6mo ago

Astro Bot was so good it almost "outdid Nintendo at its own game", says former US boss Reggie Fils-Aimé

www.eurogamer.net

26 comments

I would love to play it some day. Shame it's a $600 game.
- You might, Sony seems pretty open to PC releases these days
  
  The ps5 controller is designed into the game, hard to believe this will be available pc anytime soon
  
  And Death Stranding even got released on Xbox.
- There's a ~300 €$ demo if you go used and it plays a lot of good games
- This is a disingenuous take. All games require hardware and you definitely don’t need to spend $600 to play it.
  
  How exactly do I avoid paying $600 for it if I don't own a PS5?
Astro bot aka "we already have Mario at home"
- Except the mario at home was actually just as good as what you wanted out.
  
  100% agree. I grew up on Super NES and owned every console gen from Nintendo up through Switch. Got into PC gaming 7 years ago, and then picked up a PS5 on a ridiculous deal to try to enter into their market and play some games. Astro Bot is a charming and incredibly fun video game. So much love was poured into this game.
  It’s an incredible game and it deserves all of the awards it earned. I still love all the main Mario games I’ve played, and Mario Odyssey was a wonderful and charming game, too. Astro Bot is certainly not a “we already have Mario at home” game - I hold it up there with one of my favorite platformers I’ve ever played.
  It’d be great if it could get ported to PC, but they would have to significantly adjust the game controls to get around the purposefully tight integration with the PS5 controller. Playing that game with the PS5 controller was so much fun.
  Edit: fixed some mobile typos
It DID outdo Nintendo’s equivalent - the previous mainline Mario entry - Super Mario Odyssey - in every way except maybe 4 :
Quantity - Mario had more moons than Astro had Bots to rescue… so more collectibles.
replayability - with the Luigi balloon challenges, they extended the game’s longevity with this feature and it is better than Astro Bot’s simpler “speed run challenges” because of Mario’s unique game mechanic of allowing players to create and compete by crafting one-of-a-kind challenges for each other.
Nostalgia - Mario’s New Donk City party was absolute peak love letter to the origins of Super Mario and the sequence with the song sung by Mayor Pauline honestly brought me to tears…

…But everything else - the scale of and pure ingenuity of the boss mechanics, the visuals - from both a stylistic and technical standpoint, the Dual-Sense’s controller gimmicks, the complete lack of load times… it brought into stark contrast how far Nintendo has fallen behind - not so much from a game design perspective necessarily - but certainly at least from a hardware power standpoint.
- Astro Bot from what I've seen - and played a bit of - is more similar to Mario Galaxy in level design and that game is maybe the best 3D Mario.
- Lack of load times? Were you fooled by the controller flying through a portal animation? I guess it might be slightly shorter than the Mario Odyssey load times? I don't remember, I haven't played Odyssey again since it was released.
  
  Flying on the balloon was used to mask some loading times, but that was waaaaay longer than transitions from space into the world in Astro Bot.

26 comments