Gears of War: E-Day’s campaign is legitimately pretty great which surprised me. Didn’t know Xbox had it in them to make something that doesn’t suck ass. It’s not like Gears 5 had an awful campaign or anything but similar to Halo or Star Wars the new story arc they came up with was just impossible to give even the slightest shit about after the original games had a very definite ending. Haven’t played Horde yet, multiplayer takes some time getting used to since the movement’s all different.

Also finished Valkyria Chronicles 3 some time ago and it might be my favourite game in the series so far, at least as far as the story and writing goes. There is some questionable/gross stuff in there but that comes with the territory of Japanese anime games. A shame it never came to the west but that’s what fan translations are for. I’ll probably install 4 soon

Gears of War’s dialogue has always been at least somewhat quippy and sarcastic. It got pretty bad and groanworthy in 5 from what I remember, but in this game those lines are mostly relegated to the nervous rookie character. "Umm, excuse me, did that thing just say “boom?” Dom and Marcus retain their old personalities

People Can Fly worked on this game too! Not their first time working on Gears of War as they previously made Gears of War: Judgment

Despite being heavily associated with Xbox’s 360 era dudebro brand, Gears of War has never actually been that bad. It’s not even toxic on the level of your average 80s action movie, it’s too inoffensive for that

In the first two games she’s just a voice on the radio and she’s not Marcus’ commanding officer, she just hangs back at base to relay intelligence and orders from higher ups to the squad. Her uniform and hairstyle make her look like a WWII-era radio operator or similar non-combat supporting staff member

In the first two games you also never see female soldiers on the battlefield but you do hear several female helicopter pilots on the radio. I think this was mostly Epic being lazy and not wanting to deal with creating different hitboxes and animations for a smaller female frame in their dudebro series where every other playable character has ridiculous 90s action figure proportions.

Gears of War 3 finally added playable female characters and made Anya a frequent squad member in campaign. They also added a new female character named Sam. While their character designs weren’t overtly horny, their armour and uniform was much more sleek and form-fitting than the male equivalents and both had thin, slender builds and long-ish feminine haircuts. Gears of War 3 also had a badass grandma officer but the Youtube right-wing grifting industrial complex didn’t exist back then so no one gave a shit. I’m pretty sure I remember some griping at the time about how female COG soldiers ruined immersion because they clearly wouldn’t be big and strong enough to kill Locusts or whatever though

Gears of War 4 introduced a new cast of characters including a new young female character who The Coalition then promoted to the new series protagonist in Gears 5, sidelining Marcus Fenix’s son. Because she was a woman, hispanic, had a sort of androgynous haircut (and dyed hair!!!) and replaced the most generic white guy protagonist in existence* Gears 5 also got a lot of hate back in 2019

*

I like the helmeted Kiwi twins and their banter. Also it seems like they recast Tai Kaliso with a Maori (?) voice actor instead of it being just Baird’s voice actor doing a vaguely ethnic voice. I’m sure someone’s mad about that somewhere

I thought that was the entire US armed forces

On a sidenote, the fact that PT is already over a decade old is almost vertigo-inducing. Still feels so recent to me

One thing to note is that MGS1 is a lot less self-aware compared to the later games, especially with how Snake is written. His status as a badass legendary super soldier is played completely straight where the later games soften him into an endearingly silly unc who’s much more likeable. Being a super macho man written by a Japanese guy in 1998 his interactions with women in the first game are very cringy by today’s standards

Of course this shit comes from the roach king

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I just love that they apparently believe it’s fucking USAID handing GW checks to make girl Space Marines. It’s completely unhinged

Yeah but it’s Western game developers that they believe have fallen entirely to USAID-funded woke DEI transgender communism

I think it’s just gamers being huge Elon dickriders and having constructed their own Qanon parallel universe where him and Trump are dismantling the woke deep state that’s ruining games and comic book movies

I just hope most of these manage to get to the finish line. I guess wishing all of them are going to turn out as lovingly crafted as the Super Mario 64 or Zelda ports is foolish, but it’d sure be nice

https://github.com/LittleBitUA/DPRecomp

Seems to play but reading about the current issues it sounds like it’s best to wait to see if more of them get sorted out

Also even that github page reads like LLM slop to me

These companies care so little than when a company like GOG approaches them to rerelease their old games for them they turn them down because they see the potential profits as too insignificant to give a shit. So unless these companies are showing up to their door with wheelbarrows full of money in exchange for their old hard drives I don’t see why it’d be different

I doubt this, mostly because we’ve seen that most of these companies are very, very bad at preserving assets and source code for old games

I already have a Linux installation I’ve been messing around with on another drive. It’s too small for gaming though

Nah, I’d switch to Linux if I didn’t want to hold onto all the crap on my Windows installation and will do so when possible