Morrowind was a terrible action game, and a fantastic hand-crafted world to explore.

Oblivion felt like a huge step back to me. Sure it looked a lot better, it was technically bigger, it was entirely voiced over, and its physics… err… existed.

But it was so bland. Completely generic environments, copy-pasted dungeons and buildings everywhere, almost any encounter a leveled rando with no personality.

And then everything they did to make the game more modern only made it more boring. Voiced over? Sure, enjoy everyone having one sentence of dialogue. Looking for stuff? Nobody’s got time for that, just follow the magic compass.

I understand why they did those. But despite how janky Morrowind could be in some aspects, nobody can convince me Oblivion was the better game.

Depends, at some points you need enough to progress. I might have been a little too controlling of my cult’s population for my playthrough, because there were several times I struggled a bit to meet the requirement.

Haven’t bought the latest DLC yet. I might return to it.

They’re possessed by the power of Music.

Necrodancer : REANIMATE!!

Not sure, but I certainly don’t get “it’s there” from “there is something else instead that feels completely different from the original design”.

Well, if I get what they’re doing this time, it’s different.

Heroes in Fable are driven by narrative forces, they are supposed to be literally heroes of a fable. Morality in these games is not reputation, it’s not supposed to be realistic, it’s like a natural law of the world. And, along with a few other character development traits, morality changes your character physically.

You can even “boost” your evilness with stuff like eating live chicks. Nobody witnesses you doing that.

There’s a whole shtick in Fable that sets it apart from most RPGs, in that, Fable never even pretends you’re a character among others. You’re one of 5 or so heroes destined to shape the story, and the rules applying to you are just different from everyone else.

It sounds like this time, they’re going for something a lot more classic, i.e. scoring how people feel about your choices.

I really can’t sympathetize, neither with buying and then losing that much runescape money, nor with having and then losing that much in bitcoin.

The only BG&E2 that I cared about about was a direct sequel, and that hope died about 2 decades ago.

Ubisoft did nothing worth a damn for a very long time, and they can blame their shitty management and the army of marketting “experts” ruling their projects for that.

I’ve played it long ago. Doesn’t it end on a cliffhanger of sort? Or am I confusing it with something else?

I kinda remember being annoyed with the state the plot was left in.

Microtransactions, and gacha in particular, are a plague. I don’t expect this terrible mess will have any significant negative impact for the game publisher, but if it does, good.

I’m in France. Local implementation of the EU law may be different in other countries (that’s how EU laws work) but here every digital content store, including Steam, just has you ticking the box that says “You agree to no use your legal period of 14 days to cancel this purchase”, and then they can do whatever they want.

Steam’s refund policy is their own. And though it’s mostly a good thing for customers, in my opinion, it’s also an attempt to defuse some valid criticism. Easier to keep not controlling any of the broken or zero effort unity tutorial/asset flip shit that gets released on the store routinely if you can tell people “just refund”.

The travel ticket thing

That’s the one, the thing that let you go to random deserted islands, usually for materials. It was just never meant to be printed en masse and hoarded like capital.

I think the idea of needing an economy between players in AC is a bit ridiculous too anyway. My only “trades” with other players, if you could call them that, were stuff like “you can go pick some of my extra blue roses, and please get me that cool red godzilla variant from your town”.

NH tends to be “softer” in general, and I do regret some choices too, including that one a bit, but I think it would have been a lot harder to maintain to go back to all those little choices and put toggles on them. Especially with all the complaints around everything that was “wrong” back around NH’s debut (with people arguing a lot about how wrong it was).

There has been a lot of QoL added to updates, which makes me think they did hear some of the most common annoyances people had, but if you weren’t there around the first months, you can’t imagine the level of drama going on.

Including stuff that were only problems because of people making up their own rules and getting upset when it was not streamlined enough.

I don’t hear a lot about that anymore, but there was a lot of people trying for a better online player economy (…yeah, not sure why). Their problem was the most common currency, bells, was too easy to cheese/get through cheating. So they turned to another “currency”, the Nook Miles Ticket. Since you get it from miles, and miles are rewarded for actually imteracting with the game a lot, it felt more “valuable” to them (hell, they put proof of work into freaking Animal Crossing).

Since normally tickets have only one purpose on-game and that’s visiting a singular mystery island, the miles redeeming machine only gives one ticket at a time with a fairly long interaction. For normal use, it’s completely fine. But of course people wanting to use them as money complained s lot about how long it is to spit out a hundred “NMTs”.

One of the things that don’t exist anymore in NH but was still a thing in NL is villagers can move in and most importantly out without you noticing, because you can only convince them to stay if you catch them the day they decide to move.

