Really? Was that a long time ago?

Seems to me he and Gearbox have been in lots of shit for a while now (the infamous USB drive, serious plagiarism accusations when Borderlands did an artistic 180 during development, Alien : Colonial Marines released broken as hell after funneling its funding to make BL2, Duke Nukem Forever…)

And every time Pitchford’s (mostly unnecesary) public answer has been terrible.

It’s a bit fun to imagine that. People of the future playing a game that would be sci-fi to us, but really to them it’s like Oregon Trail.

Joke?

By the time they launch, they’ll have a game with 8k textures and everyone else will be releasing games for Star Trek’s holodeck.

Konami is more about ruining everything they have the rights to, but I guess that makes them kind of complementary, yeah.

Because of the nature of generative AI, anyone selling it is in the mindset of making money out of stuff they had no rights to.

By that definition, it’s a massive crossover whenever McDonald’s does a pokémon happy meal. These may be popular IPs, but that’s not like there aren’t stuff like that all the time.

That’s a massive crossover?

Development is more than writing code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development

Went from “never before seen AAAA game made by a studio with unlimited resources” to “everyone’s fired, everything’s cancelled, fuck off to another publisher if you can, and by the way we’re keeping the IP so go explain that to them, too.”

Good job, Microsoft, thank you very much for buying half the videogame industry before deciding it wasn’t worth it.

Switch still have them. Of course now some publishers on Switch 2 are shitting on the very concept of cartridges by making empty carts that are just keys to download the game.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 became my favourite entry in the series because of how it still has light, silly moments, improbable vistas and absurd world building, but when it tries for dark, it hits hard (and to be honest it’s generally a good deal darker than the other games even from the beginning).

Previous episodes had their emotional moments, but nothing comes close to one particular scene in 3.

I have been pausing NMS for a few months. I think I’ll start playing again next week, a bit curious about this corvette thing.

It sells like hot cakes on all Nintendo consoles, it’s as mainline as it gets. Starting as a spin-off means nothing.

Persona is a Megami Tensei spin-off.

Smash bros is nothing but a giant crossover episode.

The whole Mario series used to be a freaking Donkey Kong spin-off.

I think you forgot about Mario Kart World. You can’t really consider Mario Kart games not mainline when you see how much they sell compared to the install base. I do think this entry is rather underwhelming, but it was still one of the main reasons to have a Switch 2.

After that, Donkey Kong Bananza was not a launch title, but close enough. Sure, Donkey Kong is not usually that strong an IP, but it’s rather original and weird, and the closest thing to Super Mario Odyssey we’ll have for a while. I know I was curious about it, and yeah, it’s fun.

You might almost feel sorry for them.

I might, but I seem to have misplaced my world’s tiniest violin, unfortunately.

Make your own Donkey Kong figure with papier mâché or something and stick a tag on it. Boom, one of a kind amiibo!

Amiibos are a bit expensive. There are a few DK amiibos, they should all work with Smash because amiibos have a character identifier that’s recognized between games and amiibo series.

The ones from smash bros and super mario series should be around the “normal” price (for me it’s about 13-15 euros). Maybe you can find a second hand one for cheaper.

There’s a new one with DK and Pauline for Bananza, like other new amiibos it costs a bit more (around 18€ for me). It unlocks a costume in Bananza as an extra.

There’s also an old Skylander DK figure that doubles as an amiibo if I remember correctly. It’s kinda ugly and cheap-looking, and probably not easy to find, but who knows.

“Another fighting game character”, take your pick. Just with non-nintendo IPs at this point it could be Ryu, Ken, Terry Bogard or Kazuya Mishima.

And then you can throw Solid Snake, Pac-Man, Sonic, Mega Man, Simon Belmont, fucking Minecraft Steve and a Mii disguised as Sans from Undertale into the mix.

My problem with Smash is I just can’t commit to one character and I’m just kind of bad at all of them. If anything, the most decent I get might be with the Links and Belmonts. I guess projectile jank is kind of my thing.

I am pretty sure this is fake news. There never was such a thing.

Oh fuck, Hard DK has found his way to you too then :)

Streamer Alpharad got a “Hard DK” bit running since they got their ass handed over to them by a crazy Mario Party CPU DK that was just gambling like mad and winning everything.

They trained an incredibly good amiibo CPU DK in Smash they called Hard DK in reference to this.

Yeah, completely. Pauline’s got her time in the limelight right now, between Odyssey and DK Bananza, but Rosalina was just relegated to “bonus Peach clone that can do a swirl attack” in 3D World, and that’s basically it.

I prefer the first one to be honest.

2 botches things that worked very well before. Especially the camera that did a good job of always being in the right place in 1, but in 2 you suddenly have crazy angles and blind spots that play against you. This can’t even be explained by more complex level design, so who knows what happened.

Also they got rid of the hub for a small, disturbing looking ship and a very generic map, and they killed any trace of story. Those were two things that really set Galaxy 1 apart IMO.

On the new side of things, there were Yoshi, with different powers, and more challenges (but they kind of feel repetitive, because you end up needing to do the same things with just an additional timer or enemy etc…). And the last stars were quite a bit harder than anything in Galaxy.

