I'd say HeartGold/SoulSilver were the absolute peak, and the best entry point. Faithful to the spirit of the originals while feeling sufficiently modernized, and they went above and beyond with how much bonus content they packed into it.
I'd say HGSS is much more polished, and the formula hasn't changed much since anyway. Only major mechanic differences in XY would be Fairy-type and reusable TMs.
IMO, XY is pretty rough around the edges, felt a bit unfinished. There's a good foundation in there, with more time in the oven Z potentially could've been one of the best games in the series...
RGBY - You had to be there. By today's standards, these games are incredibly dated, to a point where it's hard to explain to anyone who didn't grow up on them why they were so magical. Despite feeling aged now, they honestly were ahead of their time in several ways, and there's a reason these games took off and became such a massive cultural phenomenon that dominated the late 90s.
GSC - In comparison, it's honestly surprising to me how well GSC still holds up after all these years. The sequel carries forward the magic of the first games, while polishing and improving the formula in every way. Being able to revisit Kanto for the postgame was the coolest thing ever, and it's sad that we'll never see anything like this again.
RSE - I will forever be a Hoenn hater. Coming off the heels of GSC, these games were just a massive step back in many ways. One region and 202 Pokemon. Weirdly unbalanced with the excessive amount of Water-types, and tedious amount of Surfing. Began the trend of Legendaries becoming more and more god-like, and forced in the story. Not a fan of the art style or trumpet-heavy OST either. Only good thing this game brought to the table was Abilities.
One thing I don't think a lot of people today remember is that this was Dexit before Dexit. When RS first launched, you only had 202 Pokemon in the Hoenn Dex, a step back from GSC's 251, and the missing 184 species were not mentioned or referenced at all. At the time, I thought that they had been retconned out! Eventually, linking to later gen III games would unlock the National Pokedex, but at launch no one knew that was going to be a thing. And it was still fairly wack how many games they spread it out over, gen III as a whole was a mess.
FRLG - RGBY minus the soul. It may be more modernized, but it just doesn't hit the same. I know this is very much a "you had to be there" take.
Colosseum - Painfully slow. Never finished it. Never played XD either.
DPPt - These games were just... bland. There's not much I can actively hate on as much as RSE beyond just how slow they were, but there's also not much that stands out either. I don't have much to say.
HGSS - IT'S PEAK. Does a much better job than FRLG of feeling faithful yet modern. And the sheer amount of bonus content they added in was incredible. By far the best game in the series, nothing else is even close.
BW - Gen V really had a hell of a vibe to it, this era felt like Game Freak really wanted to experiment and it paid off. I give this game a lot of credit for being the first and only entry to have a good plot. However I do feel that the gimmick of new species only wasn't so great, dragged down by the fact that half the Unova Dex is blatant copies of existing Gen I mons. Why bother doing that?
BW2 - However, this game's story was so bad that I stand by my conspiracy theory of it being a last-minute rewrite from a planned Gray. I wonder what that would've looked like. Other than that though, everything else about BW2 was quite strong.
XY - The jump to 3D was rough, but could've been a lot worse. These games honestly feel like an unfinished beta to me, there's a really good game in here somewhere but it's dragged down by performance woes and very very little content. With more time in the oven, I think Z could've been one of the best games in the series, but they never gave this game the Director's Cut it needed.
SM - Since XY's framerate was so troublesome, let's make it worse by adding more models onscreen! Also, let's drop XY's best feature, the Player Search System, in favor of doing almost nothing on the bottom screen! People really liked Megas, so let's replace those with attacks that just do big damage and call it a day! And let's really go way overboard with the cutscenes, tons of long tedious cutscenes! Most of all it was the framerate that really pissed me off. This was actually the first time I bothered finishing the Regional Dex, but I was too fed up with the framerate that I decided I would wait until the next generation on new hardware to try for National...
And so that ended up being the last game I played. Skipped USUM because I didn't want to deal with this engine any longer, and then SS... Seeing how they'd just been cutting more and more corners with each game, I simply saw Dexit as the last straw. Maybe I'd have been willing to accept it if they'd actually been bringing new things to the table to compensate, but they don't. I've come to terms with the fact that the Pokemon that I know and love, the Pokemon that I grew up on, the Pokemon that I named my account after, is dead to me.
