2 botches things that worked very well before. Especially the camera that did a good job of always being in the right place in 1, but in 2 you suddenly have crazy angles and blind spots that play against you. This can’t even be explained by more complex level design, so who knows what happened.
Also they got rid of the hub for a small, disturbing looking ship and a very generic map, and they killed any trace of story. Those were two things that really set Galaxy 1 apart IMO.
On the new side of things, there were Yoshi, with different powers, and more challenges (but they kind of feel repetitive, because you end up needing to do the same things with just an additional timer or enemy etc…). And the last stars were quite a bit harder than anything in Galaxy.
Galaxy is so great. Good flow, good looking, excellent music with a mix of epic and ambient… And a new character that got more personality from a short story and a couple dialogues than any character from the series ever had.
Too bad they never really knew what to do with her after that. Except Ubisoft with Mario + Rabbids 2, but… Meh.
Part of it might be applying the many patches of definitions and stuff, but it’s probably mostly just loading a shitload of png files in memory.
Even worse, even after years of updates, the several literal minutes of loading on a HDD happen on a completely unresponsive, static screen (Windows even prompts you with that “kill the app or wait for it to respond” pop-up if you alt-tab out of it).
There’s a mod to add a progress bar to that initial mod loading. Yeaaah.
It’s something I feel like more recent Nintendo games haven’t done.
References to past games are still a thing they do quite a lot. Weirdly enough in Super Mario Odyssey they went all in on Donkey Kong nostalgia. 3D world has the Comet Observatory, reimagined levels from 64, Bowser’s Fury brought back Bowser Jr’s paintbrush from Sunshine.
Breath of the Wild is chock full of references, ruins of old places, every land feature name is evoking something, be it a character, an old boss, whatever, music cues from the Temple of Time, Spectacle Rock dungeon, Dragon Roost Island…
Echoes of Wisdom borrowed like 70% of its map from A Link to the Past. Again. They already did that in A Link Between Worlds. Not a fan of that one honestly, I love ALttP, Nintendo please stop nostalgia farming it for subpar games already. I like my maps to feel fresh.
Mario Kart World is almost nothing but references, most tracks are from past episodes, and you can find stuff like SNES circuits on the roads around the official ones. And there are loads of remixes of past games music, from NES to Switch and everything in between.
Not all games are about graphics, and this looks completely serviceable to me. I understand struggling with ASCII roguelike interfaces (never really got the hang of it myself), but everything here looks easily identifiable.
I’m pretty sure the few overpaid execs that are “fuck you” rich are still there, and they’re probably richer than ever. However now they probably consider themselves too important to park with normal people. It’s all about private jets and helicopters.
Tells a lot about this guy and his ilk that he thinks you measure a healthy company to how many assholes actively flaunt their money with shallow luxury shit.
I mean, Hamilton exists. If people want to write crazy shit about historical figures or make games about them they should be able to.
There’s a 35 year old game series featuring stuff like leading Cleopatra’s army against the tyrannical rule of Theodore Roosevelt while Gandhi’s words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
I recently learned there was a musou/Warriors game called Bladestorm taking place during the hundred years’ war. The game was not great apparently but reading about the crazy anime takes on European historical figures and events is funny.
Apparently it has a sequel where Joan of Arc turns evil (including the stereotypical villainess costume change, of course) and leads an army of sorcerers and monsters to wreck havoc.
The Triforce quest was somewhat nerfed in the remake. You get some fragments immediately instead of finding a map to them.
And the new sail kinda makes wind control useless for sailing which I’m honestly not sure I like. This is just a part of the game’s theme they cut, there is such a thing as too convenient IMO.
IMO the cool thing about TP is the weirdness. There are those eerie choirs, even in the jingles, there are some quite grotesque designs, and a few quite disturbing and puzzling cutscenes.
It’s definitely the Zelda game for weird moods, maybe not as crazy as Majora’s Mask but more like a constant feeling of something being not right.