I am not really seeing it. I did finish it without a guide back then. It was the Windows 9x port, but I don’t think it changes much.
Really in my case a guide would not help for the hardest parts, which were mostly the crazy moves needed to push those floating things to break rocks and to swim against currents with boulders.
I got certainly the most lost I’ve ever been in a game in a Daggerfall dungeon, trying desperately to find the tiny wall tag that’s supposed to be the exit.
They weren’t nearly so patient with Okami around that time. They barely communicated around it, killed the studio, then commissioned a port they…barely communicated around again, and then they complained the game was doomed to be a commercial failure because… I don’t know.
It’s basically like one of the better classic Legend of Zelda games, only with a unique universe and charm and about twice the size of those.
It was criminally overlooked on PS2, but they have zero excuse for not turning it into a major hit for the Wii. One of the best game on a console with an absurd install base and that had almost no competition for it at that point.
Gacha and lootboxes (similar in concept) tend to be the worst of predatory microtransactions because they exploit gambling addictions.
“Classic” microtansactions, like freaking Oblivion horse armor, skins, etc, are bad, but you buy them once and you know exactly what you’re getting.
With gacha and lootboxes you buy a lottery ticket hoping to get something good. They use rush-inducing casino-style tricks to get you hooked. They obfuscate your real odds and how much you’re spending as much as they can.
Nintendo games do that a lot. Most Mario games (some of them in Charles Martinet’s voice), StarFox, Metroid (with occasional thumbs-up/waving at player), F-Zero…
I am against all game design patents in general. You shouldn’t be able to file a patent on game mechanics, like no movie director could have filed a patent on, say, the idea of sequence shot.
Game content (art, characters, etc) is already protected by copyright. Patents have absolutely no business in this.
You’d be lacking shortcuts obviously, and very rarely (mostly when you ask for it) you might be prompted to input a name for something, but almost everything else has mouse controls.
Now that I think about it, there are two keys that might be a bit inconvenient not to have, spacebar for emergency pauses (there’s a screen button but it’s harder to hit in a bind) and shift that let you queue an order instead of replacing the current one.
My random suggestions right now for stuff I like and is played with mouse would be:
Rimworld. Almost any top-down PC management or (not too fast paced) strategy game should work, but, I really like the crazy random shit that happens to the characters you’re slowly getting to know in Rimworld.
Almost any of the Zachtronics games, if you like to torture your brain. Open-ended sort-of-engineering puzzles.The bigs ones like Spacechem, Opus Magnum and Shenzhen IO in particular, last call BBS for a bit more variety inside one game. Not Infinifactory, since while it doesn’t have any kind of fast paced action it still requires navigating in 3D so mouse only wouldn’t work.
I’d heard the reason for the Xbox One was that some marketing genius noticed people were calling Xbox 360 “the 360”, and thought they would call that one… well, the One.
And then everyone laughed and went ex-bone instead.
Humans are bad at probability, and that’s mostly why they gamble too.
Every wheel draw is supposed to be independent (it’s not totally so because computer “random” is really a pseudo-random algorithm, but close enough). So every time you draw, the odds are 1:4. Previous draws don’t matter.
On an infinitely large number of draws, you’d see a 1/4 success rate. This doesn’t mean you can’t fail a dozen times in a row (the probability of that is (3/4)^12, about 3%… It happens).
If anything Firaxis’s take on XCOM has made turn based tactics somewhat mainstream again, and Ubisoft has already tried to surf on this trend once with Mario+Rabbids.
Thinking about those I’ve played, I don’t think remakes have ever detracted from the original to me.
The first time I finally completed Metroid 1 was shortly after Zero Mission (which had the cool effect that the locations of some power ups was still fresh in my mind).
I also enjoyed Samus Returns despite it missing the point of Metroid 2, and that didn’t make Metroid 2 worse in retrospect.
Kind of similar with Majora’s Mask 3D, Mario 64 DS…