A problem for game developers is when people (especially people with less experience playing games) change the way the game plays and have way less fun than they would have if they left the developer in charge of the experience, and stop playing the game or telling their friends about it.
A problem for fan communities is whether fans have a shared experience or if the experiences are so different that they no longer really signal something strangers might have in common. (I certainly played a lot of Battle Chess because of the cool animations and credit fed through a bunch of arcade shooters long before I knew what those games had to offer)
I paid $1 for game pass this month just to remind myself what Halo 5 multiplayer was like (and honestly surprised MS has now my given same account a THIRD chance at this $1 deal). I have a lot of weird choices for how to play Halo Infinite:
1. play it on my ancient xbox one natively (low framerate and flat image quality)
2. play it on my ancient xbox one with the xbox cloud gaming beta (input lag, compression artifacts)
3. reinstall windows 10 from scratch to maybe hopefully fix the permissions bug I've already spent 6 hours troubleshooting that prevents some game pass ultimate games from working for on my GTX970 based PC
3. pay $60 for the steam version
4. buy an xbox series s for $300 just to play the campaign then return/resell it (unclear to me how much better this might run than on my PC)
5. watch twitter to find a deal on a $500 series x and figure out if it's still possible to install emulators on it to make it useful enough to keep around
6. buy an incredibly overpriced new PC and graphics card
The music is good, the framerate is solid, and it's fun to move Samus around and aim. BUT the level design sucks, the art direction sucks, there is no satisfying exploration or puzzle solving, no mastery of platforming mechanics, no feeling of danger from exploration or running low on resources, and no satisfaction from improving your ability to control Samus or having tools that make situations less dangerous. Just a bunch of tedious boss fights and poorly obscured colored keys and doors in an thoughtlessly designed maze. Every other Metroid game is significantly better including the pinball one, the both portable multiplayer FPSes, and that cool Metroid Blast minigame from Nintendoland. None of them felt like a low budget mobile game the way this one does.
Senator Lieberman stated "It's just the worst kind of message to kids, and furthermore it can harm the entirety of America's youth". Wideload Games responded by saying that Stubbs is a zombie, not a human cannibal.
I think there's a pretty good argument for this being the best 2d action platformer game ever made. Certainly don't dismiss it just because you might have thought Shovel Knight and The Messenger were a bit dull and repetitive, or because you could never get into Contra/Ghosts n Goblins/Castlevania/Ninja Gaiden for their punishing difficulty. It's also worth hunting for every upgrade on a first playthrough and doing a second playthrough without picking up any health/SP upgrades once you've mastered all the abilities.
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