Bravely Default, Octopath Traveler, Triangle Strategy, Various Daylife… Usually, they just stick with the project name and people made fun of them over it for years. Turns out keeping the project title was a good choice as they can’t name games for the life of them.

I remember putting so much time into the GameCube version as a kid, but I don’t think I ever finished the game even once.

For the most part, I just enjoyed doing the police chases and dragging them out as long as possible. Think multiple hour long ones. Destroying police cars and creating as much property damage as humanly possible. Sadly, on the higher levels these became quickly frustrating as the police started deploying instant K.O. spike traps. Losing your run an hour in to one of these was the worst feeling.

The actual racing was fun, too, although I never liked drag races. Their control scheme was just awful. And I probably wasn’t any good at racing, given that I don’t remember ever finishing the game.

Still, I have a lot of nostalgia for the game and the soundtrack shaped my tastes in music to this day. I haven’t enjoyed another racing game since then, I should probably go back and finish it.

I think it’s worth to have a look at either the Gothic or Risen games, both made by the same people. They are quite old and janky, but they check a lot of your boxes.

There’s also a remake comming up for Gothic 1.

As someone who’s lived in Germany for years: that’s a first for him.

I’ve played so much on lower end devices growing up, a stable 20 is fully playable. Even played some games dipping into single digits. 30 is buttery smooth. I can’t tell the difference above that.

I’m no expert, but I think Santa Claus isn’t exactly a biblical figure and neither is the Easter Bunny. These are normal holidays around here, but you’d be hard-pressed to find many children who know any of the christian stuff.

Also, I think Christmas was actually built on top of the prior winter solstice celebrations. It’s not like anyone knew the exact date of birth for a random guy from hundreds of years ago.

The existence of a queue sparks the follow-up question: What happens if something is born while the queue is empty?

It’s still ongoing. Might as well ask how long the cross gen period between PS4 and PS6 will last at this point.

RPG Maker MV is 80 bucks and that one is from 2015. DLC included you’re looking at ~130 bucks. I’d expect it to be quite a bit more expensive.

In the order I played them in:

• Pokemon Ruby + Pokemon Colosseum
• Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
• Fable
• Dragon Quest Monster Joker + Dragon Quest 5
• Risen
• Dark Souls
• Dragon Age: Origins
• SMT Devil Survivor
• Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology
• Xenoblade (as a series)
• Witcher 3

There are probably others, but that’s the list I came up with in the moment.

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.