In NH they’re basically stuck with you forever until they tell you they consider moving, and then you can tell them not too. And you can also try to choose a new villager by meeting random ones on desert islands (though you can still just leave it completely to chance too). Depending on who you ask, some prefer the bit of simulated independence, others can’t stand the idea of their “dream villager” leaving if they missed the day.

By the way the same masked rabbit is living in my NH town right now! She’s called Grisette in French.

It is exactly that. I never truly did that for Civ, but had fun with hotseat sessions of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. IIRC the game literally calls it that, must have been the first I encountered the term.

Neither do I, but it was about 450 where I live.

I have a big switch library, and my OG switch is not in the best of shapes. Also, I honestly expected better from Mario Kart.

So yeah, as I said, I’m not exactly advising anyone to get one right now. I’m just saying, it’s more comfortable than the switch, it has one good exclusive game, and it runs some switch 1 games significantly better.

I have one, I like it as a slightly better switch, but, yeah. There’s not a lot of reasons to get one for now.

Mario Kart World and Age of Imprisonment are disappointing, most of the other first party games are just upgrades of Switch games, including Prime 4 that’s… Meh.

Bananza was a lot of fun, but it’s not selling a whole console.

I had an original DS, the big gray brick that’s been nicknamed “panzer” compared to DS Lite and DSi… Amusing when you see how 3DS XL and then the Switches turned out.

After years of service the upper screen broke into a pretty LCD rainbow. At the time it was long into DSi life and 3DS was almost coming, but I still got a new white DS Lite because I wanted the GBA port. I still have that one.

It was a bit awkward because New Horizons (Switch) is not very different from NL except it started very rough and unfinished. It removed a lot of things from NL (especially furniture customization options, which is still a shame), and at launch there was very little to do.

Nowadays though, following several updates, it’s great. There’s still a bit of nostalgia for great stuff in NL (better Isabelle, funnier dialogues, more furniture sets and customization, and a few special villagers and cool mini-games).

But the missing NPCs/events were progressively added, exterior furniture is a huge pro, and especially the big update along the Happy Home Paradise DLC added a ton of new items. And there’s a new update coming soon (probably the last one, and after a very long time wothout anything, but it was a bit unexpected).

the whole thing was basically held together with duct tape at one point, and the shell’s paint is peeling

Yeah, sounds common on 3DS. I have a Majora’s Mask edition n3DS XL, its paint started flaking on edges for normal use only a year or so from getting it.

Got a free new shell (correct golden colour!) from support back then, so there was that at least. After that I encased my 3DS in a clear rubber protection so the paint doesn’t wear off again. But those rubber things don’t age well and start getting an ugly yellow hue after a while.

I consider the best “New” to be Wii by far. Good challenge, good level diversity, the right kind of chaotic fun in multiplayer.

The first NSMB was still very basic, and U was boring and uninspired. New Super Luigi U was the best part of U, at least it tried something, but too little too late.

NSMB2 felt like the worst example of “we need a Mario game now, pile up random shit until we have one”. I mean, they tried to have a gimmick in this one, putting it everywhere in theming and it’s… Collecting more coins than usual? And even then they don’t do anything with it.

By the way, of course everyone is allowed their opinion, but… 30 years later, still team SMB3.

Yeah it’s usualy how they work. At some point you could do it with a modified custom map for Smash Bros. IIRC before that another hack used that Tales of Symphonia Wii sequel everyone has forgotten ever existed.

On Wii U, they found a way to execute code from a vulnerability in the web browser, so that’s convenient. Just go to the right website and you can launch your homebrew installer that will replace the useless “Health and Safety” app.

There was a time you needed to sacrifice a legitimately acquired DS game on the Wii U (Brain Training DS was a popular choice, because it was free at one point. And most people don’t care about being able to play that, especially on a home console).

Stuff like that happened with the Wii and 3DS. Suddenly a random LEGO game that’s not being produced anymore becomes the hottest game on the second hand market because it can be used to inject code and install homebrew.

Until someone finds another way in at least.

I liked Wonder. It’s a decent attempt at refreshing 2D Mario, and some of the level gimmicks were quite fun. I think they’ve tried to recapture the effect of “every level a new idea” in 3D World, though I’d agree they were not as succesful in this one.

It’s a lot better than NSMB U IMO, that one was incredibly bland (especially after NSMB Wii, that one was great).

What the hell was that excuse in the quote?

“We tried to tell our employees not to work on sundays, and then one guy told us once he couldn’t work on that friday and that he’d prefer to work on sunday!”

This is absolute bad faith, it has nothing to do with resorting to crunch. You may make your schedules more flexible, for convenience. It’s nice, but it’s comparatively not a huge deal.

