>>50621
What game is the first image from?

>>50623
I think this is diablo 2.

>>50625
yup,
second Chapter, City and entrance to the secod half of The second chapter

Played more Halo with brick today. Was fun as fug. Got this action shot to share. Absolute unit completely kitted out with power weapons going to town on some enemies.

Venom - Codename:Outbreak in 4k.
This game sadly has wierd mipmapping, where textures pop out very close to the player, like the grass texture detalisation changes 5cm from the player and some textures has no detailed version at all. And in 4k you can see some seams you will probably not see even in 1080. But for me this kind of visuals is fine anyway, together with bleak-ruined-empty-scifi mixed atmosphere an designs they used later in the original stalker.

I like the way Diablo 2 still looks great two decades later. Really something should be said for not trying to go full hyper realism. I've yet to see a game that ended up looking good many years later after being marketed on its realism, which only gets funnier the further back you go until it becomes easy to forget that digital slop pile was once marketed as muh grafix muh realism. Really the transition from sprites and hand painted things to 3D was one of the worst periods aesthetically speaking.

>>50625
Okay, I guess I should finally play this game. Thanks.

>>50633
Indeed, I would have never guessed this was D2.

>>50634
You can tell from some of the character models. Usually the characters in iso games looked poorer because you had to independently render their model's movements as opposed to just a high res static image that never changes. Come to think of it Fallout Tactics was the same way, and the real artistry comes from still making the models look real enough to not clash too harshly with the static isometric environment. A good example to where the models were absolute garbage but still somehow meshed with the environment was the first two Fallout games. They barely looked better or different from Arcanum of Steamworks Magick Obscurait was literally done by same people iirc and you can actually tell just looking at them but due to also stylistic choices the horrendously cartoonish pixel people still blended in perfectly with the gorgeously crafted environments. It's probably a lot easier to pull off with how zoomed out some isometric games are so you can't tell how garbage the models all look in comparison to the background they're moving across. I mean keep in mind we're talking late 90s hardware here. It's partly why you could have such gorgeous hand painted stuff but actually rendering in realtime was fairly limited.

>>50630
I like how in this game in Russian you sometimes see little pronunciation and little mistakes clearly showing that game was done by Ukrainians ("Електрическое оружие" instead of "Электрическое оружие")

Mipmapping mistake not presented on ground textures at least on the second level, or my change of options did something.

Oh yes, I guess this is soft-lock - here should be the corpse that I need to get a keycard from but nothing hered.

Generally a funny janky game with a lot of good semi-tactical semi-RPG ideas.

>>50642

>Ivan has achieved full-4K gaming

Are you an oligarch?

Playing Rise to Ruins.
Had a nice colony going, with defenses that withheld corruption nicely until the last two nights... last night I already had some monsters swarming my town and I was only able to survive by tossing them back over the wall by hand.
Somehow they even started to attack a fire pit, don't know why, they never do that even if it's in the lane. Would it have been one of the 2 to the right of it, corruption would have teared down my walls and bypassed most of my defenses... so I got a design flaw I need to take care the next time. I may try and shift the mobile golem defense deeper into my defense grid, so they are covered by the close defense towers, but any monster escaping the onslaught and my watchful god eye, will fuck shit up for sure.

Permanent defense perimeter breach likely, loss of colony expected within the next 2 nights, switching from containment to emergency evacuation.

All citizen of young and healthy age not working on critical jobs are requested to register at the closest migration center to depart into the 2 neighboring regions in an orderly fashion.

Any and all possible dying by monsters in your vicinity needs to be ignored, this is the new normal!
Supplies were already sent and you will find plentiful food, materials and very little corruption in the next region! For now.

>>50662
Wait how is this different to rimworld?

>>50625
Btw there's this new mod called Project Diablo 2, it has some decent QoL and balance changes, so there's quite a lot of people playing online rn.
I played it a bit too excessively though and I'm burned out now. But if anybody wants to get rushed or needs some free loot, I'd be down to log on again :D

>>50669
It's a still very undiscovered gem.
Under development by one guy and still going strong. Grabbed it for 5 bucks on New Years Eve and got 137 hours of playtime on it.

Basically you play a god with an overmap, in which you choose your first settlement from about 20-30 maps in which you start out with 10 villagers. After the first night, corruption spawns on the map and starts to claim more and more of the land and attack you at night.
That's when the comfy settlement management changes to survival on LV-426.
If you corner the corruption too much, it will fill a red rage bar on top of the HUD and make them stronger by level much faster then usual. But with more land you can also power a much larger war machine, yet the travel times at the beginning are a pain in the ass.
You can even purge corruption from the map completely by repelling all their land, but during the last few nights the remaining patches of corruption will spawn endless streams of high level monsters, so survival like this is highly unlikely. I only managed that on easy difficulty.
You build your maze, towers and defense golems to protect yourself against those nightly raids, while feeding your villagers and building an industry that keeps everything going. Ballistas need bolts carved from wood, rock pebble miniguns need stones processed in a rock tumbler and magic towers require you to harvest the magic that fills the air in the form of essence with essence pools, but the crystal industry can also toss in refined crystals to give essence generation a boost.
Goal of each map is to survive at least a year and send migrants and supplies into neighboring regions, to start there from scratch, yet with better starting conditions, depending on how much you were able to send.
Loosing a region makes winning the world map impossible, but you can reset it and keep any god perks your earned during your gameplay.
I played a few maps on easy difficulty to get a grasp of some game mechanics and everything just fits so nicely together, also yes, I'm a huge fan of Rimworld and turtling in general.

Turns out my maze design was good it was just one of those nights high on flame elementals, yet survival right now is on the brink of collapse.
I don't employ lumberjacks and miners anymore, as harvesting by god powers is the only way to keep up with ammo production. I even have to turn of my ballista bombardment during the day, to safe ammo for the night.
But I was able to migrate 50 people into both neighboring regions together with an ample supply of goods and food, so that will let me kickstart golem production there when I want to play again.
But all those missing people slowly start to leave a dent in water and food production, also general maintenance of roads and trash is neglected.
One thing or another will cost me the colony...

All is lost.
The stream of fire elementals just would break off and me tossing them back over the wall into that little pool to chill off would only delay the inevitable while it starves me from soaking up the essence to use other god powers...

120 people migrated into safety.
I guess I settle in the middle upper half to force corruption into the lower map, then wall them off at the 1/3 point, where the mountains and woods split for a moment.
Give them more land for the time being and see how this affects spawning.
Also, this time I'll dig a moat, so I'll only have to deal with fire elementals during the first winter when everything is frozen.
Even if this gives the map a hard time limit for when the second winter arrives...

