Fun fact, that’s why the immersion-breaking magic compass thing exists in Oblivion (and most open worlds since). Bethsoft devs explained it once.

Stuff is relocated a lot in development, and this means having to rework all dialogues refering to directions, occasionally missing some. It was even more unfeasible for Oblivion in which all dialogue is voiced and would have to be re-recorded.

So they just removed all directions from the dialogue and now you’ve got 100% accurate floating tags telling you exactly where to go, even when you are not yet sure what you’re looking for.

Ah, First Hunt. The demo that made me hope for a good DS Metroid Prime-style game.

And then we got Hunters instead. Boooo.

IMO 7 has a good part of what makes 8 good, especially better item balance (which had already been improved a bit in Wii, but not enough). And I really liked some of the tracks, though some of the linear ones did not convince me, including Rainbow Road.

But 8’s tracks just blew my mind, both the originals and the heavily reimagined classic ones. And the ones from the DLC were even better (well, fuck Baby Park). 200CC being thrown in as a patch was refreshing too. The only thing that was not great and I know was not well received was the loss of actual battle arenas (fixed in 8 deluxe), but since I almost never play those I didn’t care much.

I would have loved for 8D’s pass to be in the same vein as the base tracks, even if it had a lot fewer, instead of hastily recycling Tour content. They clearly went for quantity over quality for those. And the city tracks feel awful to play IMO.

Mario Kart 8’s gimmick barely counts as one. The game would be completely fine without anti-gravity, it’s barely noticeable most of the time. And of course, it’s not even new, it had existed forever in Wipeout and… F-Zero X/GX. It was just not a thing yet in Mario Kart.

They didn’t innovate for Mario Kart 8. They just made an exceptional entry, probably my favorite one in the whole series.

But for some reason, nah, after 2 decades without a game F-Zero needs to kickstart the next era of video games or whatever.

Huh. Didn’t expect that.

I wonder what the gameplay’s like. I am expecting still having a management component but building automatons instead of cultivating rice, maybe…

Actual ammo vending machines. That can be tampered with. Great.

Could we not Torment Nexus the rest of Bioshock, please?

You know, if you people wanna ditch the Kingdom and join the club, I don’t think it’s too late.

People who don’t believe birds are dinosaurs have not watch some birds closely enough. Including chickens.

I’ve played Tales of Monkey Island. If you’ve played Telltale’s version of Sam and Max, it’s pretty much the same kind of take. Probably suffers quite a bit from the episodic format, and puzzles are a bit straightforward compared to classic monkey island games. Fans of the series mostly consider it a huge letdown.

Can’t say anything about the more serious parts of the Telltale catalogue, I’ve never played those, but for having played this, the 3 Sam & Max seasons and Back to the Future, there was certainly a Telltale formula that started annoying me after a while. They went less and less subtle about crafting their dialogues so they all lead to the same answer, they clearly wrote their stories with an objective to reuse character models and assets, and they still used that in-house engine that looked and controlled terribly, barely improved through the years.

Maybe it’s because I played them too late, but while I mostly had a blast playing HL2, the first one never clicked for me.

I know, it’s been very influential and new when it released, but it was still quite straight a FPS game. Whereas HL2 is like a crazy theme park of different ambiences and mechanics.

Yeah, it’s probably terrifying at first.

I’m sure they’d get used to it though, almost any kind of riding/driving a vehicle is going against all your preservation instincts when it’s the first time you do it.

Okay, that looks pretty cool.

I remember the sense of Pride and Accomplishment everyone got from that game back then.

Sakuna, of Rice and Ruins is about a goddess in a fictional but very shinto-adjacent religion in a country not quite, but not entirely unlike Japan. She’s the daughter of her pantheon’s God of War and Goddess of Harvests. She bashes monster heads and she sows rice, and both are important.

Fun and light-hearted, with a small cast of quirky likeable characters.

YouTube pushes whatever format feels popular to them at the time, like when they started giving absurd weight to shorts.

Even content creators that pretty much only do long, focussed videos started to hack useless bits of them to put in shorts as an aside, just because the algorithm would make their channel basically invisible without a few of them.

And then of course YouTube will prioritize those in all feeds, even if you’re watching on a fucking TV app.

If youtube starts the same kind of shit with vertical streaming, you can be sure they’re going to pop everywhere, no matter how fitting the format is.

General opinion seems to be this is definitely a game.

So now their solution to the whole “don’t you guys have phone?” situation is to keep designing for mobile but port those everywhere.

I think I’ll keep not giving a shit, thank you very much.

Warner Bros is trying way too hard at this multiverse thing.

They did say that GOG didn’t mean “Good Old Games” anymore at one point, trying to change their image a bit, but even then they never really stopped doing that really.

They chased lost licences for a bunch of old CRPG, they made preconfigured DosBox packages for games that needed them…

They’d be crazy to stop that. As you said, it’s one of the things that set them slightly apart from the competition.

Cool declaration of intent, and they definitely do a lot for tweaking and packaging old games so they’re in a playable state.

But it’s a bit amusing to see The Witcher in there. I mean, yeah, I certainly hope you’re maintaining that one.