stalefishies

It's worth noting that all the recent Pokemon games have had framerate issues, at least since they came to 3DS - at this point I just don't really trust Game Freak's technical chops to make a game with a decent framerate. That certainly doesn't mean I think BotW2 will have an incredible framerate, just that a modern Pokemon game isn't something to really judge another game by.

12 minutes, by a lot

Got 100% in just over 11:30 and loved it.

It's incredible that they found space between the openness of Super Metroid and the linearity of Metroid Fusion. If you want, you can totally play it as a linear game, and it was almost always successful at telegraphing the 'right' way forward. Beyond that though, there's layers to it: with a little bit of knowledge from previous games (walljumping, infinite bomb jumps) you can get a few missile upgrades early. But no major items: to get truly sequence breaking, you've got to really push at the game. It was beyond me to find anything myself, but there's already plenty of Youtube videos of neat ways to skip items or get things early; I'm looking forward to seeing what the speedrun routes end up being. Having the Metroidvania-ness layered in like that is, frankly, a remarkable achievement in world design.

Otherwise, I have the same issues as everyone: the run-from-the-EMMI sections are at best fine, and at worst frustrating, and I can't imagine the hand cramps you'd get from trying to play this with joycons, and the few times I'd hear a melody from a previous game used as a leitmotif made me really want more from the soundtrack. But nothing to really stop my enjoyment. It's no Super Metroid, but it's still really good.

I saved in Far Cry 2 without realising I was right before a game-breaking scripting bug. Never went back to the game.

Always have two saves.

A number of people (including me!) are having this issue, so I thought I'd put it here. The player on giantbomb.com/chat gets stuck on 'Loading Video' (and the player does not ever load) if 'performance cookies' are disabled. Allowing performance cookies fixes it, but that still sounds like a bug behind the scenes.

I'm on Firefox 89.0.2 64-bit and Windows 10, and still happens with adblocker turned off, but a bunch of people in chat seemed to have the same issue so it might not be browser-related.

Console dump with performance cookies disabled:

Copy-paste spambot.

A Monster's Expedition is one of the most well-designed puzzle games I've ever played, it's fantastic.

From my experience, there's a lot of console stuff that isn't actually harder on Windows per se, it's just that there's a lot more help out there which is directly related to Linux than Windows (and that help also tends to apply to Unixes like MacOS).

LaTeX is a good example actually: I absolutely have LaTeX working on Windows and it really is no harder than when I've used it on Linux. But if you google anything, you always get references to things like ~/texmf/tex. I know on my system that I need to actually go to C:\texlive\texmf-local\tex, but working out how to translate all that stuff takes some time and experience.

Another example would be adding a folder to the TEXINPUTS environment variable. Taking the first stack exchange answer to the first result on googling 'latex TEXINPUTS' says to do export TEXINPUTS=.:/path/to/the/local/folder//:. But to do that on Windows, you need to know how to edit Windows environment variables: Control Panel -> System -> Advanced System Properties -> Advanced -> Environment Variables... - that's two levels deep of clicking something that says 'Advanced' - and you need to know how the GUI it pops up works - there's two types of environment variable, which might be confusing if you don't know why - aaand you need to know that the colons in the Linux command above is the path separator, which you need to replace with semicolons on Windows.

That's a lot! It's the same level of required minutia that Linux generally gets historically criticised for, except that there's now a lot more stack exchange answers and random blog posts to help the Linux user than the Windows user. But it's certainly not an insurmountable amount of knowledge, and there's plenty of times on Linux where you end up in similar holes where there just doesn't happen to be the same blog post coverage on what to do.

I seriously don't understand this thread. If you think that criticising Dan's stream is an automatic source of jealousy, entitlement, or a call to action for him to change, then - genuinely - what the fuck are you even doing on this website? Do you angrily comment on all the negative game reviews to complain about them being jealous of the game developers? Do you think that a negative take on a podcast is them demanding changes to a game? Of course not - so why are half the posts here equally as dismissive about any criticism of Dan's stream?

People are allowed to not like things. People are allowed to say that they don't like things. I don't like what I've seen of Dan's stream. That doesn't mean I'm entitled for not liking a thing. That doesn't mean I'm jealous of his success. That doesn't mean I'm demanding he change his stream to something I like. That doesn't somehow mean I don't understand how Twitch works, as if it's some mental challenge to understand why people would pay for video content.

If you want to disagree with what people don't like about Dan's stream, or draw comparisons between his current stream and his Giant Bomb stuff as counterexamples, then great! But don't just dismiss the very idea that someone might think a stream that constantly loops back to advertising ways to pay Dan is gross. And save the bizarre and grotesque misrepresentations about what people that don't like the stream 'really think' or whatever.

Remember when the launch was so bad they had to drop the price and give a bunch of virtual console games to everyone that bought it at the bigger launch price that they never released any other way?