Not always for the overarching main plot, but a lot of the games have decently written characters. The main story of Ruby/Sapphire is pretty dumb (let’s flood the entire world!/let’s get rid of all of the ocean!) but Wally is a pretty fun character to watch grow.
It’s kinda the beauty of the franchise. There’s a lot for everyone. I mostly play because I’m a completionist who wants to complete the Dex, some people want to shiny hunt their favorites, some people want to get into competitive (and even then there’s tiers/which gens you play, which are all vastly different strategically), and sometimes it’s just to see all of the different character designs.
Reading Playboy for the articles was 100% legit btw. They published stories by Arthur C Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury…
Never video games, but I came in second my only ever Magic the Gathering competition, was probably 1998 or somewhere around there. Was a counter spell/horseshoe crab deck. Lost against a very similar deck.
When I was very young and video game places were a thing, I entered the nation wide Tron contest. It was fun, I won lots of tokens, and came in second to the winner over the whole US. :)
MMOs and live service ruin lore. They’ll twist the existing story into knots so that players can fight or recruit every popular character from the series, even if it makes no sense. Even if they’re dead. Gotta keep those players engaged, even if it comes at the expense of the integrity of the world and writing that drew them in in the first place!
It’s so damn good. I must’ve replayed it like six times since it came to pc. The story, the voice acting, characters, graphics, everything is absolutely top notch. Except for the goddamn controls (and the menus). I’m not sure if it’s due to it being a console-first game or just a rockstar thing as rdr1’s were also crap, but holy shit they’re infuriating. The amount of times I shot people by mistake, lost missions because of a wrong key, or just plain ended up with an unpayable bounty is too damn high.
To answer the question I think you are asking: No, I’ve never done any of the modern game competitions or leagues. I am not nearly good enough to compete against anyone who is remotely good enough to compete in gaming competitions. I’m also a completely different gamer these days and prefer to just play more meditative single player games that have bursts of action.
To answer the question in a very literal way: Yes, back in the 80s I made it to the regional finals of the Nintendo World Championships (at the time when the Fred Savage movie The Wizard had just came out). I was up on stage in the central throne chair with the 100ft TV screen behind me projecting my game to 1000s of people in front of me cheering us on. I was roughly 10?? at the time, so I thought I was fucking amazing. I just barely missed out on making it to the next round in some other state because I screwed up placing a long piece in Tetris. I won a hat out of the thing.
I also played in a Tetris tournament at a bar in LA about 15 years ago. I fucking crushed it and won $100.
Sticker Star kind of ruined Paper Mario for me. Super Paper Mario had already gone quite weird, but in a good way - the combat was completely different but it still felt like the original and TTYD in terms of the levelling, exploration, and plot.
Sticker Star, Colour Splash, and Origami King are very linear in comparison, their lack of experience makes battles largely pointless, and the obsession with giant household objects and nameless toad NPCs is getting tedious.
The latest three games were all still enjoyable, but they’re really nothing on the first three.
Absolutely correct. Modern Paper Mario is more about the spectacle of the story, rather than the way it’s mechanically explored. They peaked with TTYD, had a weird one with Super, and the rest have been “use this gimmick in VERY SPECIFIC WAYS to explore OUR story how WE want you to.”
This isn’t to say modern Paper Mario games are bad, just that it’s blatantly obvious they threw out mechanical complexity and deeper narrative tones in favor of “watch this big thing explode, ooh pretty colors :DDD!!!” Sticker Star is definitely the worst of them though.
I really hope we get another Paper Mario game that FEELS like a true Paper Mario RPG. TTYD Remastered is incredible, and I think that by making it, Nintendo acknowledged that fans just… really don’t care for modern Paper Mario as it is.
The saddest thing about Sticker Star is that I actually think the game had very interesting ideas with its resource management-based combat, but falls apart because the player is actively disincentivized to spend those resources. There is no reward for combat, so the optimal play is to run from every encounter. And bosses have nothing going on either, just use the correct item and ypu win. So you never actually engage with the mechanics at all!
And the fix would've been so simple: EXP. Y'know, the thing RPGs normally give you as a reward for combat?
Prototype 2. I loved the main character of the first one and the idea that even a monster was not as evil as human corporations. The jump to him being a main villain in 2 was too abrupt, there needed to be more story reasons to justify the change, or they shouldn’t have made him a villain at all.
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Aktywne