But this doesn’t confirm my bias’.

Metal Hellsinger was one of the more inspired experiences I’ve played in the past several years. Really sad to see a studio making genuinely quality games have to shutter.

Seconded for Dark Cloud 2 specifically. Game is incredibly good.

You know, fundamentally, I don’t hate Gamepass as a concept. “Netflix, but for videogames” is an idea I can get behind, as it widens the audience for something I love by lowering the bar of entry. There are plenty of people out there that benefit from being able to play a few games here and there without needing to commit hundreds of hours to $100 purchases.

But Netflix has overstepped with price hikes and ads, and I’ve cancelled my service with them. That Microsoft thinks it can charge some ~$40CAD a month is pure hubris. I hope they learn quickly that, at that price point, the enthusiast market will happily cancel and just buy their games outright, and the casual market will decide it’s an expense they don’t need.

Because if they’re shuttered, the company/people that make the company have the opportunity to go somewhere else and do something better. I’ve disliked everything they’ve produced since they were purchased by EA, so I’ve come to think the publisher holds them back.

I mean the last Bioware game I played and enjoyed start to finish was Dragon Age: Origins, so… /shrug.

I accept that ME2 was a good game, but I couldn’t get into it. It felt too much like a shooter, too little like an RPG for me. And don’t get me started on DA2. “ANOTHER WAVE!” and character customization being kneecapped, or completely removed in the case of your party members, left me quitting it after some 3-4 hours.

Inquisition was okay, but I still lost interest after some 6-8 hours. It wasn’t “bad,” but it was still an okay game wearing a good games skin.

Bioware losing the creative freedom to explore characters outside of the mainstream that the saudi’s are going to permit them to write/create is a real problem. As a marker of political freedom of expression and as a stance against the fucking fascists that are rapidly encroaching on people’s rights, this is a huge step in the wrong direction. But I won’t mourn any specific games. Honestly, I hope they get axed, so they are given the opportunity to go indie and/or get picked up by a better producer/studio.

The last Bioware game I genuinely enjoyed was Dragon Age: Origins, which was the last thing (mostly) developed before the EA buy-up. I’m sure it’s scary for the employees, but I suspect this is good for Bioware in the long term.

and the Switch port was (apparently) never fixed…

What’s the supposed issues on the Switch port? I only owned the game on Switch, and I didn’t have any issues playing through it.

I’m already playing Hades 2 and FF Tactics comes out tomorrow.

So that, I guess, then probably nothing. /shrug.

Steam sales lose their luster when they’re so frequent.

An absolute masterpiece of a game. What starts off as a “cute rhythm game” very rapidly evolves into some of the most immaculate gameplay design and in-game storytelling I have ever seen. I “joke” often than the final boss is the tears in your eyes, but it’s a lot less of a joke than you would imagine.

If you like rhythm games, emotional storys and ludonarrative harmony, I cannot recommend this game enough.

The cost of food and shelter driving people homeless and hungry is evil. The cost of Nintendo products causing people to play fewer Nintendo games is rude and unfortunate.

I’m just pissed off at all this misdirected frustration. We should be lobbying governments to manage grocery and real estate megacorps, and instead we’re creating YouTube videos about Nintendo being evil because the price of an individual game went up $20. The gap between unfettered corporate greed of UHC causing suffering on scales previously only seen in wars against Nintendo getting an extra $20 here and there if you want to keep up with their products isn’t even a fucking comparison.

And I’m tired of pretending a completely unwelcome and tone deaf price increase is “evil.” I hate paying more for videogames as much as the next gamer, but the cost of living has increased by 50% in basically every metric. Rent, food, power, gas, restaurants, movie theatres, snacks, alcohol… Literally everything I spend money on has gone up between 25-50%. Nintendo is the first asshole in the video game industry cocky enough to up their prices by the same amout, and suddenly, “The Switch 2 is EVIL.” Really?

Listen, I am not a fan. $10 for a tech demo that should be packaged in is insane. But pull your head back and look at the wider picture instead of coming in here with these terminally online takes. If you can’t distinguish between “evil,” (like health insurance corporations condemning millions to chronic pain and, in extremes, death) and “shit I wish wasn’t so expensive” (like a singular brand of videogames) then maybe it’s worth figuring out where the nearest patch of grass is.

I teach 7s and up, so the absolute youngest I deal with is 11. I will absolutely check it out. Thank you for both creating and sharing this.

Oh lord this looks incredible. What’s the age rating/target audience for this? I’m a teacher who works to try and bring quality and engaging games into the classroom, and at a glance it feels like a perfect junior high entry into gaming.

Adding to this one. Incredible game.

Bugsnax. Substantially better game than I anticipated.

