Spawn_of_Apathy

Spyro 1 on the PlayStation back in the 90s gave me a creeping headache. I’ve since had similar feelings in games where the FOV is too low, which can be exacerbated by low and inconsistent frame rate and frame pacing, and camera wobble. Starfield actually gave me a headache day one until I modded the FOV out to 100. It wasn’t bad, but it made playing upwards of 2 hours kind of unpleasant. With most games now fixing the FOV feels like the eye/head equivalent of putting a cushion behind my lower back when watching tv and gaming. lol Fuck getting old.

Demons Soul Kart. Just different enough?

Is this just for video content, or is an alternative to MS’s auto-HDR for gaming too?

March 21 I guess is still “early 2024”, but just barely. Still, good to know.

It’s like digital cock fighting, or dog fighting, or mongoose and cobra fighting etc. you go out catch your own. Fight others. Level them up. Learn new moves, build teams of different makeups, earn badges by beating gym leaders that lets you control Pokémon of higher and higher levels. It’s an RPG where instead of a knight, white mage, rogue, dark mage, etc you capture animals. Solve mysteries. Depending on the game you have gangs, a rival, and maybe some legendary Pokémon to defeat that’s screwing with the world. many people have at least 1 favorite Pokémon. And there’s a desire to fill out the Pokédex (collection index) of every Pokémon in the franchise. So it’s a big collect-a-thon game too. There’s breeding in games, so you can even get into breeding Pokémon with the stats and abilities you want. There’s “shiny” Pokémon that are rare versions of basic Pokémon.

Define “fine”. They are some of the worst looking, worst performing, jankiest games in the Switch library. Definitely the worst in all areas compared to other Nintendo first party titles. They should only be considered acceptable if you’ve got stocks in Nintendo.

lol yeah, a guy can hope for the sake of all the Pokémon fans. I played it today and … I didn’t hate it. I don’t know how long it will hold my interest, but I built up a bit of a base that could self sustain itself with food and went out adventuring. Honestly, I can see why many Pokémon fans would get drawn to this. I find myself trying to capture every Pal I first encounter. They all have different traits, some making them good at something in the base, some good at fighting, and some good at very little because of their negative traits. Different Pals during the day and night. There clearly seems to be the same type of rock, paper, scissors that Pokémon uses. The personality traits are amusing. I had this Pal that immediately started slacking off and and was in a grumpy mood as soon as I introduced a Pal with water abilities. That grumpy Pal had a passive trait “hydrophobic”, so I think that causes an issue. lol

Indeed. I wonder if the success and interest in this might convince Pokémon company and Game Freak to improve their own games, making Pokémon a better product.

Humble brag over here claiming he only plays great games.

that’s how much the contractor bid to design and produce it. So now it’s more like $85 per roll after and development period that cost $1.7B

So not $0.03?

Mainline Pokémon games look and play like a janky Indy game and they sell more than 10M units per year. I can see morbid curiosity of this Pokémon spoof could move one copies over a week.

based on the previews and my experience with the Quest 3, I could see it. From only manufacturing standpoint I could see where people might be like “why does it cost $3500”. I guess it depends on how much apple is trying to recoup. The R&D cost on the hardware and software would likely still mean that at $3500, if the Vision fails they’ll still take a loss. So they price for the bigger enthusiasts. The kind that buy a new phone and watch every year and have everything else Mac that Apple makes too. I wonder what a non-pro version will have and cost. I’m guess not less than $1500-2000

Oh just the physical version will be unavailable after March 3. That does make more sense.

I thought some of those people’s ashes were already taken to space and released to the void.

Did Walmart buy into the Starfield hype? Did MS think they’d sell a bunch of copies around Christmas, contracted with Walmart to seemingly “rent shelf space” in every store, and they didn’t a ton of copies. Do either not realize how little physical copies sell compared to digital now? Or did Starfield sell just fine and this is just the overstock that MS and Walmart don’t care about and the advertising shelf space arrangement is just expiring? the latter being no big deal and can happen all the time. Kind of used to happen in the movie Renault industry. You see an entire or two bays of wall space dedicated to a single movie, because Blockbuster and the Studio had an arrangement. Blockbuster would get a revenue share deal with the Studio with the agreement that after a period of time (usually 30 days) a certain percentage of the rental copies would either be sent back to the studio or destroyed each week for a period of weeks until you have just a few copies. This was why Blockbuster seemingly never sold some movies for used.

Just seems like they did a lot of work to only sell it on half the available platforms for only ~60 days.

Is it a licensing issue that the game will only be available for like 2 months?

It is nice to see how much is getting fixed though. Quite a few graphical patches that may make for a slightly better looking. But yeah nothing transformative for the game.

What’s in this update?

I’m not sure I’m feeling the current art style. Something about the visuals in the latest video just seems off putting to me. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it was a lack luster amount of environmental detail. Maybe it’s the FOV. Maybe it is the art style itself of trying to be something like Elder Scrolls with a color pallet closer to Sea of Thieves.

My Dad and Stepmom watched this last weekend and apparently really enjoyed it. My dad said they are eagerly anticipating part 2.

Both as a plot device using time travel and prequel stuff. The time travel stuff I hate the most is traveling back in time to modern-ish time. I hate the “how does this technology that the audience uses every day work? Hahahaha” No! Stop it. Don’t get me wrong, I can and have enjoyed Strange New Worlds. But I am tired of James Kirk finding his way to the Enterprise every other week. Also there’s no tension with the established characters, because we know where they end up over the next decades. I get that the show was always meant to be fan service and like a good faith olive branch and apology letter to the most basement dwelling fans that hated every design decision in Discovery season 1. But I really wish the ship was not the Enterprise, the crew was 100% original and unknown characters, that could have the same character traits, going on original missions that aren’t a bunch of callbacks or prequels to TOS episodes. Star Wars and Star Trek both now seem so afraid of their fans that they’re trapped. Bound to beloved time periods and characters. They’re afraid to do something new, because fans revolt and refuse to give a chance if they don’t see things they immediately recognize they already love.

As long as Todd Howard isn’t in charge of directing the game in any way maybe it will be fine. Maybe it won’t feel like it was designed to run on a GameCube.

I don’t really consider Nintendo not dropping the price much or often on games as gouging. Now if when Switch 2 releases and they put out a Breath of the Wild remaster with 60fps for $50-$70 even if you own the original digital I’ll say “yeah”. I would say yeah in regards to digital purchases as owning a title digitally on the Wii didn’t translate to you owning it digitally on the Switch. That’s definitely gouging to me. to me this is an area where MS does far better (to the consumer) than either Sony or Nintendo. To me this and MS’s commitment to game preservation and backwards compatibility and licensing is has been my favorite thing about Phil’s leadership at Xbox.