I spent a lot of time playing Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts alone and online with friends. A lot of people I’ve talked to view it negatively and are surprised when I say it was one of my favorite 360 titles. It’s one of the main reasons I want to try out Xbox 360 emulation.
Thanks for the nice comment. I was struggling to do the editing in the browser, so I downloaded Abricotine to draft the post in Markdown more easily. For the zine do you mean the last image? The Choice Beat one? I can’t seem to replicate the issue.
Ah, I see. Let's just say that we'll have to agree to disagree. I dislike nearly all 3D games with free movement - I've never been able to tolerate TES, for instance. Give me tile-based movement any day.
Xeen was what I thought of our first “proper” game. So many good memories. I played it like it’s real time, spamming the attack button without any strategy.
Still play it every so often. And thanks to ScummVM I could play it on a toaster if I wanted to.
Pretty much all of those are characters from franchises that quickly jumped to consoles, or had the intention of multiplatform releases from the very start. I’m not sure any of them are very fitting.
So on that note, the least nonsensical mascot for PC gaming in particular I can think of is that dwarf, whoever he is, from the box art of World of Warcraft. Or possibly the orc from the alternate version. WoW is earth-shatteringly popular and has basically defined the entire private lives of a depressing number of people, not to mention it’s the sole and singular thing even non-gamers think of when you mention MMORPGs. And it has only appeared on home computers. Never consoles. Other Warcraft properties have, but not WoW.
Maybe I’m biased (see profile picture) but I’d argue that Kerbals from KSP fit.
KSP exists on consoles but almost everyone plays on PC. It was one of the first successes of the early access model which for better and worse has affected gaming as a whole. It’s influential too. The internet is full of anecdotes about KSP being the reason someone became interested in space, got an engineering degree, or even getting jobs at NASA or private space.
The aesthetic of Starfield is excellent. The planets are beautiful but you can only access one small square of surface at a time. The ship flight and navigation is simplistic but the combat and boarding is fun. In fact I can’t really think of a better game for ship boarding.
But overall Starfield somehow is less than the sum of its parts.
As an Elite Dangerous Enjoyer (I enjoy Star Citizen too, but SC is more “rule of cool” than “rule of real” than Elite) I appreciate the more or less “grounded in reality” setting that Bethesda created with Starfield. Most planets are giant, empty, desolate rocks or iceballs, which is exactly what one would expect from real life planets. And I suppose this may be a big reason why many people were disappointed. It seems that many expected the game to be “Star Wars Skyrim,” but Star Wars is very unrealistic with regards its planetary depcitions. Planets are varied and generally not shown to be mostly empty, desolate space rocks. Full world cities, jungles, magma, gas storms, etc. Likewise I more or less find the gameplay enjoyable, even with its annoyances (most of which are fixable with mods that are available right now).
However, I actually found myself very disappointed with the visual aesthetics of the game. When Bethesda marketed the game, they described it as “NASA-Punk.” But I suppose my disappointment comes from them failing to communicate what that meant to them, since it obviously meant something different to me.
When I first heard the term “NASA-Punk,” I became excited to see an abundant use of white and black, with copius amounts of shiny gold foil. I expected to see exposed mechanics and rocket piping. Basically, a mood board of NASA created technology from the beginning of NASA up until now. Ships inspired by the Lunar Landers, Lunar Rovers, etc. Bethesda on the other hand, seems to have created an aesthetic of “what would NASA look like 1000 years from now?” Since the two are so drastically different, you likely can imagine my disappointment at what I see as a weird, ugly aesthetic for many of the ship designer parts and space suits.
Well said. I adjusted my expectations and found myself liking the game. I didn’t find the planets lacking in anything, really. I expected things to be barren as it felt more realistic. The game is photographiclly beautiful. While a lot of the gameplay and writing critique is valid, I didn’t think it was a fundamentally bad game, just mediocre in some parts and excellent in other parts many people simply overlook.
My impression of Starfield (after release, at least) was, that it was a bunch of pretty well intended and implemented subsystems (as is, to my knowledge quite common in game development; each team works on a different one), but they just don’t fit really well together. All the subsystems are good parts of a theoretically good overall big picture, but the complexity seemed too high for them to actually flesh out the big picture.
Technically it all works, but IMO you feel the conceptual gaps whenever you transition (UX wise) from one gameplay mechanic to the next. It just doesn’t (or didn’t) feel like a cohesive game.
If it’s random and unfair, why do I consistently win more than others I play with?
Many good games have some luck, some skill, and some strategy. Mario Kart has all of these. Strategy in how and when to use your items, skill to drive/drift/etc, and luck in which items you get. It strikes a really good balance of this, which results in me, someone who’s an above average player, winning most of the time, but keeping it fun for those who aren’t as skilled, like my parents, where sometimes they can get one over me due to some luck, strategy, or a mistake on my part.
Finally, let people live their lives, and maybe git gud. It kinda sounds like you just suck, and are salty about it.
Don’t chase weapon upgrades and crafting research too hard. The minor stat upgrades don’t really effect much for the stupid amount of grinding required to get the exact right materials needed.
I found that the novelty of the game wore off pretty quick after I started finding what initially felt like handcrafted points of interest repeating for the third time. Apparently there’s a mod that tweaks the RNG to significantly reduce how often things repeat, because it’s really rough out of the box.
I might look into that mod. I heard the repetition of the dungeons is particularly rough, but I was planning to leave it because I honestly don’t really care for Bethesda Dungeons anyways. After the second dungeon my brain just defaults too “okay. When will this be over”. But It sounds like RNG extends outside of the dungeons too, so I might look into the mod
Agree. 5 was a fun spectacle but the character switching really was ass, and playing as V it felt like the winning strategy was just buttonmashing. Still was very happy it got made after DMC.
playing as V it felt like the winning strategy was just buttonmashing
How are we still making these criticisms in 2025 😔
This is why discussing action games in mainstream spheres sucks balls because half of the criticisms are as lazy as this. Y'all should do better.
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