From someone who really loved The Witness, I'm surprised Jeff didn't like Outer Wilds so much. His phrase for that game that "yo this game is like Metroid but the Ice Beam is your mind." I feel Outer Wilds handles that so much more elegantly, but also is a lighter/playful and more fun touch than The Witness. The Witness was like, actually a lot more hardcore and hitting a wall in that game was so much more severe than something like Outer Wilds. There's this kind of slapdash adventure quality to OW whereas Witness is a pretty brutally difficult game after a couple hundred puzzles. It also had this quality for me personally when I got stuck on multiple areas I questioned my entire concept of knowledge in that game and if I actually knew the rules of a section and learned something or it was just a half-fluke that I muscled through.
[not to discredit The Witness, I think it's a special game and gets a ridiculous amount of things right – even down to the UI, controls, walk speed, and scale of that island, there's a lot of similar first person puzzle games and walking sims it sons and sets a gold standard for...seriously do a remake of Myst and other classics with this engine and controls etc.]
The thing that sucked about Majora's Mask's loop resetting was that you were managing an inventory and moving across such a complex world sort of slowly so repeatedly. This game fixes all of those problems and then some – the loop's restraints are freeing in a way. The loop is a canvas for creativity in how you spend your time and observe/explore, but also is light enough where it's fine if you spend time just sort of poking at a thing because you could stumble upon a shortcut or trick to better equip you next time. Also, there's an option to have time not pass when reading text or using the ship's nav menu, which is very nice.
I get that his complaint on Outer Wilds was that he didn't found anything to work on or be interested in his time with the game, so that would be like running around in The Witness for an hour and never finding a puzzle panel. Which sounds just as bonkers to me as the notion that someone could have played for several loops in Outer Wilds and not found anything worth exploring or that sparked curiosity.
Either Dan's memory is actually amazing, or maybe I should start really worrying about mine. I also played MK11 paying full attention to the story, and I would not be able at all to recall why the time shenanigans start happening.
I never quite got the Mr. Popo being that racist thing. Like I always thought he was just some sort of weird alien. The reason is through original Dragonball there existed other "black" characters who were NOT done in this considered racist way I felt but maybe I am dumb. So it isn't like that is just how they draw "black" characters, and he seems more alien-like than just some human, and then with as weird as these characters are in this show, why can't there be a character with pure black skin? That seems silly. I get the history of this stuff but I really don't think this one makes sense.
Anyway, if you can get past his skin color, Mr. Popo is a character I actually like.
Is not just the skin, his face is heavily inspired by racist cartoon caricatures, like this. His "ethnic" clothing also doesn't help.
@tevor_the_third: I guess the main objective would be to be "sucessful in life", or at least in the realm of what life they make possible to you. The games also evolved to have you select ambitions and personality traits to your sims that make them want different things in life. Some might want to be rich, or really popular, or to have a fulfilling career in a specific area... Then it's up to the player to get them there, doing activities that would raise their charisma levels so they can make tons of friends, for instance, and the Sim being happy means they can do those stuff better and more efficiently. Then they eventually die and you can maybe keep on playing with their children and the game continues.
In between all that, as you said there are the goals you put for yourself, like upgrading your house, buying a nicer looking sofa or killing 13 people inside a community center!
In my life I feel I have played every conceivable kind of video game. The Sims included. I've even made myself play styles of games I know I don't enjoy simply as an exercise in trying to understand them.
The only two games I think I "Don't Get" are The Sims and Minecraft.
Two of the biggest, most popular and successful franchises of all time.
There's some kind of self reflective death spiral about the nature of humanity and my relation to it in that somewhere.
I think the appeal of The Sims is pretty easy to get, it's a management sim like many others, but your resources are human needs, so you're constantly trying to keep those numbers up through the many kinds of interactions, and through that, organic stories start developing. And that's not even getting into the fashion and home customization parts of it.
If you truly only don't get those two games you mentioned, that means you get clicker games, which are usually even more stripped down versions of the main hook in The Sims.
Well, to be fair, if I had glowing red eyes, just got out from inside a mirror, and was found sitting beside a skeleton, I would be fine with being called creepy.
It was baffling that when finally they did the thing and something FINALLY started happening, they couldn't be bothered to even watch it. Why even play it?
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