brsrklf @ brsrklf @jlai.lu

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2 yr. ago

If you want worse, 15 years later, look at meta's avatars. They outright won't let you initialize your quest headset without setting up a meta account and one of these monstrosities. I shudder every time I activate meta's VR UI by mistake and have to watch at the creepy bastard in the customisation mirror.

These avatar things completely miss the point of miis. You didn't care that your mii looks stupid, the minimalist style pretty much made it a requirement. Yet they were a lot less creepy than all those discount cartoon characters with expressionless faces.

Yeah, not sure. It's very much Donkey Kong Country-style, with more or less the same rather heavy inertia physics, which is not at all typical on GB platformers (Wario Land even has zero inertia). DKL has DKC2 style rope climbing too (well I guess it's technically Donkey Kong Jr inspired to begin with).

I played the shit out of that game back then, but wow, this was a painful game to play on the original game boy. They tried making it look like DKC, but all they did was making it a dark green mess, especially in the jungle levels. A light outline around characters would have made the game a lot more tolerable, but I'm sure they decided it was not looking "Donkey Kong Country" enough.

It's ::: spoiler spoiler just in case Xenoblade Chronicles 3 :::

Depends. If they're already in a position of power, they basically win if nobody rises against them.

What often happens is they did try to stop the hero through the game, and failed.

Some games fix this issue by making the player trigger the change they want and bring the fight to the big powerful threat themselves, on their terms.

In fact one of my favorite RPG has the player characters being the ones trying to end the world as they know it.

I do think the extreme example, the old RPG trope of the big bad looming over in the red-tinted sky and being just minutes from firing the world busting laser while you finish your quest list, is rather cringe. Maybe don't invoke this in a game where time is basically irrelevent.

I think they'd already lost their way a long while before that.

They started as indies grouping together to get visibility, at a time when Steam still curated every game and accepted maybe 4 games a month (yeah, hard to imagine today. It's still hard to be noticed, but for the opposite reason). Back then they distributed only DRM-free games too, with eventually a Steam key option.

At some point they opened their own store and started including big publisher games, and really became just another store, and mostly a key store too. They spew some bullshit about not being specifically a DRM-free store, but really "DRM-agnostic". "We don't restrict publishers' choice of DRM, they can be DRM-free if they want!"

And I'm like, dude, it's not a stance, Steam technically doesn't either. You may need the client to install but plenty of games don't run on any DRM, not even Steamworks.

That does seem rather high. Quests 3 512 are what, $500 now? That truck would need to contain 3,000 of those.

They told me I was too young. They told me I needed more training. I told them to drop dead! How ironic...

I had the French version. While translation was mostly correct, there were some errors here and there.

But the worst part was the newly introduced bugs, because original bethesda bugs weren't enough apparently. For example, every interior with water had an erroneous water level value that made them entirely underwater.

There's a slaver lair cave a couple meters from the beginning of the game, it takes like 30 seconds from the end of character creation to get there. In the French version, it's completely underwater and everyone inside has drowned when you enter it. That's the level of QA we had.

Oh, by the way, publisher for the French version? Ubisoft.

You know, since we're on the subject of Elder Scrolls, Daggerfall actually had something like that.

You could ask anyone for where to find some random place, and the NPC would tell you roughly in which direction you should go, if they "knew" the place. Or sometimes they'd just write it directly on your map.

Still hard to do with voiced dialogue if you don't want your NPCs to sound like robots. Then again, Oblivion didn't need that to make its NPCs weird and robotic, with its 4 voice actors and huge amount of shared lines between everyone.

Fun fact, that's why the immersion-breaking magic compass thing exists in Oblivion (and most open worlds since). Bethsoft devs explained it once.

Stuff is relocated a lot in development, and this means having to rework all dialogues refering to directions, occasionally missing some. It was even more unfeasible for Oblivion in which all dialogue is voiced and would have to be re-recorded.

So they just removed all directions from the dialogue and now you've got 100% accurate floating tags telling you exactly where to go, even when you are not yet sure what you're looking for.

Ah, First Hunt. The demo that made me hope for a good DS Metroid Prime-style game.

And then we got Hunters instead. Boooo.

IMO 7 has a good part of what makes 8 good, especially better item balance (which had already been improved a bit in Wii, but not enough). And I really liked some of the tracks, though some of the linear ones did not convince me, including Rainbow Road.

But 8's tracks just blew my mind, both the originals and the heavily reimagined classic ones. And the ones from the DLC were even better (well, fuck Baby Park). 200CC being thrown in as a patch was refreshing too. The only thing that was not great and I know was not well received was the loss of actual battle arenas (fixed in 8 deluxe), but since I almost never play those I didn't care much.

I would have loved for 8D's pass to be in the same vein as the base tracks, even if it had a lot fewer, instead of hastily recycling Tour content. They clearly went for quantity over quality for those. And the city tracks feel awful to play IMO.

Mario Kart 8's gimmick barely counts as one. The game would be completely fine without anti-gravity, it's barely noticeable most of the time. And of course, it's not even new, it had existed forever in Wipeout and... F-Zero X/GX. It was just not a thing yet in Mario Kart.

They didn't innovate for Mario Kart 8. They just made an exceptional entry, probably my favorite one in the whole series.

But for some reason, nah, after 2 decades without a game F-Zero needs to kickstart the next era of video games or whatever.

Huh. Didn't expect that.

I wonder what the gameplay's like. I am expecting still having a management component but building automatons instead of cultivating rice, maybe...

Actual ammo vending machines. That can be tampered with. Great.

Could we not Torment Nexus the rest of Bioshock, please?

You know, if you people wanna ditch the Kingdom and join the club, I don't think it's too late.

People who don't believe birds are dinosaurs have not watch some birds closely enough. Including chickens.

I've played Tales of Monkey Island. If you've played Telltale's version of Sam and Max, it's pretty much the same kind of take. Probably suffers quite a bit from the episodic format, and puzzles are a bit straightforward compared to classic monkey island games. Fans of the series mostly consider it a huge letdown.

Can't say anything about the more serious parts of the Telltale catalogue, I've never played those, but for having played this, the 3 Sam & Max seasons and Back to the Future, there was certainly a Telltale formula that started annoying me after a while. They went less and less subtle about crafting their dialogues so they all lead to the same answer, they clearly wrote their stories with an objective to reuse character models and assets, and they still used that in-house engine that looked and controlled terribly, barely improved through the years.

Maybe it's because I played them too late, but while I mostly had a blast playing HL2, the first one never clicked for me.

I know, it's been very influential and new when it released, but it was still quite straight a FPS game. Whereas HL2 is like a crazy theme park of different ambiences and mechanics.