crispy4000

Big haul month. Humble was good, Fanatical had some interesting stuff, FF7 Rebirth came out, etc.

Vision with open world emergent gameplay would be hard to match with an indie budget. Especially in ToTK’s case. You see more examples of procedural generation in that space. (ie: No Man’s Sky, Valheim) But plenty of indies have the polish of a Nintendo title. Yooka Laylee and the Impossible Lair immediately comes to mind. Matches the aesthetic, and is better than a lot of classic Rare games even. Also, B and C tier Nintendo isn’t unthinkable to match, or supersede. Most great indies do. Like, would I rather pay Hades or Mario and the Origami King?

Holier than thou attitude toward Nintendo that should give more credit to the indie market, not to mention projects like Returnal and Hi-Fi Rush. No one has a monopoly on interesting games.

Their need to grow the Xbox brand and business goes beyond basic capitalist thirst for better margins or even a better competitive footing. It could take many, many years to make their money on Activison-Blizzard back. Sony and Nintendo are probably thinking of these things too. But the pressure on them is different, to stay relevant as trends change. It’s why everyone is doing cross media now.

At the end of the Verge interview the article sources from. He doesn’t blame the industry. He said it’s what everyone needs to be focused on, and they want part of that expanded pie. If it’s not a play for expanded audiences, the only move is to make inroads into your competition. On console. On PC.

Yep. The gaming audience today is expanding most rapidly on mobile, on Steam internationally, and in games like Fortnite and Roblox. Nintendo’s cited that the Mario movie has helped them push consoles in underserved markets, though global Switch sales have still been down.

As far as I’m concerned, you don’t get to tell the industry to do better at reaching new audiences if you are struggling to make a difference pushing the same style of thing at lower prices. Back it up with a blue ocean move like the Wii. Start catering to new and broader audiences by making games focused on them. Don’t just buy King and consider it done. Maybe they are planning on it. Maybe it’s just lip service.

Games Pass has reportedly plateaued on both console and PC. (As has PS+.) They probably need sell more consoles to grow it. Hard to do that from 3rd place when you make exclusives less of a thing. The other option is to continue to raise prices on us. Or offer less… which they already are to indie developers.

Be honest that they've had very limited success in growing the gaming populace since Xbox became a thing. His desires for the industry would ring less hollow.

I think Phil has yet to answer the question of ‘to what end.’ For Games Pass. For Xbox hardware. For xCloud. For their PC storefront / PC Games Pass. For buying Activision-Blizzard. For furthering the expectation of ports to rival consoles. For inviting Epic to bring over their storefront. Perhaps there’s some master plan to it all to dig themselves out of a ditch. The way things are going, with subscriptions stagnating and cloud gaming meeting indifference, it’s hard to see the endgame.

Indie devs have been saying this for a while now. Microsoft and Sony must be both be testing their lower limits. Can’t imagine that anyone pays lower than Amazon though.

Has her portable battery charger also run out in this scenario? Heck you can pick up a hand crank powered charger with a flashlight too on Amazon for $40.

I feel similarly. Interested in the game somewhat, but definitely not from the objectification angle. I’d say the same for most fighting games, both in terms of gore in MK’s case, and bouncy bits in most others. I’m not clamoring for change though. Its a choice, and the general landscape of sexualization in games is a lot different than the 90’s and early 00’s. It’s often shoehorned in different ways now when it’s handled poorly. FFXVI comes to mind recently for me.

Just found this was bundled recently here: Build your own Play on the Go Bundle - Spring 2024 | Fanatical WWW.FANATICAL.COM Anyone have any recommendations for others here? Boomerang Fu and Yes Your Grace are amazing, but I've already got them.

Peoples opinions on this were expressed before all that recent drama though. The main character makes some people uncomfortable with pandering, that’s not manufactured. It’s evident in this thread. So if it’s all because she’s not brash and campy enough, I think that’s worth calling out as a shifting standard. It’s funny to me that Western AAA games are more likely to show nudity and contain or show sex, whereas Eastern ones are typically more sexualized in their character designs. Every once and a while a game like GTA drops that does both and is full of exploitation, but it’s pretty far from the norm today. Maybe it’s all just pandering on some level, and people are picking what ‘context’ they prefer to stick up for.

