Yeah. I liked Odyssey for wandering around my carrier’s interior and really very little else. The combat is absolute dogshit, and that wouldn’t be half as bad if pretty much every on-foot mission type did not inevitably downright require pissing off some faction or another, which then forces you to get involved in combat. The gunplay is pants, and I can’t fathom why there are so few hitscan handheld weapons in a universe that’s all about laser beams and railguns and shit. And then when you’re done with the annoying combat you have a ton of bounties stacked up you have to deal with.
At least the mercenary missions let you just shoot people for the sake of shooting people. But if I wanted to bounce around in low-grav and shot guys with silly weapons I’d just play Borderlands.
That reminds me, I probably need to grind some cash to pay the upkeep on my damn carrier.
What, like Minecraft, still possibly the most popular game on Earth? I mean, all you do in Minecraft is mine the a couple of minerals that are the same on every seed, and use them to make better tools to mine minerals faster, and grow the same crops so you don’t starve, and do it over and over again.
Yeah. You ought to try Magic. We’ve had tons of time to practice the old everything-is-complicated-and-fucked dance; we’ve been doing it since 1993.
The one “saving” grace you can consider (except to your wallet) is that official competitive play allows cards from sets only up to a certain age from the present, with the most restrictive being “standard” which at the time of writing doesn’t allow any cards older than a set released in 2021. It’s not even that the metagame makes old decks nonviable – you’re literally forced to buy new cards when expansions come out if you even want to be allowed at the table.
“Modern” is a little less restrictive with the time span, but still restricted. Because otherwise, there would be no way to contain the pileup of legacy unstoppable strategies and broken combos, plus the combinatorial explosion of interactions between old mechanics and the seemingly mandatory 2-3 new ones added per expansion set.
So casual players (myself included) just play with whatever damn fool old cards we have with a gentleman’s agreement not to be assholes with the game-breaking combos because fuck it, crack is cheaper.
The total footprints of the two cases are virtually identical. The Switch game cases are taller but not as deep, and the DS cases are shorter and deeper. I believe the DS case is basically the same dimension as a cut-down DVD case. It’s the same depth, +/- a mm, with 65mm chopped off the top.
The NDS game case is 134x125mm, 167.5 square cm in total. The Switch game case is 105x170mm, 178.5 square cm in total. The Switch case is also thinner, 11mm vs 15mm. The amounts of plastic used in each is pretty similar.
Deserve to be held up visually and remembered fondly next to the likes of Chrono Trigger? They really aged better than the best of the early PS1? Yeah. No. These games not only played like ass, they looked like ass, too. Even for their time. That’s my point. The ones that weren’t outright offensive were just plain old bland.
The operative word in pixel art is “art.” Just because something is 2D does not mean it automatically needs to be revered to the exclusion of earlier or later titles or visual styles. What we got out of these games visually is a direct result of what was put in by the designers, and in the majority of cases what was put in was not very much.
Mario Is Missing is an exceptional case because it manages to have worse spritework than Mario World, a game which it directly ripped off for its sprites. And any sprites did did not directly copy (minus a couple of pallete colors, for some reason) wound up looking like these chumps:
ALttP and Chrono Trigger are some of the best designed, highly polished titles on the system, though. We have to remember that while everyone harps on FF4 and FF6, Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid, Mega Man X, A Link To the Past, Bahumut Lagoon, Donkey Kong Country, etc. as if they defined the quality of the SNES library, we’re looking back through nostalgia tinted goggles and those games in fact… didn’t. They were the exceptional outliers in, as ever, a wide field of mediocrity.
What I’m saying is, there are a lot of gonk-ass games on the SNES. A lot. We just selectively don’t remember them anymore because they were crap.
For every one of the gems above there were ten or twenty of the likes of Pugley’s Scavenger Hunt, Cliffhanger, Pit Fighter, Mario is Missing, Revolution X, Bebe’s Kids, Rise of the Robots, Captain Novolin, Double Dragon 5, Ren and Stimpy, Chester Cheetah… Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball… etc., etc. And that’s just the North American titles. There was some wonky niche shit released in Japan that could have just as well been on the original NES.
Just using an SD card requires modding your Switch to run homebrew and, er, “backups,” right?
A properly constructed cartridge that can masquerade as a retail Switch cartridge would make owners who aren’t willing to modify their console very happy indeed. That’s how the various NDS/3DS carts work – just plug and play (literally).
“Said” being the operative word. Talk is just talk. I predict that if any union-forming attempt is made, Bowser’s opinion will change with frame perfect accuracy and this statement will be memory holed. (Although unionization of Nintendo employees is unlikely to happen in Japan anyway. If it does, it will more probably be within their American or European subsidiaries.)
We should remember that Nintendo is a privately held, for-profit company run by Japanese people. They have their own ethic, the company belongs to them, and profit comes first. They might make video games and franchises we like, but they are not good guys. There is tons of well documented past behavior on their part that illustrates this in many ways.
A large part of the progression in BOTW (and to a lesser extent, its sequel) is getting the means to permanently or at least easily deal with the various types of environmental challenges, to the point that the ones that were tough to surmount in the early game aren’t even really an inconvenience in the end.
These are, in no particular order:
Areas that are cold.
Areas that are hot.
Areas that are on fire.
Eventually finding stronger weapons that don’t break as fast.
Getting better armor, and improving it, to make combat easier.
Getting a horse to make traveling to new areas easier.
Improving your maximum health and more importantly, max stamina so you can climb more stuff and glide longer distances.
Getting a movement technique that allows you to yeet yourself to the top of objects.
FWIW, if you stick to the “intended” path on the Great Plateau (the starting area of the game, where you seem to be) the old man will explicitly tell you what to do to deal with the cold. There are actually multiple solutions for getting up there without freezing your nads off.
spoilerThe most straightforward one is to use one of the cooking pots, either the one at the old man’s cabin or the one outside of the cave where you first meet him, to cook up some spicy peppers and eat them. This gives you a time limited buff that makes you immune to the cold. You can also carry a lit torch, which keeps you warm as long as you’re holding it. You can also find the recipes for two special cold resistance dishes in the old man’s cabin if you read his diary on the table, and if you bring him both of these at the top of the mountain he’ll give you the Warm Doublet, a piece of armor that permanently protects you from cold. But anything you cook a spicy pepper into will give you a cold resistance buff.
Persistent ghosting is always a factor on IPS displays, although your example looks a little pronounced than most. I have a Thinkpad with an IPS display and its ghosting is atrocious with specific color combinations: Dark greens and vibrant purples, if left static on the screen for a while. It should not be permanent, and causes no harm other than irritating you. I can get my screen to show slowly fading remnants of an image for upwards of 3 or 4 minutes, if I try hard enough. It gets more pronounced when the panel is hot.
I suspect this game happened to find the sweet (or sour) spot in the combination of foreground and background in the color gamut where image persistence is most noticeable on your particular panel. It should go away on its own after a few minutes, especially if you display something constantly changing with a wide luminosity variance (like a video) in that spot.