My main complaints with the game that I’d like to see fixed would probably be beyond the scope of the term “remaster”. The facial animations during dialogue were pretty uncanny in the base game, but they’re good in the DLC and sequel.

To me this feels like perfectly within the scope of what should be the realm of “remaster”, it’s just that history teaches us to expect less.

With each lazy and unnecessary cash grab remaster we move closer to the day a remaster announcement is made at the end of a game’s release trailer.

Very excited for you to take on the Sierra Madre! It’s a pretty divisive DLC, people either really love it or really hate it. I personally really enjoyed it, but there are certainly parts of it where I can see how they’d make some people dislike it.

A true man of culture, refinement and impeccable taste.

This all sounds great, but the one thing I truly wish they’d eventually add is official VR support. I played the game briefly with the VR mod, and it was already apparent how well the game is suited for it, but I wish it had fully integrated VR controls for full immersion.

$40 is like 40 pulls, maybe?

It depends on how you spend it. The best bang for the buck top-up pack - the $99 one - works out to about 20 pulls per $40 (this includes first-time purchase bonus). If you spent your $40 on the $5 monthly subscription (and logged in every day to claim it) it would work out to 160 pulls for your $40 - but it would take you 8 months to claim.

I remember EverQuest being called EverCrack back in the day before WoW.

Saving this for later, this sounds absolutely lovely and very interesting!

Another TV show that was famous for its amazing soundtrack that had subsequently been changed and butchered is Skins.

Came to the comments to post exactly that video, happily surprised to already find it here. Impeccable taste, sir.

I haven’t tried everything out there, but so far nothing I’ve tried is true perfection. The controller I use as daily driver for my PC is an Xbox 360 controller, which I find extremely nice - except for the D-pad. It also lacks the fancy tricks of the PS5 controller - a controller I Iike less for ergonomics but love for stuff like haptic feedback.

Completely agreed with all your points. Act 3 soured me on the game quite dramatically after being pretty high on it after the first two acts, and my only consolation (especially having also read that Steam page guide to cut content) was Larian’s habit of releasing Definitive Editions of their games.

It’s not as bad as the mobile version from 2014 (seriously, go look it up if you don’t believe me!), but I still prefer the original art and sprites. Butchered is maybe too strong a word though, that’s more fair to say about the mobile version.

EDIT: forgot to mention they used the GBA translation as a base and discarded many iconic Woolsey lines from the original, like “son of a submariner!”. There are obviously a lot more changes but I’m not going to be full purist and claim everything was objectively better on the SNES just because that’s the version I’m used to. You can look at the full differences here.

I recommend Woolsey Uncensored, I think it’s a really strong translation that combines the best of all worlds. The Dancing Mad mod was also recommended to me recently as a way to add uncompressed, higher quality music samples. I don’t have any experience using it, but it looks like it should work on top of Woolsey Uncensored. Your mileage may vary, though.

Great points. I also wonder if fixed crises and era changes will make every game flow in a very similar fashion, leading to repetitiveness? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

No surprise it’s FF VI. Absolutely peak final fantasy. Classic Uematsu soundtrack, great story with an iconic villain and a lovable cast. Active Time Battles and a phenomenal Esper system for customization. Square at the height of their pixel art powers with some beautiful sprites. Ultros, the opera scene, train suplexing…

It’s a shame they kind of butchered the pixel remaster. I’d try playing a romhack version on an emulator if you’re interested, preferably something based on Woolsey’s wonderful translation (son of a submariner!).

The combat gets better, FFXIV has a massive issue of most classes only playing the way they’re supposed to on max level. I guess that’s common for many MMOs, but it’s especially bad here imo. I also stopped playing during Endwalker, so I don’t know what’s been revamped since then.

Even if they’ve continued to simplify and homogenise the classes, the dungeons and raids will get better. Once you get into the expansions you’ll start having more fun mechanics to play around.

The game kind of lost me eventually, but I’ve had some amazing experiences with it and it has a lot of good qualities. The music is fantastic, especially the parts where Soken is riffing on themes written by Uematsu like Coils and Stormblood.

Despite my reservations about the game of late, the stretch of post-ARR into Heavensward into Stormblood and post-Stormblood patch quests was amazing. And the community is unreasonably lovely for being an MMO.

God damn how I wish James McCaffrey was still with us.

To… participate or watch? Because these days I can’t say I’m competitive enough in any game to bother. Not that I’m all that interested in competing either, anymore. Ten years ago me and my then Dota-friends were toying with the idea of signing up for something for a period there when we were playing a lot and doing well

To watch, well… I’m not sure. I don’t really play any esports type games currently. It’s a cop-out, but it would depend on the organisers. After mainlining the Olympics for a month I think I could probably get into anything - provided the commentators are good.