acharlie1377

I ended up re-watching the Best of Giant Bomb for the Quiet Man stuff, and that game's story is dumb and ridiculous enough that it makes me think it could've been written by Kojima; the only thing that gives it away is there's no military element to it. It makes me wonder what kind of reception that game would've received if the story was the same, but the gameplay itself was MGS quality.

Baba Is You is the best puzzle game I've ever played, although Portal 2 is my favorite; I'm just consistently impressed by the amount of intelligence and detail in that game.

If you have a Switch, there are 3 Picross games for it that are like 10 dollars a piece, each with 20-30 hours worth of puzzles. They're pretty standard Picross, but they're still excellent.

Also, I'd recommend Into The Breach; it isn't technically a puzzle game, but it's easily the most puzzley tactics game I've played, and it's amazing.

I don't love the show, but I think it's well-crafted and well-acted, so probably. I'm still working through the re-release of Evangelion, though.

@sweep: I pretty much completely agree with you; every word ever spoken or written by Kojima has read to me as incredibly pretentious at best, and downright sexist at worst. Hearing Dan gush that he thinks MGS is the greatest story ever told, and that he can justify every single thing Kojima has put in the story, only to immediately follow that up by saying he didn't know it was a political story, infuriates me to no end. The stories for his games read like forgotten pulp novels from the 1940s, and as a writer/story creator I think he's worse than someone like David Cage, who gets plenty of hate from the entire Giant Bomb crew.

That said, with the exception of Dan, most of the crew seems excited about the gameplay, rather than the story. When most people talk about MGSV being the best game of all time, or even the best game of 2015, they talk almost entirely about the mechanics. It's a similar thing to Breath of the Wild, where the story is unimportant compared to the intricacy of the mechanics. The difference is that BotW has pretty much no story, while MGSV has a poorly written and nonsensical story, with enough heavy-handed symbolism to convince people they're experiencing something deep and artistic. That's actually what angers me the most about the cult status around Kojima; though Metal Gear undoubtedly wouldn't exist without him, I don't think the good parts of Metal Gear would exist without the people who actually create the game, and they are basically given no credit relative to Kojima's auteur status. If Kojima wrote the story for something like Heavy Rain or Detroit: Become Human, and no-one knew it was him, I think it would rightfully be torn to shreds.

I could go on about this, but going back to Death Stranding, the idea of having to traverse this barren world and physically reconnect areas to each other sounds novel and interesting. I don't think it's as novel or interesting as people make it seem, but Kojima does have a track record of making mechanically fantastic games, so I understand why people would be excited for that. As for the story, I haven't seen anyone except the rabid Kojima fans treat it as anything other than trite nonsense.

I don't know, I feel like having Fire Emblem, Luigi's Mansion 3, Link's Awakening, Doom Eternal, Wolfenstein Youngblood, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, Outer Worlds, Gears of War 5, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Borderlands 3, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, and Google Stadia all launch this year sounds like a fair amount coming in 2019. That's about 2 games a month, on average.

Overall I thought it was a pretty great event, but the Dark Crystal announcement confused and kind of annoyed me. The game itself sounds interesting, but Netflix and Nintendo partnered up to do a game before Netflix bothered to put an app on the eShop? The omission of Netflix on Switch is kind of the only negative I have about the console, and that announcement made it all the more noticeable.

Other than that, I thought it was great. Animal Crossing looks neat, the new Fire Emblem looks pretty rad, Astral Chain and Daemon ex Machina both look way cooler than I thought they would, and I'm extremely excited about a new Breath of the Wild. All in all, the next year looks pretty jam-packed with all kinds of interesting Switch games.

@poprocksandsoda: Definitely shoot for the hats! If you shoot a hat off and then collect it, you can put it on a character later. Also, make sure to check out all the side objectives and non-combat areas; that's where you'll find the other characters you can bring on a mission (I think there are like 7 total).

I'd strongly recommend Steamworld Heist; it's kind of like a 2D XCOM, set in the Steamworld universe. Not too complicated, but it's tons of fun and I've put about 65 hours into it on Switch, and it's on sale for like $5 on Steam.

@count_zero: Same here. Is it troubling that not even the speed test for Stadia is working?

@captain_insano: Ha! I didn't even realize this was a four-year-old post, my bad!