properly modded sniper rifle can get truly depraved late in the game.

Andromeda has the biggest difference I’ve ever seen between low graphics settings and high ones. I wonder if the lack of recognition for its beautiful environments isn’t mainly that they just weren’t beautiful on most people’s systems.

The ammo system rewarded you with ammo for the opposite color of beam you were using, so you are actually totally free to ignore the power beam most of the time without running into supply issues. Even when you wanted to only use one color, like the light beam when you’re on Dark Aether, use the one you don’t want in combat to shoot crates and plants and stuff to farm good ammo for the fights.

I believe it’s a reference to when his penis was famously described as looking like the little mushroom people from Mario games.

Seeing The Good Place on his resume is the most reassuring thing I could have hoped to see for this movie. I don’t want anyone making a Matrix sequel who couldn’t have equally made a Speed Racer sequel and I think he has the chops for that.

If you’re not familiar, you should know going in that it’s an anthology of shorts by different writers and directors. All the advertising I remember focused on the first short because the CGI was so good for twenty years ago and that segment is boring as hell from every other standpoint, so just remember while you’re enduring it that other shorts are coming and most of the movie is actually worth seeing.

Games that I’m confident the average person would love:

• Burnout (3 and/or Revenge)
• Tony Hawk’s Underground (definitely 1 and not 2)
• Shadow of the Colossus (I’m otherwise avoiding games with HD versions for modern platforms but I specifically think this game is weirdly better with PS2-level graphics and performance)
• Ultimate Spider-Man (Spider-Man 2 had better swinging but I think this is the stronger overall package)

Games with a more niche appeal but, dammit, I want you to play them anyways:

• Steambot Chronicles
• Shadow of Destiny

Games that felt like a big deal at the time but I haven’t actually played since I was a kid so take with a grain of salt:

• Evergrace
• Way of the Samurai (1 and/or 2)
• Stuntman
• Def Jam Vendetta & Fight for NY
• Mercenaries 1
• NBA Street (2 was my favorite but all three were great)
• NFL Street (only played 1, presumably 2 and 3 are also great)

A game I know is bad but I want you to play it so that the voice clips will be burned into your brain also:

• Kessen 2

West of Loathing. The RPG stuff is great and the comedy is great but really the main strength is I just enjoy reading its dialogue. The vocabulary and sentence construction have a real sincerity for the setting contrasted against the silliness of the rest of it that makes both parts hit harder.

Similarly, the first three Monkey Island games which achieve that same injection of the heartfelt into the wacky by way of their gorgeous art and music.

But as far as the joy of just doing something it’s hard to beat the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games, to just be dropped into a level and be told “do cool stuff for a while”.

I really think modernizing the controls is a bad idea. Lara is probably still going to be as heavy and rigid as in the original, so if all it changes is what analog sticks do then it’s going to set up the players with expectation that it should be responsive in the way that dual analog games are responsive instead of the type of responsiveness you got from the old tank controls so people will perceive the game as being sloppy and unreasonably demanding. And if they change more than just what analog sticks do, if they change the underlying mechanics of movement to be more the way dual analog controls are responsive, it’s going to make the platforming a lot harder because the jumps were designed around the type of precision tank controls offer.

In the modern day, its weird retro tank controls are honestly one of the original series’s biggest strengths for me. In a landscape full of platforming that largely plays itself, old-school Tomb Raider makes platforming feel exciting again by making you stop and think through what you’re doing.

I feel like these conversations get dominated by games with the fewest explicit flaws rather than the ones that have the most to offer but it’s my firm belief that no piece of art can be truly great which is not also kind of annoying. Not because annoyingness is inherent to greatness but because greatness and annoyingness are both the products of an underlying willingness to take creative risks.

So in that spirit, my answer is Steambot Chronicles.

But I don’t think the software can differentiate between the ideas of defined and undefined characters. It’s all just association between words and aesthetics, right? It can’t know that “Homer Simpson” is a more specific subject than “construction worker” because there’s no actual conceptualization happening about what these words mean.

I can’t imagine a way to make the tweak you’re asking for that isn’t just a database of every word or phrase that refers to a specific known individual that the users’ prompts get checked against and I can’t imagine that’d be worth the time it’d take to create.