Sonic and Dr. Robotnik are codependent. They don’t actually want to defeat each other. That’s why Robotnik is always building these elaborate bases that, for some reason, have a bunch of perfectly Sonic-sized tubes for getting around in. And it’s why there’s always that moment at the end where Sonic is chasing Robotnik but doesn’t catch him.
This is true for a lot of hero villain combos. Batman and Joker come to mind immediately.
Most games have a terrible story that merely serve as plot points to give context to what’s happening. The lore and world building is usually pretty good but story rarely is better than ‘ok’
This kinda makes me think of Borderlands. I love the games, but the writing and dialog can be… subpar, at times.
I really, really, wanted to like Wonderlands…
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The factory doesn’t always have to grow.
At some point it needs to stop.And even deflate a bit, it wouldn’t hurt.
Yes, give the bots a rest.
I just realized you probably weren’t talking about the gaming industry, but I’m pleased to see my comment fit anyway.
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This is why I’m very pleased by how small in scope the upcoming Factorio expansion is compared to some of the mods that inspired/preceded it (notably Space Exploration).
I wanted to do an eco-friendly run of factorio but it’s really hard
The dark souls games aren’t as hard as people think they are. Or they’re differently hard than people think.
I’m not saying they’re easy. But I think people think they’re all lightning fast twitch or die. A lot of the game is more “you took a corner at high speed and fell into a hole in the ground, and then rats ate you while you panicked”.
Sometimes there’s speed, but a lot of it is staying calm and aware.
When one of my friends started playing Dark Souls, one of the first areas he went to was somewhere that was extremely difficult at his level and skill (he went to the catacombs straight after firelink). He found it exceptionally difficult in a not-fun way, but he continued pushing forward, because he had heard about how gruelling and difficult Dark Souls was.
He told me about this when I was first playing the game, as a way of explaining how the game isn’t necessarily difficult in the way people make it out to be. He needlessly struggled because he was inadvertently listening more to how people talk about the game than what the game was actually communicating to him, via it’s in-game mechanics: namely the skeletons weren’t reviving because the game is unfair and mean, but because there are some mages reviving them; said mages are often difficult to reach, but ranged weapons exist; divine weapons make the skeletons stay dead and can be obtained by explaining other parts of the game; clubs are better against skeletons than swords.
The thing that he, and later I, loved about the souls games is how the challenge works. I like how they foster an environmental awareness in me, both for lore purposes, and figuring out if there are any sneaky mages hidden around. I like being very autistic and getting attached to certain weapons, leading to some enemies being much more difficult than if I were more flexible (and occasionally, I like changing my play-style when the game’s systems are screaming at me “WHAT YOU’RE DOING ISN’T WORKING. TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT — LITERALLY ANYTHING DIFFERENT, YOU HAVE SO MANY WEAPONS”)
Ghost of Tsushima is one of the most overrated games of all time. It’s a perfectly fine experience carried by solid combat and high polish, but far from being one of the best games of all time. The writing and acting is monotonously dour and the quest design is uninspiring, which wears you out because the game is also way too long for what little variety it offers. The open world is also your bland, boring, garden variety Ubisoft style.
Romances in BG3 are poorly written and realized and detract from the quality of the game. BG3 in general is merely “fine for a video game” in terms of writing. People also let the game get away with murder in terms of how much it falls apart in the third act.
Cyberpunk 2077 - despite all its flaws - is CDPR’s best game.
Cyberpunk 2077 - despite all its flaws - is CDPR’s best game.
Brave and accurate.
Meanwhile the Sly Cooper series was among the best games, for the man hours they sunk into Ghosts they could have made have made the most amazing Sly 5
Agree about the romances in BG3, they feel pretty shallow. While I can maybe see your point about the writing in general what I think makes BG3 great is that it felt like playing tabletop dnd. New bad guys every week, silly fights and absurd coincidence, maps with minimal markers and characters that are there for the party to use to progress as heros (biggest thing to me that didn’t feel like tabletop dnd was having to loot every box VS just saying I searched the room).
Haven’t played other CDPR games. Guess I don’t need to bother lol.
