/vr/ - Retro Games

>>716612

If I exaggerate, it's only because I see this kind of comments all the time. Another popular is "Play SS1 first". Thankfully I haven't seen it on 4chan a lot, but just enough to question whether some people have completely hollow skulls. Recommending SS1 to a newcomer in 2013 is just completely stupid. Most people really want "That game that inspired Bioshock that everyone's talking about" and then autists crawl out of the woodwork insisting that SS2 is a continuation of a deeply complex narrative that you couldn't possibly understand without play the first. It's not like it's literally spelled out in 60 seconds in the intro to SS2 or anything.

Here's another thing -- SS2 was a rushed game. The developers barely knew what they were doing and they admitted as much. The game is cobbled up around the Dark Engine kind of like Bloodlines was cobbled up around Source. Maybe it didn't suffer so much from the fact, but it's readily apparent it's rough around the edges. The developer's vision never really shone through in the first place. I'm not using this as an excuse to liberally shit all over the art style with any mod that strikes your fancy, just pointing out that developers are not infallible gods who necessarily had a completely crystallized vision of the end product. This is why I'd always recommend some heavy aesthetic mods for Deus Ex and New Vegas, because those games were half-boiled at best in terms of aesthetics. And of course, because there are quality mods that enhance the atmosphere instead of working to it's detriment.

Bottom line, I'm not talking HL2's Cinematic Mod here. SS2 has one of the best visual styles of the era and it does look pretty damn great vanilla today. This is why I'd only recommend mods that work in the context of that visual style. You tarnish that more by using a LCD screen than by using SHTUP. And nobody's gonna pick up a CRT just to play SS2.