God, Mouthwashing was a masterpiece.

I also really, really enjoyed Arctic Eggs, but it’s so absurd that I can barely recommend it to people.

I appreciate Critical Reflex in ways I hadn’t quite put together until reading this article.

I’m famously a World hater, so yes, absolutely. Until Icebourne released, I was extremely disappointed with World, even for a pre-G Rank release.

Though, all of the titles since Generations have had the problem of being released with a portion of the planned content missing. I was more forgiving of it before, though I am having a hard time pinpointing why.

Compared to World and Rise? It’s just not very good. It’s by far the fewest hours I’ve put into a Monster Hunter game since… Well, literally ever.

I still have the CD in a box somewhere. It was loaned to me by a friend and I never gave it back. Hilariously, I still see that friend, so that might make for a fun conversation.

I do want to state that the flight model has NOTHING on Elite. But otherwise, it is in a lot of ways a game which I wish Elite was a lot closer to.

Friends and I downloaded it, prompted by this post. There’s a little bit of awkwardness and animation jank, but man, does the game get the core concept right.

Space is not flat, the ship feels like a near arcane contraption, rail guns should feel like they’ll punch a hole in a small planet, and grappling hooks always feel good. These guys know what I’m looking for. The only thing I could genuinely ask for is a more true to physics flight model, but ultimately, I’ll be too busy taking down fighters using a rocket launcher while gravity-booted to the nose of my ship to care too much.

“Everyone who is critical of me is woke.”

I hate that you get downvoted for pointing out the reality of the situation.

Relative to the price of everything else, $80 for a AAA videogame is actually reasonable. The problem is that rent has gone up drastically, food has gone up drastically, and our wages have stagnated. Getting pissed off at Gearbox for charging $80 for Borderlands 4, and then paying $15 for a burger and fries without an equal reaction just doesn’t seem sensible to me.

Everything is awful, and videogame devs aren’t the ones stealing all our buying power.

That’s an interesting take. I found them to be very different people. Two different flavours of cliche’d anime protagonist, sure, but very different people none the less.

My partner and I make a point to occasionally play through a couch co-op game as well. Here are some of the things we enjoyed.

Phogs - Currently playing this. It’s a cute, dog-themed puzzle game thing, where you play as two heads of a single long dog-thing. We’re enjoying it, but we’re not particularly deep in, and I do wonder if it’ll get Ibb and Obb samey, but it’s worth checking out imo.

Cassette Beasts - Couch co-op, Pokemon inspired, adventure RPG with great storytelling, fantastic music and a retro aesthetic. The world is very Zelda-like in exploration and puzzle solving, while combat is Pokemon double battles. Highly recommended, just be aware that one player gets to be the player-made protagonist, while the other is one of an interchangeable series of partner characters.

Sea of Stars - The co-op update did a lot of good for this game. A Chrono Trigger inspired, faux-SNES era, indie RPG. There’s a lot of unvoiced dialogue, which I could see as being a barrier to enjoyment as a multiplayer game, but the game is paced quite well, so I don’t think it’s a huge problem. Also, players do take turns inputting commands, but everyone is responsible for the timed hits/blocks, and you each control a character of equal agency in the overworld, so it avoids the largest co-op turn based RPG folly of having one player and one half-watching “follower.” There are a ton of accessibility options/features (difficulty is VERY malleable), and as an added bonus, there’s a free story DLC coming on the 20th.

Children of Morta - This is perhaps the most “hardcore” of my list, but the girlfriend, despite explicitly not enjoying “hard” games, really really enjoyed this one. An action-RPG with some very light roguelike elements, Children of Morta has you play as a family of hunter-gatherer-warrior types in a fantasy world, working together to stop a malevolent power from corrupting the physical world. Each family member has a different playstyle, their own skill tree, and a lot of personality. The game is very story driven, with a few moments being taken between each run for the fantastic narration to drip feed the narrative, slowly teaching you more about the world, the characters, and their family dynamic.

These are the ones that came to the top of my mind, either because they were particularly good or, in the case of Phogs, is ongoing. If I see anything else worth mentioning when I look at my Steam list next, I’ll add.

I’m not home right now, but I’ll follow up with more formal testing either tomorrow or the next day. I’m very interested in why such similiar machines get completely different performance.

The machine in question is sporting a Ryzen 3600, for discussion sake.

My partners RX6600 holds 80 FPS on mid settings without framegen. Maybe the gap between med and high is larger than I realize, or there’s an ultra setting I hadn’t noticed, but the author’s experiences still seem out of whack.