Like for example. I genuinely like Wakka from Final Fantasy X and think he’s a great character with a lot of development. He has a genuine albeit misguided reason to hate the people he does given his situation, his firm beliefs in Yevon and to not spoil an over a decade old game his brother’s death.
Plus he has a great character development point throughout the game that lessens his hate towards the Al bhed and even sees him developing a genuine friendship with Rikku and the other Al Bhed to some degree
I forget that people hate Wakka. Not every character needs to be a paragon of justice. It’s interesting because he’s such a hopeful character, but also hateful.
A+ pick.
And it’s further backed up by the change you can see in him when he learns the WHOLE truth and how he does a 180 as a character.
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Breath of the Wild was a bad Zelda game. Not bad as a game in general, but terrible as a Zelda game. Apparently, people have told me this is a hot take.
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I actually don’t mind gacha games with microtransactions as long as the gameplay is good and the game is free to play. I really like Super Mecha Champions and Zenless Zone Zero currently.
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Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a snoozefest to play. People always tell me to play it and how good it is but the auto-battler combat where the characters have bark lines for literally every action they take in a second is just not for me.
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Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour is the best C&C excluding the Red Alert games. No, I won’t argue with you, and no, I won’t change my mind.
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Metroid Other M wasn’t actually that bad. Yes, the cutscenes were long and the game was pretty linear (just like Metroid Fusion and Dread, honestly), and yes, I can see why certain people would be mad about certain plot points, but the game was not literally Hitler. It was a very fun action game, and what is crazy is that the gameplay was equally as fun to watch someone else play it. The pixel hunts were kinda annoying because of the way they were forced, and I do wish it had analog controller support, but at the end of the day I still think it was a pretty fun game to play.
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Call of Duty Infinite actually had a fun campaign. Granted, the last CoD I played before it was World At War, but I actually really liked the campaign. I liked the structure of being in a spaceship and choosing the missions I wanted to do.
Absolutely agree about BotW. I’m barely getting into it (only 800 more korok seeds to go…), and I really enjoy it as a game, but it feels more like a great game set in Hyrule than it does a Zelda game. I think they strayed a bit too far from the formula on it. I miss going into a temple, finding a bunch of stuff I can’t do anything with, getting an item, using that item to solve all the puzzles I couldn’t do anything about, then using the skills that gave me to beat the boss with that item. I miss permanent items that are given incrementally and give a feeling of progression as more of the world opens up to you as a result. BotW feels like it gave me all my items at the beginning, handed me an open world, and said, “Have fun.”
I am having fun. Just not Zelda fun.
I am having fun. Just not Zelda fun.
The problem I have is that it just makes me want to play a Zelda game. It would probably be fun without the Zelda skin but as it is it just reminds me of a game I would rather be playing.
Honestly just in general BotW was so amazing when it came out because it really was this break in formulaic gameplay that was really needed, but as soon as you complete a casual campaign or two it wears thin as the flaws start setting in. Seeing TotK really focuses hard on those flaws while also spelling out a future of even more formulaic games than ever before. Considering that Eiji Aonuma hinted that TotK is the baseline for future Zelda games, it seems clear that they’re falling in the exact same trap as they did with OoT, the trap that he acknowledges in that same interview. It kind of feels dooming for the future of the mainline Zelda, since we already see the flaws of this style very early on.
Super hyped for Echoes of Wisdom though. That one looks like it could be fun if executed well.
I agree about Xenoblade 2. I played for 10-20 hours and had to drop it. At some point I would find a horde of enemies and go “dear God not ANOTHER fight” and just start running.
Definitely there on Other M too. The story is pretty mindless but the gameplay is pretty addicting and the FPS missile context switching is as fascinating and creative as it is awkward.
In general, I’m tired of seeing this trend of open world being just a superior format to linear gameplay. It feels like this encroaching new version of “3D is objectively better than 2D”, and watching Nintendo IPs fall into this trap one by one is kind of depressing. Open world is for players crafting their own story, and linear is more fitting if you want to tell a story. It’s certainly why the delivery of TOTK’s story is so repetitive, and how most open world games aren’t really open world because it just ends up on a linear track as soon as you reach an objective. Meanwhile, Metroid Dread the first go around honestly feels like an open world game despite being a total rollercoaster because the game design pushes the player’s intuitions so well, combining what the industry learned from games like Half Life, Mirror’s Edge, Uncharted, etc.
