Steam changed it so that popularity metrics are mostly ignored during the first couple days of Next Fest. This started with the October 2024 run, and it's a big part of why you no longer have the good demos popping up quickly at the start. To my knowledge, they never published details on it, but there was a short blurb in the developer Q&A. Things should get better starting sometime tomorrow (tends to be day 3 or day 4).
The idea is that it gives games that don't have pre-existing marketing a way better chance of success, instead of the really massive snowball effect that used to exist where devs lost out for the entire thing if they weren't popular within the first couple of hours, but it has made it a hell of a job to look for new games.
It is a mechanically very dense game. There is a lot of depth and complexity to its gameplay. I get why a lot of people enjoy that. But I just kind of bounce off that, I need something to motivate me to engage with game mechanics. I need a story, or like, some kind of theming that I can project a goal on to. Poker but weird just doesn’t do it for me.
Like I adore paradox games, but I can project a broad world buildy-esq self built narrative and goals on to that, even when the mechanics are as broad as an ocean but as deep as a puddle.
Gaming journalism has really lost all credibility. A fucking 10/10 from TheSixthAxis. For this pile of shit. Even if you’re a hardcore pokemon fan, as a journalist you can’t just ignore the issues. No wonder GameFreak feels no need to do better when they all lap it up like honey, no matter what they release
beautifully shows what city life is like in the Pokémon universe
With flat ugly buildings? With textures that literally cut windows in half when they meet a corner? With people/pokemon popping up 10m in front of you?
Had that on the PS3 back in the day. Got a weird glitch one time where the zombies all spawned with no heads and were basically immortal. Now that was true horror.
Had to switch the console off and leave it for a few days. Crowds of dozens of headless zombies running at me and I couldn’t kill them, all I could do was keep fleeing on horseback, only to encounter another crowd of them. Genuinely the scariest experience I’ve ever had in a game.
This feels like how it will be if there is a real-life Zombie apocalypse. It’s different than playing games, we won’t be killing the hordes, we will just be scared as hell and trying to run as fast as we can.
They do in the show once (Team Rocket) in a throwaway scene that implies pokeballs are fairly uncomfortable and also that humans are too powerful to be contained within ordinary pokeballs.
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