I play games that are so niche that 'matchmaking' consists of pinging people on Discord. I've played the same rivals often enough that I have a pretty good idea of who's close to my level and where the skill gaps lie.
I can play a long FT20 set with someone and there will be many individual rounds that look completely one-sided, for both of us. But because it's a long set and not just one-and-done, we can see how normal that really is when it keeps happening in both directions. That's something that will always be a part of games, and there's no magically flawless matchmaking algorithm that would prevent it.
I don't understand what you're talking about. Balatro does not contain loot boxes/gacha. In a world where so many modern AAA games are exploiting all kinds of shady dark patterns, Balatro took off by not doing any of that shit. It's just a sincerely fun game, and it sounds like you're literally just complaining that it's too fun and that should somehow be policed.
Dread. I wasn't sure if it could live up to the high expectations set for it, but they hit it out of the park. Hits all the highs of Super and Zero Mission, then goes on to outdo those games in terms of combat and boss fights. Had a blast going back to speedrun it again and again.
Been a while and I don't remember the routing details at all, but I was surprised to find that they weren't much of an obstacle at all for the speedrun. They're designed to scare you on a first playthrough, but on subsequent replays you just go fast and they won't catch you.
FWIW, that room is completely optional, only reward is a Power Bomb Tank. If you fall down there you do gotta get out, but if you can at least make your way up to the first platform you can bomb it to reveal a tunnel that lets you bail.
I could be wrong, but I think that only happens if you repeatedly enter and exit the EMMI Zone, allowing it to wander around too much. Which is something you might get scared into doing on a first playthrough!
It's super cool that SMZ3 is a thing that even exists, but beyond the novelty of it I felt it was dragged down by the fact that ALttP is so much bigger than SM, to the point where it kinda drowns SM out.
Interesting that in the title, stated in absolute terms in the text, and from the designers they interviewed, they cite getting lost as crucial for the genre. Personally, I disagree. Getting lost has tended to be why I didn’t care for certain games in this genre, like Axiom Verge, and it soured my otherwise higher opinion of...
while Castlevanias powerups focus almost entirely on combat.
Castlevania has always (edit: I mean since SotN) had a pretty heavy emphasis on movement abilities to access new areas. Looking at SotN, we have double jump, high jump, swimming, mist form, bat form, wolf form, as well as good ol' keys to literally unlock the environment.
This is why I consider Metroid Fusion, Other M, and Dread to be among the weaker Metroid titles. All three have an obvious, forced always on hand-holding mechanic that you don't find in other Metroid games.
I'll give you Fusion and Other M, but I'm going to have to disagree on Dread here. The game does sort of guide you along an intended first playthrough route, but so does Super! It's a delicate balance to give the player room for exploration while still ensuring they don't get stuck not knowing where to go. That balancing act should not be seen as disqualifying, or else we're throwing out the genre's foundational text too. If anything, the biggest difference between Dread and Super here is that Dread actually has more developer-intended sequence breaks. If you play Super as intended without utilizing any speedrunning tech, you almost always follow the same route in the end.
I suppose I should've been clearer there, I really just meant the Koji Igarashi-era games, not Classicvania. As the other comment mentions, the term Metroidvania was actually originally coined to separate the two eras of Castlevania, before the genre exploded in popularity and it became repurposed.
For me, anything 25 FPS or higher is 100% fine and I’ll be enjoying my time. I never play competitive online shooter games ever, though. All single player ones like GOW and the likes. I game on a 60 Hz 4k monitor. GPU is AMD RX 6600 alongside Ryzen 7 5700G and 32GB RAM. My games are set to meduim most of the time at 4k....
If it's a fast-paced action game, 60 is a must. If it's turn-based, or otherwise just slow enough to not matter, I'll sometimes accept a stable 30 - but only if it's truly stable, any dips below that are not okay.
