They’ve been pretty underwhelming for a while now.
You used to get crazy deals on games only a few months old. Now it’s just the same 50% off a five year old game before being ramped back up to full price between sales.
There’s a few bargains of stuff you may have missed, but likely they’ve been an Epic freebie, or on PSPlus or in a Humble Bundle by now.
SMG2 is probably the best 3D Mario game, but since I already own them I’ll just keep what I have.
Dolphin can play them both just fine. If it’s anything like the last pack, it’ll be the laziest possible emulation anyway. This shit should have been in the NSO subscription if they’re not actually going to remake it.
I thought it was a decent 20 hour game squeezed into a 100 hour open world slog, that completely ruins the urgent nature of the plot.
Phantom Liberty was pretty great though. The confined nature of it let the story develop with pace.
CDPR should just stop trying to force everything into open worlds because their games are still good in spite of them, not because of them.
The sad thing is none of them want to make a bad game. They just cit so many rough edges off so nobody cuts themselves that they all end up making the same ball.
Much rather have a game like Death Stranding that half the players are going to bounce off and the rest are going to love all the more for it.
Thing is, even if you look at all the Mario Kart characters, there’s only a handful that are big names. Nobody wants to play as a Shy Guy. Even Link and Zelda feel wildly out of place, although maybe they wouldn’t have done in a Links Awakening style rather than what they went for.
I think Sony could do an Astro Bot on it and put in a bunch of their other characters in there. Lego has potential if they can get a bunch of their licensed characters in there (although you know with that kind of money floating around, most of them will be DLC locked behind Harry Potter packs, etc). A horrendously expensive MCU license maybe with some chibified characters.
I think Mario Kart just has that easy “an idiot can play it” gameplay, but it doesn’t get boring once you know what you’re doing. It’s a really hard balance to get right. The only recent attempt was CTR, and it didn’t have that first factor at all, it was hard as nails.
Article next year: how 20 million unsold Switch 2 consoles finally killed the world oldest videogaming company.