prolurker

I liked this writeup, I didn't experiment with ultrahand as I would've liked, and sort of gave up on shrines at one point too. I can't say I loved TotK as much as others seem to. While I really liked (at least the idea of) ultrahand, new temples, the depths, etc. TotK seems to take on an extreme maximalist approach to just about every new mechanic or new location:

-TotK is about 2.5x the size of BotW. It feels like, "butter scraped over too much bread." I personally can't fathom why they made this decision, considering how packed and varied BotW's overworld felt.

-The ability to combine weapons (forget the name) means thousands of combinations, most of which simply result in stat boosts (at that point I have to ask, "why?").

-If you grind enough, you can build virtually anything anywhere-- which, for me, meant building a flying segway and speeding through the map. This felt like cheating, but considering the size of the new map, didn't really faze me.

Personally, I think TotK should've narrowed its focus to overhauling the overworld, center on less features but really flesh them out, and simply don't throw so much at the player, especially when it means stat boosts or cycling through the inventory every 5 min.

My 2c, I think TotK is much, much better than the average game, but BotW is a more succinct experience, in my view.

Anecdotally, I tried xcloud, stadia and geforce now during lockdown, and I thought stadia had the best latency and fewest frame drops than the other two. But I used geforce now the most because I didn't have to pay extra for my steam games. In the US, I have to worry about my <1TB/month data cap too.

Tbh, I think even if Apple said, "hey, we're going to support every steam game in existence on our new silicon chips," it still wouldn't be a big sales point because most people already have a console or PC. I.e. nobody's suddenly moving to a mac because apple now supports gaming.

Cloud gaming is still pretty niche, and tbh I don't think the average person will use it extensively unless they do everything else through the cloud too.

Xcloud and geforce now are still pretty usable, but if I can get a cheap used console on ebay or whatever then what's the point?

My theory is that dark souls was slow to boil, I don’t think FS ever expected their series to take off like it did. Anyone who wants to be as successful as FS wouldn’t make a dark souls clone, they’d go make a mobile game, for example. It really is the epitome of a niche product that got big with other developing markets like content creation and streaming. Not to say Elden Ring isn’t a good game, it does exceed players’ expectations. I’m not interested in Dark Souls gameplay, but I love watching streamers play it, and it makes for incredibly entertaining bite-sized clips.

Most people I talk to IRL either seem indifferent to or actively dislike twitter. I don‘t know how to improve such a platform, to me it feels like bite-size takes where no topic is ever truly fleshed out and understood. Perspectives are misconstrued and few people actually talk to one another human to human. I don’t know if/how musk could improve a platform. Making the algorithm open source seems like a good thing to me, personally. shrug

Realistically, it could be anything. You never know what will go “viral” and cause a shitstorm online. I wouldn’t be surprised if marketing teams use this phenomena to their benefit, because any PR = good PR. I think Rockstar did this with GTA games, and look how many parents decided GTA was bad for their kids after reading a NYT article, and ironically, kids just wanted to play those games even more (I know I did).

What causes this? A new factor is buggy games. And I think there’s an incentive to release buggy/alpha games because people online react rather than ignore, which boosts sales. I.e. cyberpunk on consoles. Bugs are hilarious in these games, which makes for good meme content and easy to digest/shareable content online. Unless the nature of social media changes, then I don’t see this practice changing.

Another would be *insert politically contentious issue here*. In the early 2000’s it was gore/violence, which is why games like gears of war took off imo. I won’t go into off-topic territory, but old media covered shocking games, and that was the zeitgeist at the time. Not that it’s a blatant money grab or anything, but hell, if I could double my sales by including gore back then, then I would’ve done it too.

A third category kind of goes with the first, but empty promises. I think superfans form a bubble, read into every marketing gimmick at face value, then explode when the final game comes out. One game that comes to mind is Spore, which is in my view a very unique/interesting game. But it wasn’t sold that way, which caused backlash online. Whether that vocal explosion is representative of the silent majority it another question.

tl;dr many things, but I learned to filter out the noise after the 100th time seeing the same core ideas crop up.

