I played a bit of Terranigma this past week for a Discord Game of the Month run. Would love to see this and Illusion of Gaia get remasters with script updates.
Currently playing No Man's Sky. This is my third attempt with it since it came out, and it's going a lot better so far this time around. Ironically, it might have been the things missing from Starfield that finally whetted my appetite for what this game has to offer.
Some Nintendo 64 games got up to the $80 range in the late 90's before PlayStation really started taking off.
What made matters worse was the publishers didn't have as much price control as they do now, so game and accessory prices would vary store to store as retailers tacked on additional margins.
While the software for current games is substantially cheaper, the hardware is more expensive at this point in time. The Switch is spendy for a nearly 7-year-old system. The PS5 has had a price increase, when we saw a big price cut for the PS2 at two years in. Accessories, depending on where you live, are up 25% or more from retro eras (especially Joy-Cons).
PC prices have come back down to earth now, but during the GPU shortage, it hadn't been more expensive to put together a gaming PC since the 90's/2000's.
This is a meaty demo, taking me a little over 2 hours.
As someone who adored the "City Building" series by Impressions (Caesar, Pharaoh, Emperor) and thought going in that Synergy had similar vibes, it's about what I expected. It has a lot of similar systems with plenty of different resources, both physical and "well-being," which is like Desirability. It does away with the really fussy stuff like city walkers and labor availability, and instead gives buildings a range of effect. Travel time for your populace still appears to be important (like Tropico).
It also has its fair share of jank. Building work orders are by far the biggest problem; you can only assign one task, and even when there are available resources for an alternative task, the building will just idle. This is especially bad in the gathering huts because you have to manually select the plants to collect from, and plants have multiple resources (but only one mode is available at a time). I could see this being a recipe for micromanagement hell. There are some other small issues I figure will be resolved for the full release, like missing ambient audio from the settlement itself and untranslated elements, although the translation itself was good (this was developed by a French studio and publisher in case you couldn't tell; no native English speaker in their right mind would release a video game named Synergy).
Overall, I'm interested. I also got the impression it might be a continuous city campaign, unlike the chapters you'd get in the City Building or Tropico series, which could be a fun change of pace. I'll be keeping an eye out for a release date.
AW2 is classic survival horror combat. Limited resources and such.
I don't like survival horror gameplay to begin with, but even setting that aside, I really think it clashes with the story at times. It's better in Saga's sections, at least.
Going to try to do more patient gaming this year after last year a certain popular RPG grabbed me for hundreds of hours. I've got Atelier Ayesha on deck and thinking about Tokyo Xanadu.
Also considering:
Horizon Zero Dawn: the Frozen Wilds
Live a Live
Midnight Suns
Ys IX: Monstrum Nox
Plus a VN, I think. Either Phoenix Wright: Spirit of Justice or Higurashi (which I started but hasn't grabbed me yet). And here's hoping OP that you starting Final Fantasy Tactics manifests a remaster finally.
Finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2 - Torna: the Golden Country last week. The gameplay was largely the same, and I didn't find that to be the base game's strength. I mostly liked the story but the dozens of forced side quests absolutely killed any pacing it had going for it, and there was sidequest-styled filler even before that in the main questline. On top of that, I have a few nits to pick about how the story closed out. Ultimately I was rather disappointed, considering I'd heard a lot of positive word-of-mouth on this over the years.
For now, I've got one more year left in Atelier Meruru, so I'm going to see about closing that one out. This is probably going to end up being my favorite in the series so far, but I'm really looking forward to the games with the looser/no time limits.
I also just started the demo for Synergy, an upcoming city builder in the style of Pharaoh and Emperor. Mostly good, but the biggest problem by far is that the buildings need a more developed work-order system. Could see this being a worthy successor in this genre.
Having played through the PL story, I didn't like the overhauled skill system as much as I'd hoped, but I still want to go back through the main story again. There are still some old sidequests I never got around to as well.
Wish I had this problem. I'll do something like open the fridge, see my big jar of beni shoga, and get annoyed because I can't think of a way to use it that sounds good.
It depends on the implementation, but typically, everyone sits down at the table as equals. No advantages are brought in from collections, unlike constructed formats.
Building a deck is also a separate skill to piloting one. Especially when there is a timer involved, it can be a frantic, fun challenge to draft correctly.
Finally--and perhaps most importantly to me--it takes a long time for draft sets to get "solved" by meta-gaming. There are so many moving parts in new sets that you have to play the game to find out what works. And even if a set does get solved, you're still having to work with limited options and need a good plan B or plan C.
Toxic discourse in large Internet communities predates Reddit, even. It's been a thing since before there was the web, becoming significantly more likely to find once you get to a critical mass of people.
It's a good time in the political cycle to find and contribute to niche communities. I almost never come across this kind of thing because that's where I hang out.
You're getting downvoted, but I think there's something to this, even if it's not the whole story. The game had a robust presence unnaturally quickly on Tiktok and among streamers. This studio isn't big enough to have engineered a big campaign, but it's quite possible they did some small, targeted marketing and it really paid off.
But don't sleep on the Persona 4 anime. That one was amazing.