It wouldn't surprise me if Portal 3 is released at some point. I'm skeptical, but I'm not outruling it. The game is whacky enough that there are probably a lot of interesting and cool things that can be implemented into a worthy successor.
I am, on the other hand, utterly convinced that HL3 is not going to happen. The previous two were groundbreaking, stretching limits of what one can do with a physics engine. I'm having a hard time imagining that it can be pulled off a 3rd time, simply because I am unable to imagine any sory of content that would all:
a) fit with the series so that it still feels like a HL game
b) interesting enough to allow for the innovation that the previous two games had
c) good enough to justify a new game rather than just a tech demo
I sincerely hope that my opinion on the matter is simply a matter of failure of imagine, and that a good HL successor is released at some point, but sadly I think I'm right on this one.
Half-Life: Alyx is mostly what I hoped we'd get from HL3, inasmuch as it hits your points a & b for sure, and IMHO c (though I know that's not agreed on by everyone).
It had great action and expository setpieces (avoiding spoilers), and the (albeit relatively simple) puzzles definitely added something to Half-Life that really worked for me.
Unfortunately it didn't solve all VR issues (melee being an obvious one), and not least of which the cost. I played it on a cheap (~$100), janky old WMR headset, but not everyone can do that without vomiting, so a great PC and good headset are a hefty price, which is probably the biggest hurdle for a full-scale 3 in VR. Especially considering there just aren't many other games worth making that investment in, IMHO. I played the hell out of Alyx, a little of a few other games...but Alyx was the pinnacle of what VR could do for me.
Alyx did what most Valve games do, it advanced the industry. It is absolutely a half life game and it fits but it isn’t HL3. It isn’t that grandiose.
For people who accuse it of being a glorified tech demo, well, that’s exactly what Half Life 1 and 2 are. The sole reason for the existence of HL2 is just to sell the source engine to devs and to push Steam forward. It is a tech demo. Its puzzles are tech demos.
What Alyx did is implement proper gunplay and looting mechanics and really showcased how possible it is to tell a story in VR without taking your POV from you. I’d argue that there still isn’t a single VR game that nails one of the foundational pillars of Alyx as much as Valve did.
IIRC, Valve pretty much admitted that they really have no interest in making games anymore, unless they have a interesting technology to play with and learn, and the game is an excuse for that.
Thats why Alyx got made, cause they wanted to play with VR.
The golden age of gaming was the late SNES/early playstation era.
Graphics were beautiful, games were long and generally had incredible, immersive, and even heart wrenching stories.
Unlike today, where the focus on hyperrealism, generally at the expense of story and definitely performance. but hey, its only 6 hours long and you get to pay 80 dollars for it, so thats great, right?
The golden era depends on your personal preferences. What you said is true, but golden era for MMOs was early 2000s to early 2010s, and for me personally it was during that period
1999 was such an amazing year in my gaming life. Rollercoaster Tycoon, Mechwarrior 3, Battlezone II, and Unreal Tournament. So, so many hours of my life spent in those. That was like, 5 years ago, right?
Do you really? Dang, I'm so jealous. I still have my original discs for I and II, at least. Yeah, my brother and I loved those as well. My dad worked in IT for EDS at the time, and got some old laptops on the cheap. So, I remember my brother and I laying on the living room floor, playing BZ facing each other over the IR ports. We started implementing gentleman's agreements, like no killing scavengers and no attacking your opponent's base for 30 minutes. It became a cold war game, where we would max out our units, and just spy on each other. Maybe send a single fighter over to poke at defenses. Then, I'd send over the mass of APCs I was hiding away from my base, and just annihilate everything.
And BZII had such a great mod scene! We loved XMod. We'd always say no nukes, but we always made them anyway.
I remember my first foray into online in BZ II. I didn't realize turrets could be glitched to not deploy, so my strategy of high-armor turret run lasted about 10 minutes...
My friend's strategy was very similar to yours when we played BZ I. He'd go silent, then the next thing everyone knew, he had a fleet of bombers wipe the map clean.
I know MechWarrior gets all the praise and hype, but I genuinely love this specific title. It's peak isometric turn-based strategy and I love it.
