They literally tried to patent the loading screen and mechanically locking a player object to a moving object ingame just after the release of TotK. Nintendo is the absolute king of frivolous gaming patents. Here’s hoping it’s their downfall. For an example of how seriously vague some of the patents they’ve been granted are, check out some of their current ones after pokemon sleep’s initial success (basically trying to keep everyone without 9 digit money out of the sleep app game space).

https://patents.justia.com/assignee/the-pokemon-company

PT stands on its own in the horror video game genre IMO. Too many games fail to convey one of the elements of horror well, typically overusing shock and disgust as it’s hard to achieve psychological terror when your art medium has the potential for funny things to happen (like physics objects in amnesia deciding to fling themselves all over the room when you let go because they bounced wrong). Really interrupts the flow of the scared juice. The other half of horror games give you enough tools to completely defuse the horror after an initial few encounters (death stranding) or straight up don’t try to scare you situationally, just acting as combat action games with horror themes (later resident evils).

PT remakes for PC are in a good place finally, “P.T. emulation” being a bit closer than unreal PT to the source material as a project. How konami could possibly drop a project with star power like kojima+del toro is beyond me, especially considering reception to the demo was GREAT and it was slated to release while streamers playing horror games was still in vogue. Unbelievable fumbled bag lying there

It’s so hard to describe contact. It’s like a more exploratory Rune Factory with no farming sim element and swappable jobs like the final fantasy MMOs. I feel like the audience for the game wasn’t targeted well, as it fell in that era where “core gamers” stopped being a popular target audience (we hardly use the term at all these days).

Early in the lifetime of the DS, before the 3ds had even been mentioned, a ton of JRPGs released for the platform seemingly in a bid to become the next earthbound or chrono trigger. Most of them were very mediocre, but to this day Contact (published by atlus) and The World Ends With You (square enix) stand out as stellar titles to me. They represent opposite ends of the jrpg spectrum; contact is a grinding game with a very floaty story, whereas TWEWY has an intricate story and a penalty-free swappable easy difficulty setting to help new players cope with the (initially) awkward combat system. Both of them are stand-out in their own ways, with memorable settings and characters supporting the mechanical depth they offer.

Both of them are games that take advantage of the DS’s unique features, not the microphone but the touchscreen. While Contact is pretty easy on the gimmicks, only requiring you to occasionally peel a sticker or something simple like that, TWEWY’s combat flow has you use buttons to control the top screen while simultaneously doing multiple touch screen gestures, making the game difficult to master on the actual DS and unbelievably hard on an emulator.

TWEWY has since had a remaster and a sequel, but contact is seldom mentioned anywhere when I see the DS talked about. Worth a look!

Graal online already exists. Your clutching of pearls is meaningless.

You could build up your base (also a defense map) pretty freely, but it was never unlimited resources creative. You’re right to be confused by this comment

Save The World isn’t sandbox or everything and was the only launch mode for the game. It had more mobile gacha practices than anything tbh. I get thinking that seeing as it has taken cues from Roblox, but it isn’t reality

You’re incapable of having a rational discussion and ignoring the fact that you needed to install uPlay even when buying it through other storefronts. This isn’t something steam did better on, and you googling and linking the first article you see that remotely confirms your viewpoint (which is now detached from the thread) is kind of childish

You cherry picked a single example you couldn’t recall until pressed. It’s really obvious you’re only here to trash a storefront you don’t use for no reason. If you recall, the division 2 was only on uPlay, requiring you to install the game through it even if you purchased it elsewhere - and that’s a substantially worse data collection vector than EGS (multiple breaches) and it is actually missing features like linking of DLC to the store page. What’s your point?

You are not arguing in good faith here - the other user is being very clear about their question and you are pretending not to understand. You invented a sourceless situation to answer the question while saying you didn’t understand it.

What features? I have seen a lot of complaining about performance of the storefront here, which leads me to believe a lot of the complainers have not actually used EGS in actual years. I haven’t seen anyone mention an actual specific feature of Steam that EGS is missing. Multiple running versions for beta testing, DLC linking with the main game page, sale frequency, everything except the social features of steam (which are notorious for being garbage communities) are on par in EGS these days, so this thread is confusing for me since you guys haven’t actually explained a single missing feature.

There’s an in-game log of hints you’ve been given in the ship, the “rumor mode” on the terminal can help you stay goal-oriented.

The alien names aren’t gibberish - they’re all mineral and plant names. Made it really easy for me to keep track of lore, actually, having something to tie the characters to conceptually. Absolutely true that it’s a puzzle game first and foremost.

Someone has never played a round of highlander.

