I have! It was great as well. I think it’s my favorite original romhack so far. I’m planning on playing Insurgence next, although that’s a fan-game as opposed to real romhack.
KotOR’s console controls can be a bit awkward at times. I haven’t played it on Switch, but I originally played it when it released on the OG Xbox. I assume the control scheme is similar. And the graphics are going to be dated, but that’s a given for a game from '03. But other than that, I’m sure it’ll be a fantastic experience, especially for a die-hard Star Wars fan. It’s still my top game of all time, and if you can play it on PC with some graphical enhancement mods, it still holds up really well nowadays.
Aspyr’s KotOR port was considered pretty good, I believe. I was disappointed in their Civilization series ports for Linux because their netcode was incompatible with the Windows versions, which is baffling to me, considering Linux users are already siloed so much in other ways. But the games ran okay, so it wasn’t all bad.
But yeah, I haven’t really heard any good updates or news come out of Aspyr for a while. If I recall correctly, they were the original devs for the KotOR remake, which was going to be their first game from the ground up from a technical perspective. But they had that taken away from them after working on it for a year or two, which is crazy. It must’ve truly been awful.
Aspyr has a history of laziness and incompetence, unfortunately. I really want to like the company because they were one of the few companies bringing my favorite games to Linux (KotOR and the Civ series) before Steam and Proton got so damn good. But their Civ ports were always plagued with weird bugs not in the original games, not to mention they didn’t have cross-platform multiplayer, preventing me from playing online with my Windows-using friends unless I dual-booted or tried to fight Wine. And somehow their Civ save file format is different, so you couldn’t even switch between Windows and Linux and continue the same game. It was baffling.
Haha, yeah, I’m familiar with the work culture in Japan. I’ve heard from other developers currently working there that it’s much better working for newer and/or international companies.
I’m taking my conversation-level Japanese courses this year and have been looking to land a dev job in Japan. From the sound of it, I’d like working for Pocket Pair a lot. But then again, most companies make their employment sound fantastic…
Redfall was made by Arkane Austin, a different Arkane development team. Dishonored and Death Loop were made by Arkane Lyon, the same team doing Blade.
Now, you may be right that some of the devs behind Dishonored and Death Loop aren’t there anymore, but it would be for other reasons and nothing to do with Redfall. So in that light, I’m still hopeful Blade will live up to the hype.
Just finished Sea of Stars. A random indie game I saw that looked like it would tickle my nostalgia senses, and boy did it deliver. Managed to sneak its way into my top 10 games of all time, easy.
If you’re a fan of turn-based RPGs with action command mechanics (like Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi), old school isometric pixel graphics like Golden Sun or Breath of Fire, great characters, a solid plot, and good pacing, I urge you to pick this game up. There wasn’t ever really a moment where I didn’t want to keep playing.
It took me about 35 hours to finish the entire story and most side content. I estimate it would be probably another 10 hours to finish the rest of the side quests and get all the achievements.
I agree with your last statement, but I actually really enjoyed the puzzles in Spider-Man 1. The story-based ones were never difficult, and for the optional ones, I just waited until I was in the mood for some puzzles, and then blew through them all in one go.
But if you don’t like puzzles at all, I understand turning them off.