So it has to be enough of a shtick for it to be excusable. That's the biggest irony on that side as I see it. Maybe if the Stellar Blade girl had a pixie cut and less idol looking face, people would forgive the assets more. It's also a bit ironic to harp on something like this as softcore porn, when popular movies and TV today in mainstream contexts generally come much closer and no one bats an eye to it. But it's real people acting, so I guess that means the token sex scene in interstitial episodes isn't awkward, nope. It's artistic expression, you gotta validate the director's choices and the actors for agreeing to flaunt it. That's not even getting into the sexualization in reality TV… Obviously there's games that go this far too (and further), but by and large, I don't expect to see sex and nudity in most high budget games so much as in other media. Maybe that changes in the future, but in the here and now, I'm okay with it. The context I have is watching a fighting game developer be harassed for not making their characters 'curvy' enough. Or giving them tails or something. These people are absolute nutcases. Same for those saying Alloy isn't attractive enough. In truth, they've already lost and are just lashing out. I can only imagine the fallout if she took her shirt off. You'd both have highly selective outrage and hilarious justifications for it. To be a fly on the wall for that.

Pretty sure most AAA games targeting a global audience wouldn't receive funding today with an overtly sexualized lead. It's no longer in vogue. I've seen ugliness on both sides of this debate. One camp that thinks that there's no room for it anymore in the year 2024, and treats it tantamount to an attack on representation. The other trolls developers for not making their characters curvy enough according to their shifting thirstiness barometer. But if there's one thing they seem to agree on ... Don't you dare shit on Bayonetta! She's a female lead, punk, an implicit bisexual, and has a domineering attitude. Female empowerment. All said, there's probably some rational, reasonable middle ground here that doesn't involve reading too far into things.

I can see it. But for me, it was mainly with fighting guardians over and over in BoTW, and ToTK's: But most of the exploration, puzzles, systems, etc in those games kept me engaged, even if repetitive once you became familiar with the template.

Looking back at the games that I've beaten, I think Beyond Good & Evil is a great example. The first dungeon is a competent Zelda clone in its own right. But then the game insists its a stealth game, but wait, its now a mini-game collection. By the end, you're at the final boss and trying to remember what basic combat feels like. For those I haven't, Baba is You and The Witness. They're so clever, until they're too clever, then esoteric to the point of being actively not fun.

Playing through pixel art games for the other thread and reading reviews got me thinking, what games did you enjoy a lot at the onset, but fell off a cliff? Not just the expected tedium of repetition and of general fatigue. But stuff as the game gets going, where you question how they could fumble it so hard.

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: *** I expected this one to be much worse, but came away pleasantly surprised. Metroidvania where you toss your luminescent bat around to light different parts of the room. You can choose either a character with a sword or wolverine claws... so the sword guy might as well not exist. Looks and plays fairly good on the whole. Level design isn't specacular, but I like how you find map fragments that fill out part of a zone instead of the whole thing. The one big gripe I have is with leveling: you can upgrade visibility, defense, or attack. You don't actually get to choose, but instead play a slot machine mini-game for each one, which is hard to time. Why was this needed?

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: **** Is it truly a roguelike if your experience, health, skills, etc, stay for each run? Even more than Moonlighter, your progress goes with you. Like Hades, there's some light storytelling between missions. Combat isn't imediately as fun as that game or Voidogo, but still, there's something here that is addicting all its own, and very approachable. The visuals look like they painted something then reduced it to pixel art form, which becomes more apparent when the camera zooms out. Overall its great. Maybe not the strongest 4-star game I've looked at, but I'm really going to have to return to it.

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: ***½ As a Zelda-like, I don't think it feels particularly great, certainly not better than Blossom Tales. But the shop managing and persistent upgrade systems give it a twist that makes it feel much more replayable. I love run-based games where progress carries over, and this does that in a more interesting way than most. The art and animation in particular is also fantastic. The DLC goes for very cheap, even on Epic where the base game was given away ... I might snag it.

Time Spent: 20 minutes Rating: **½ 2D puzzle platformer with character switching. There's powerups that each of your 3 characters can take to transform, giving new abilities. The main twist is that the view is fractured into different viewports scattered almost randomly, some overlapping. I've seen this gimmick before in JRPGs (Baten Kaitos comes to mind), and I like it better as a palette cleanser than as the crux of a larger game. It over-complicates the puzzles artificially.

Time Spent: 45 minutes Rating: *** Relaxed 2d metroidvania. There's something lulling about the character's relatively slow movement and jump animations. Once you get into a rhythm with it, its enjoyable. It's low stakes compared to the other NES-inspired indies I've looked at, which I can also appreciate. Not everything needs to kill you all the time. Frequent checkpoints are also nice. There's still nothing here you haven't seen before, but the puzzle focus elevates it.