Problem is when you’re making your employees work 12-hour days or a whole week with no rest day. Making it sound like one anecdote is ruining all your attempts to have an healthy work schedule is insulting to everyone.

I’ve played Penny’s Big Breakaway. It’s well made, and I had a bit of fun with it, but it’s not what I usualy look for in a platformer. It’s a very score-based game in which just going through a level is easy but the real challenge is doing it in style, by chaining moves and racking up combos.

I mean, that setting alone shouldn’t be enough to claim copyright infringement, but the visual identity of the Tencent game looks way too close to Horizon. And since apparently they tried to get the licence and failed, it’s even harder to see it as anything but an attempt to make “I can’t believe it’s not Horizon”.

They could have made it look different enough that it would be considered at most heavily inspired and there would be nothing wrong with it.

I certainly don’t think Sony needs defending, but yeah, I can’t say that result is surprising.

It’s not wrong, but the amount of random shit they added to it is enough to make a dive into it worth it to me, at least once in a while.

It’s certainly not deep, but there’s stuff to do, some room for creativity, and occasional funny weirdo creatures to encounter.

It’s Bethesda we’re talking about. They can definitely reach that level of incompetence without AI being involved.

I absolutely love XC1 and 3, and I enjoy XCX for everything that’s not its story, and…

Yeah I totally agree with you. XC2 is cursed on many levels. It’s the one I just can’t replay and it’s mainly because of its characters and degenerate quirks. You’ve played the worst game of the series by far.

I am sure anyone who played Tears of the Kingdom did that at some point, but there are those koroks little guys you’re supposed to guide to their destination, generally by designing machines to carry them there.

Of course instead you just strap them to the most absurd rocket powered contraptions and play Korok Space Program.

I can kind of see that.

It was not a huge problem for me, but I play lots of metroidvania, and I am used to memorizing stuff for later. And for stuff that I know will be hard to remember, occasionally, I might take notes or screenshots of hints.

Though most of the time, there are more than one hint for a single quest. The game does a very good job at updating every related NPC dialogue when something has changed.

But if you want to find everything, yeah you have to talk to absolutely everyone. TWICE. Almost everyone has two lines of dialogue at any moment.

I like CrossCode, but I am going to bat for Phoenotopia Awakening, one of the best game almost nobody has heard about. Slightly different perspective but similarly massive game full of secrets, puzzles, fun characters and a consistent world where even the tiniest bit of banter can lead you to discover something on the other side of the map.

It doesn’t actually appear anywhere in game but Oblivion’s main character has an internal name in the editor. “Bendu Olo”. Very Geoge Lucas kind of name.

Shin Megami Tensei games have you rename their protagonist (and often the 3 other central characters too), but most of them don’t have a canonical name. Also most of the time those people are supposed to be Japanese. Every time I am starting a game like that I struggle to choose a name that doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb for them.

If there is a default name, I usually use it. Exceptions are the kind of RPG where the character is a blank slate, whose identity doesn’t matter at all and whose appearance is custom (like Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Xenoblade X for example). And stuff like Pokémon, obviously. When your avatar is going to meet other players, doesn’t look good if everyone has the same name.

I started Xenoblade Chronicles X (Wii U) without even knowing the main character had a canon name (it’s… Cross. Like the X is supposed to be pronounced in the games’s title). But even if know it now I still rename them. They are custom, there is multiplayer, and story-wise they’re the blandest of characters anyway, so…

A bit of warning : I’ve seen indie developers mention that having a single common word for their game title was a mistake. It makes it hard to search for. A combination of words or a simple phrase is better in that regard.

Searching only for “Architect game” right now already yields a bunch of things, like a Korean MMO, actual house architect simulators, and you know, the very popular Prison Architect.

If you are already subscribed to Switch Online, the SNES version of Puyo Puyo Tsuu has been on the SNES online app for a while (in Japanese, but there’s just a couple of simple menus and a bit of silly banter before story mode battles).

It’s basically the one that became the model for Puyo Puyo VS rules.

Wait, is this what they’re calling the metaverse now? Just being able to run stuff inside other stuff?

That cycle was artificially squeezed into one year though.

If we’re staying in the area of games that don’t rely on story or lots of new manually crafted environments, a game like, say, SimCity could have had a minor update and be released slightly better every year. That didn’t happen, it got 3 games in ten years despite being quite popular.

They litterally did 4 years of re-releasing the exact same FIFA on Switch with only a roster update, just slapping a “legacy edition” on them for good measure. If it’s the same game, by comparison, making it a DLC of the previous edition is slightly more honest.

Annual sports game editions are just a wet dream a marketing genius had back in the 90s. A shame that it must still work on a significant part of their audience.

Well, thank you very much, because of that last sentence I’ve parsed your message three times wondering if some of it was sarcasm.