I think that was the only full price I’ve bought digitally, because my friend and I wanted to game share and play together.
MMO shooter seems like an undeserved concept. Buy I guess you have the scope of Defiance with the polish of an MMO. Or you have the scope of Destiny and the polish of a normal shooter.
I may be stretching the definition of cancelled a bit because we don't know if it was ever in development to begin with, but I will forever have a chip on my shoulder about Puyo Puyo 30th Anniversary.
The three best games in the series were Puyo Puyo 15th Anniversary (2006), Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary (2011), and Puyo Puyo Chronicle (2016, this game is 25th in all but name). None of these games were released outside of Japan, but after Puyo Puyo Tetris's Switch port got localized in 2017 and sold really well, fans had high hopes that the pattern would continue and the next one of these would get localized too.
The pattern did not continue. Instead, Sega responded to PPT selling well by making Puyo Puyo Tetris 2. It's literally the exact same as the first game, only much buggier. It's a terrible game and I hate it.
To this day, we still have not gotten a proper mainline game. In fact, Sega just announced they're rereleasing Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S as a Switch 2 launch title. This is all the series will ever be from now on.
The three best games in the series were Puyo Puyo 15th Anniversary (2006), Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary (2011), and Puyo Puyo Chronicle (2016, this game is 25th in all but name). None of these games were released outside of Japan
After being defeated, Satan joins the party and promises that the way back home lies at the top of the Color Tower, and all Arle would need to do now is scale it to return home.
Hmm.
I think “Satan as a playable character” might be one of those cultural-issue things that would come up when considering localization.
I was one of those people who bought Puyo Puyo Tetris as their first Puyo game, mainly to have a 1v1 Tetris on Switch. Turns out I really like Puyo though, but… “the tetris player is at a slight disadvantage”. Or, as this video essay explains, the problem with PPT is that the two games are fundamentally so different it’s impossible to balance them. Forcing them to play competitive online against each other, will always end up with a monoculture. In this case no one can play the first half of the Frankensteined game.
I’m sure Sega must realize that. Now they just have to care.
Bethesda’s version had expansive and impressive maps and visuals, but the writing and world-building were subpar compared to Fallout 1/2 and New Vegas.
But would this game have been successful, given the kind of games that were being released at the time? It would most likely have been the end of the series.
I think it probably would have been the biggest success of the 3 games. But you’re also probably right that it likely would have been the end of the series. Bethesda making them into 1st person open world games was probably the best thing that ever happened to the series. At least in terms of achieveing widespread success.
What was your experience like? Interesting to hear from someone who tried it now as opposed to when it was released. I will add that it’s not merely a matter of nostalgia, but you also have a better grasp of the core gameplay and the general storyline beats if you’ve played it several times since release.
I played the Multiverse Edition which had a bunch of patches and fixes integrated. Including HD I believe.
I think the world building is pretty good, at least parts of it. There is some disappointingly boilerplate Tolkienesque fantasy in there, but the conflict between magic and technology is well realised and interesting and feels grounded in the world. The steampunk aesthetic is cool and I like the Victorian racism angle they’re doing with half orcs and ogres. I liked the newspapers and there are some interesting quests, like the half ogre conspiracy. I thought the peace negotiation was going to end up being absolutely amazing but in the end it is just an anticlimactic stat check.
The combat is absolutely atrocious in every possible way, from balance to animations and whether you play turn based or real time doesn’t really matter, both are horrible. It’s quite possibly the worst AI I’ve ever seen and every fight is just every creature mashing into eachother until one dies. I don’t think anyone or anything has special abilities or different AI behaviour. You can’t use Mage followers because they don’t use their magic, opting instead to charge into melee with their fists or staves.
The tech skills are the most interesting and unique aspect of the game, but involves a horrendous amount of parts collecting, crafting, inventory management and over-encumberance for very little rewards.
The companions feel extremely bare bones by modern standards and it’s extremely disappointing that none of them even get ending slides. I liked Virgil but not even he got any sort of closure at the end.
The main story was okay, it had some twists and funny moments like with Nasrudin. The whole “life was a mistake” angle by the BBEG felt a little tired to me, but maybe if playing Arcanum was the first time I came across that concept it would have blown me away.
The actual writing itself is not bad in terms of the prose and dialogue etc and the game has some funny moments.
The vast freedom you get with character building is probably the best part. I like how varied you can make your characters, although I don’t know that all builds are viable. Props for following the example of Fallout 1 and 2 and including specific “dumb dialogue”, even though I didn’t go for that personally. Having to balance tech and magic with your character build is a fun concept.
Overall I understand why it has its cult following and I’m glad to have played it, but it’s hard to recommend it to people unless they have an extremely high retro game/clunk tolerance.
I mostly agree. The combat is indeed terrible with both real-time and turn based. Turn based just feels off and pure real time is not viable. I play with real-time with pause.
