I’d like a more Mario sunshine/64 style game. The movement mechanics were sublime in sunshine. That itch hasn’t been scratched since, even by odyssey, which came closer than the galaxy games.
Makes sense, when Sunshine was made the only other 3D Mario was 64, so it used the same formula on a larger and more elaborate scale.
But then something unexpected happened, they made bonus levels that were capsule worlds that looked a lot like classic Mario games. And players wanted more of that so the Galaxys were basically that, fleshed out into full games.
Odyssey is a natural progression of Galaxy’s formula. But 3D World is not a natural progression of Sunshine, its New Super Mario Bros. in 3D.
It would be nice to get more 64/Sunshine-type games.
I want more Animal Crossing 🤞 I’m hoping with it’s success for New Horizons that we don’t have to wait 12 years again for the next one. A new Mario would be good too though, Odyssey was a lot of fun.
If you didn’t try it, “Bowser’s Fury” was a lot of fun. It’s annoyingly packaged with “3D World”, although if you haven’t played that it’s also a good 3D Mario.
I realized this idea long, long ago, when Rare made Banjo-Tooie.
Banjo-Kazooie was a fun game. You unlock worlds, go to the world, collect 100% of all there is to collect, then continue.
Banjo-Tooie, its sequel, wanted to be bigger and better in every way. Sprawling open world hub, much larger worlds with more sub-zones, interconnectivity between worlds, more things to unlock, more things to do, etc. etc.
And I think, despite having so much more, it was a worse game for it. You go to a new world but find there’s a lot you can’t do yet because you didn’t unlock an ability that comes later on. You push a button in one world and then something happens in another, but now you have to backtrack through the sprawling overworld and large world maps to get there.
And this was just a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64, before the concept of “open world” had really even taken off.
But it demonstrated to me that bigger was not always better, and having more to do did not make it a better game if it wasn’t as enjoyable.
Early open world games were fairly small, and the natural desire for people who have seen everything becomes “I wish there was more,” but in practice it ends up typically being that they take the same amount of stuff and divide it up over a larger area, or they fill the world with tedium just for the sake of having something to do.
When looking at the collectibles and activities on a world map like Genshin Impact, it’s basically sensory overload with how much there is to do.
But almost all of that is garbage. And this is just a fraction of one region among several. Go here, do this time trial, shoot these balloons, follow this spirit, solve this logic puzzle, and then loot your pittance of gatcha currency so you can try to win your next waifu or husbando before time runs out.
And don’t forget to do your dailies!
If a game has a large world, it needs to act in service to its design. It needs to be fun to exist in and travel through, not tedious. It needs to have enough stuff to do that keep it from feeling empty, but not so much stuff that it makes it hard to find anything worthwhile. And it needs to give enough ability for the player to make their own fun, to act as the balance on that tightrope walk between not-enough and too-much.
Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the most recent games that seemed to properly scratch an open world itch for me. While they weren’t perfect, the way they managed to really incorporate the open world as its own sort of puzzle to solve, in ways that Genshin Impact failed to properly emulate, made them more enjoyable as an open world than most other games in that genre I’ve played in recent memory.
It’s a useful place to find out if something totally sucks though. That’s how I use it. 60+? Probably good, at least for some audiences. Less than that? Only if you’re already hyped or a fan of whatever thing it’s related to.
Yeah I mean ratings are giving you an idea of whether there’s a chance you like that game. The higher the rating, the higher the chance. But there’s always a bit of chance involved.
I tend to buy highly rated games much more often, but if I really am hyped for a game with an OK rating, I still might give it a go. You never know if it will hit your specific niche.
It has an engine that permits recording and “rewinding” gameplay, with a lot of interesting quirks, like elements that don’t rewind. Puzzle platformer based on that.
It was a fascinating thing technically, and the creator did a lot with that capability. But IMHO it’s not otherwise exceptional, like graphically or such.
I’d like to imagine this is analogous to autocomplete on a keyboard, like if I mash “A” a few times to get to the title screen and game’s like “Did you mean A A A A A Start Start Down Start A A B Right Right…”
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