>>50674
How is cheating?
Modded D2 uses the open Battle.net if I remember correctly, doesn't it?
D2 really shows how important a coherent and thought out art style is, this makes those graphics appear timelessly good, while D3 already looks just so bland and like any other China MOBA.
Would love to play it again and I bet I still have the CDs & keys in my basement somewhere.

Sorry for double and triple posting, but this game gets my urge to talk about it going and tomorrow I'll have to be back at work anyway... then I'll promise to turn it back a little.

Already settled a new map and like I strategized, corruption had a nice start on the lower half.

Better use of god magic allows me to swim in raw resources, so I was able to dedicate a large part of my work force to dig the moat that should protect me against those pesky fire elementals, except for Winter...

This time I let corruption have 1/3 of the map, so I'll see how this influences monster strength too. I'll probably waste a lot less ammunition without my defensive line picking off the endless amounts of worker drones.

Also, I got a bunch of really helpful perks that increase the range of my elemental towers, now I can place them easily into a killbox in larger numbers without having to fear return fire by fire elementals. God those are shitty enemies, but a maze design without them would be without challenge.

>>50692

>How is cheating?

It's taken pretty seriously, to the point that they used to shut their servers off whenever an explot was discovered. So yeah, it's not open Bnet if I understand that correctly, they have their own servers.

>D2 really shows how important a coherent and thought out art style is

For sure, mb I'm a bit too nostalgic about it, but I feel like all elements of the game work toegether really well to create a very immersive atmosphere with the art style, music, sound design etc. And you hit the nail on the head with you description of D3, it just too much "Klickibunti" and not really coherent design-wise, even if it might be decent gameplaywise.

>>50707
Oh wow, that sounds actually interesting if there is even a trading economy going without cheats.
Always loved trading in D2, the auction house streamlined it so much in D3, that trading lost all personality and effort.
I might as well give it a try once I look for a new game, wanted to play D2 again for ages as nothing really compares.

For now, I discovered that you can do full map dumps and made a lovely night and morning map.
Sadly, particles are turned off for the shot, with them it looks even more lovely.

As a god, you either design your defenses with style or nothing of value was lost once your creation gets overrun.

>>50716

>if there is even a trading economy going without cheats.

It's very active. There's a trade channel on their discord server and now they apparently also texting an extra site where you can paste the item stats directly from the game and put them up for sale.

It was the first time I tried trading in D2 actually and it definitely adds a whole different layer to the experience, but it soon became kinda tiresome to keep track of all items with the muling and whatnot, but also the thrill of trading made me spend more time on that than I was comfortable with.
It does feel more personal even with the short interactions when you hop into someone's game to trade, check whether it's the right item etc., I don't remember using the auction house in D3 much.

>I might as well give it a try once I look for a new game,

Yeah, feel free to drop a post in here if u do

Watching the speedrun at AGDQ made me want to replay Metroid Prime.
Runs rather well on Dolphin and it's as comfy as it was almost 20 years ago. Around ten hours in, I am again almost at the end, but getting my ass kicked by Ridley and control issues which I don't know are problems of the game itself or on the emulator side.
Anyway, it's great fun.

>>50746
Sounds comfy, are SoJs and Ist runes still the go to currency?
How the times have passed, I remember how I had the Diablo clone spawn in my cheap ass beginner Mephisto run game no. xxx, then I panicked and summoned my whole smol friendlist into the game and even together we didn't had the strength beating that big ol' fucker.
One of them logged out and asked around in the chatroom for additional high level help and brought back some fully kitted sorceress who was able to slowly chip away health from the bar while all of us low levels threw ourselfs against the foe to take the hardest hits.
Fun was had and the sorceress even left me with the Vernichtikus charm for beating the clone, man was I proud about that lil' imaginary stone :3

Also, I finished winter on map 3 and with that the main goal.
The big southern wall is completed and the maze and armaments are in place. I still got a lot of free building slots to establish even stronger defenses, but without aggressivly cornering the corruption the rage bar is still barely filled and monsters only spawn at level 20-25. They hardly ever make it through the initial meat grinder... Next time I'll grant corruption a little less land for the challenge.
Also made nice full maps of the last 2 maps that are in progress of being overrun. I got the year and migrated, so those are still a win unless I let them fully play out... which I don't. Corruption may bite my shiny essence ass.

>>50655

>full 4k gaming

I would not describe this as "full", honestly. Doom 2016 on maximum graphics in 4k already goes in unstable 30 FPS on my video card. Like, the arena with the Cyberdemon was fine, this scene after is already kind of uncomfortable. So, I fear, newer and resource-consuming games will work worse, so no 4k for me here, at least for now. Maybe if I disable Anti-aliasing it'll help, not that you really need it that much in such high resolutions. Doom 3 works more than fine even on a sourceport, so can't complain here.
Original Stalker also runs perfect, the only issue with this game in 4k is that fons don't scale after 1024 resolution so all menus and dialogues have tiny text. I don't mind because the screen is big and I have good eyes, it just looks weird. And the mouse cursor is ultra-slow in menus and dialogue windows and you can't really do anything with it.

Another thing with ultra-high resolution in older games is that developers had more low standards for UV on textures and texture consistency, since, if we take STALKER, in 1280x1024 or 1366x768 most of it not really clash or that visible, but in 4k you can see places where the texture detail of one object is the 5 times more than the other. And more black in time we are going, more loose these standards are.

>>50749

>Ridley

I got absolutely everything in this game but could never beat Ridley. I gave up trying for some reason and never finished it (my memory is hazy but there may have been a girl involved).

Continuation from my last post in the old thread.

Tried Shadow Warrior 2 again now that I got the 2013 game out of my system some more. It still doesn't hit quite like that last game did, but it's not terrible. I have a few issues with it despite there being some very tangible improvements to the game.

I'll start with the good. Movement feels a lot better. You've got more speed, extra jump height, and so on. You're able to move around the map far more effectively and combined with no fall damage, means you can do some pretty impressive stunts which is fun. The idea of having more open maps compared to the first game is a decent one, though the execution is average. Combat itself has some mechanical improvements in terms of fluidity but the actual flow has taken a step back. It's fun but the shortcomings are very visible.

That leads into the negatives. First up, I'm really not a fan of genre shifting in a sequel. Do a spinoff game instead. The first was a very fun, charming linear action shooter, channeling the spirit of old school FPS games with modernised mechanics. The sequel is a an okay looter-shooter. Problem one is that if you're a fan of the first game (it's probably on my list) then the sequel may not actually be your cup of tea. In my case, I don't mind the looter-shooter genre but the problem is that this genre has already got Borderlands, and it executes it far more effectively. Having already played Borderlands, the execution here doesn't feel satisfying. I've just got loads of trash to go through, and a bunch of weapons that aren't really exciting.