Someone remaked Super Mario World in 3D in Unreal Engine 5 (no realistic graphics). The video explains what he did and its super interesting and entertaining to watch. However, there is nothing playable right now. And even if there was one, Nintendo would be fast to remove it. I hope he will publish a finished work as Open...
Splatoon. You could definitely come up with plenty of cool movement abilities to unlock. And in general I just want to see the IP explored in all kinds of directions. If the franchise had debuted a generation earlier, I keep imagining what kind of straight-to-handheld companion title it would've gotten.
Why do you say that? Lots of other old games get remakes that don't try to completely change genre. Just because a game is old doesn't mean no one would play a faithful remake, that reasoning doesn't make any sense.
Hell, SE themselves have done faithful remakes of games that are much older. Dragon Quest III HD just came out and I hear it's been selling pretty damn well.
Yes it was. Plenty of developers who didn't already have an established audience to rally votes from complained about how difficult it was to even get noticed. And it invited a lot of shady tactics as other developers gamed the system to bribe or even bot votes, because if you're not doing that then your game will be left behind as your competition gets Greenlit first. Many perfectly good games got stuck in "Greenlight Hell" for a very long time.
Greenlight era had a lot of problems, and these problems are well documented. Valve dropped it for a reason. Don't start with the revisionist history.
I played it in the “open beta” two years ago. Sad that it’s come to this, the game had a lot going for it but… having all characters locked on start then weirdly shutting the game down for an extended time then coming back with everything somehow worse… everyone saw this coming....
So the market and ecosystem would have to substantially change before these kinds of ports could ever become viable. I doubt any of that is likely to happen.
I wonder if that and/or Labo might be what they meant by the disclaimer that backwards compatibility might not support all titles. Since it's built around old Joy-Cons, might not work with new ones, unless the Switch 2 can just use original Joy-Cons.
Could also be an excuse for Ring Fit 2 built around new Joy-Cons.
Sort of, though Wii and Wii U are a bit more complicated than that so this somewhat of an oversimplification. The ELI5 answer is that some hardware components are directly upgraded and can run in a compatibility mode, other components are just the original hardware thrown in separately.
New3DS is the most recent and most notable exception. It's directly upgraded 3DS hardware, but the CPU downclocks to run at 3DS specs on all legacy titles (and there are almost no native New3DS games so this upgrade was pretty pointless). Softmodding can unlock the full clockspeed, and most games do work fine this way but there are a few rare bugs.
I expect Switch 2 will just be the same architecture upgraded, because that's a lot easier to do now, while the old style of true redundancy would inflate costs too much today. It's also worth noting that Switch titles already expect variable performance in order to support handheld and docked modes, so I doubt much would break if allowed to overclock. But I could also see Nintendo not even trying to support it if even one bug might exist somewhere.
You asked "has Nintendo even released a game?" and the answer to that question is "yes". They released 22 of them. I don't care where you wanna move the goalposts to, you can't say 22 games is "not really".
From Jason Schreier. “The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’,” but this is some analysis from Schreier seemingly rooted in many anecdotes. The long and short of it is that development on AAA games tend to routinely hit bottlenecks where entire portions of a team are waiting for some other team to unblock them so that...
To me, what I dislike the most about the direction the industry is going is that consolidating more resources into fewer megagames means there's less room for experimental side projects and spinoffs. I especially miss all the kinds of B-games that used to go straight to handheld. Of course part of the reason they disappeared because we don't have handhelds to put them on, but I think that half the reason handhelds died was because publishers weren't going to make handheld games for much longer anyway.
Of course there's still a lot of cool stuff coming from indies, but there's a wide spectrum between indie with no budget and AAAA with $10 trillion budget. We're losing everything that was once in between.
Also, spinoffs. I do like seeing alternate takes on IPs and characters I like, but those are rare now because all the resources go into developing one main project. Like I've always wondered, if Splatoon had debuted a generation earlier, what kind of DS companion piece would have accompanied it?
I'm still holding onto the dream that we'll get SteamOS onto something small enough to fit in my pocket and run all my favorite 2D indie games. First manufacturer to do it gets all my money.