I thought the beginning of Borderlands 2 was childish/boring. I didn’t like the respawn mechanic, and I thought for sure I would stop playing after 20-ish minutes. Then I kept picking up new weapons which changed the gameplay loop. The writers clearly had fun with the script, and it doesn’t try to take itself too seriously. Apparently, I’m a 12 year old in a grown man’s body.

Counter-example would be many, many AAA titles that feature heavy, melodramatic stories and a difficulty slider that only adjusts the “sponginess” of enemies.

I like "breaking" a game for the sake of replayability. I.e. in BotW you can go to specific locations early on and grab OP equipment so you can obliterate the competition. To me, this is extremely fun. The entire DLC focuses on adding OP abilities and armor pieces so you can cheese fights. The trick is to hide those items and make OP equipment not easily attainable.

On the other hand, I don't like it when some games "force" you into immortality/god mode, i.e. in Control when you learn how to fly/hover. To me, the whole point of a shooter-type game is placement. And when you decide a character can simply hover to high ground via. the press of a button, then you've removed a core component of what makes a game fun. You've lowered the skill ceiling, and I can't simply ignore this mechanic once I have it.

This concept plays heavily into PvP games, and why games like Halo or CS:GO succeed for such a long time imo. These games don't have power creep. The skill ceiling is high, but not too high, and the core playerbase is dedicated to these ideals.

So it really depends on the game and whether it's PvP or not. This is why I question NFTs, how are you going to balance the use of an OP helmet in a single-player game which suddenly is placed into a PvP game? The entire system would need to be rebalanced for every single game. I digress.

I played this the past week, and have mixed thoughts. Hollow Knight is one of my all-time favorite games, so inevitably I ended up comparing the two.

I liked the first few hours of gameplay, acquiring new items that change how you play is where Tunic shines. The first boss was tough but fair, it took me around 8 deaths before I defeated him at full health somehow. I really like it when there’s a trick to something you can deduce given enough persistence/effort.

So I spent my first few hours pretty much in a linear fashion. I don’t know if I was lucky or what, but I made it past both bells without navigation issues.

Then I found the mountain pass to the mines area.

I spent the next hour attempting to get to what I thought was the next area. This part broke me. I don’t know why you can access this location so early on, because I genuinely thought this was the correct path. I made it to the fire/save point in that location after 20 attempts (and each attempt takes a full 90-ish seconds just to get back). I felt like I was playing a roguelike at this point. Death after death after death after death. I made it to the save point, and guess what, you can’t access this save because it’s surrounded by water. I was so disappointed at this point that I decided to turn on no death mode.

This wasn’t satisfying, but helped me realize I was not supposed to be in that area (I didn’t have the grapple hook yet).

This is where Tunic lost me, Hollow Knight pretty much blocks new locations unless you have the right equipment to succeed in that area. i.e. you can’t reach the end of a zone just to realize you’ve hit a dead end. There’s always more than one path, which feels rewarding. Tunic doesn’t do this.

The other issue is hidden paths. It’s not fun wandering around an entire location just to discover you didn’t check one very specific corner (reaching the frog zone comes to mind).

Otherwise, the combat and progression was ok. I looked up the final ending and was glad I didn’t try to attempt it, personally. Overall, a tantalizing experience for me.

I got an ABS pre-built from newegg... it went well for 14 months but now I get a daily BSOD and it's been a headache since january (3 months after the 1 year warranty expired). On the plus side, I'm learning how to troubleshoot hardware/software. Silver lining lol.

I'm not picky either way, but I wonder what the future will be like, and if people are going to want to marry video game characters. Or just virtual holograms i.e. blade runner 2049. Or robots like black mirror. Or an alexa-esque AI like in the movie Her.