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Miyazaki hasn’t really innovated since Demon Souls. The other games are slight variations on the same gameplay and design. Sekiro is the biggest change, but the overall design is still very similar. The rest are just “more aggressive / faster” or “open world/metroidvania” in comparison. There are other differences, but the core experience is basically the same.
Fumito Ueda, while similarly iterating on similar ideas, was far more ambitious in his game design between Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian. Ico was very different to mainstream gaming at the time. SOTC pushed animation and scale to the limits of the hardware while doubling down on “design by subtraction”. Guardian, while similar in concept to Ico, was a bold move in relying on a “true to life” creature and developing your relationship with that creature as gameplay design. Each were far less mainstream than Miyazaki’s design which is why, as acclaimed as they are, you will find more division about them from so called “core” gamers.
He’s the more important auteur in the medium. You don’t get Dark Souls without Ico.
Most crafting mechanics suck and feel grafted on. This is especially true if crafting isn’t the main point of the game.
Breath of the Wild was a much needed change in a series that had started to go stale. While I like Zelda games, the formula of go to the dungeon, get item, defeat boss, go to next dungeon and repeat was getting worn out, with exploration taking a backseat.
There are too many Pokemon. I don’t know if that’s a hot take, but I’m including it anyway.
Having parts of the map blocked off at the beginning of GTA games is garbage and the in game explainations even moreso. Part of the fun is walking around doing random stuff, I want to be able to do that from the get go. Thankfully GTA V got it right.
The GameCube controller is overrated. While I like the giant A button and the shoulder triggers, the D-pad is too small, the X and Y buttons are oddly shaped and easy to mix up, and there should’ve been a shoulder on the left side too.
My hot take on games like BOTW and TOTK: when the game is so open ended you can invent your own answer, the answer to every puzzle ends up being the same.
In BOTW the answer to every puzzle is “balloon”. In TOTK it’s “big stick”. In Scribblenauts it’s “invincible deadly flying rideable friendly <insert your favorite noun here>”. No, I don’t mean literally every puzzle, but it works often enough that I feel like I’m just wasting time if I try doing things any other way.
The handful of times I’ve actually felt creative in TOTK were when I was just messing around. Creativity is rarely useful in meaningful progression.
More traditional metroidvanias (including traditional Zelda’s) give you bits of “huh I don’t think I can get there now but clearly I’ll have some way to get there later” and “I just got this thing I wonder what I can do with it”. That kind of puzzle solving is completely absent from many newer Zeldas (BOTW, TOTK, ALBW).
Any puzzle that requires exceptional levels of creativity to solve is going to leave some players stranded
Which is not only fine, it’s what a game should strive for
Sure in a specialized puzzle game maybe.
I agree except for the crafting lol. I love being able to be like “you know what, fuck society” and building up my skills to find ways to make my own stuff without paying in-game money for it. I guess too many games have crafting mechanics that do suck though so you are right about that.
Dark Souls 2 is a significantly better game than Dark Souls 3
Extremely spicy but I can respect it
I find dark souls 3 successfully condensed down the mechanics and gameplay of the souls games but delivered nothing in terms of exploration and world building.
The lore is DS2 is very good but the gameplay feels so horrendously unpolished and a lot of enemy placement feels really bad.
If I could play ds2 with ds3 gameplay it would potentially be able to rival the first half of DS1 for me
the enemy placement isn’t exactly amazing in vanilla but it is atrocious in scholar of the first sin. which one did you play?
I’ve watched gameplay for SOTFS but I played vanilla and maybe both DLC I think.
What do you consider the first half of DS1? Before Sen’s fortress?
Everything up to the lord vessel. Your goals and fast travel completely changes how you play the game and the new areas are less interesting imo
Depends, just the base game or with all the DLCs? The DLCs are some of the best in the series, but the base game is about as enjoyable as fucking a fleshlight with glass shards in it. With the DLC I’d put it just above DS3 because you still need to suffer the base game to play them.
