AI_Impaired

Portal, wherein you are given a 'companion cube' with hearts on it. You bring it around with you and solve a bunch of puzzles with it, then they make you throw it into a pit of fire. I also like the moment of revelation in Bioshock when you finally meet Andrew Ryan. Both demonstrate that your free will and choice as a player are constrained, the only choices you have a player have are to either co-operate with the choices a game gives you or turn it off.... Of course I like the portal moment because it made me laugh hysterically and simultaneously feel loss and sadness over an anthropomorphized inanimate object.

Transition to 3D was huge, both Zelda OoT and GTA 3 were the best examples of gigantic evolutionary advances that worked. I gotta say though, each game in the Witcher franchise slayed the previous one in advancement. Technology and Scale pulled out of seemingly nowhere. How even?

The more corporate gaming becomes, the more statistics driven its design is, the more it stops surprising you. So breakthrough classics tend to surprise the hell out of you, and have a lot to prove. Once proven, they are now an investment opportunity. I would say though.... some first party games particularly for Sony and Nintendo, have been more interested in pushing a series forward to captivate fans and sell hardware. I tend to prefer those kinds of sequels. Some games that may not be necessarily first party, are often still get their creativity backed by a hardware manufacturer to show off their product. Those can have interesting results too. My difficulty with COD by name, is it is now just a formula. AC, is also just a formula. They have basically abandoned its whole meta-story now. I would argue these are impressively good formulas, but most original fans stopped caring awhile ago because of increasing redundancy. God of war for PS4 was a good example of a series surprising its audience and being a good showpiece. Would love to see more series try things like this.

I have been a gaming community migrant, broke off of the 1up.com community when it collapsed with a few wordy games journalist types. The community we developed kind of dried up years ago. Been occasionally popping into Resetera, but would love a smaller but still thriving community. When it was still possible to play all the finest games you could play (say prior to 2007) I had played them. I even made a sport of finding the hidden gems and adding them to my collection. In its glory my collection was reflective of my absolutely unhealthy obsession with spending money on games. I ended up having to sell most of them over the past few years to ease financial woes. Now im just a 34 year old man with tales of some really great ones. The best ones. These days grown ass adulthood keeps me restricted to a few games here and there. Damn if I don't like to sit around the internet camp-fire and chat about them though. My absolute game sub-genre's of choice are probably CRPG's, or 'Immersive Sim's'.