Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN MAY 2025?

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

Another month down, and a quite chatty one here on c.s.i.p.g.action.
Not that I'm complaining --it was a pleasant surprise to see 20+
messages waiting for me when I finally get around to visiting the
newsgroup, rather than the usual five or six-- but... if you were all
yakking it up here on Usenet, did that leave you any time to actually
play video games? I guess we'll find out.

June already?

* Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2017)
I remember this game being a lot more fun the last time I played it.

Well, maybe 'fun' isn't the word I should be using. Perhaps ' less
janky' is better. Because despite it all --especially in the
moment-to-moment gameplay-- "Battlefront 2" _is_ fun. The gunplay is
extremely satisfying; even if the lasers are little pew-pew pistols,
they /feel/ powerful, like a blaster should. The game is gorgeous too.
It's not quite as impressive as it was even a couple years ago --the
competition has kept apace-- but it's still deliciously and
impressively detailed in every scene. I can see why I liked this game
so much in 2017.

But I now see the chinks in the armor too. The weird AI that moves
around quite artificially, for instance. It gets stuck on terrain, or
bounces back and forth between two pieces of cover, or --in at least
two instances-- phases directly through an object as it charges
towards me. Or the array of player weapons, none of which really feel
distinctive from one another. The too-close viewpoint, with your
weapon weirdly dominant in the center of the screen. The almost
complete lack of interactibility with the game-world; everything feels
static. It's a world that is made up of unbreakable and immovable
items. And --especially after shows like "Andor" raised the bar-- the
in-game narrative and characters feel shallow and unrealistic. The
setting can offer up better stories.

For some of these problems -the AI especially- I wonder if this is a
change caused by some upgrade since I last played the game; surely I
would have noticed its antics back in 2017. Other issues (like the
static game world) are less a failing by the game and more a result of
the industry moving on and games just becoming better in the eight
years since "Battlefront 2" released. These days we just expect every
window we see to be breakable and every item to have physics applied
to it. But some of the problems I'll own up to my own blindness. I'm
sure I was unconsciously ignoring some of these faults just because I
was dazzled by such a gorgeous game set in the Star Wars universe, but
now that there are even MORE gorgeous Star Wars games available, some
of that glamour has worn off.

"Battlefront 2" isn't terrible, of course. EA spent $200 million
developing it; you don't end up with crap after spending that much
money. But it's aged a lot poorer than I expected it to.

I still have my SWB(1&2) from the original days from Fry's
Electronics(RIP)! I wonder if I can install, install, and play online
with 2017 players with SWB2.

Well, that's my playlist this month. Did you play more games? Fewer?
Let's find out. Just answer the following question:

What Have You Been Playing... IN MAY 2025?

Umm, I played my daily iPhone games for 13 days straight. Today is my
15th day, but I'll be ending its streak due to my upcoming slammy colony
days so I will be online less. :( Oh, I played more SW:TOR online for a
few hours.
--
"Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." --Galatians 6:2. Like colony stuff?
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