As for as storefronts go, which is what’s being talked about here, they are competing and winning. With a fraction of the employees other companies employ for storefront work. Origin (Rest Unpeacefully) and Uplay never stood a chance and epic has had plenty of time to market saturate. The company not being publicly traded doesn’t prevent competition, it prevents investor interests like quashing competition.

Classic “fuck you got mine” take from someone who has experienced no difficulty in decades with a field. If you’re ignoring the mass layoffs happening across multiple fields right now, ESPECIALLY in well-performing companies, I guess it looks like AI is not having much of an effect. Like if you consciously decide to not look at any business news at all this take could make sense.

While it was the complaint, the game did mention a required PSN account on all storefronts. This was disabled when auth/login was unplayably bad on launch week, then not re-enabled until a while later (with a week long heads up for new players and a month long heads up for existing players). Nobody actually got locked out of the game, and as my PSN account is registered somewhere I do not live, I don’t think anyone would’ve been stopped playing by the change if it had been pushed.

What we “won” and sony “learned” is that they can’t get accurate metrics on playercount since HD2’s statistics aren’t being tracked correctly by the game’s session system and the playerbase is uncooperative. In this era where data is king, this just means we’ll stop seeing Sony funded helldivers ads on youtube while they market their giants that correctly report the data they’re looking for that helps them make a userbase that prints money.

Oh, and we marred the all-time and recent review score from overwhelmingly positive. Guarantee you the successful action was the steam refund count on the game - truly unsolvable problem. As refund requests that don’t meet an automatic metric need a reply, and resolution usually takes ~an hour, the 6 digit refund count was not realistically solvable without rolling the requirement for a legitimate PSN account back. You can track how many total refund requests steam has day by day, as this is a public count in steam’s support page. There were 800k more than the average weekend.

Tl;dr: while the complaint was this, the reality was not. The review bomb hurt arrowhead’s relationship with sony more than it hurt sony. The refund bomb didn’t cause steam to change policies this time but damn if it isn’t justified now.

It would have killed nintendo to add an ethernet port. As someone who bought the dongle, having a wired connection will NOT save you from nintendo online being the worst gaming networking service ever devised. No game benefits from it, least of all actual nintendo titles like splatoon or smash. It’s not even a problem of speed, it’s wholesale reliability issues, constant loss of connection errors. If an ethernet port was available included rather than needing to be a seperate purchase, more people would realize sooner just how truly awful the paid nintendo online service is.

I’m just still mad that I could play phantasy star online for ten hours uninterrupted on my gamecube, but now there’s not a single nintendo title that has stable online. Pokémon might let you get a raid or two before needing to reconnect. Splatoon might get a match or three before needing to reconnect completely. Smash won’t stay stable for even one full match. It’s a complete tragedy.

I don’t pen a word without 20 hours invested in the game unless it is a short title. I talk about the game with friends conversationally to get my thoughts in order, then I actually do a write-up if the game seems to deserve some word-of-mouth for innovation or refined design.

Sometimes, 20 hours isn’t enough for a game’s whole story, and it needs further investment to have a real analysis of scope - path of exile, elite:dangerous, any given mmo or fighting game, some 4x and rts, plenty of titles have zoomed-out takes that really take familiarity to understand.

Nothing bothers me more than clear beginner takes on a game written flippantly. Impossible to tell if someone is sharing an experience or just parroting what they read about the game when people talk about some titles recently, like gaming discussion has become infected at large by /v/ bandwagon culture.

It’s rare, but sometimes in talking or writing out how a game felt to play, I kind of change my mind about the experience. In the past few years I had the opportunity to just pick up a bunch of AAA titles as they dropped frivolously, since I sold a lot of dota 2 items from early TI events for mad steam bucks. I’ve noticed new IP in particular get a lot of hate from people who didn’t play the game at all and decided that without seeing any actual gameplay whatsoever, and going in to them I was kind of flippant myself, but by the end of the experience the gameplay always matters more than whatever the huge negative press cycle is focused on. Shitty dialogue? Level design woes? Random focus on a feature the genre typically does not have anyway? Sure, whatever, but I hardly remember anything from a game except for where the fun was derived when all is said and done.

Stephen King said the secret to being a good writer was to “Read a lot, write a lot” and keep that up. If you want to articulate your thoughts about a game, or even just improve at playing one, the same concept (practice) works all around here. I’m not going to say a disciplined approach is required for truth or validity, especially when it comes to games, but it sure helps you reach it in ways that literally just repeating what other people are saying cannot.

Play Outer Wilds.

I believe it. Multiple friends of mine updated to play and see the streets changes when this press cycle hit, a few even shared footage of suspicious noiseless head/eyes deaths while they were in enclosed spaces. If it has been long enough, just the words escape from tarkov will send some fans back, negative experiences suspended.