Sunjammer

I tend to play games that foster replayability. I love score attack games like Cave shmups, run based games, and tactics/strategy games with procedural content like Civ, Xcom, Stellaris etc. I don't replay story games much unless the underlying game mechanics are really good and open to emergent gameplay.

This feels impossible but I'll try. I guess these are the systems I consider "done".

• NES - Mega Man 2
• Game Boy - Castlevania 2: Belmont's Revenge
• SNES - The Legend of Zelda: A link to the past
• Amiga - Elite 2: Frontier
• Sega Master System - Sonic The Hedgehog 2
• Dreamcast - Chu Chu Rocket
• GBA - Advance Wars 2
• DS - Korg DS-10
• 3DS - Luigi's Mansion 2
• PSP - Tactics Ogre
• XBOX - Ninja Gaiden Black
• XBOX 360 - Fable 2
• Gamecube - Metroid Prime
• Wii - Xenoblade Chronicles
• Wii U - Xenoblade Chronicles X
• MacOS - Marathon 2
• PS2 - Ace Combat 5

I still keep my PS3 hooked up and I find it almost impossible to pick a favorite game on there. My heart wants to go "Killzone 2" but I know there's so much other good stuff. Can't do it!

• Aliens is the worst movie of the original trilogy. James Cameron is a populist hack and all he really wanted was a do-over on the production design Roger Corman squandered on Galaxy of Terror.
• Christopher Nolan is a dour bore whose last good movie was The Prestige, and every single person that finds great mystery and wonder in the arghblargh he's been putting out since is a person I can reliably assume I won't have a good conversation with. The only good thing about The Dark Knight was Heath Ledger. Everything else was dumb. Every single thing.
• The Mega Drive had the best sound chip of its generation and the only reason it sounded "worse" than the SNES was because it took actual skill to work with and the SNES sound chip had massive comical clown training wheels on.
• Super Mario Bros 2 USA is a better, more well rounded game than SMB3, and the SMB3 Mario sprite looks like a shark-eyed serial murderer.
• Mortal Kombat was always extremely lame, almost too lame for objectivity, and the projectile tennis that ensues in the competitive scene makes everyone look terrible.
• Hideo Kojima has made a single truly good game his entire career, MGS V, and his ridiculous "hollywood" ambitions managed to screw that one up too. He coasts on the talents of his team and he himself appears to be the weakest link. He is like SWERY's ultra lame, wealthier cousin. He's the Gladstone Gander of Japanese game design auteurs.
• The PS4 is dull as dishwater, singularly ugly as a piece of industrial design, and is scarily indicative of the console games industry treading water rather than forging ahead for a better future. As dumb and ridiculous as Microsoft's ventures have been at least they're doing "stuff". Sony is just hoping money will keep happening if they do the same thing and if the PS5 is just another one of these things it's the death knell of their games division.
• The Witcher could have been a really good franchise if the main character wasn't The Worst Character Possible.
• Civ 1 is a much better game than Civ 6.
• Alpha Protocol is a better written, better playing stealth/espionage game than any of the Metal Gear games.
• As amazing as their production design is, neither of the two recent Wolfenstein games play very well, which leads me to believe the folks at Machinegames that left Starbreeze didn't include whoever stayed behind to make Syndicate, a vastly better game from a gameplay point of view.

Goodbye friendships!

I think being on syfy killed The Expanse. It is for my money the best show they ever made and I think they did the novels justice. The way that show was rolled out internationally made it very difficult to connect with: The best way to see it here in Norway for instance was through Netflix, but the gap in time between seasons 1 and 2 coming out here was so vast people literally couldn't remember what had happened in the previous season. And they're doing it again now with Season 3, which is nowhere near release over here yet.

I grew up in a time when Babylon 5 *dominated* out here, it was a show people absolutely adored and still talk about to this day, so I don't think there's anything about "space" that turns people off. But if you're going to roll out something as politically and conceptually dense (not to mention slow-moving) as The Expanse, you need to be ahead of the curve in distributing it to the right audience.

When Game of Thrones became big it rolled in on fucks and murder *AND* the fact that HBO is a very experienced distributor with a lot of good will. Almost anything HBO does will get international distribution through clean channels. Practically, the inverse is true for Syfy.

It's a damn tragedy, but it's not the audience that is to blame.