Although that may have something to do with scoring that MadCat in the first or second level. I think it's supposed to give your Commando mechs a bad time, but I lit up the oil refinery next to it and lucked into getting the pilot to eject. The thing was completely salvageable and I absolutely dominated the first half of the game with it. Good times.
That MadCat was such a gamebreaker if you could capture it. I had all my mechs just do cockpit aims since blowing the oil tanks carried a solid risk of outright destroying the mech.
and it was not nearly as easy as I'm making it sound, it involved lots of running my lance around in circles and whiffed shots (And some reloads) before i ever landed a shot on its cockpit.
Honestly Yakety Sax should have been playing the entire time while i was doing it, lol.
I only ever beat it back in the day by using the game guide lol! That was long enough ago that the game guide was an actual paper book I had to find at a store and pay real money for! Well, my mom paid for it anyway lol
My mom liked playing Nintendo games as much as I did so if there was a game she wanted to see the end of we would end up getting a Nintendo Power or a standalone game guide that was supposedly purchased for me lol
I didn't have a guide, but got stuck for days at the part where you have to super bomb the glass tube. I just did it out of desperation and couldn't believe it worked! A similar thing happened 5 years earlier in Simon's Quest when you have to hold crouch while holding the blue crystal. Come to think of it, Super Metroid might just be the last game in which I got stuck like that before I had access to the internet to look these things up.
I was well into adulthood when that came out. If you want to make me feel old, remind me that the Atari 5200 came out 42 years ago. And almost no one bought it. And the people who did regretted it. And now it's only old people like me who remember it even existed.
Went into CEX the other week, and saw PS1 games I'd bought when I was already an adult with a job, being sold second hand for more than I'd originally bought them for.
The local oldies station summer concert features Vanilla Ice, Tone Loc, Tag Team and some other 90s bands, so now I kind of want to buy a walker and some tennis balls since my childhood is considered oldies.
Forget Shadow, I was there when ICO was first released. Probably even within a month (if not week) of it's official release. At the time it looked like no other game. Very atmospheric and contemplative.
I love that Fallout is now thought of as a first-person game, but it started as a turn-based isometric team RPG in 1997 which was, itself, a near-remake of a 1988 game, which I spent hours playing as a kid.
They're amazing. I highly recommend it if you like games in that style. The first two Baldur's Gates were also like that (I haven't played the latest).
Don't think that's actually true, though. Edit: top selling games of 2023. Pretty sure the idea that "old games were higher quality" is a example of a cognitive bias, too. I say this as someone that's been gaming since the 80s.
I think it's like old songs, you remember the good ones, discuss them with people, and preserve them. The crap from then is mostly forgotten, so it only appears that they were all great.
Agreed. I loved and still love Megaman X. Just replayed it recently and it's remarkably short. I recall it costing near $70 when we got it. People would be rioting if such a short linear game came out at that price point today, which is why it's bundled with 3 other games for $20 now.
The people who are vocal and discuss games on the internet are a small fraction of the population that actually buys games. Doesn't mean there isn't a market for that stuff. Gaming market is bigger than it's ever been. Direct delivery makes it incredibly easy for small indie devs to get their games out there. But that's not the stuff that's making the most money
Tactics Ogre Reborn came out in late 2022 for Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, and PC.
That game is a remaster of another title called Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, which came out for the PSP in November 2010 in Japan. This puts it 12 years before Reborn.
But the PSP game was itself is a remake of a game with the same name that came out originally for the Super Famicom in October 1995, 15 years before its remake and 27 years before the remaster of that remake.
Half-life 2 will turn 20 in November so I guess the third one is coming out any day now (opens a new can of copium and grips the favourite spork)
I'm sure Portal 3 is coming soon too... right?
Sure, right after Left 4 Dead 3
If only valve could count past 2
https://youtu.be/jpw2ebhTSKs
brilliant
It wouldn't surprise me if Portal 3 is released at some point. I'm skeptical, but I'm not outruling it. The game is whacky enough that there are probably a lot of interesting and cool things that can be implemented into a worthy successor.