I bought a Miyoo Mini Plus a while back, purely an impulse buy for how cheap it was on sale, and ended up putting far more time into it than I ever did with my deck. This is the cozy form factor I need.
Play store is unusable tripe. I member back in the day there being websites and forums that actually gave honest insight into what was good and what was trash. Anything like that today? Where does one find the good android games nowadays while avoiding all the shovelware crap?
Let's discuss: Pokémon (beehaw.org) angielski
The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!...
deleted_by_moderator
Balatro wins formal appeal to reclassify poker game as PEGI 12 (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Favourite Metroid game? angielski
My favourite Metroid game has got to be Zero Mission on the GBA....
Why We Love to Get Lost in Games: The Enduring Appeal of Metroidvanias (www.nytimes.com) angielski
Interesting that in the title, stated in absolute terms in the text, and from the designers they interviewed, they cite getting lost as crucial for the genre. Personally, I disagree. Getting lost has tended to be why I didn’t care for certain games in this genre, like Axiom Verge, and it soured my otherwise higher opinion of...
What's your "this is totally fine and I'm going to have a great time" FPS (refresh rate). ?
For me, anything 25 FPS or higher is 100% fine and I’ll be enjoying my time. I never play competitive online shooter games ever, though. All single player ones like GOW and the likes. I game on a 60 Hz 4k monitor. GPU is AMD RX 6600 alongside Ryzen 7 5700G and 32GB RAM. My games are set to meduim most of the time at 4k....
I Spent 1 YEAR Remaking Super Mario World In 3D! by Bobby Ivar (YouTube: 18:25 min) [Jan 30, 2025] (youtu.be) angielski
Someone remaked Super Mario World in 3D in Unreal Engine 5 (no realistic graphics). The video explains what he did and its super interesting and entertaining to watch. However, there is nothing playable right now. And even if there was one, Nintendo would be fast to remove it. I hope he will publish a finished work as Open...
Games franchises that need metroidvania spinoffs? angielski
My picks:...
Thoughts on Final Fantasy VII Remake angielski
I grew up playing Final Fantasy VII. I probably played it around 10-12 years old and again on ios a few years ago....
Why there are few native Linux games compared to Windows or even Mac? angielski
Does the existence of Wine compatibility layer discourages the creation of native Linux games?
Steam now warns about Early Access that have not been updated in months. (bsky.app) angielski
Excellent feature. One of the first things I check anyways when buying early access games is when the last news post was.
Multiversus ends updates, will close servers on May 30 (but will remain playable in Singleplayer) (multiversus.com) angielski
I played it in the “open beta” two years ago. Sad that it’s come to this, the game had a lot going for it but… having all characters locked on start then weirdly shutting the game down for an extended time then coming back with everything somehow worse… everyone saw this coming....
Resident Evil 2 remake has sold fewer than 10,000 copies on iOS, estimates suggest (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Video game publishers are starting to use "anti-DEI" as a marketing meme (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
Dragonsweeper: A nicely challenging Minesweeper/roguelike combo (danielben.itch.io) angielski
Some notes:...
Games Done Quick from home is a waste of time angielski
Nintendo Switch 2 finally officially revealed (venturebeat.com) angielski
A Direct is announced for April 2nd to cover the games.
deleted_by_author
Why So Many Video Games Cost So Much to Make (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
From Jason Schreier. “The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’,” but this is some analysis from Schreier seemingly rooted in many anecdotes. The long and short of it is that development on AAA games tend to routinely hit bottlenecks where entire portions of a team are waiting for some other team to unblock them so that...
Nintendo Responds to Leaks: "Not Official" (smarfdurden.wordpress.com) angielski
SteamOS expands beyond Steam Deck (store.steampowered.com) angielski
RetroArch 1.20.0 release (www.libretro.com) angielski
Changelog 1.20.0...
Notch says he will work on a spiritual successor to Minecraft (x.com) angielski
Android games angielski
Play store is unusable tripe. I member back in the day there being websites and forums that actually gave honest insight into what was good and what was trash. Anything like that today? Where does one find the good android games nowadays while avoiding all the shovelware crap?