Secondly, environment design. I've said that the more open environments are interesting. They are a pretty promising concept (give the player more open areas to learn and then use with various missions received from the hub area) but they're just so empty and boring because they're randomly generated. With a linear level, I blast through enemies and can have a more visually impressive spectacle because the designers can set up cool shit. The sequel uses open areas generated using blocks of arenas, but the randomness just means that you recognise the same areas and they all merge together a bit. The visual design is also jarringly different. The first game had a kind of near future corporate Japan crossed with the trappings of Feudal Japan. It was pretty cool, subdued and very stylised (easy to recognise things at a glance). You had things like Japanese castles on mountain peaks, secret labs, sewers and graveyards. Now it's much more conventional 'slap neon on everything and turn it into visual sludge', or 'swamp with some randomly placed japanese walls and buildings'.

Finally the writing is not as good. The story in the 2013 game was nothing to write home about but it was good, and I genuinely wanted to see it through. It had a simple premise, and then added some charismatic one liners from Lo Wang and Hoji to spice it up. This one starts in a situation that I don't really get. Having stopped the demon invasion in the first game, the world is now infested by more demons? And why is there suddenly demonic shit all over the skylines? None of this is explained and kills engagement pretty quickly. They also tried to recapture the brilliance of Hoji as a sidekick but the replacement doesn't have the same charisma and is just annoying.

Overall I'd say that the game is fun, and I'll finish it, but I'm also really glad that the devs have gone on record as saying that they're going back towards the linear style of Shadow Warrior 2013 with the upcoming Shadow Warrior 3.

>>50804
Oh, and a comparison to give you an idea of what I mean by stylised aesthetic vs visual sludge thanks to oversaturation.

>>50770

>are SoJs and Ist runes still the go to currency?

Most things are priced in HR (high runes), there's a rough conversion chart starting from ~Lem, also there's a new item which is also used for trading. It's called World Stone Shard and can be used to "corrupt" items in the cube, which either gives it a random new suffix, a random amount of sockets or bricks it and turns it into a random yellow item.

>Vernichtikus charm

Haha, never heard the German translation before, it sounds kinda cute compared to "Annihilus" in English. Also that's a nice story, I never managed to kill DClone myself cause I mostly play solo and it's too hard without really good gear

>>50816
A nice, currency used for crafting is always nice against inflation. GGG understood that very well tbh.
I was just too lazy to look up the englisch name of the Vernichtikus, back then I still ran every game in German and D2 was a major turning point in enabling me to have my English Matura without any learning whatsoever.
But yes, Vernichtikus sounds a lot cuter then Annihilus. That sounds more like, you know, licking someones chocolate starfish :3

Playing Mud Runner after some exercise, burning all that fuel innawoods gets the testosterone flowing and is the perfect opportunity to mainly listen to some nice music, Japanese DnB for now.

>>50845
I guess it's the kind of thing that could be really relaxing while drunk but I just don't get the fascination people have got with certain things, but then again I'm assuming y'all haven't gone mudding irl either so I can see the appeal. Oh and mudding is a legitimate real life hubby too though you better use junkers if you're poor.

>>50848
Yes, pretty much.
Tonight I'm going to get a bottle of nice red wine, stuff the last crumbs of homegrown herbs into my vape and enjoy doing my duty delivering lumber.
Here you have another village or hamlet that caters to tourists every few kilometers of road, deep up the mountains and thanks to ebikes even formerly hardly visited areas, like where we used to play airsoft a few years ago, are now overrun to the point that you don't get a parking space at the start of the trail on weekends.
I wish we would have large stretches of uninhabited and wild land like those huge ass American national parks in which people still seem to get lost and die. Ain't got no more bliss in solitude here, sadly.

Well shit, The Frontier actually came out. Impressive for a mod of its scale (bigger than the actual game, and in development for 7 years). Might try it next week. Will have to put together a from scratch modlist though, it's apparently got problems with what was my preferred core mod, Project Nevada. Pain in the arse, but the art direction is pretty cool, so I'll put up with it.
https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/68009

>>50850
It's not just the national parks honestly, in fact you are more likely to deal with hordes of retarded tourists there than elsewhere in the country although every year that becomes less true. This is a big place. States people think of as giant suburbs like NY, TX, CA, FL are basically just some cities and lots of wildnerness, although you guys too apparently have some wild areas left. I found it interesting whole towns destroyed by the plague spent centuries getting overgrown and only rediscovered because of WWII aerial reconnaissance.

>>50858
Care to give an example of such a village? Never heard of those.
Even if it, of course, puts me to shame to take local history lessens by an American :3

Maybe I should retreat into the Ukrainian woods and buy a used BMP, once I saved up enough money.
It seems to me, this would be time spent in vain, holiday is of course spent where it's warm and cozy. I saw those babies go for about 10-20k€ demilitarized.

>>50868
That's a BTR. BMP is the tracked one.

>>50869
Why yes, of course. BTR-80, my fault.
Also, giving yourself military vehicles by modding may break the game a little, but damn boy, look at that pulling action going on!
That's 3 middle log carts in one go to finish the map!

Dragonstar from Project Tamriel is released, after years of work, so if you want to try it you may do it. There is more content than in both official addons combined, so it is probably the biggest RPG-related thing in this year yet lol. On the latest OpenMW nightly runs excellent in 4k, tho I not installed many shaders or fancy graphics tweaks.

>decide to finally pickup Total War Warhammer 2
>end up getting TWH1 too
>also end up pissing away like an additional $50 or something after that on almost all DLC afterwards for both games
>end up just playing Manfred Van Carstein on Mortal Empires anyway

Such cases, oh well. I need to find a manual. Shit like this is part of exactly why I complain endlessly about no hardcopy manuals bundled with game CDs anymore. It's not so much I don't know what I'm doing as idk what a ton of stuff does and am clearly missing certain nuances to stratevy and tactics as I've also never played a Total War game before, so I don't actually know if doing shit like flanking does anything to some kind of stats, although I finally got my ass handed to me so badly by that evil deranged purple tree spirit I can't even tell how to win anymore. She wiped out both of my main armies on like turn 9 or 17 or whatever it was. Also it's a fun game but I'm realizing the extent to which this is not just a real 4x game, but one where each battle takes forever so it's a drag knowing I've got such a fuckhuge library now but just finishing one game to the end is hard. Maybe I should go back and beat Alien Isolation. Or start a Vortex campaign with one of the three factions I wanted to play most, the pirate vampires, not-Necrons, or said deranged evil tree spirit. Or finally beat my old Vodyani campaign, since I never even played any of the ES2 DLC yet. Or just see if I can get close to finishing up The Division since I'm pretty close to the last handful of storyline missions like 2-3 left.

I'm starting to see why some people don't pan new games for being so short. I mean yeah it was expected to have like 40 hour games and you'd call a game you can beat in 10 hours a ripoff 15, twenty years ago, but you also didn't actually have a lot of them to beat. It's also frustrating how much time I waste online that nowadays more often than not I need the internet to play it The Division and Inquisitor Martyr are both technically MMO oriented I think and by the time I get home from work all I want to do is watch YT videos and shitpost.