I am, on the other hand, utterly convinced that HL3 is not going to happen. The previous two were groundbreaking, stretching limits of what one can do with a physics engine. I'm having a hard time imagining that it can be pulled off a 3rd time, simply because I am unable to imagine any sory of content that would all: a) fit with the series so that it still feels like a HL game
b) interesting enough to allow for the innovation that the previous two games had
c) good enough to justify a new game rather than just a tech demo
I sincerely hope that my opinion on the matter is simply a matter of failure of imagine, and that a good HL successor is released at some point, but sadly I think I'm right on this one.
Half-Life: Alyx is mostly what I hoped we'd get from HL3, inasmuch as it hits your points a & b for sure, and IMHO c (though I know that's not agreed on by everyone). It had great action and expository setpieces (avoiding spoilers), and the (albeit relatively simple) puzzles definitely added something to Half-Life that really worked for me.
Unfortunately it didn't solve all VR issues (melee being an obvious one), and not least of which the cost. I played it on a cheap (~$100), janky old WMR headset, but not everyone can do that without vomiting, so a great PC and good headset are a hefty price, which is probably the biggest hurdle for a full-scale 3 in VR. Especially considering there just aren't many other games worth making that investment in, IMHO. I played the hell out of Alyx, a little of a few other games...but Alyx was the pinnacle of what VR could do for me.
Alyx did what most Valve games do, it advanced the industry. It is absolutely a half life game and it fits but it isn’t HL3. It isn’t that grandiose.
For people who accuse it of being a glorified tech demo, well, that’s exactly what Half Life 1 and 2 are. The sole reason for the existence of HL2 is just to sell the source engine to devs and to push Steam forward. It is a tech demo. Its puzzles are tech demos.
What Alyx did is implement proper gunplay and looting mechanics and really showcased how possible it is to tell a story in VR without taking your POV from you. I’d argue that there still isn’t a single VR game that nails one of the foundational pillars of Alyx as much as Valve did.
IIRC, Valve pretty much admitted that they really have no interest in making games anymore, unless they have a interesting technology to play with and learn, and the game is an excuse for that.
Thats why Alyx got made, cause they wanted to play with VR.
Black Mesa remake looks so good. I just picked it up for $4 on Steam. It was nearly 30 damn gigs lol.
Black Mesa is amazing! It's what the already great HL1 could have been.
you must mean half life 1.
you must mean half life 1...
....right?
Some games that came out 16 years ago:
I just finished my Windows XP build, and have been enjoying FO3 again the way it was meant to be played.
I am already down. Kindly refrain from kicking me.
whispers in ear: Metal Gear Solid fooooour....
Stop, stop, we're already dead.
We didn't realize we were in a golden age, did we? /old-man-noises
I knew we were in a golden age when The Orange Box came out. A red letter day in gaming.
The golden age of gaming was the late SNES/early playstation era.
Graphics were beautiful, games were long and generally had incredible, immersive, and even heart wrenching stories.
Unlike today, where the focus on hyperrealism, generally at the expense of story and definitely performance. but hey, its only 6 hours long and you get to pay 80 dollars for it, so thats great, right?
The golden era depends on your personal preferences. What you said is true, but golden era for MMOs was early 2000s to early 2010s, and for me personally it was during that period
This hurts me. Why would you do this?
I am fueled by your fading sense of youth.
get out.
I remember me and my friends being so hyped for Brawl, and then gutted when it got delayed for another year
I'm ok with forgetting it. Stupid slipping.
Doom came out in 1993 Dec 10
So yeah just over 30 years ago
Thanks, I'll just be over here browsing the AARP webpage.
Hm this mortuary guide looks interesting...
We played that at the office after work :-/
I still listen to the soundtrack regularly. Though the game is slightly older than I am.
1999 was such an amazing year in my gaming life. Rollercoaster Tycoon, Mechwarrior 3, Battlezone II, and Unreal Tournament. So, so many hours of my life spent in those. That was like, 5 years ago, right?
No one, I mean no one mentions Battlezone or Battlezone II, ever. I love that series. I still have the BZ II box and everything.
Do you really? Dang, I'm so jealous. I still have my original discs for I and II, at least. Yeah, my brother and I loved those as well. My dad worked in IT for EDS at the time, and got some old laptops on the cheap. So, I remember my brother and I laying on the living room floor, playing BZ facing each other over the IR ports. We started implementing gentleman's agreements, like no killing scavengers and no attacking your opponent's base for 30 minutes. It became a cold war game, where we would max out our units, and just spy on each other. Maybe send a single fighter over to poke at defenses. Then, I'd send over the mass of APCs I was hiding away from my base, and just annihilate everything.
