Except they’re not just saying “we don’t like this” and moving on. They’re using dogwhistles (“woke” is only the first one) and 4-chan level type of slurs in their cries of conspiracy. It’s a thinly disguised hate club, games are only an excuse.
They tried to progressively hide it from their group’s front page, editing its language several times, but it was still there in the discussions in and around the group.
Not sure what part exactly was spoiled to you, but I’d be surprised if it can ruin the emotional impact.
There is one twist I will not reveal that I can see might take a bit out of it, but I am not sure how you’d encounter such a specific story beat in isolation. Not convinced even that would completely spoil it too.
It’s a long game, but Xenoblade Chronicles 3 messed me up in all the right ways. Especially if music moves you, I recommend it. Mostly standalone too, if you didn’t play the other 2 main games.
They’re terrible people because they use transphobic slurs out of nowhere and label anything they don’t like “woke”. Only took reading a dozen messages to get to that point. Also, welcome to the block list.
I’ve seen their discussion board. So yeah, intent counts too, and I’d advise anyone who may want to join/use that group to carefully consider why it was made.
They worked on the writing of quite a few famous things, and surprisingly, they made one niche full game themselves that I have played, one of the playdate’s initial games.
Yeah, that curator’s crusade against them doesn’t smell too good, very gamergate-y. That said the call to flag the curator en masse could get them in trouble. Probably not the right solution.
Not from US or UK, but all game magazines I can remember from the 90s and early 00s had that kind of snarky tone in some way really. They loved taunting their readers, and some even trash talked a lot.
In several of those, there was a specific character whose whole job was to answer reader’s mail in the most antagonistic way possible. Of course part of the game was readers expecting to be treated like shit, and writing in an exaggerated need rage and aggressive tone themselves.
I can confirm in the case of switch joy-cons, sticks (and also rails, another weak part of those) can be replaced without any kind of soldering. It’s all ribbon cables.
I haven’t tried this, so can’t really compare it myself, but if we are comparing this to Splatoon (which seems reasonable in terms of appeal if not completely in terms of gameplay), I can already see a difference, and in my opinion a huge problem.
Microtransactions. Very bad case of them according to lots of reviews.
Motion Twin is an interesting studio. They have a completely horizontal structure, they keep their studio small (10 people at most) on purpose and they’re more like a partnership of independent developers agreeing on common projects.
Most of them also seem to prefer switching to completely something else once they consider a game is done. Dead Cells is a special case because after a year part of MT wanted to keep working on it, so they created their own, more traditional studio Evil Empire and hired people just for that.
But then, things at MT apparently didn’t go too well. They spent months vetoing everything because no game concept seemed good enough for everyone to agree on it. The lead dev on Dead Cells tried to push them to at least try something, it didn’t go well and they pushed him out instead.
Looks like there has been quite a bit of turnover on the studio since Dead Cells, and very little news, and since we’re talking about a studio of 8-10 people, it’s a bit worrying.
There have been 4 paid DLCs, Castlevania is just the latest.
However, I agree it’s been all worth it until now. Every new area feels like a new experience with cool new gimmicks, gameplay has been refined with stuff like the backpack, we got cool free indie crossover stuff…
And Return to Castlevania has more love for the series in it than anything Konami has done in the last 15 years (which is not saying much, fuck Konami).
I’m okay with the next DLC being the last. The game has had a fantastic life, and I wouldn’t want it to go past the creators’ motivation and start becoming bland. Excited to see what Motion Twin and Evil Empire have in store now (though Motion Twin’s situation seems a bit complex).
So, a long time ago I got Little Big Adventure 2 a.k.a. Twinsen’s Odyssey.
This game has a “behaviour” feature that lets you switch between 4 modes : normal, stealthy, athletic and agressive. This has an impact on how the main character Twinsen moves and acts : normal walks and interacts, stealthy sneaks around, athletic runs and jumps, aggressive lets you punch stuff.
Note that all of those except athletic are unbearably slow, and the game requires quite a bit of jumping, so I quickly considered athletic the default one, only switching for something else briefly when I needed to do something specific.
In this game you get your second and last weapon, a sword, quite far into the game. It does a lot of damage, and it’s required to beat some enemies. But every time I’d try to use it, Twinsen would do a ridiculous backflip first, then do a jumping attack forward. It was very hard to hit a moving enemy that way, it required a lot of space and since I could barely control that move (tank controls by the way), there was a huge risk I’d get hit in the process.
I lost many times against a huge boss that was only vulnerable to the sword, eventually beat him with great difficulty and after that went through the rest of the game still trying to get the most out of that ridiculous weapon.
It took me another playthrough to understand that the way Twinsen used the sword depended on his behaviour. Only athletic did that double jump first, agressive in particular just let you hack stuff up immediately.
Probably something on the Amstrad CPC computer, and I couldn’t tell which game specifically.
I had the Donkey Kong arcade port on it, ironically better than the NES one because it had the full 4 levels instead of just 3.
Other game of note was Jet Set Willy. Despite the simplistic style that game was creepy as hell to me. The intro music was a pretty good 8-bit rendition of the Moonlight Sonata. Not sure how much of this is due to the game, but that music still kind of gives me the creeps.
Then on that computers I had lots of forgettable games, often in compilations. And a few bad ports (Salamander a.k.a Life Force), okay ones (Contra) and a very late addition of Lemmings, probably the best game I had on it yet not the best version of the game by far.
I got a NES as a secondary gaming platform at some point. Super Mario Bros 1 and 3 were not the first games I played, but after playing so many crappy platform games on the CPC they definitely had a huge impact on what I still consider good game design now.