If you hold down fire and tap the aim button in GTA3 (and possibly VC/SA I can’t remember), shotguns become rapid fire and gain auto lock.

A cold open implies that the game begins instantly with gameplay. None of those games did that. Kingdom Hearts 2 had over 10-20 minutes of godawful unskippable dialog/cutscenes, MGS1/3 had intros, cutscenes, and codec conversations. Tsushima took about 5 minutes. Breath of the Wild is the only one even close. It had maybe a 1 minute cutscene before gameplay began. An actual cold open in a video game is ultra rare.

You could argue that a cold open in gaming is not about when gameplay starts (and is about instantly starting the story before a title card), but that falls apart quickly upon inspection. Pretty much every game being discussed has a title card, logos, and an intro before start is even pressed – instant disqualification. There’s no cold open after an intro to an intro. See? Pretty much every game just uses a fake cold open. I remember that Mad Max’s fake cold open pissed me off for teasing gameplay but going to cutscene. JRPGs also use amazing fake cold opens because they will have 5 title cards in the process of their game, sometimes.

The actual best cold open ive ever seen in gaming was X-Men 2 Clone Wars on the Sega Genesis. The game randomly selected a character an dumped you into a fight 2 seconds after the application started. It was intimidating, intriguing, and unforgettable. The title screen and character select didn’t happen until after the first stage.

This is Reddit. Even if a game sells ten million copies people will call it a failure and a disaster.

With how hard redditors are pushing this, it makes me almost certain that it’s exaggerated, a result of the internet journalism telephone game, or completely made up.

As someone who makes games as a hobby, I 100% side with the devs in these situations because I’ve experienced, first hand, the time consumption of game development. I used to be much less understanding and more critical (typical on Reddit). But after thousands of hours of game dev, being on multiple failed projects, and with nothing to show for it – the only real excuse is that they didn’t work 24/7 on it. That’s the hypocrisy of Reddit in a nutshell: no excuse for failure, work harder. Also, crunch is ruining the industry…

In my experience game design was nothing but crunch. 16 hour days of debugging, refactoring, learning from mistakes, etc.

The amount of filler and garbage that AI is about to bring to gaming must make the Microsoft execs swell with excitement. Anime games are especially about to explode in saturation because of this but I expect Microsoft/EA/Ubisoft to take AI generated crap games to the stratosphere.

The reasons to own every console havent changed for awhile. You buy an Xbox if you want features. You buy Sony/Nintendo if you want exclusives. As with the previous generations, owning an Xbox is basically pointless when you have a PC.

Tons of clones and ripoffs of smash these days. My suggestion is getting into Project M or playing Brawlhalla.

Two playthroughs ago, I realized that the entire honeybee brothel sequence in original ff7 used a combination of writing/camera work/blocking/framing/mini games to foreshadow that Cloud is a big fat fraud and a scared little boy (imo he’s a satire of gamers). The level of sophistication in that games design is just nuts.

I’m a sick, no life gamer and currently unemployed. I’ll probably forget some things, but here was my 2023:

• Second playthrough of God of War Ragnarok.
• 20 hours of the first God of War to confirm it was darker/harder.
• Metal Gear Solid 5 PvP ~30 hours. Maybe another 30 hours doing FOB/missions.
• Several hundred hours into Overwatch. A whole separate essay would be needed.
• Marvel Snap almost every day.
• Psychonauts 2 interrupted half way through.
• Dead Space Remake 5 times.
• Original Dead Space immediately after the Remake.
• Octopath Traveler 2 full playthrough
• Resident Evil 4 Remake fifteen times. I said fifteen.
• Tears of the Kingdom full playthrough.
• Both Diablo 4 betas. 100+ hours of Diablo 4 after release.
• Granblu Fantasy Versus did the campaign until boredom.
• UFC 4 full career.
• Marvel Midnight Suns full playthrough.
• Final Fantasy 7 Remake hard mode playthrough.
• Skyrim main campaign (magic Knight) on hardest difficulty.
• Star Wars Battlefront 2 ~30 hours ground combat and probably another 30 in space combat.
• Streets of Rage 4 finished unlocking everything.
• GTA San Andreas ~10 hours.
• Bloodstained 2 Randomizer and 1 hard mode playthrough.
• Elden Ring ~30 hours.
• Street Fighter 6 beta.
• Sifu (first playthrough) on Master took probably 30 hours.
• Sea of Stars ~30 hours tapped out due to filler.
• 13 Sentinels, 2 full playthroughs.
• Horizon Forbidden West ~20 hours.
• Assassin’s Creed 2 ~20 hours.
• Devil May Cry 5 ~10 hours.
• Doom 3 ~10 hours.
• Aliens Fireteam Elite full playthrough. Maxed out 1 class.
• Final Fantasy 7 full playthrough.
• Final Fantasy 12 got bored in the jungle.
• Mario RPG Remake full playthrough.

Most enthralling: 13 Sentinels, Sifu, OG FF7, RE4 Remake, Diablo 4, Overwatch 2, Zelda, Octopath 2.

Allegedly got tanked by Microsoft’s incessant directing towards microtransactions and multiplier.

If you read about what happened behind the scenes, they created a whole bunch of standalone awesome parts but it didn’t tie together at all. I’ve long speculated that is one of the problems that the Overwatch PvE had.