BlemboTheThird @ BlemboTheThird @lemmy.ca

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2 yr. ago

Minor correction, most of them seem to think that voting at all is the issue. Can't imagine why they work so hard to depress voter turnout on left-leaning social media

My bet is before release. Shoulda just made it available instead of announcing it.

I feel that excuse only goes so far. It's funny; the original Half Life was my first PC shooter experience, and Alyx was my first VR experience, but HL1 manages to be engaging for me even now while Alyx already feels stale. Like, I get the decision to dumb the movement way down for VR first timers who might get motion sick, but it goes way too far and offers vanishingly few options for people who might want more immersive physics. Or, like, a sprint button. Apparently I have naturally strong VR legs, but jeez, it bothered me even on my first time with a headset

Other things should still have had more room to expand as the game runs on, too. There's so little weapon variety and even among what it does have, the SMG and pistol fill almost the same niche. Apparently they made the AI painfully bad on purpose, but why couldn't they have saved a more engaging combat experience for the endgame or higher difficulties? And the constant orb puzzles they used to replace the traditional physics based ones get incredibly repetitive, especially when replaying the game.

It fails to iterate on the mechanics it introduces in meaningful ways, instead choosing to introduce new things that are entirely self contained (i.e., the Jeff sequence and the final level's vortigaunt blasts). Like, Jeff was super memorable, but part of the reason for that is he breaks up some seriously repetitive gameplay, and nothing about that level is ever relevant again.

Plus I have other gripes about sound design, physics (especially for heavy objects), even the way fall damage is handled. And the way it retcons Ep2 feels cheap to me. Idk. The game was ultimately fun, but flawed far beyond what I think can be said of the earlier games. Obviously I'm biased, but I wound up having more fun with HL2VR than Alyx.

People say Breen is sympathetic?

Ohhmygoodness I must have argued about this on the old site at least 5 different times. People really like the idea he was doing the best he could to buy time in a world where he genuinely believed fighting the Combine was impossible. I guess they were really starving for a sympathetic villain? But yeah his actions don't leave any room for sympathy, let alone his speeches and the dialogue between him and Vance. If anything the evidence points to him working with G-Man to cause the Black Mesa incident on purpose.

The only part of 2 that hit that high for me was the underside of the bridge

True, HL2 really deemphasized platforming as something necessary to win. I've always figured Valve tries to make games they want to play, and they fell out of love first with platformers, then with shooters. That's why there's been no HL3: they're into MOBAs now. I put together an almost entirely new PC and I'm still out here playing TF2 when I get the itch to shoot stuff; Deadlock really isn't my jam. Honestly at this point I figure even if we do get a HL3, it will have been taken in a direction I'm not really interested in.

Yeah it feels like BM picked 3 because that's what HL2 did, but to be fair there needed to be fewer than 10 because each individual grenade was way more powerful than in the original. At least HL2 didn't go as far in reducing weapon variety as HLA!

Also I edited in some actual hot takes into my original post.

Yeah okbh was a meme comm and I guess its mods were equally unserious. Not like I got banned for making a non-meme post, mine was the only viewpoint in that thread that got deleted so I guess they just didn't like what I was saying lol

Uhh yes. Oh boy, an invitation to ramble!

Ah jeez I'm gonna stop. Feel no obligation to read any of that. But yeah I used to post about all kinds of half life stuff. Once I wound up permabanned from okbuddyhalflife when I argued that valve popularized lootboxes and gaben was not a good billionaire

I checked Reddit last month for the first time since June of 2023 and had 4 notifications. 3 of them were about buying into Reddit's fucking shitass IPO. I guess people just aren't interested in my half-life hot takes :(

The problem becomes even more stark if you assume parties A and C win 25% and 26%. Heck, let's make B even more unpopular with a 34-35-31 split. There is an incredible amount of movement required to make a new party dominant and competitive in our fucked up system.

Lucky you. I've been letting calls from any number I don't recognize go to voicemail for years and nothing ever seems to change.

Whatever the reason, navigating that is still more complicated than navigating Lemmy or Mastodon

Lol were you just looking to pick a fight? You literally asked why people found this country appealing then got mad when you saw an answer you didn't like

... You think it's embarrassing that I think that advertising works?? You're hilariously naive to think that it doesn't.

Like I said, sure, we have a higher standard of living than most countries, but there are plenty of options when it comes to moving somewhere with a higher-value currency. And any other option will probably come with some form of socialized medicine and better protections for workers. Oh and they won't have an incoming administration promising to deport everyone en masse and keep them in camps in the meantime.

For anyone who wonders what the stunt was about, just look at this fuckin shit

I generally try to avoid doing the whole "American propaganda" shtick, but in this case... I mean come on. We make some of the most popular, ubiquitous media of any country in the world, and the vast majority of it shows us loving freedom and being cool as hell.

I won't deny that our standard of living is among the highest in the Americas, but the fact that things are getting worse all the time doesn't seem to matter to most people

You know, if this rednote thing really takes off, I don't think I can believe the whole "fediverse is too complicated" thing anymore. People are moving to an app that isn't even fully in English. That's WAY more complicated than picking a random instance out of a list (or more likely, just going to the one big one). I'm getting to where I think the vast majority of people just click on what's advertised no matter how stupid it is, and without ads (not people spreading things by word of mouth, I mean actual "ooh, shiny" ads) mainstream uptake of the fediverse will never happen. Good luck outspending the big corps on that.

Might be for the best anyway. The type of people who respond to ads probably aren't particularly fun to engage with.

Yeah I can't even log in on metapixl

I haven't checked it out yet but "loops" is supposed to be that

The only reason Facebook doesn't sound dumb is that we've been saying it for like 15 years

I mean they definitely don't have a switch 2 so