Cliche internet non answer to your question:

For Wasteland 2, I personally really enjoyed it- however I do think it drags on way too long once you get to the second half.

Wasteland 3 is a much more polished and tighter experience. It focuses more on faction interactions, with a large number of factions you can support or oppose and various combinations lead to various outcomes. The combat is also much better. Assault rifles were sacrificed a bit, now being generally underpowered choice but it mean more variety in all other weapon classes.

I don’t think anyone should preorder. It’s a predatory way to suck a full price of the game or even higher than normal price out of customers by using often laughably cheap benefits to drum up FOMO.

For me personally, I rarely have interest in brand new AAA games, which are the most guilty of pre-order sales tactics, so the problem more or less solves itself.

Early Access games can be a different story. I’m more willing to throw money at a small studio or solo project that appears to have some passion behind it. Even so I only spend with the mindset that whatever state the game is in might be all I ever get, so match the price to that expectation. I recently played through Deathtrash. It’s unfinished and is historically slow to get updates, however for the $11 I got it for on sale, it had a lot of content and I felt happy with what I got.

Project Zomboid is another example of a “permanently Early Access” game. It might never get out of Early Access but it has so much content now that $20 is a perfectly acceptable price. The history of devs supporting it and the community around it means support for it is unlikely to simply disappear.

I had a ton of fun playing the MCC version of Halo CE with the Ruby Rebalance mod. It’s a very thoughtful overhaul mod that makes a ton of changes that feel natural. I’m excited to play the Halo 2 version of the mod when it comes out, as I have more trust in that mod team than I do the official devs.

As the other comment said, the MCC was a remaster. Most of the changes were cosmetic, to the point where it actually had a button to switch between original and remaster graphics, since it was the original engine running everything. The level design, mechanics, weapons, and such were all untouched.

The new Halo remake is a completely different game made in Unreal 5. Already from what has been shown it is very divergent from the original in many ways. This announcement is an intention to do that for the other games.

The first words of the article:

So this is interesting. Just weeks after Google’s campaign to promote Android as being more secure than iPhone, the smartphone battle has taken a sudden twist.

‘Architectcracy.’ Which is more or less, “rule by architects.”

I mostly made models and textures, I was never a one-person team. I made assets for a number of students in game dev programming and I worked on some gamejams. Quite a few games, but nothing beyond the scope of a limited project. Currently I just don’t have the time in between other things to go back to making assets.

This was built inside of Unity.

My Steam recents:

Everything that’s got a finishable campaign here I’ve completed, with the exception of MCC where I only played Halo CE and ODST to completion.

I often agree with this, though for Death Trash given the slow pace of major updates I figured I’d just jump in. It only took me about 10 hours to beat the main content, and a few more hours poking around to feel finished with the game. This isn’t something like Zomboid with a big sandbox element to sink hours and hours into.

Honestly, at the pace it’s being updated I don’t know if it will get a huge proper ending.

I’ll never get past the Dangerous Hunts games since some management somewhere at Cabela’s had to approve a hunting game with deep lore about a literal shapeshifting demon and chimpanzee supersoldiers.

In Wasteland 2 there is a museum of pre-war artifacts. One item is an undetonated nuclear bomb. If you monkey around with it you can find a big red button. It is obviously a terrible idea to push the button. If you still decide to push it you get a special game over screen.

And then it goes into a sewer.

I blame the Tylenol.

I noticed you haven’t mentioned the actual quality of the content. Is it a responsibility to give money to a medium simply because it takes payment instead of using ad revenue?

The competition for what’s in those magazines is with independent online reviewers.

The idea of ranking games on a numerical scale is inherently flawed. I suspect many publications still use it as a way to make nice with game publishers. Text that’s lukewarm can slap a 9/10 score on and a lot of people just jump over the review to the “objective” score.

I feel it’s important

Genuinely, why?

Not all YouTubers are quality. This is obvious. What I am saying is that I’ve found a mere handful who are quality and for my tastes they have replaced the entire legacy professional gaming journalistic media. Other people I’m sure can find similar YouTubers who cater to their tastes and opinions.