Kin posted:

So what's the Epic launcher like? Is it buggy or a pain in the arse to use, etc?

I kinda wanna play Alan Wake 2, but I've never bought something from Epic.

Wintermutant posted:

Oh nice, that's now two bands that the Max Payne series has turned me onto

Kin posted:

Hmm. Not overly glowing feedback. I guess I don't actually need to play Alan Wake 2 just now and can wait a year or so.

Kibayasu posted:

Epic Games itself published Alan Wake 2. You may be waiting a very long time.

teethgrinder posted:

#2 ... HEALTH?

Impermanent posted:

if tim sweeney is sitting around relaunching beloved franchises when the gently caress is ZZT 2 coming

Oxxidation posted:

paraphrasing one of my older posts about it: the first max payne game was unabashed noir schlock where a smirking hardboiled fella with a pistol gunned his way through a small army of interchangeable palookas, and where his own tragic backstory was more perfunctory than anything. the ragnarok references were primarily set dressing for what was otherwise a straightforward third-person shooter with a then-innovative bullet time mechanic; besides that, all the characters were basically archetypes and max's inner monologue was mostly played for laughs

max payne 2 treated its characters and events with far more realism while, and this is important, not diminishing the events of max payne 1. max isn't a joke anymore, he's an addled wreck who he can't come to terms with his existence as a borderline-unstoppable killing engine. vlad deliberately sics max on his enemies because he knows that max won't stop until every single one of them is dead (and then immediately panics and locks everything down the instant max winds up fighting the cleaners, because they're vlad's subordinates and that means vlad just became max's "final boss"). max spends the entire game being haunted by the actualized fictions of his life - all the tv and radio programs are parodies or allegories of his own story, the "late goodbye" theme that references his relationship with mona is hummed, played, and referenced by complete strangers he comes across, one recurring stage is a theme park whose parody of violence becomes "real" when the cleaners come knocking (you're literally psyching out and killing them with the park's own props), and max on some level recognizes the drastic change in himself and the people he knew from the previous game - and on a meta level, too, with himself and mona suddenly being played by different actors: "I've been switched! I didn't used to look like this!" the paradise lost motif is played way more deftly than the ragnarok ones, with mona biting into an apple immediately after warning max about vlad (which inadvertently dooms them all) and max's fall being an unspoken reference to the biblical one.

max payne 2 is about max falling to "the bottom of the hole," freeing himself of his violent action-hero past by letting himself succumb to it until every single thing about it has been annihilated, even the parts he cares about. that's the meaning of the final line in the game, and why he only achieves catharsis when mona dies. he's killed all his old ties, and by extension all his context as the protagonist of an action-heavy video game, allowing himself to move on to something new. there are very few examples of metafiction that don't just become tediously wry commentaries on the medium they're playing with and MP2 pulled that off while wringing way more pathos out of its cast and conclusion than pretty much anything remedy's done before or since

pseudorandom name posted:

Good news! Super ZZT was released in 1991.

Kin posted:

Well, that's annoying.

I could get it on PS5, but it sounds like the kind of game that my newly upgraded rig could sink its teeth into.

NoEyedSquareGuy posted:

EGS is a minor inconvenience but not worth actively avoiding. It would be easier if everything was on Steam just so you can have your whole library in one place but EGS functions much the same when you're occasionally forced into using it for an exclusive. Even if you don't buy anything it's worth having an account so you can get the games in the free rotation and then never install or play them.

Kin posted:

I just looked up a list of the historic free games and don't think I've missed anything worthwhile, to be honest. Solid B-tier games at best which I'll never get around to playing given my backlog of the A-tier "overwhelmingly positive" stuff from Steam.

Kibayasu posted:

Epic Games itself published Alan Wake 2. You may be waiting a very long time.

Impermanent posted:

if tim sweeney is sitting around relaunching beloved franchises when the gently caress is ZZT 2 coming

Schwarzwald posted:

it gives me no joy to say this but I think "ZZT 2" is just roblox

Big Bizness posted:

I'm no fan of weirdo sex games but I was recommended something called "Carnal Instinct" on the front page while recording footage for a YouTube video. Since nothing about the promo slide was explicit and it was being recommended with the tags "Souls-like" "Dark Fantasy" "Action RPG" I thought nothing of it and included that footage in my video. A comment laughed about it's inclusion so I googled it, and surprise, it's some weird furry rape game set in ancient Egypt. Thanks Steam.

Hwurmp posted:

and what did we learn today

Hwurmp posted:

and what did we learn today

mystes posted: