A couple titles that deserve mention and I don’t see in any other lists:
Children of Mora - Narrative driven action RPG with some light Roguelite-ish elements. Amazing world building and story telling, good character choice/building and gameplay.
Cassette Beasts - Pokemon, if it were good. Much more mature story, tons of quality of life systems that makes building things fun, a weakness system that matters a lot more than “number big” and the entire game is double battles. I’ve played the game start-to-finish in couch co-op and it was incredible. They’ve recently added online multiplayer, but I cannot say with 100% certainty that the online allows you to engage with the story together. Couch co-op has one player play as the companion character in an otherwise unchanged experience whereas online has one player character hop into another player characters world.
Weird enough, the Monster Hunter franchise - I’m not sure how this isn’t anywhere else in this thread. Use large weapon to hunt large monster. Build bigger weapon to hunt bigger monster. World and Rise are both on sale on Steam right now. World is dumb to move through the story together though, despite the fact that most fans who aren’t me are likely to call it the better game.
I mean, a small part of me dislikes the lost potential for satire. Dead Rising was always an over-the-top franchise, and Frank always came off as a kind of “wants to be taken seriously, but often finds himself selling candid shots of celebrities to tabloids to get by” kind of photographer. But the presentation was too serious and felt ultimately creepy, rather than being funny or coming off as social commentary.
Hopefully slinger won’t have the same softening mechanic as in Iceborn.
Speculatively, they seem to have replaced the mechanic with monster wounds and focus strikes, as shown in the focus video. I’m glad to have them keep some kind of mechanic to emphasize the importance of hitting certain parts of the monstet, because base world was far too forgiving with Weakness Exploit and ignore hitzone builds.
You’re right, but at least there are challenges to be found in FFXIV. Attempting to run past monsters and click the thing will result in death. There are clear bosses where taking you hands off the keyboard for 5-10 seconds means you won’t make it. I am sure the high-end of ESO has genuine challenges, but I couldn’t find them. This is a game where you can genuinely ignore enemies and afk during combat and you’ll still survive. o
To be clear, I think it’s devs really hit on a specific market: there are a lot of people out there who genuinely want a “wind-down, complete quests in vibrant world and feel like a hero” MMO. I was just bored out of my tree after a few days because I am the furthest thing from that audience. Casually getting into ESO, it is truly a challenge-free landscape, far more so than even the intensely story and social driven FFXIV.
It’s not a good article. I was following along until, 5 minutes in, it suddenly decided to be detailing and describing exactly what AI and LLMs are. Like, long after showing some of the ways it’s hurting the industry, presumably to pad words.
For every shitty article pushing AI hype out there, there’s a shittt article pushing AI hate. Extremism generates clicks.
I thinks there are some nuggets of good information in there. The bits on first-hand accounts from former and current Activision employees, and on how it’s mostly the concept artists that are hurt is interesting. But you really have to wade through a mound of shit to get there, and I genuinely don’t have the patience to wade through the second half and see if there any more truth in this soft mound of turd that Wired called journalism.
BPM: Bullets Per Minute. A boomer shooter had an affair with he rhythm game genre and this was the outcome. Amazing game, assuming you don’t mind rhythm games, and an immaculate one if you actively like rhythm games.
Neon White is technically a shooter, but in most ways does not play or feel like one. It’s better described as a first person puzzle/platformer, but I would still recommend it, as it is an incredible game.
Both of the Doom ports run insanely well on the Switch. Seemingly impossibly well considering how dated the console is.
Warframe is good, free and playing surprisingly well on Switch.
A strictly anti-capitalist fever dream adventure RPG getting completely consumed and milked by greedy capitalists who added nothing of value to its creation is peak this timeline.
I just fucking want Elite to be good. I could shoot pirates and 'goids all day if getting a ship ready to do so wasn’t as enjoyable as running dental floss into my mouth and out my asshole.
As a “space games guy” is there anything out there that is as satisfying to simply fly around in as Elite Dangerous is without the absolute shit fuck of ass-backwards, tedious and boring mechanics?
I fucking love flying ships in that game with my HOTAS and VR headset, but I will be damned if I am going to roll around on a moon praying I trip over some precious metals just so I can play logistics hot potatoes trying to figure out how I am going to get my module to the relevant station, upgraded, and then placed into the ship I designed it for. Elite is such an incredible space cockpit sim, and they’ve gone to great lengths to prevent me from wanting to actually play it. I just want a good cockpit sim with HOTAS support that doesn’t make me want to scoop out my own eyeballs whenever I think about loading it up again.
The endgame Sephiroth fight was definitely forced. It reeked of “well, he’s been the secret antagonist all game, so we can’t just disclude him from the finale” kind of thinking.
I liked the more persistent villain lurking in Cloud’s broken mind, but they shouldn’t have felt the need to try and put a pseudo capstone on that story thread.
That’s so fascinating, tbh. I mean, different strokes, so I can’t judge, but it’s the impressively deep strategy they’ve baked into Remake’s combat that I am particularly impressed by. That said, it makes sense though that if you dislike Tales combat, you’d dislike Remake’s combat. They’re not the same persay, but they’re cut from the same cloth imo.
I can’t get over just how much better Remake is compared to the original, so you do you, I guess. I was incredibly pleasantly surprised to see the ways they’re engaging with telling a different story and taking the name “remake” very literally. I was seriously concerned they were just going to sell the original story again in three seperate parts as full-price titles.