And BZII had such a great mod scene! We loved XMod. We'd always say no nukes, but we always made them anyway.
I remember my first foray into online in BZ II. I didn't realize turrets could be glitched to not deploy, so my strategy of high-armor turret run lasted about 10 minutes...
My friend's strategy was very similar to yours when we played BZ I. He'd go silent, then the next thing everyone knew, he had a fleet of bombers wipe the map clean.
Hmm... Manson's Battlezone,... 3. Hey I ain't got nothin' else to do!
MechCommander came out in 99, too, didnt it?
That was my introduction to battletech. Fuck I loved that game, I played it SO much.
I know MechWarrior gets all the praise and hype, but I genuinely love this specific title. It's peak isometric turn-based strategy and I love it.
Although that may have something to do with scoring that MadCat in the first or second level. I think it's supposed to give your Commando mechs a bad time, but I lit up the oil refinery next to it and lucked into getting the pilot to eject. The thing was completely salvageable and I absolutely dominated the first half of the game with it. Good times.
That MadCat was such a gamebreaker if you could capture it. I had all my mechs just do cockpit aims since blowing the oil tanks carried a solid risk of outright destroying the mech.
and it was not nearly as easy as I'm making it sound, it involved lots of running my lance around in circles and whiffed shots (And some reloads) before i ever landed a shot on its cockpit.
Honestly Yakety Sax should have been playing the entire time while i was doing it, lol.
Breath of the wild came out 7 years ago.
This made me remember that NFS Underground 2 is 20 years old now, and it's still the peak for the series.
cue Riders On The Storm …
Unpopular opinion: I fucking hate the open world premise of NFSU2 and I just quitted playing after a while, but I've completed NSFU several times.
This made me curious so I looked up my favorite game from childhood that I still play sometimes now... Super Metroid just turned 30 years old 💀
I'm so nostalgic for that one. Don't think I ever managed to beat it back then though.
I only ever beat it back in the day by using the game guide lol! That was long enough ago that the game guide was an actual paper book I had to find at a store and pay real money for! Well, my mom paid for it anyway lol
I never convinced my parents to get me Nintendo Power... So there were many games that I just never figured out!
My mom liked playing Nintendo games as much as I did so if there was a game she wanted to see the end of we would end up getting a Nintendo Power or a standalone game guide that was supposedly purchased for me lol
I didn't have a guide, but got stuck for days at the part where you have to super bomb the glass tube. I just did it out of desperation and couldn't believe it worked! A similar thing happened 5 years earlier in Simon's Quest when you have to hold crouch while holding the blue crystal. Come to think of it, Super Metroid might just be the last game in which I got stuck like that before I had access to the internet to look these things up.
That is the greatest game of all time (in my opinion). Celebrating its 30th all year - what a masterpiece.
The fact you couldn’t go back after saving in the last area was horrible.
But if it didn’t have that I might agree, definitely one of the best games I’ve played.
Wanna feel old? This September marks the 28th anniversary of the release of the N64
I still remember the whole family crowding around when I booted it up. Everyone was fascinated by the 3d graphics.
I was well into adulthood when that came out. If you want to make me feel old, remind me that the Atari 5200 came out 42 years ago. And almost no one bought it. And the people who did regretted it. And now it's only old people like me who remember it even existed.
I still can't fathom that Pikmin is past the legal drinking age in the United States.
Don't look up when Pikmin 2 came out
Looks up when Pikmin 2 came out
Is a year earlier than I remembered
Turns into dust
Halo CE is 23 years old.
What... call of duty modern warfare 2 still has active servers, it came like 3 or 4 years ago... right?
IW4x is actually still really active if you want to play the original MW2 multiplayer.
15
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty:_Modern_Warfare_II_(2022_video_game)
That's the 2022 game not the OG 360/PS3 game.
You were missing the joke where kids talk about the remake
I'm replaying a few games that are older than my daughter and she's at college right now.
When I was a kid, computer games for consumers were a concept of science fiction.
Pong can't be that old, can it?