Galaxy is so great. Good flow, good looking, excellent music with a mix of epic and ambient… And a new character that got more personality from a short story and a couple dialogues than any character from the series ever had.

Too bad they never really knew what to do with her after that. Except Ubisoft with Mario + Rabbids 2, but… Meh.

Oh yeah, the old “make it a contest and have a bunch of people work for you for free” trick.

I hate that this kind of scam works.

Pesto-apocalyptic, Calzone the Barbarian…

I tried.

There’s Cadence of Hyrule, and the map shifts every game!

Okay, that’s a stretch.

It’s something I feel like more recent Nintendo games haven’t done.

References to past games are still a thing they do quite a lot. Weirdly enough in Super Mario Odyssey they went all in on Donkey Kong nostalgia. 3D world has the Comet Observatory, reimagined levels from 64, Bowser’s Fury brought back Bowser Jr’s paintbrush from Sunshine.

Breath of the Wild is chock full of references, ruins of old places, every land feature name is evoking something, be it a character, an old boss, whatever, music cues from the Temple of Time, Spectacle Rock dungeon, Dragon Roost Island…

Echoes of Wisdom borrowed like 70% of its map from A Link to the Past. Again. They already did that in A Link Between Worlds. Not a fan of that one honestly, I love ALttP, Nintendo please stop nostalgia farming it for subpar games already. I like my maps to feel fresh.

Mario Kart World is almost nothing but references, most tracks are from past episodes, and you can find stuff like SNES circuits on the roads around the official ones. And there are loads of remixes of past games music, from NES to Switch and everything in between.

Not all games are about graphics, and this looks completely serviceable to me. I understand struggling with ASCII roguelike interfaces (never really got the hang of it myself), but everything here looks easily identifiable.

I’m pretty sure the few overpaid execs that are “fuck you” rich are still there, and they’re probably richer than ever. However now they probably consider themselves too important to park with normal people. It’s all about private jets and helicopters.

Tells a lot about this guy and his ilk that he thinks you measure a healthy company to how many assholes actively flaunt their money with shallow luxury shit.

I mean, Hamilton exists. If people want to write crazy shit about historical figures or make games about them they should be able to.

There’s a 35 year old game series featuring stuff like leading Cleopatra’s army against the tyrannical rule of Theodore Roosevelt while Gandhi’s words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS.

I recently learned there was a musou/Warriors game called Bladestorm taking place during the hundred years’ war. The game was not great apparently but reading about the crazy anime takes on European historical figures and events is funny.

Apparently it has a sequel where Joan of Arc turns evil (including the stereotypical villainess costume change, of course) and leads an army of sorcerers and monsters to wreck havoc.

The Triforce quest was somewhat nerfed in the remake. You get some fragments immediately instead of finding a map to them.

And the new sail kinda makes wind control useless for sailing which I’m honestly not sure I like. This is just a part of the game’s theme they cut, there is such a thing as too convenient IMO.

IMO the cool thing about TP is the weirdness. There are those eerie choirs, even in the jingles, there are some quite grotesque designs, and a few quite disturbing and puzzling cutscenes.

It’s definitely the Zelda game for weird moods, maybe not as crazy as Majora’s Mask but more like a constant feeling of something being not right.

Such is Aryll’s power. I am pretty sure she can invade people’s minds.

Exhibit A : just her being there is enough to change the background music in all of Outset Island to her theme.

On the subject of colours/lighting, not sure your emulator is to blame because this is one of two things I didn’t like about that remake, and I played it on Wii U. They made everything neon and cranked lighting effects to the max.

The other thing was removing the Tingle tuner, that was a lot of fun in coop on the GameCube, and replacing it with a soulless online message system that didn’t even last for the whole (very short) life of the console (because it was tied to miiverse, a service they killed after a few years).

The game does have a long intro, but IMO Twilight Princess was even worse. That game took forever to start.

Well, I did say a sequel would probably not ruin a game I liked… And admittedly, yeah, this involves very few competitive multiplayer games.

The part about a beloved franchise or character didn’t really evoke that kind of ruining to me. But I get that point of view.

I don’t think it would be possible for a bad sequel to ruin a game I liked.

Metroid Other M has not ruined previous Metroids for me (its terrible Adam Malkovich depiction doesn’t even register when I’m playing Fusion, since the character has barely any continuity between the two).

Okamiden did not ruin Okami, it just sucked on its own and what little story it tried to change I disregard. I’d replay Okami today in a heartbeat.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 took a direction I hated, both in style and gameplay, and it made me want to replay XC1. I did. It’s still awesome, though XC3 became my favourite.

And complete opposite of the topic : Baten Kaitos was not bad, but kind of a silly popcorn game to me. Baten Kaitos Origins did not ruin this game : it was so great and flipped the interpretation of the first game so well it made BK better.

… How is that the name of an actual game?

Just in case, no, that was a joke about Voltaire, the philosopher.

The phrase “Holy Roman Empire” is most commonly used for the German empire that went from Charlemagne to 1800-ish (long after the fall of the “other” Roman Empire). Voltaire criticized the HRE of his time calling it “neither holy, nor Roman or an empire”.

This quote is kind of a meme among Crusader Kings players for example because HRE is kind of a pain in these games.