Man. At least Notch probably just gets to laze about and do fuckall. If I got hundreds of millions of dollars I'm not sure how long I could force myself to isolate and play down my vidya library, versus feeling compelled to do shit IRL but I definitely can see how and why certain people with lives just want a short game that's half cutscenes after work or before putting the kids to bedwhich come to think of it makes me question how that one lad even had time to game that much.

Think I'll switch between The Division and trying to get past the TWH2 Van Carstein roadblock, although I am out of my pineforest incense.

Oh speaking of which, because I've wanted to do do this for awhile I actually started burning incense while gaming over the summer just because I knew scent is deeply tied to memory and I wanted to see if I could actually program my memory to deeper nostalgias over videogaming which has actually somewhat worked so far. The idea being to only burn a specific flavor of incense for focusing on one specific game, like the scent of a woman or childhood memories, and thus far I've already gotten two heavily associated to Pathfinder Kingmaker and Beautiful Desolation. I've tried to avoid burning them since mostly, and anytime I smell it makes me think of those games vividly. The problem is trying to only do it when actively playing only one game and having it a game where it's actually worth the bother. It's probably a turbo autist experiment but whatever it works.

Decided to tidy up a bit my cupboard and stumbled upon some (pirated) vidya CDs and DVDs I bought back when I was in middle and high school. Gonna be throwing them all away, but before that I thought I'll go for a little nostalgia trip in this threda.

>>51038

1. Commandos 2 — the very first game I bought for my PC. It's a bit of an odd one since it's only in English (pirates usually included some sort of a translation to Russian, however awful it was), but nonetheless it worked perfectly and nothing was cut out of it, which often wasn't the case with other pirated games here.
2. C&C Generals — pretty decent RTS, although not really a C&C game, because it shifted to Warcraft/Starcraft-like building and economy. It also had those early ugly 3D models for infantry which looked like rough wooden dolls. Still, a decent game overall. Also, GLA is pretty much ISIS.
3. Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War — no need to talk about it much, I guess? It was the game that got me interested in Waha universe, despite not being very accurate itself.
4. Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast — one of my favorite Star Wars games. Very solid shooter/slasher/action with nice looking graphics (Q3 engine) and cool level design.

>>51039

5. Код доступа: РАЙ, known in the West as Paradise: Cracked — a cyberpunk turn-based tactics. It was pretty nice for its time, with good (albeit quite tedious) gameplay and interesting characters. Me and my buddy used a lot of the characters' lines as some sort of local memes. Also, the MC was voiced by Boris "Bonus" Repetur — on of the hosts of the gaming TV show of Eastern Slavlands in the nineties: "От винта!".

6. The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind — no need to talk much about this one either, right? It impressed me a lot with its world back then, and the shader-drawn water looked gorgeous (my GeForce 3 Ti 200 totally justified itself). Also the system requirements are total bullshit: like hell it's gonna work on a 500 MHz Pentium III. And the Russian version was infamous because you couldn't complete it — Caius Cosades didn't give the first quest. People who wanted the Russian version bypassed this bug by playing the English version first, taking the quest and switching back to Russian.

7. Deus Ex — this one included a Russian dub made by a one male "actor". I tried it for five minutes out of curiosity and switched to the English version in total horror.

8. Painkiller — my favorite FPS of 2004. Cool levels, fast-paced old-school gameplay and a kickass soundtrack.

>>51041

9. Thief: Deadly Shadows — the third game of the Thief series, and Ion Storm's saving throw after the failure of Deus Ex: Invisible War. I never actually completed it, but I'm gonna do it sometimes, because I want to play through all the Thief games eventually. I also remember being thoroughly spooked by the orphanage/asylum level.

10. Arx Fatalis — liked this one much more than Morrowind. The version here was really bug-ridden, it often crashed on loadscreens and a several times corrupted my savegames. Didn't complete it back then, but still enjoyed it a lot.

11. Mafia: the City of Lost Heaven — really liked the plot in this one, and the ending left me in tears. Also facial models and animations looked really great for the time.

12. Unreal Tournament 2004 — my favorite UT game. I played the first UT in computer clubs, and UT2003 was the second game I have installed on my own PC (the first one was Disciples II), and UT2004 didn't disappoint me either. Naturally, I didn't have fast enough Internets to play it online, but it was really fun even with bots. It also brought back some of the things from the first UT which were missing in UT2003, like the Assault mode and some of the classic maps (Face, Deck17), and it featured the Onslaught mode which used the popular back then gimmick of driving vehicles.

>>51042

13. A compilation of Quake 4, Serious Sam 2, Black & White 2 and Age of Empires 3 — bought it mostly for Serious Sam 2 (the screenshots on the back are wrong, they're from Serious Sam: the Second Encounter; pirates often fucked up like that), which turned up to be a huge disappointment with its cartoonish style, dumb jokes and boring gameplay. I tried other games too: Quake 4 barely worked on my PC which was getting old and wasn't very interesting in the first place, B&W2 got me bored fast, and Age of Empires 3 somehow managed to work even worse than Q4 to the point of being totally unplayable.

14. A compilation of The Suffering, Hellforces, Fallen Lords: Condemnation and WarPath — bought it because I've heard that Fallen Lords: Condemnation was a fantasy Dynasty Warriors (I loved Dynasty Warriors 4, so naturally it got me interested). It kinda was, but it still was ugly, unoptimized and boring. The Suffering was an okayish horror about the prison island (I didn't go very far because I wasn't into horrors much), Hellforces was a mediocre shootan, and I didn't bother installing WarPath at all.

15. Trine — a fun puzzle platformer reminding of Lost Vikings somewhat.

16. Prince of Persia compilation — the screenshots on the back for the first Prince of Persia are wrong: the compilation included the very first Prince of Persia for DOS, but the screenshots are for Prince of Persia 3D, which was a total failure. Sands of Time was a really atmospheric Middle Eastern styled slasher/platformer, while Warrior Within turned all dark and edgy and became very actionized. I need to revisit these games sometimes, they were pretty good as I remember.

>>51043

17. Heroes of Might and Magic compilation — probably the best compilation I had. All games worked perfectly and it also included a lot of user maps and campaigns if you get bored with regular ones. The screenshots are all for some reason from HoMMIV: why no respect for older games?

18. Baldur's Gate 2, Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 8 compilation — bought it for BG2. It made me realize that I didn't really like party-based RPGs with active pause combat. Still, I think I will get back to Baldur's Gate series someday. As for Final Fantasy games, I played 7 quite a bit but got disinterested (I think it was the first JRPG I ever played, so I guess my dislike for them may be blamed on it XDDDDDDD), and 8 kinda threw me off right from the beginning. And I don't think that weeb-looking dude and chick on the front cover have anything to do with the games on the DVD.