I feel like this has been a trend lately. New, high-fidelity game releases, and the wave of “UNOPTIMIZED GARBAGE!” “dev, fix ur game!” starts rolling, only for myself, and the majority of people I speak to personally, to have no real issues. Feels rude to play this card, but I am starting to lean towards most people having no idea how to care for their machine, in a lot of cases, and rarely facing some weirdly specific drive/card compatibility stuff.

This thread is actually huge, so apologies if this has already been recommended, but take a look at Against the Storm. It’s an indie city-builder with a bit of a rogue-like spin. You can usually get it on fairly deep sales, and the rogue-like elements combined with some meta-progression gives it a real play length, even though a single city-building session is a ~45-60 minute experience.

Okay, for a VR indie title? Gorn did incredible.

Mhmm. Everyone is shitting on Nintendo, but the reality is their games are literally keeping up with inflation. The problem is that our wages haven’t kept up with inflation, and the cost of living has, at least, kept up. In some cases (rent), it’s grown faster than the inflation of everything else.

Don’t get me wrong, Nintendo is tone deaf for making this decision now, and I suspect they’d still make billions with a $15 price increase rather than a $30 one. I’m not defending them. But the picture is a lot larger than them.

It can be both.

There’s no “sanity” system in Look Outside. The closest thing is a hidden “stress” stat which, last I checked, is literally just combat problems when it gets low.

That said, Look Outside is a fantastic game, and the Dev is super down to earth and active with his players. Highly recommend.

Interest, I can understand. Trust and faith? Yeah, I’ll pass, thanks.

Oh I don’t have any performance issues. My 3070ti has no issue holding 120 fps (with frame Gen on, mind you). Game plays perfectly.

And I’d be more forgiving of the “15 hour long free game,” but it ate a part of the game I enjoy, made playing that part of the game with friends challenging to the point of feeling not worth it, and it’s required before I am allowed to enjoy the game I actually paid for. Those 15 hours - well, 12 for me - were more valuable to me than the price I paid for the game. 15 hours of work is well into the several hundreds of dollars space. But I already paid over $100 CAD once taxes were in. Why do I also have to give it my time?

Again, great game, but worst on-boot Monster Hunter to date. And that’s saying something, considering World doesn’t let you hold a weapon for the first hour.

Genuinely couldn’t stand how on-rails it is. Why advertise this wide open world and then constantly restrict and limit my options to interact with it?

There’s lots of positive things to say about it. The combat is, yes, perhaps more satisfying than ever. They really nailed the Monster/weapons/armor designs this time around. I feel like there’s value in gathering again, something that recent titles have lost.

But it’s all stained by the low-rank experience. Spending 10-12 hours behing hand-held through a series of walk and talks where I am constantly prompted to stare at the beautiful landscape piece, or the way small monsters interact, as though the game is afraid I’ll miss it if I am left to my own devices, was both boring and insulting. There was a lot of decisions made to put cinematography ahead of gameplay experience here, and these decisions have genuinely made Wilds my least favorite release Monster Hunter title to date.

Based list. Outer Wilds in particular chef’s kiss.

I’m a teacher, and as soon as students figure out I play games, they inevitably ask me this question, but I largely think it’s an unfair question to ask someone who games as a genuine hobby rather than just a kill time.

I like to tell them that’s a really impossible question to answer and instead offer them my favorite franchise of games: Monster Hunter. I feel like I can more reliably say that I am a massive fan of the franchise, with it reliably being my favorite videogame franchise, without that seeming weirdly inaccurate considering the wide variety of genres and sub-genres that make up video game interests.

To say that Monster Hunter Rise is my favorite game would be a massive disservice to the captivating, genre-breaking storytelling power of Hades, my deeply rooted love of the flight mechanics in Elite Dangerous, my history as a brief world record holder for a Mario title, the thousands of hours of Team Fortress 2 I’ve shared with friends, or my experiences grinding World of Warcraft arenas to the top 0.5% of players. And I’ve somehow listed 5 formative titles from the top of my head without even representing my deep passion for rhythm games, with Hi-Fi Rush being a genuine contender for that “favorite game” slot that I am arguing doesn’t exist. So I don’t answer with any of these games, because not only would my answer be fundamentally untrue, but it’s not really the question my student means to ask, either. They want to know what I am into, and giving them a standout franchise that automatically gets my money when a title is released gives them a much better answer than any one title could ever do.

Amazing.

If someone already owns Tunic and is considering this, I would say to just directly donate the money.

Or just like… Donate through the bundle and consider trying out some minor projects created by people who are trying to make something cool? Why turn down access to these games out of some form of perceived superiority? This notion that since you’ve never heard of these other titles they can’t possible offer anything of value to you is kind of a spit in the face of struggling artists of all types.