Blackmist

There were two isometric Tomb Raider games a couple of years back (Guardian of Light and Temple of Osiris which wasn't as good IMO). You could play in single player, but the co-op mode tweaked the puzzles slightly so you'd need to work together to complete them. And as luck would have it they're both on sale. The first is currently a whopping £1.27 on Steam.

If you fancy going even further back, there was a PS2 game called Kuri Kuri Mix by FromSoft. It may looks like it was made for toddlers, but it was surprisingly tough in places. You almost certainly can't buy that any more, but I'm sure and emulator and ROM site will do nicely.

N64 definitely aged better than PS1, especially in motion. Just a few too many compromises, like the integer positions and no perspective on textures.

It's just a shame that only one company wants to bring it to the masses, and they're one of the worst companies I can think of.

Although the last few years have certainly given them competition on that front, if not the VR one.

I legit thought that was a pre-rendered video until I saw them crash in the same place I did.

My first videogame machine was for black and white TVs and had 10 games, and all of them bar the target shooting game were variants of Pong.

PS2 was the last really big graphical leap. My fucking mind was blown by GTA3.

Since then we've had higher resolution, normal maps, physically based rendering and now raytracing, but none of it really feels that huge when moving from one gen to the next. PS2 came out and everything from before was obsolete, instantly. It even had backwards compatibility but I think I used it exactly once just to see the texture "improvements" (they actually just blurred them). This gen I've used it all the time.

Working from home is the solution to all infrastructure problems and I'm sick of pretending it isn't.

Fuck your cars, buses, trains, the lot. Housing too expensive where you work? Live in a small cheap town. Roads too busy? Don't use them.

Are we all supposed to pretend the covid years didn't exist now?

I mean, yeah. Lots of shitholes all over. I live in one myself.

It's kind of the opposite of "developing" though. All it's industry got ripped away from it. Nothing got put back. I don't know why every country thinks it's OK to have a handful of rich cities and a whole load of former "something" towns.

Oh no. It's not like that. They don't even ask you about cookies any more.

This is a payment so they don't sell all your cookie data to their 1354 trusted data partners/advertising vultures.

Keep Quen up, roll about, hit stuff.

There's a couple of enemies where this doesn't work, but it should get you through the trickier combat sections.

Don't forget the DLC, and for all the praise Blood and Wine got because of it's size, don't sleep on Hearts of Stone - it's the most memorable part of the game for me.

And they're not even the worst in the UK.

I forget which one it was that decried the Brass Eye paedophile special as sick, while on the page directly opposite it was an article telling you how big 15 year old Charlotte Church's tits were getting along with a photo.

Indeed. There must be no downside to clicking no. Consent must be freely given.

Although I'd argue almost nobody complies with the spirit of the law. Popping up a consent form every time you visit unless you accidentally click accept and then never asking you again doesn't feel like consent was truly given.