19. Compilation of Silent Hill 4, Obscure, Fahrenheit, Shady Brook, Nibiru and Tom Yum Goong — bought it because of Fahrenheit, which was praised to hell and back back then for its "innovations". It turned to be simply an interactive movie, and a precursor to all those modern "adventures" with barely any gameplay like Heavy Rain and all the Telltale shit. Also, launching it was a game in itself, because it was protected by the infamous SecuROM, and the crack worked in mysterious ways, only starting the game whenever it felt like. As for the rest, Silent Hill 4 was okay, although wasn't really fitting with other Silent Hill games (I didn't complete it, because, again, I wasn't into horrors), Obscure was fairly decent survival horror about kids in school, Shady Brook was an archaic point-and-click adventure which failed to interest me, Nibiru was a point-and-click adventure too, but a surprisingly decent one this time, and Tom Yum Goong was a crappy 3D beat 'em up about an Asian dude which didn't really fit the rest of the compilation, IMO.

20. Petka and Vasily Ivanovich compilation — a series of fairly popular Russian point-and-click adventures starring Civil War division commander Vasily Ivanovich Chapayev and his batman Pyotr Isayev who turned into folk characters. Chapayev and Petka in the games resemble the characters from Russian jokes more than their real-life counterparts, of course, and they get involved in some wacky plots, like fighting off an alien invasion in the first game or dealing with Chapayev being turned into Terminator in the second. I replayed the first two games not so long ago, and, as I expected, I didn't enjoy them as much as I did back then: the jokes weren't really funny, the parodies felt stale and illogical, but it still was nice to revisit the games simply for nostalgia's sake.

Well, that's all of them. Now, into the trash they go! :-DDDDDDDD

Take all, take one, take none. I don't care.
Just be so nice and leave a message about what you took so others don't have to test all the keys without getting anything from them.

KW0TN-BG23T-L8TZE

GAPAV-8JYEI-22T4K

L29EP-GN92F-9Z7LK

N36ZY-5YW9L-J6H8V

MND22-TIVGE-8CWQK

LGRDJ-JV8AN-5QQ5C

L2IT0-CEBTE-AA3Z6

L5Z0X-TAN82-BZQGB

KN62I-FWMVK-8WRBA

I am just now realizing why exactly I seldom finish any video games. I simply do not gain the kind of empty gratification from completing a task le trve cvlt gaemers claim playing shit on nightmare difficulty so it always just ends up being a tedious run through the motions towards the end when really about 95% of the time I'm playing it more for the story, it's just that I don't want an unrealistic Fallout 1 walking tank experience either because that becomes immersion breaking on top of being boring.

I'm so deep into The Division but I'm a PC level below one of the last missions which is going to make it a chore to finish the game. I just want to tick off the "beat games 2020" box at this point. Had a similar problem with Alien Isolation where it got hard enough that also like with it being too easy, it becomes too immersion breaking on hard because you only reload. Over. And over. And over. Which at that point is identical to scumsaving. I dunno. It's become a real goal of mine at least to finish The Division before I take my potted Christmas tree decorations down which is already sending out green shoots but I know I won't have the game completed until February unless I try really really hard, and I'm too self aware to not be cognizant of the level of fake accomplishments and time wasting any vidya ultimately is that doesnt hit you right in the feels.

The sole exception to this I guess is if you're either brain damaged from a disease/injury trying to heal itself or very young and learning the basics of strategy or budgeting and cost/benefit analysis say, and not a grown man who should be captaining a ship or planning real cities or something. Then again maybe the same reason I seldom beat my games is why I'm not a real city planner either right now.

Ah well. Maybe I should use it for a real legitimate purpose, namely retraining myself to deal with frustration, alongside delayed gratification, patience, tenacity, whatever. It makes me feel like I accomplished nothing at this point, not even something virtual, although I guess gravitating towards sandbox or spiralling complex long ass things doesn't help. Maybe I should just will myself to beat this and Alien Isolation rather than letting my mind drift to whatever other game is shiny and new.

I'm playing some Xcom2 again because it's like my comfort game to unwind with after the worst fucking year of my life

>>50868
did you play spintires? it was a sore disappointment after playing mudrunner. People on steam get real mad too when you give it a negative review for being shit compared to mudrunner.

>>50914

>Such cases, oh well. I need to find a manual

Zerkovich and Legendoftotalwar on youtube has a lot of good videos on how to play different factions. Vamp Counts are pretty hard because they have no ranged units but what they do have is ass kicking immortal lords.

>>51044
I remember getting a load of pirated games and shit when I went to Ukraine, half of it was in Russian with dodgy exe files and ther other half didn't even read in my CD ROM drive

>>51073
Thanks black santa, I took the bottom two for my kids steam account, it was two point and click adventure games

>>51038
Oh wow, a pirate discs collection! I think I throwed mine into the garbage long ago. I think I still have FIFA99 and some Fargus Medal of Honor, but this is all. Rest is what I have in my apartment is a dozen of actual official jewels.

Never forget comilations where some games not worked. Never forget pirated King's Bounty Armored Princess where starforce security asked for Stalker Clear Sky disc and inserting pirate stalker disc worked.

>>51074
I can't play the fucking things anymore. I feel a guilty when i do, like i should be spending my time better. Funnily enough if im playing split screen or with friends this feeling isnt present.

>>51041
I lol'd irl at #7. Honestly half the joy of playing the original Deus Ex to begin with was the unintentionally hilarious dialogue due to the English speaking JC.

>what a shame

I don't get this about much of our American voice actors. Why do they always sound so flat? It is so common I think they actually do it on purpose for some reason. I'd think perhaps it is to be less jarring to the player hearing "your" voice so you can self insert but then why bother even using a voice actor at all? They are consistently dead pan. I think that unvoiced protagonists of early 2000s was one of the better ways to go.

>>51075
There really is something to be said for great gameplay over story. XCOMEU is what got me really back into gaming after mostly taking a 5 year hiatus, and XCOM2 was one of the few games I waited for and maybe only one I bought full price on release. Sorry to hear last year was such shit.

>>51075

>half of it was in Russian with dodgy exe files and ther other half didn't even read in my CD ROM drive

Well, usually (not always) those discs offered a choice between installing either a Russian or an English version, but you still had to navigate the Russian-language installation menu to do that. The main problem of those Russian versions was that they often were horrible in quality, sometimes falling so low as being machine translations (most infamous translator was probably PROMT; its name have become a common label for shitty translations) without any editing done (I remember Maze from the first Fable introducing himself as Labyrinth (Stable); yes, the pirates left both variants of the machine translation in the game). Awful translation of GTA: Vice City was what prompted me to only play English versions, even if I didn't understand everything back then. And yes, reading problems were very common, and even if it did read properly, it didn't necessarily mean that it would work properly, since pirates often cut a lot of content like movies and music, and sometimes that tinkering caused some nasty bugs in the game.

