I agree, the last genuinely pretty game was Emerald, imo. Diamond and beyond is where 3D assets started weakening the art direction, imo. Either keep the beautiful pixel art, or do proper cel shaded graphics, like windwaker. Personally, I’d stick with pixel art for the strongest possible art direction.
That would be more valid here if Pokémon were focused on being fun. As a lifelong fan, modern Pokémon games are typically both ugly and not terribly fun. They make decent “turn off your brain” games, but the quality of game did not go up with the decrease in graphics.
Yeah that’s fair. I haven’t cared about Pokemon since the remakes of Sapphire and Ruby during which I didn’t lose a single battle. It was a cool nostalgia trip but since there was absolutely no strategy necessary I never ever wanted to go back since there’s not enough reward for the time sink; it’s just not fun imo.
While it wasn’t necessarily pretty and had its share of glitches, I quite enjoyed Arceus. It was a nice break from the standard patterns it’s fallen into.
Course I say that as someone who also enjoyed Sword and Shield after a skipping a few prior.
Graphics definitely aren’t everything, but they could stop it With the half finished games with glitches.
Arceus was a fun break from the norm, and was even more fun once I played it on redacted to remove some of the performance issues my Switch had with it. I’m looking forward to Z-A exclusively because the impression Arceus made (well, and
Spoilermega evolutions
)
I’ve been playing a randomized (and slightly higher level enemy Pokémon) run of Shield after beating it once originally and being quite disappointed, and I’ve enjoyed that pretty thoroughly as well. The return of follower Pokémon in the DLC is something I’ve been asking for since HG/SS.
So, still atmospheric and beautiful, but low poly enough that artists don’t have to spend so much time creating detail. Sort of like an impressionistic painting.
To be honest though for most AAA games I think its animations and highly choreographed gameplay sequences that are bottlenecking development more than the art is. Look at games like cyberpunk and fallout 76: they largely didn’t have unfinished art assets (in fact the art assets in both those games, particularly the environments, look quite good). Instead they had broken animations and gameplay systems. I guess art style does play a roll in that though, as a more realistic model kinda demands more realistic animations to avoid looking weird.
“devs too focused on making a game pretty instead of fun” is talking about making the art photorealistic with fancy hair engines and such, when doing so doesn’t add meaningfully to the experience and only serves to needlessly complicate development and inflate the cost.
We can tell that making all these 3D models and animations is a problem for the devs because they’ve said so repeatedly. They’ve even said they can’t have every Pokemon in the same game as a result. Instead of the lovely pixel art of FRLG we have a mish-mash of dead-eyed, poorly-animated cartoons with PSP-quality “realistic” terrain that grate against each other. And for what? Why do 3D when you can only do 3D so poorly?
Games don’t need to be graphically ground breaking to be fun but the art should at least not be repulsive and/or incoherent as fuck like modern Pokemon games.
TBH I used to be a huge Monster Hunter fan, pre-ordered MH: World but it was such a huge disappointment that I will never purchase any capcom game ever again.
Anybody surprised about the state of wilds hasn’t been paying attention.
Yeah that game was unplayable for me. I rebind my keys, but there were functions hard bound to keys, probably from like debugging or something, so pressing them would execute two functions. Specifically it was camera rotation. That was disorientating as hell.
For one of my friends it kept crashing, and since you can’t save during the intro he had to play it 3 times or so.
MH: World is the only MH game I tried, out of curiosity. It ended up on my library at some point as a PS+ game. Got through the initial “story” thing, if you can call it that. The tutorial. Getting to the camp. The mandatory chat with 10 different people. Did the first real “hunt”.
It seemed to mind bogglingly boring, that after that mission, I just uninstalled the game.
Wilds looks amazing. Which makes me wonder if the games are sufficiently different that it might be worth give it a chance.
That suits me, I just dumped everything I had into renewing my online subscription. Half off.
It feels like this is the only way Nintendo feels comfortable going from a currency system on the Switch to the exact same thing on the Switch 2. Nary the twain shall meet.
They just don’t want to be hounded by anyone about transferring gold from one system to the other.
They just don’t want to be hounded by anyone about transferring gold from one system to the other.
Why do you need to transfer from one system to another? From my understanding (the last Nintendo device I owned was the OG gameboy) the gold points are roughly comparable to steam points. Why would it matter whether you have a Switch 1 or Switch 2?