Huh, mine is a little weird to me:

1. XCOM 2 - 176 hours
2. Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion - 127 hours
3. XCOM - 124 hours
4. HITMAN - 117 hours
5. Stellaris - 82 hours
6. Fallout 4 - 79 hours
7. Fallout New Vegas - 77 hours
8. Metal Gear Solid V - 76 hours
9. Dishonored - 72 hours
10. Skyrim - 71 hours

In the 60-70 hour range the list goes and goes though. What is the magic threshold where we determine a play-time is representative of a pattern?

The reason I say it's weird is because my memories of playing games and enjoying them isn't 100% correlated in the list. In other words, games that I remember as far more impactful don't necessarily have high playtimes. I know for a fact I have DCS World playtime in the 600+ hours but I still have more memories of playing Dodonpachi Resurrection, which has 30 something...

Anyway, fun experiment. Guess i'm a stealthy tactics RPG guy?

Aliens is the worst film of the original trilogy. It is in fact a bad film.

Civilization is muddled incomprehensible mess of a series that has completely lost it's way since civ 2.

Marathon still makes Doom look like it was made by dumb people.

Games are not expensive.

Splatoon aiming / motion assist is the greatest innovation in game controls since dual joysticks and anyone that doesn't like it is just like the keyboard players in the 90s that shunned mouselook.

The chat needs to batch renders instead of force a repaint on every message as it currently appears to be doing. The sheer amount of throughput occuring in live chat now makes very capable PCs howl in pain, at least on Chrome. This ain't right.

It's a gorgeous, survival-themed Metroid Prime-like, and I'm so damn happy for that team for really pulling it off. It's such a good survival/exploration game it honestly makes nearly every other game like it look utterly amateur hour.

So first of all let me preface that I really really enjoy Splatoon 2, and I played a ton of Splatoon (probably my 2nd favorite Wii U game after Bayo 2), so I'm not really hating on the game. But some nagging thoughts just want out, and y'all are going to have to deal.

1. Would it have hurt Nintendo to add more music? The repeated playlist was an issue in the first game too and this is like that, again. The 1-minute-left tune, after dozens of matches, really just highlights how repetitive the soundtrack is. Which is crazy because there is so much cool music in the game, just doesn't seem like any of it gets used in multiplayer?
2. The weapons somehow seem less well thought out this time around. Is the stingray good for anything at all? Compared to the inkjets or tentamissiles the stingray seems absolutely useless. It just plants your feet and lets you not do anything useful. The levels I've played so far make chargers pointless. They make you incredibly weak up close (as to be expected) but the levels don't lend themselves to mid-range sniping anything less than the scoped versions push you towards. Why would you ever use a charger over any of the plentiful rapid fire sprayguns? In fact, rapid fire is absolutely king in this if results are to be judged by. I have never ever had problems with anyone with a blaster or charger, but literally anything with a decent firing rate can put up a fight. The aerospray is so ridiculously easy to dominate with it makes choosing anything more deliberate feel like a mistake. The splatling guns.. Why oh why. Why. Just why. They made it a charger which makes it pointless up close, and each burst is not long enough to suppress.. This thing could have been an excellent long range low power suppressor/area denial weapon, and instead it's just a death sentence. Overall I just think there are a few too many obvious duds in the arsenal. A significant balance update is due.
3. I think the current levels are pretty boring and don't make particularly good use of new features like the grind lines. They need to start rolling out bangers from the previous game soon because these are getting heck of old. Humpback Pump track in particular is a flat out whiff of a design, devolving into a messy and chaotic king of the hill that I think kind of oversteps the kind of splatoon chaos you want in favor of something that just feels random.
4. I really wish they'd included a minimap with the dpad for quick-jump to teammates. Having to bring up the map full screen all but guarantees i barely ever have time for it. I really try to practise using it more but it was so easy on the Wii U and here it just feels jarring. Bring up map, select teammate, confirm teammate. It's at least one step too many.
5. One thing I wonder about, and I'm probably wrong: These matches swing so much I wonder why they are 3 minutes long. It seems to me anything of import happens during the last minute anyway. You can utterly dominate the map only to be smashed the last 60 seconds, which makes me sometimes wonder what the point is to making much of an effort the preceding 120... I guess just to grind points?

Anyway, I still love this game and when more updates roll out I'm sure things'll improve. But the weapons really do bother me.

@svenzon: Arcanum is toouuuughh like that