>>51087

>starforce

Ha, it was a real mess, even without any pirate intervention. A buddy of mine bought a licensed Zlatogorye 2, and after a while the game just stopped recognizing its own CD. Meanwhile I played it without any problems with Alcohol 120% + MDF image + Starfuck :-DDDDDDDDD. Good thing that publishers dropped that piece of shit eventually.

>>51090
You think that English JC sounded flat, heh? The Russian one sounded bored, sleepy, tired and with a stuffy nose at the same time, plus he was recorded on some sort of very shitty mic. That "dub" reminded me of pirated VHS tapes from the nineties, and in all honesty the only people I can think of who would want to play a "dubbed" game like that are the ones with severe reading difficulties. Oh, and IMO, when it comes to bad acting, underacting is still better than overacting. But yeah, I would agree that unvoiced protagonists are generally better.

This was my era of gaming. Its time to give it up all up and move on. I get no joy from the modern stuff and i lose quick interest if i take the boomer gaming route. Rest in piss.

>>51095
Brick and me still play ODST and Reach firefight on steam fairly regularly. You're welcome to join us if you want, the more the merrier.

security>hayabusa

>>51095
Somehow same for me, in 2007/8 I had my first self-built computer, with a 8800GTS/320MB. Bioshock, Crysis and COD4 where games I played, COD4 on servers for the cracked game.
The first computer and games has been in the household since 1999, I stopped gaming around 2013/14 or so. Can't remember when it was really over, But it has been a few years already. I sometimes get informed by new games via friends consoles and their computers. A quick game in between is ok for me, but I would never ever buy a gamer pc again, never had a console.
If it doesn't take you, move on, what is the problem? You can get nostalgic just like I do now, but to be clear, I wouldn't return any moment.

>>51075

>I took the bottom two for my kids steam account, it was two point and click adventure games

Hope he likes them.
No one seems interested (or they took them without telling), so take the other codes too before they're lost forever.

>>51073

>L29EP-GN92F-9Z7LK

>>51095
Man that reminds me I don't think I even had my first discrete graphics card until like 2012, and 2007 was right in the middle of my long gaming hiatus due to work, school, relationships. The very last game I'd played was partway through Half Life 2 in 2005 and I never touched it or any other new game again until roughly 2012 which also was when I got a new PC with a 1gb GPU, and it wasn't a "gaming desktop" either just some prebuilt. Up until that time the only thing I even played was Plants vs Zombies on a shitty old HP laptop. I vaguely recall ATI sticker on one of my old laptops but otherwise everything until 2012 was running off integrated graphics.

I was thinking about it lastnight too how in the mid 2000s they first started coming out with "60 fps!" videos and we were supposed to be amazed but it just looked weird and unnatural to me back then, and it was usually in context of Hollywood movies. I wonder how many people playing games now even remember when no one thought about fps in gaming and everything was standard locked at 30 and we just called dropped frames "lag" so yes that clearly means what it implies that laggy" games having trouble running on our hardware was so choppy it was well below 30fps. Imagine trying to play a game like HL2 in 2005 and being only mildly annoyed when you finally got it to run an acceptable 20fps at 480 or 600p or whatever it was back then by turning the graphical options down, and a game simply being capable of running 60fps was considered mindblowing by techies and filmfags.

It's still probably going to completely fucking suck
https://www.ign.com/articles/star-wars-knights-of-the-old-republic-kotor-ea-bioware-remake

>There have been previous rumors of a Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Remake being in the works at EA, and that it would take elements of the first KOTOR and Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords and retool the two stories to make them fit in current canon. It is unclear whether this is the discussed project that has since been taken away from EA or if it is an entirely new story.

It's just going to fucking suck. EA not being involved is just one sliver of hope but because it's still the garbage that is Disney I guarantee you that it is absolutely going to fucking suck. There's some poll on there which indicates to me they're going to ignore everything about the story and soulfulness which is why those games were great to begin with.

The only other solace I can take in watching something I loved get deformed and sodomized by vile MBA major suits is that it may have more involvement from Ubisoft, and just solely because of The Division I do not hate them as a triple A company. But man. It's probably going to fucking suck.

I don't get why they can't just make a great game with a great story and atmosphere and branching questlines, and instead focus on how to milk retards of as much money as they can while being under IP.

That really is what started turning me off so hard politically. Art is a sacred thing. By turning it into just another commodity ran by those grubby little money counting fingers and making everything about IP ruins it. It's taught me the central importance of authorship. The original author is what matters. You can't just give some bumbling money hungry retard an easel and some paint and then try to pass it off to me as a Picasso just because the jackass loosely used some similar techniques and tell me pay out the ass because it's "reinvented" "a refresh" "made to conform with canonthat is now entirely decided by executive suits for the purposes of IP rights" and "remake" no, it's a completely different shit and that's why I will always consider Wasteland 2 to be the true Fallout 3, not Morrowind with guns and supermutants aka "Fallout 3."

I wouldn't even mind if they actually did something completely different with it provided what different thing is good. You don't have to try to mimick the original artist, in point of fact you can't. You're always going to be a cover band playing someone else's beat on different instruments with a different singer, so own it. I've heard plenty of cover songs I enjoyed hell there's a bunch I liked more than the original artist, just don't try and pass it off on me like different hands are making the same thing. It's why nothing is real Star Wars movies beyond Episodes I-VI. I liked Rogue something? There was one grimdark movie I enjoyed. I've seen zero of the other Disneyfied craps, which ironically Rebel One or what's it called was more grimdark and I liked it for that.

I can only hope that 2021 doesn't just bring more disappointment to be butthurt about evil things done to things I loved, but somehow suspect VTMB2 won't be too hot either. Again, I can put up with it if it's designed by the people that made The Division. I can put up with different artists than Bioware or Troika. Just don't try and tell me I'm buying a Rembrandt made by Todd Howard and don't fuck up what you're doing.

I think 40K is a good example in a sense. I've never liked the universe a whole lot, and only got into it because it's so prolific, with the most ironic damn thing being that StarCraft--one of my top ten of all time--was originally meant to be a 40K and had they gotten that game license it might've sucked. It's fine it was different entirely. It's not fine what nuBlizzard did and I didn't bother even pirating after HotSdemanding my government ID to get in my own account on its own will forever have them on my shitlist.

