SonicKitsune

Starfield not having playable mechs is pretty expected, since the only free-motion ground vehicle they seem to know how to make are horses, and I'm fairly sure most folks know how that went last time (long story short, horse flinging is a speedrun tactic in Skyrim). However attempting to justify it by saying they were banned some short time before the game starts just seems like a cop-out, more of one than just reusing the power armor thing, and really more just gives me a quasi-canon reason to just wreck everybody's shit if I do end up playing.

Of course I bet the usual "essential character nap" is still in effect. I wish they'd let the player screw up more like in Morrowind, where the entire purpose of the essential flag was to tell the player they screwed up, and even then there was a hidden way out for the main plot. But at least there will be mods like usual to fix/break that.

There being a Modern Warfare (reboot) 3 is somehow less surprising than there being a Just Dance/Madden 2024, and also implies there will be a Warzone 3 alongside it that will soon also become just Warzone again and knock the previous usurper offline. Also not only is it a consecutive Modern Warfare game, apparently that's the result of an expansion that became it's own game. However I highly doubt it'll be a Tears of the Kingdom situation unless there's a point where Sergeant Gunperson takes on General Evilbadguy with some taped together contraption of wheels and rockets and flamethrowers.

With this Noctis IV thing being mentioned a few times on here, I decided to get DOSBox set up on the Linux side of things after putting that off for whatever reason. After copying over the old config and drive folders I used, I mainly just had to change some paths and adjust some CPU settings in the config files, and things mostly work as they did on the Windows side. Naturally had to make sure Mechwarrior 2 and its expansions still worked perfectly as a general test.

As far as Noctis IV itself, it certainly is a DOS game, as I had no idea what I was doing. I think I got as far as making the ship turn while toggling some settings and accidentally exiting it a couple times in a brief test of sorts. But it does look cool so I'll have to poke around a bit if I can manage to figure out how to make it go to a thing without knowing where I even want to go.

I've thought about the next Sims game EA is doing and my main considerations involve two things:

One is anticipating that it does end up a free-to-play thing but then it's just called "The Sims" with no number or subtitle, just to fuck with anyone searching for the original as if that wasn't hard enough already. A lot of general "The Sims" searches get a lot of Sims 4 results since that's the current one so you have to go "Sims 1" or "Sims Classic" like looking for some ancient soda.

The other, which also involves the competitor games being made in a similar vein, is generally wanting to move toward "realistic" simulation and interactions and stuff, which that's cool and all, and having natural reactions to stuff like not always using the furthest away sink is appreciated, though I'm the type who also wants to see more weird stuff happen. To vaguely put it, similar to the level of classic Sims without forcing memes and marketing it as a purely wacky thing and all that, so there's some ground level to escalate from and return to. Of course I'd probably still mod it so I can have lizard robots and game characters and so on.

With that realism push though, it reminds me of when there were all these indie skateboard games coming out that were all based on Skate in terms of approach and controls, but to get something like the Tony Hawk games it apparently takes having some cute animal gimmick, and then the execution of actual gameplay in that apparently varies wildly, like between the bird game and the frog game that I've tried so far. I don't have any problem with cute animals of course, but now I wonder if a successor to the Sims I'd actually take interest in would follow that pattern, like would it be rats or ants or bees or something like that paired with the type of gameplay and simulation I'm after. Maybe robots or lizards, whether or not I mod that in.

More related to the realism thing would be city simulations, since I haven't seen much of any modern ones involve UFOs or whatever they're called now, or bargain bin Godzilla bootlegs, or futuristic elements other than bright white egg buildings with trees. There's always the classic games but you'd think they'd take more that worked from those in newer ones. And of course there's usually mods.