It could start withdrawing from a retirement account without penalty in about 6 years.
💀
Went into CEX the other week, and saw PS1 games I'd bought when I was already an adult with a job, being sold second hand for more than I'd originally bought them for.
Anybody else just get back into aoe2 in the last year and watch hera? This is basically that.
Whatever T90 streams
The NES has been considered an antique since 2015 (30 years for an object to be considered an antique).
Linkin Park is old enough to be classic rock.
100 years is the legal definition of an antique. 20-99 years is vintage.
"Classic rock" is a nearly-meaningless term.
Always has been. It's about as specific a genre as "oldies." Just nostalgia-bait.
The local oldies station summer concert features Vanilla Ice, Tone Loc, Tag Team and some other 90s bands, so now I kind of want to buy a walker and some tennis balls since my childhood is considered oldies.
Oh, there you are, Shadow of the Colossus.
2005 (PS2), 2011 (PS3 w/ Ico), and 2018 (PS4 remake)
You can emulate a PS2 on your phone these days. Bluetooth controller with a phone clip and you have a hell of a catalogue available to you.
Forget Shadow, I was there when ICO was first released. Probably even within a month (if not week) of it's official release. At the time it looked like no other game. Very atmospheric and contemplative.
Pokemon Let's Go - 5 and a half years old Pokemon FrLg - 20 years old Pokemon RB - 25 and a half years old
World of Warcraft hits 20 this year. I was there (via private servers), starting in 2006.
That made me think of my Sega Game Gear. That was 33 years ago. I recently turned 40 and now I really do feel like an old fart.
I love that Fallout is now thought of as a first-person game, but it started as a turn-based isometric team RPG in 1997 which was, itself, a near-remake of a 1988 game, which I spent hours playing as a kid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_(video_game)
And then a few years ago, Wasteland was also revived in the style of the first two Fallout games.
Yes, I know I'm old.
I still want to go back and play the first 2 fallout games. I wasn't aware of them when they came out, so I wasn't introduced to the series until 3.
They're amazing. I highly recommend it if you like games in that style. The first two Baldur's Gates were also like that (I haven't played the latest).
I do! Although I do think I prefer BG3's turn-based combat vs real time w/ pause.
They are turn-based, not real time with pause. I prefer the former too.
Oh good! That's awesome to hear. I think I might even own them from some bundle in steam, but I just haven't gotten around to playing them.
Pitstop 2 that my brother and I played constantly we were kids are 40 years exactly... the pain..
OG Graalonline player checking in
Accurate (it's a bit older than 16 years though)
Don't think that's actually true, though. Edit: top selling games of 2023. Pretty sure the idea that "old games were higher quality" is a example of a cognitive bias, too. I say this as someone that's been gaming since the 80s.
I think it's like old songs, you remember the good ones, discuss them with people, and preserve them. The crap from then is mostly forgotten, so it only appears that they were all great.
Agreed. I loved and still love Megaman X. Just replayed it recently and it's remarkably short. I recall it costing near $70 when we got it. People would be rioting if such a short linear game came out at that price point today, which is why it's bundled with 3 other games for $20 now.
Games people say they want: new IPs, platformers, indy games, local multiplayer.
Games people actually pay for: franchise games, annualized games, live service shooters, online multiplayer.
The people who are vocal and discuss games on the internet are a small fraction of the population that actually buys games. Doesn't mean there isn't a market for that stuff. Gaming market is bigger than it's ever been. Direct delivery makes it incredibly easy for small indie devs to get their games out there. But that's not the stuff that's making the most money
Here's one:
Tactics Ogre Reborn came out in late 2022 for Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, and PC.
That game is a remaster of another title called Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, which came out for the PSP in November 2010 in Japan. This puts it 12 years before Reborn.
But the PSP game was itself is a remake of a game with the same name that came out originally for the Super Famicom in October 1995, 15 years before its remake and 27 years before the remaster of that remake.
I've missed it until the Reborn remake, which I still need to finish. By the time I get back to it though, they might have put it out a 4th time!
I'm still waiting for the Ogre Battle 64 remake..... any day now.... any day...
Fuck
Next year, Civilization IV will be TWENTY years old. D:
Dude, I remember installing the first Civilization on my Mac LC II in high school.