In fact most 40K is outright fucking cringe to me, particularly anything that focuses on the Imperiumalthough part of that is super low IQ neofascists don't get the whole thing is over the top parody of itself, right down to in universe le god emprah HATED religion and purged the fuck out of people worshiping him, and the Word Bearers turned to Chaos and all that jazz so it's like parody on top of parody that so many devs take it all at face value and said tile painter gaymers in turn think it's some hymn to neofascism thus becoming the IRL grimdark of some of why everything is so shit in the Imperium but I digress which is sadly the bulk of it. I actually only even like Tyranids and Chaos as factions and some background lore ultimately, and am glad dumb shit like Squats are gone.

In spite of all that, I have seen a number of really well done 40K games by a divers array of studios, and many games going in very different directions. I still do wish there was an Endless Space 2 WH40K that mystifies me there is not and the closest I've gotten is Gladius and Battlefleet Gothic Armada. But all that stated, it can be worked with and not turning out a cringey piece of shit.

With all that being said, I think it's the finest point here that expanded universe Star Wars ended up itself being as if not more interesting than the original in-universe canon, partly by awesome writers and going way back in time. I have likewise seen some unspeakably godawful EU shit you can likewise but not always tell what cringe it will be in 40K just by naming alone; there is some cringe shit in 40K. Exar Kun, Naga Sadow? Great names. Names like General Grievous, or names that sound like Darth Malevolent? Not so much. 40K pulls the same shit sometimes. Point being, that the expanded universe had some gems in there, and that while being totally separated by authorship and even philosophy, a game like KOTOR II managed to be its own totally separate classic that had little to do with the original Star Wars universe of Lucas while still being just as awesome and still ultimately being Star Wars. I can only hope that a similar thing could happen with a new KOTOR game, where it may not be Avellone writing it, and it may not be the original developers, or have anything to do with BioWare and LucasArts, but that it still can be awesome.

Man 2021 doesn't feel off to as great a start to me...
...maybe I should just stop kvetching about everything

>>51117

>retool the two stories to make them fit in current canon

I haven't seen new entries of the Star Wars franchise after Disney acquisition, but do they even touch KotOR games' stories which take place, IIRC, about five thousand years before the original trilogy? Or do they mean some sort of universe mechanics which differ between the EU and Disney's Star Wars?

>>51123
To me it sounds like cleaning it up. Haven't played in over a decade so can't say how prevalent it was, but maybe things like pruning stuff that's there for reference's sake, and making it more self contained. That also fits their direction as I see it. Good enough high concept ruined by incompetent management.

>>51123
New Disney canon is a bunch of garbage where mostly they take some random popular EU stuff and doing from it their tier crap, mostly to adopt it for kids/something alongside their movies and marvel shit to milk it more. Not that I give a shit about KOTORs because they were rape of source material as well. And same way KOTORs fucked the original old republic into another prequel-style adventure, Disney will fuck it another time. Will normies be happy with it or dislike it is totally random because normies have no real opinion.

>>51137

>source material

Also, btw, Disney can fuck as they want, but the original old republic will live in "canon"

>>51139
Also also, this is the current "High republic project" nu star wars writers.

>>51137
>>51139
What works from the EU are worth checking out, BTW? I mean for a "normie" like myself, who is not too deep in SW lore, so I don't masturbate furiously to every little geeky reference and allusion to the movies and whatnot, and just want to enjoy a nice adventure in a familiar universe (like, for example, Ciaphas Cain books would be pretty fun to read for any battle-scifi fan, not just wahafags). I've heard nice thing about Thrawn trilogy, is it good?

>>51141
wow black people and women, very scary

>>51184
There a lot of problems with the EU honestly. This is a giant pile of different interconnected tales and books and comics and games from different creators. Some were close to each other, some not so much. Some are great read but contain something meh for overall universe logic, some are mediocre but safer and don't have out of place stuff. And answering this question is hard because there is something popular and great, for example, KOTORs, games that are good by themselves, however, they turned lore direction in a very meh direction and added a lot of bullshit and retcons that I not happy with, but to explain why and where you need to play/read all that crap to see the overall picture. In addition, there were after-retcons. Encyclopedia books, big official articles, tabletop stuff that tried to summarise, add and fix timeline which by themselves add to perception how you observing information in a new context. Most of the EU-assburgers are just constantly creating their headcanons and argue about everything on the internet. So this is what the EU is in reality: a giant half-organized pile of information where you creating your favorite universe. You can imagine it as Star Trek - classic shows are great, but they have crap and unconnected episodes.

So well, where to start... there are a bunch of great places. For example, something close to the movies, which would be nice without context.

Star Wars Empire - there was a bunch of comic series in the "main timeline" - from the old days of the republic to the far future, however, they came out in different times and there is no need to start from 35000years before. I like the "empire" series (not long before and sometime after Episode 4). Some of its arcs, like Darklighter, add to Episode 4 so much, that without this parallel story I can't imagine this movie at all, it feels unfinished without the story of Luke's best friend.

Star Wars X-Wing Rogue Leader - there was an actual X-wing Rogue Squadron comic series and books, but comic books are not the newest things and their stories contain a bunch of weird stuff. It is a fun read overall, but you may like to start from this prequel-mini series, set right after Episode 4. Short solid story connected to the movie makes a sort of introduction to the whole post-Endor situation, which in this universe ended in the fall of uni-galactic state and actual constant galactic civil war for years.

Star Wars TIE Fighter - 1994 videogame, part of the X-wing simulator series. This series of games is stuck between actual complex serious simulators and more arcade stuff, being more complex than wing commanders but not as complex as an actual flight sim, these series actually based on LucasArt's WW2 simulators. X-wing being the first game, TF was the second one and the best in the series. These games, using actual sources and existing at the time board games and EU tried to create a more serious, technologically depth approach to starfighters, ships, space combat, and tactics. TIE Fighter combining it with a deep political plot, showing galactic empire and its political and economical problems from inside. Set between episodes 5 and 6, it shows that this state was kind of doomed and without the rebels. The full CD version came out in 1995, in 1998 came out Windows hardware-accelerated textured version. The Windows version is broken as fuck, but you can fix it with wrappers, mods, and tweaking and it makes it the best version until the XWVM team will finish their remakes (not soon). If you are interested, I might post a guide.

Star Wars Shadows of the Empire - SotE was a multimedia project, created in times when Lucas came back to SW and was kind of part of "Special Editions" projects, expanding the story between Episode 5 and 6. Unlike mentioned above TIE Fighter, it focused on the main characters and main plot of the movies, in addition to a bunch of new heroes. The multimedia project consisted of a Book, a Comic series, and Videogame which add to each other. What I want to recommend the most here is the comic. I think, it is self-contained enough and you'll understand everything without additional sources and there is the most content that related to the movies and connects them. Game... well, I was not sold on the new character and its presentation and this is an N64 game. Meaning that story is just out of context chunks with quite primitive gameplay. 64MB limitation is quite hard for a 3d adventure plot-driven game, you may try it if you want. There was a PC version with creepy pre-rendered cutscenes instead of static art images from N64.