I had the misfortune of playing as a technologist on my first playthrough in the early 2000s. It was really rough. Over time you can figure out strategies/approaches to make it easier, but I would argue many of them almost break the game.
I agree you need a measure of tolerance for retro gameplay/jankyness and honestly combat was subpar even for its time (Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).
To be fair to Arcanum in terms of companions Baldur’s Gate 2 was really the watershed moment in terms of how companions were treated in RPGs. Arcanum released less than a year after it and so while development timelines were shorter back then I doubt they had much time to adjust and get influenced by BG2. Fallout 1&2 doesn’t have it much better in terms of fleshed out companions.
(Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).
I would definitely recommend FO 1&2 easier than Arcanum and with fewer caveats. Maybe that’s just because I think they are fundamentally better and more important games than Arcanum though and so they are more worth suffering through some jank for. They still have a fiendishly retro interface that is quite clunky and the combat is not great, especially without mods. There is some really questionable encounter design in there and they both suffer from tremendous RNG heavy potential misery and loads and loads of reloads. Not least with random encounters.
Also the first few hours of Fallout 2 are absolutely miserable. It’s still one of my favourite games of all time though.
The whole aimed shots thing makes combat magnitudes more fun in the classic Fallouts. Maybe this is telling of when I first played the games (hint: I was a teen), but there is something about taking cheap shots at people’s groin that doesn’t get old. Becoming a Prizefighter by exclusively and indiscriminately punching your opposition in the dick is always going to be funny.
The critical hits and misses are also very entertaining, though definitely add to the notorious RNG. The animations and effects, like disintegrations and splatter, also make combat a lot more satisfying.
Black Isle Studios planned to include a dual-combat system in the game that allowed for the player to choose between real-time (Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout games and Micro Forté and 14° East’s Fallout Tactics) or turn-based combat (Fallout and Fallout 2) but real-time was only included due to Interplay’s demands.
I am most probably not good at the game, but in Wasteland 3, it felt like you needed the first round advantage, otherwise you would get blown to pieces before you could even act once. That burned the game for me.
Thanks to the design documents being leaked back in 2007 (I think) and the original designers being open to contact from some dedicated people, there are actually a couple of fan made attempts at creating what would have been Van Buren. I know of both Project Van Buren and Fallout: Yesterday.
I’d like to play around with whatever alpha build they made for the original concept of Team Fortress 2.
I love the one that came out (it’s probably my most played game of all time), but those first few screenshots before retooling were captivating when we’d already been waiting so long for the release.
There was a demo reel of the spy as well that was incredible. I played untold hours of tfc. It is likely what made me a intellimouse fan (thumb buttons for both grenade types?! It was the future).
I truly miss conc grenades. There has never been a more versatile weapon in a game.
Titanfall was so goddamn fun. Hey, do you like the combat in CoD: Modern Warfare 2? Do you also want to call in a giant mech suit once in a while? Well buckle up, Buttercup, cause I’ve got a game for you!
Cancelled or shut down? If you wanted a cancelled game to come out, 99 times out of 100, it was your imagination making it into a great game, and they cancelled it because it wasn’t coming together.
For games that were shut down, for me, it was Robocraft. It was only shut down recently, but the version of the game that I loved from about 2017-ish was basically replaced a year later with a version of the game that I was not a fan of, and it stayed that way until the game’s and studio’s closure. I had to get burned by Robocraft in order to come to some realizations about the rot at the core of live service games, and it informed a lot of where I spend my time and money now.
Yeah. Sometimes we’re lucky and get a leak of the cancelled game. Happened with the War Craft adventure game. It was almost finished. And it was really mid. Maybe up to today’s Blizzard standards but not back then.
The game “Humankind” plays very similar to civ 6, might be better to compare it to being inbetween civ 6 and 7. But it has a much more tactical combat system.
I found humankind to be very difficult to go the domination path, but I haven’t played since close to release.
It was very prohibitive to take direct control of conquered cities as the cost seemed exponential, and you had to constantly declare peace and then go right back to war or something if I remember correctly. It seemed like a silly system
The cassette cases are really cool! I keep my Gameboy games in custom DS cases. It’s really nice having all of my gba/DS games looking uniform on the shelf. I kind of wish the Switch had kept that form factor.
I guess we’re total opposites, I usually avoid physicals because I know myself. I want to keep things nice and pretty and pristine, I’ll never subscribe to “the flaw/crease/spillage adds to its charm!”, and I know I am too clumsy to actually keep it as nice as I’d like. Less objects to clean, to lose, to cry over when they inevitably get messed up.
At least from what I am aware of Mitchell cheated. I never heard of the suicide thing. If the lawsuit was really just over suicide and not over the cheating claims, I wonder why his records got reinstated after this. But hey, I’m quite out of the loop and my comment would probably be a good example in court of reputational damage, as a random who does not really follow these records but might click a video on them someday or read something and come away thinking something about a person.
Have been playing Antimatter Dimensions, an !incremental_games, and various Steam demos to see if I’ll like the game or not.
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