I’m somewhat disappointed. Mind you, I’ve only played via GameShare and watched my partner play it.

Coming from Dragon Quest Builders 2, which is phenomenal, I was hoping to get more of that. However, it’s not that. The areas feel quite small and the mining/building process felt more cumbersome to me. I could work with these drawbacks, but the biggest thing for me are all the non-voxel buildings you can (and sometimes must) create. They kind of kill the aesthetic and on top of that, I don’t vibe with the real time waiting times at all. Also, these buildings introduce loading screens.

In DQ Builders 2, you would place your blueprint, add all materials to a chest and the NPCs would literally take them and place every individual block for you. Every building was made out of voxels. Furniture of course wasn’t, but I’m fine with that. Watching them go was one of my favorite things to do.

Maybe it will click with me if I go for a full playthrough myself, but it’s certainly not the game I wanted it to be.

I just don’t see how this could provide any value. Assuming a new games comes out, there is literally no information to train on but the game itself. You kind of need existing guides for that and if developers have to write them themselves, you might as well add those with a good full text search.

On top of that, the age of guides seems kind of gone. Most games are quite on the nose about everything and tend to present more tutorials than you will ever need.

And lastly, I just don’t want to write stuff out on a console and neither do I want to wear some kind of microphone for my single player games.

I don’t think I ever found a potion before clearing the area. I remember stocking up on food, like you, and eventually stumbling into the merchant selling me fire resistant armour.

Ignoring your uncalled for insult, that’s just not how I play games.

Once I was free of the tutorial area, I set off in a random direction and did my thing. I completed multiple divine beats before ever setting foot in Kakariko.

If I wanted to follow the direct path as described by NPCs, I might as well go play a linear game. I got to the destinations eventually, but almost never on the beated path.

It’s a game about free exploration, it’s silly to expect the player to directly follow these instructions. Just make him part of the mandatory tutorial area or have him come to you after collecting your first 10 seeds or something.

I only found out about the guy after finishing the game.

God of War 2018

I gave it a full playthrough, but since then it has pretty much become my definition of AAA slop.

• The game is littered with “puzzles”. The solution is always obvious within seconds and on top of that you get commentary on how to “solve” it. They just waste your time.

• Stats don’t matter. Early on you get your first weapon upgrade, I think I tripled my damage. The very next enemy got some commentary about “showcasing” my new weapon. It took the exact same amount of hits as the same enemy type did before ugrading my weapon. Since weapon upgrade materials are fixed drops from bosses, everything just scales alongside you.

• The battle system in general is a slog. 9 out of 10 times throwing your axe feels like the best option. Even the post game bosses are annoying at best.

• Also, why is the camera so darn close. Your “cinematic angles” mean shit when the gameplay suffers from it.

• There are so many “cutscenes” that have you walk at a snails pace. If your “gameplay” can be executed by a rubber band on my joystick, then just give me a proper cutscene. Annoying me isn’t immersive.

• You get awesome godly powers - for as long as cutscenes are running. Your super healing and mountain splitting punches mean nothing against any random draugr.

• Probably some more things, but it’s been a few years.

The story was fine, but I would have enjoyed watching a cutscene compilation more than playing the game. In fact that’s what I did your second entry.

Pokemon is owned by GameFreak, Creatures Inc and Nintendo. Roughly split in thirds.

However, Nintendo also owns an undisclosed amount of Creatures Inc and I think parts of GameFreak, making them the majority holder of Pokemon as a whole.

GameFreak does release other games on different platforms. Notably, they will release Beast of Reincarnation on everything but the Switch 2 this year.

I deal with crack and I’m fine! It’s those damn addicts who are the problem.

It’s the same thing every time. Someone tries to stop a corporation from preying on vulnerable people and others jump to its defense because they “aren’t affected”. Have some empathy, man.