Star Wars Clone Wars - not 3d The Clone Wars, with is childish teenager cartoon where marry sue teenager girl and "funny droids" fight in 9000 boring seasons and which is now in Disney Canon so I dismissed it from EU because it was inconsistent with it anyway. I not a fan of prequels in general, their concept and presentation, however, this 2003 Tartakovsky's cartoon is what elevates them to a new, enjoyable level, where clone wars shown as epic galactic wars. From short original series, was compressed 2 complete movies, that will follow you right from episode 2 to episode 3 opening scene. This is one of the rare reasons why I tolerate Prequels' existence. They are available on youtube https://youtu.be/g6-yclEOgR4 https://youtu.be/t1LK-JwKt2I Some scenes from here are pure platinum, real Jedi fights, real space army fights, highly recommended.

Star Wars The Thrawn Trilogy - sigh Well, this is the book trilogy most of us started from, a long time ago when EU was a mainstream, before dark, Disney times. And they actually nice adventures, with great scenes, great new additions to the universe, and a nice read overall. This is the sort of safe sequels many people wanted to, and I'm not surprised it still one of the most known and beloved Star Wars media pieces. Of course, I'll recommend reading it to a new person. However, this is one of the things I mentioned above, about where I think some stuff might be overrated, I have questions for a lot of characters and ideas on a universe level. Seeing that Thrawn's character was used by Disney for their morning cartoons and it incorporates everything worst I have complaints about for original books, making him some sort of caricature on himself. But more about it later, if you'll be really interested in all that crap, I'll make my giant wall of text especially for you, after you'll read all things mentioned below and above lol.

Star Wars Republic Commando - another star wars game set between 2 and 3 episodes, in clone wars. It is a nice atmospheric shooter where you are controlling the squad of Republic Commando clones in multiple missions. One of the nice and still known Star Wars games. There are RC books but.. eeh... even I didn't read them :\

Star Wars Empire At War - the best RTS in a Star Wars series, have a campaign and galactic conquest modes, with a kind of total-war style galactic map. Standalone addon Forces of Corruption is much better in my opinion - it adds 3rd side to galactic civil war, adds a lot of mechanics that make this game more deep and interesting to play. This game using a lot of EU stuff and addon elevates it to a new level. This game is from petroglyph, former Westwood developers. Zann Consortium music for addon was composed by Frank Klepacki.

You can ask me about any comic, or in general, things I mentioned. I have the great English scans of Omnibuses and what was translated on Russian for the most part if you need this also.

>>51190
I not against black people, not against women, but I know what these people from pictures will write, and this is will be "as predicted". I don't want to be preconceived, but we don't live in a bright world of the future and I saw the previews.

>>51197
Okay, down into a Rabbit hole. If you want more, I moved it to the next post to avoid creating a too big wall of text and mark what secondary.

Star Wars Dark Empire - comic trilogy, one of the things that founded EU as we know it. From here starts the history of Dark Horse Comic as owners of SW license for the next 20 years. Created more on enthusiasm and ideas than for money, this comic is one of the things that resurrected star wars, abandoned by its creator after Episode 6. This thing for me, written by Tom Veitch and illustrated by Cam Kennedy is the best piece of the Star Wars media as a whole. Unlike the Thrawn trilogy that was written alongside it, this is in my opinion is the true sequel trilogy. So why I have not put it right in the first list of recommendations? Because it is something, that puts people off, a comic that not trying to explain itself, and often the careless reader will see it more as random junk with questionable plot and ugly style. Its main premise "the Palpatine returns!" sounds silly and a lot of its elements look weird. However, this is one of the best stories, that in reality created actual lore - about force, about siths, and universal balance. In this dark style, it actually changing the movie's story about son-father into the end of a 1000 year arc. In this short review, I can't explain everything, but this comic first created Old Republic lore and most of the lore about the force and the Palpatine, not original movies which actually not explained or showed much in this regard. Everything great in Star Wars was created here, and its designs, concepts, scenes, ideas are perfect for an actual movie adoption.

Star Wars Tales of the Jedi - comic series that go full nuts into actual Old republic. Some of the creators of Dark Empire alongside some other names made actually full-featured comic books about days of the Old Republic. 5000 and 4000 years before the battle of Yavin. Inspired by Dark Empire lore, weird french science fiction, and fantasy, Sword&Sorsery, expanded the universe for thousands of years. Showing far past, long times with spaceships with sails, with primitive blasters alongside animals and steel blades, when the force was a mysticism, galaxy unexplored place of wonders and adventures. All this lore actually Lucas borrowed to create prequels, however, Lucas failed to properly understand what this and Dark Empire and other EU at the date created. So everything great and backstory, lore, and concepts of prequels is actually dumbed down content from TotJ.

Star Wars Darth Plagueis - another thing that elevates prequels in a non-direct way. This is the story of Palpatine's master, and Palpatine himself. Something what prequels actually should've been about, but failed to deliver and spent their time on random shit. This thing already bases itself on Dark Empire and Darth Bane stuff, explaining what is Darth Bane line, what is the rule of two, and what was Palpatine's role in it. I recommend reading it after everything above, it is another great EU piece that constructs logic and a big story from the mistakes of Lucas.

Star Wars Dark Forces-Jedi Knight series - this is one of the most famous star wars series of games and 3 books about Kyle Katarn. First Dark Forces is a great example of early plot-driven adventure FPS games, which made what build engine games did in the next years. Star Wars Dark Forces II Jedi Knight is one of the most ambitious games of the time. Full 3d plot-driven FPS game that marked very high standard. It is this game that ended the era of Doom clones and started the era of more modern, adventure-FPS games which will follow with games from Raven Software, Half-Life, Unreal, etc, but was in many ways above them. It also had one of the biggest in production live-action cutscenes at the time and 3 illustrated books alongside it. This game in story and presentation trying to follow the style set by TotJ, Dark Empire, and Jedi Academy Trilogy books. And the same time, while featuring stuff wat above anything Disney did in the terms of atmosphere, ideas, style, also has some floats because of lacks of the budget for the idea, silly moments and usual 90s FMV cutscenes problems, and some gameplay jank, being a 3d hardware accelerated FPS with abilities made in the mid-1997 by LucasArts on their custom engine. Later games, especially the last in the series, Jedi Academy, is the EU rollercoaster, basically very quality fan service for fans not more of movies, but everything I mentioned in this and previous list, this why I placed these games down in 2nd list.

There a lot more stuff, of course. Adventures, mediocre stories with good moments, great stories with a very specific context, weird stuff, basically 40 years of all kinds of content that formed this into the universe I loved in my teenage years and still have very warm feelings towards. But I think, I can continue like that to infinity and I need to put a stop switch somwhere.