Base game or base game + dlc, ds2>ds3
I don’t know if I’d go as far with my personal tastes, but I know for sure ds3 makes me stressed out. I think the combat system is far too fast and roll centric to be enjoyable to me. DS2 is just a nice adventure and sometimes I need that despite its flaws.
As a piece of art ds2 does some questionable things, but as a game it is a lot of fun to play and has a lot of replayability.
People complaining about Fitzroy or racism commentary in BioShock Infinite missed the actual point of the story. I know a YouTuber who complained that you couldn’t aim the baseball, and he super missed the actual point of the story.
Mass Effect 3’s ending was totally fine the first time, especially since its ending wasn’t reduced down to a choice between three things; the entire 25-30 hours prior to that were you wrapping up all of the series plot threads, and they all compose the ending.
Disco Elysium is too info dump-y to be held up as some gold standard of writing, and every character was such an exhaustively shitty person that I didn’t feel much like finishing it.
People who say Hades is a great roguelike have only played one.
People who say Hades is a great roguelike have only played one.
Oof this one for real. It’s a good game with excellent art style and music, but once I finished a run for the first time I was done. The lure of more story for beating more challenges was not enough for me.
Meanwhile I can’t stop returning to FTL every once in a while, despite having already beat it 100%. I’m more excited for Slay the Spire 2 than Hades 2.
For real. I love Supergiant games and Bastion has been a personal inspiration in my gamedev journey, but I have Hades loving friends that look at me like I’m some kind of alien when I prefer doing another run in Dead Cells.
I would say a lot of the characters don’t suck in disco Elysium but I also didn’t have the best of times with that game. It was cool and I think the zanyness they peppered into the writing was fun to experience.
I had a really hard time getting into Hades. It’s very visually pleasing, the VA is great but the gameplay feels unimpressive. Seemed I only almost completed one run but it just wasn’t all that to me
I’d heard so many good things about DE but the voice acting felt so jarring it really put me off. Words completely mispronounced (or maybe bad translation) in the intro and no sense of flow whatsoever.
Most writing and VA in games is embarrassingly bad.
Yeah but TBF most games are bad. If you filter out the shovelware you are left with games that are actually putting in some effort. Usually the VA and writing are at least passable in those. But many genres simply don’t value writing or VA polish very highly. A story-heavy game like Slay the Princess lives or dies by its writing and voice acting. An RTS like Total War where most of the voice acting is unit barks doesn’t need it as much.
90% of anything is crap
Homefront: The Revolution is actually a super fun game. Dare I say…a hidden gem?
It has an atrocious metacritic score for a few reasons. Mainly, some of the enemy AI was broken on release, which is fair, but it’s long since been fixed. The other big issue is that it’s a sequel to a genuinely bad game and most people didn’t bother playing it, and most who did came with the goal of trashing it.
However, this game is fun if you want something kind in the modern Far Cry style vein, but set in urban environments. It run on the Crye Engine and the gunplay is rock solid; the shotgun in this game is fantastic. The guns all have absolutely preposterous alternate fire modes. The assault rifle has its upper swapped out to turn it into landmine launcher.
The story and setting is a complete reset compared to the first game. It isn’t just a lazy “Red Dawn but
ChinaNorth Korea”. There is an elaborate alternate history backstory going back to the 1950s that sees North Korea take the role of the high tech manufacturing hub for the west, eventually becoming what some in the west in the 1970s feared Japan would become- a powerhouse of tech that was rich and had a grip on all western nations because of it. Then this cyberpunk reimagining of North Korea takes over a poor and downtrodden USA after the U.S. had made so many bad choices that NK could plausibly send “international peacekeepers”. Absolutely nuts plot, but so weird and strangely high effort. Also means the bad guys are coded so cyberpunk and have all kinds of drones and stuff.FFXV, while flawed, is a good game and it’s the only one that feels like an actual journey.
Lies of P is better than From’s souls games.
Ffxv has some of the best vibes in gaming. Nothing really hits like driving across the countryside with the boys.