Psychonauts is really good and currently less than 2 bucks. There’s also a sequel, currently about 9 bucks. (Both in €)

I’m fuzzy on the details, but it went something like this:

• I set up long resource lines of coal, copper and iron.
• I needed a thing#1 and built a neat little package to build it, exactly to order and on minimal space.
• I copy pasted that design 10 times left to right along my resource belt line.
• Then thing#2 came along. Needed the same stuff and combined with thing#1 into thing#3. So I wrapped my resource belts, designed a second package on minimal space and also copy pasted it 10 times. So I had pairs of thing#1 and thing#2 with a line in the middle to combine them and a belt to collect them. Worked nicely.

Then:

• Coal was replaced by electricity. I had no space for powerlines.
• I got other types of the grab thingies, potentially simplifying my setup.
• Suddenly I got sorting, making my belt setup a waste of space (I had one line per thing/resource).
• All belts needed to be replaced by better belts.

Oh and:

• Thing#4 came along, needing 2 of thing#1 and one thing#2 with some additional resources. Since I built to order, I basically had to start from scratch or severly hamper the production of thing#3. Also, my packages didn’t work anymore without wasting space and/or entirely fucking up resource belt management.

Therefore, I designed stuff from scratch to fit the new requirements.

That’s from the very beginning, but after repeating this pattern a few times, I gave up. Building it non-optimized felt even worse.

Being on the patient side of things, two games I’ve played in recent years and didn’t enjoy were:

God of War (2018) - it just felt like AAA slop to me. Meaningles upgrades, tons of obvious puzzles at any corner - never throwing in even a single brain teaser, boring combat - the best option was almost always to throw the axe, that thing were you start walking at a snails pace to mask loading and/or play a cutscene and on top of that your god powers being mostly cutscene exclusive. Just your bog standard AAA game with no ‘friction’ - boring.

Factorio - it just feels like work to me. On top of that, going in blind, I just didn’t enjoy building something up just to tear it down again because I’ve unlocked something new changing the requirements. Once again, feels like a job in IT. Also, resource patches being limited just gave me the weirdest kind of anxiety despite never actually seeing one run out.

Endangering others for your entertainment makes you a criminal too.

Matricide -> A mother being killed by her own children.

Maternal death -> A woman dying due to pregnancy or giving birth.

I guess the post meant ‘Homicide is the leading cause of death in pregnant woman.’

Probably the same thing that happens all over Europe: right wing parties are favored by social media.

It’s easy to just claim things and spread hate in short form content. It’s hard to set things straight and share a more nuanced opinion.

Honestly, it would be weird for any industry to start caring about ethics after all this time.

Not an endorsement of AI but a criticism of capitalism.

They released almost 30 years ago. Adding a few more years, since you can’t properly play them with no reading skills, we’are looking at enough time for some of them to be grandparents.

Heck, I and most of my peers started with Gen 3 in elementary school. There’s a 3 in front of my age.

Personally, I don’t care about TLOU, but I don’t think you should be leading with a massive spoiler as the thumbnail. Others might give you a lot of shit for that.

You can save so much money with CAD if you neither factor in your time to actually learn it or the cost of the printer itself.

Makes crime even better in comparison.

You see, that’s your problem. Companies don’t make games for any other reason than money. Since there are no microtransactions or subscriptions available, they quite frankly don’t care if you ever play the game after you’ve purchased it.

They moved a lot of units already and considering it’s only a side game with reused assets, they made a profit. Therefore, the game by all means is a success for them, even if nobody would play anymore.

Concurrent players also shouldn’t influcene future sales by much, since you only need 3 people at a time

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, above all else.

That being said, Shin Megami Tensei Devil Survivor 1 and 2 are awesome. They combine SRPGs with the usual SMT combat - I don’t think I’ve found something similar yet.

You move around like you would in any other SRPG, then you can attack enemies in range to enter normal turn based combat - however, at most, you can only play out 2 full turns before combat ends. Afterwards the next unit moves. Each unit represents a squad of up to three characters you will be batteling with, usually a human and two demons. Depending on your squad, you may have different movement, range and abilities.