Gold points are earned by buying select Switch games and hardware. You use it to buy stuff online related to the Switch. Nintendo wants to reset everyone’s progress for the Switch 2. If you want to use gold to buy Switch 2 stuff it has to be gold earned buying Switch 2 stuff.
Greedy? Yes. But then again, it’s a rewards program they don’t even have to offer in the first place.
I was gonna make a joke about Nintendo, but I’m pretty sure they actually sued someone for publicly hosting 30 year old copies of the Nintendo Power magazine.
I’d be ashamed too, losing to astro bot. What I’ve heard from the Platformer community is that while the game is good, it’s very short and lacks in the amount of unique areas (and enemies?) and as such is more or less blitz and glamour. Like, props to sony for producing jump and runs, but still…
I just finished Astro Bot and it is a very good game. However, it is very derivative of Mario to the point where it is very clearly a Mario game, except you are collecting PlayStation member-berries instead of stars or whatever.
I loved it, but I have a hard time justifying it as GotY. IMO it should have gone to Wukong or Balatro.
This approach is so common in RPGs it’s like dwarves with Scottish accents; a better question to ask would be whether there’s an RPG that doesn’t do it - one that hurries you up instead?
I mean…Dark Souls is the obvious answer, but that’s almost a different subgenre of RPG. Dark Souls does have side quests, but they are obscure and often incidental to the main quest. They also skirt this problem by having “time” be a loose concept in the lore - in every game, the world is in the process of slowly ending, in a literal way that fucks up the flow of time.
I really like my Playdate, and I say this as someone who was very critical of it before it came out ("No color or backlight? Only A and B buttons? Why would anyone pay $200 for that?) and received it as a gift from my very intuitive husband. I am still very critical of the fact that there is no backlight, but the damn thing is so cute and charming. I like playing games on it.
I’m very disappointed that the dock just got shelved and won’t be released. Now I have to make my own or buy an Etsy one. :(
Dropping a random tip here that might help a couple people that are running Metaphor on PC with an RTX card: turn on DLDSR and FXAA from your Nvidia Control Panel, and set 100% rendering scale in-game. The game doesn’t have anti-aliasing for whatever reason and the shimmer is real bad compared to Atlus’s earlier games. The best you can do in-game is crank up the scale, and I think some pretty beefy hardware is still required for good framerate with that.
Some stuff is probably going to be bad no matter what you do (like Strohl’s vest), but this way I can reduce a lot of the aliasing and still get a rock-solid 60 FPS on my modest 3060Ti. There are likely better third-party solutions being developed by the community right now, maybe even some good presets in Reshade.
It’s quite a thing, that could only be a product of the 70s. Might make you go “huh?”, and is almost certainly the only context I feel comfortable with the word transvestite today.
If you ever decide you want to see it please for the love of Tim Curry don’t watch it on TV.
The only way to experience the RHPS is at a theater, movie or stage, with a floor show. Without the floor show you will not get what makes RHPS an adored Cult Classic. Seriously, the floor show is what makes (or breaks) the experience.
If you walk into the show and you’re not surrounded by people in costumes spouting weird lines, or if you don’t see them in the aisles within the first 90 seconds of the show starting then you may as well get up and leave.
Edit: Fixed my typo’s as pointed out by @shiny_idea
The same thing applies to The Room, another terrible movie turned cult classic. You need to be in a theater of people throwing spoons or it's not worth watching.
Yeah I feel there is a weird history between steam and remedy media. Like I remember when you could one day buy Alan Wake like really cheap since it was being taken off steam. Then the Epic deal making Alan Wake 2 exclusive basically meant they excluded a lot of customers immediately on steam.
I know a guy who’s been working there for well over a decade, I wonder if he’s got any insights on this weird behavior they’ve been doing. He’s got no power over financial decisions, so it’s not likely he’s got any details.
I understand that Epic funded their project to be an Epic exclusive, but was that a financially sound decision excluding the major market place. Could they not have worked in like a two year or three year exclusive period
People who don’t want to use the epic store. That was me. I just don’t want another launcher, another account. I’ll get around to it at some point I’m sure but I didn’t buy AW2 and probably would have if it wasn’t an exclusive.
Civ VI instead of Civ V? List automatically invalid.
Jokes aside it’s an interesting list and I like the idea of ranking based on “what’s best to play right now” instead of by historical significance or some futile attempt at objective apples-to-apples quantification - even though at the end of the day I think I neither agree with the selection nor the ranking. But there are plenty of good games on there with solid reasons of why to play them in their descriptions, so it’s a good read nonetheless.
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