It wouldn't surprise me if Portal 3 is released at some point. I'm skeptical, but I'm not outruling it. The game is whacky enough that there are probably a lot of interesting and cool things that can be implemented into a worthy successor.
I am, on the other hand, utterly convinced that HL3 is not going to happen. The previous two were groundbreaking, stretching limits of what one can do with a physics engine. I'm having a hard time imagining that it can be pulled off a 3rd time, simply because I am unable to imagine any sory of content that would all:
a) fit with the series so that it still feels like a HL game
b) interesting enough to allow for the innovation that the previous two games had
c) good enough to justify a new game rather than just a tech demo
I sincerely hope that my opinion on the matter is simply a matter of failure of imagine, and that a good HL successor is released at some point, but sadly I think I'm right on this one.
Half-Life: Alyx is mostly what I hoped we'd get from HL3, inasmuch as it hits your points a & b for sure, and IMHO c (though I know that's not agreed on by everyone).
It had great action and expository setpieces (avoiding spoilers), and the (albeit relatively simple) puzzles definitely added something to Half-Life that really worked for me.
Unfortunately it didn't solve all VR issues (melee being an obvious one), and not least of which the cost. I played it on a cheap (~$100), janky old WMR headset, but not everyone can do that without vomiting, so a great PC and good headset are a hefty price, which is probably the biggest hurdle for a full-scale 3 in VR. Especially considering there just aren't many other games worth making that investment in, IMHO. I played the hell out of Alyx, a little of a few other games...but Alyx was the pinnacle of what VR could do for me.
The golden age of gaming was the late SNES/early playstation era.
Graphics were beautiful, games were long and generally had incredible, immersive, and even heart wrenching stories.
Unlike today, where the focus on hyperrealism, generally at the expense of story and definitely performance. but hey, its only 6 hours long and you get to pay 80 dollars for it, so thats great, right?
1999 was such an amazing year in my gaming life. Rollercoaster Tycoon, Mechwarrior 3, Battlezone II, and Unreal Tournament. So, so many hours of my life spent in those. That was like, 5 years ago, right?
Do you really? Dang, I'm so jealous. I still have my original discs for I and II, at least. Yeah, my brother and I loved those as well. My dad worked in IT for EDS at the time, and got some old laptops on the cheap. So, I remember my brother and I laying on the living room floor, playing BZ facing each other over the IR ports. We started implementing gentleman's agreements, like no killing scavengers and no attacking your opponent's base for 30 minutes. It became a cold war game, where we would max out our units, and just spy on each other. Maybe send a single fighter over to poke at defenses. Then, I'd send over the mass of APCs I was hiding away from my base, and just annihilate everything.
And BZII had such a great mod scene! We loved XMod. We'd always say no nukes, but we always made them anyway.
I know MechWarrior gets all the praise and hype, but I genuinely love this specific title. It's peak isometric turn-based strategy and I love it.
Although that may have something to do with scoring that MadCat in the first or second level. I think it's supposed to give your Commando mechs a bad time, but I lit up the oil refinery next to it and lucked into getting the pilot to eject. The thing was completely salvageable and I absolutely dominated the first half of the game with it. Good times.
I only ever beat it back in the day by using the game guide lol! That was long enough ago that the game guide was an actual paper book I had to find at a store and pay real money for! Well, my mom paid for it anyway lol
I was well into adulthood when that came out. If you want to make me feel old, remind me that the Atari 5200 came out 42 years ago. And almost no one bought it. And the people who did regretted it. And now it's only old people like me who remember it even existed.
Went into CEX the other week, and saw PS1 games I'd bought when I was already an adult with a job, being sold second hand for more than I'd originally bought them for.
The local oldies station summer concert features Vanilla Ice, Tone Loc, Tag Team and some other 90s bands, so now I kind of want to buy a walker and some tennis balls since my childhood is considered oldies.
Forget Shadow, I was there when ICO was first released. Probably even within a month (if not week) of it's official release. At the time it looked like no other game. Very atmospheric and contemplative.
I love that Fallout is now thought of as a first-person game, but it started as a turn-based isometric team RPG in 1997 which was, itself, a near-remake of a 1988 game, which I spent hours playing as a kid.
They're amazing. I highly recommend it if you like games in that style. The first two Baldur's Gates were also like that (I haven't played the latest).
Tactics Ogre Reborn came out in late 2022 for Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, and PC.
That game is a remaster of another title called Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, which came out for the PSP in November 2010 in Japan. This puts it 12 years before Reborn.
But the PSP game was itself is a remake of a game with the same name that came out originally for the Super Famicom in October 1995, 15 years before its remake and 27 years before the remaster of that remake.