Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

@jump Is this the quote you are referring to from when they laid off staff? "At Xbox, our goal is to constantly create new fun, social and interactive entertainment experiences. As part of Rare's commitment to this goal, we have made a decision to change our development process and methodology at Rare to best support our future projects, this has led to us reviewing the skills and the makeup of our development teams in our business." Cause that hardly is saying that....

That was PR speak for Kinetic is flop. But I was mentioning about from Pete Moore talking about how Rare couldn't recreate the glory years;

https://kotaku.com/5050970/peter-moore-on-rare-skills-not-app...

@jump the problem with post Nintendo Rare is that even when they worked with Nintendo they weren't that good. Donkey Kong Country SNes games are probably the most overrated platformers ever made. Thank heavens we have Retro studios now. I think that Metroid prime 2 and expecially Metroid prime 3 are extremely overrated and bland compared to Metroid prime 1 and Tropical freeze is a little less perfect than Donkey Kong Country Returns but anyway Retro Studios is still far better than Rare have ever been and their games are far better than Rare games were.

@jump So you mean Pete Moore does what he always does. Leaves one company and talks trash about the previous job he had.

Is he talking thrash tho, he talks about how he was behind the buy for them (rather than avoiding responsibility) and he speaks highly of them but he still has to say Rare were no longer the high standard in the current times of game making.

I do like Retro but Rare did something that doesn't happen anymore and probaby never will, they would pump out around 2-4 quality games a year of completely different genres. It would jump from kart racer to FPS and then onto platformers, nowadays a team largely sticks to one thing and never on this type of output.

@jump The dude always throws underhanded shade like that. It's just the norm with him. He makes for a entertaining interview and I will give him that though.

@LuckyLand Was wondering till how long you disagreed with me. So far we are good at it but at least it sounds like your opinion still runs into unpopular just in a different way than mine.

I think Sonic Spinball was one of, if not the best pinball game on any console

I was mostly referring to a trend that was pretty much a thing of the 90s, when console games were simpler and PC games were getting bigger and more sophisticated and layered with multiplaying elements etc. Nowadays there's really no difference between a modern console and a PC, so I don't see any rift between the two categories. And indeed the console scene has become as nerd, mean, unpleasant and elitist as the PC scene.

I found it funny how the preys have become the predators. Gamers seem to love the idea that there's always a form of lesser-gaming threatening their beloved Arcadia.

Unpopular Opinion: Intelligent Systems isn't actually a very good studio anymore.

They get an instant pass due to the glory days of Fire Emblem and Advance Wars, but when we look at their output over the past number of years, we have Sticker Star, Color Splash, the very decisive (but still good) Awakening, and the very lackluster, regressive Fates. It seems they've lost their talent for tightly meshed strategy, and have fallen into the AAA trap of "cram as many optional features and bloat that we can" leading newer FE games to be less about carefully balancing your weapons triangle to master the map and win the battle and more into this nonsensical bloat of badly glued together superfluous features and overly complex systems just for the sake of adding systems, which detracts from the pure strategic play that made the series great.

This thought occurred to me as I've been playing Rabbids and realized just what a joy a pure tactical strategy came can be without the useless bloat and filler crafting garbage littering it, and it reminded me of the older IS games. Echoes escaped the mess by virtue of being an enhanced port of one of the older games.

Also, RE Rare and Peter Moore: "But their skillsets were from a different time and a different place and were not applicable in today's market." that's just a hilarious comment about Rare. As though design experience can be "from a different time." Yooka may be critically mixed based on this "new market", but it's still leagues better than anything MS forced Rare to produce in those dark days.

I've been told directly by other devs from other studios acquired by MS quite some time ago that MS absolutely forced them to do things, quote, "the Microsoft way". They did not sound pleased about that fact, nor the resulting quality of their product. Granted, that was a long time ago, the Moore era or before, and may not reflect the Spencer era at Microsoft. But....yeah, Moore is ever more gross every time he opens his mouth.

@spizzamarozzi I was talking about the 90s too. Today the situation is probably more favorable to PC gaming expecially if you consider consoles different than Nintendo ones, because console exclusives on Playstation and XBox are (unfortunately) less in quantity and sometimes even less important (COD, FIFA and Assassin Creed probably sell at least as many consoles as games like Uncharted do), but back then there were no "PC clone" consoles like those, exclusives were big on every console, not just on Nintendo ones, so back then consoles as a whole had even more strenghts than they have now.
There were fans of certain genres or fans of brute power and the ability to fully customise their machine that were fans of PC gaming, and there were fans of other genres that preferred the more straightforward and immediate experience you have with consoles that were fans of consoles. Of course fans of PC gaming back then were convinced that their PCs were superior, but console fans were convinced that their consoles were superior to PCs as well, and for good reasons too. Of course nobody would have changed his mind because both consoles and PC catered to people with different tastes so each one was the best for their own audience.

The only Rare game I've ever really liked is Viva Piñata.

And VP Pocket Paradise on the DS, but that one was developed by someone else I think.

@NEStalgia I think you mean divisive not decisive but I completely agree with you on Intelligent Systems not being nearly as good as they used to be. This is the same dev behind Fire Emblem, Wario Ware, Paper Mario and Advance Wars, yet since 2012 Paper Mario has gone to crap, Fire Emblem as you said has been filled with more and more bloat and strayed far away from the more grounded strategy and stories of past Fire Emblem games (not to mention they've been getting incredibly greedy with dlc in FE as of late), Game & Wario was a disappointment and hasn't seen a new release in over 4 years and I'm pretty sure Advance Wars has its face plastered on the side of a milk carton asking if people have seen this franchise. (I mean good lord, this year will make a decade since the last Advance Wars game)

The other funny thing, in hindsight, about Moore's comment was t hat Rare Replay has been pretty much the best seller in some time on the X1. If their "skill set weren't relevant in today society" those old games would be rejected. Instead they're embraced and the new ones are rejected. Gotta love more. The Reaper of the Dreamcast, through MS and Rare, through EA Sports.....at least the guy's consistent.

@LuckyLand In a way, I think Ubisoft has now replaced the need for Advance Wars with their Mario + Rabbids. It's kind of the AW we've all been waiting for in a different skin When Ubisoft starts showing up IS, something is very wrong. (Though Ubi has a strange history of niche top notch SRPG titles that fly under the radar. Ghost Recon Shadow Wars was an amazing SRPG, produced by the X-Com creator.) Even Atlus bloats their attempts at SRPG. I'm starting to think Ubi is the only one that understands SRPGs. Well, NIS as well I suppose. Disgaea is bloated but the bloat is part of the joke. Maybe Ninty can sell IS to Microsoft Or maybe all the good people at IS already moved over to Monolith.

@LuckyLand PS4 still has lots of console selling exclusive between first and second party....probably roughly similar to Nintendo's output (in quantity at least if not uniqueness.) Microsoft is really the only one out of that loop, which has proven to be a significant source of trouble for them.

@spizzamarozzi I suppose it's going to be the nature of gamers....gamers are a competitive bunch whether against other players or against the "systems at work" and seek to "win" or "progress ahead".....so it stands to reason as a group they'd apply that to the gaming platform itself. Though there's a really weird, dark undercurrent to "nerds" that always seems to search for a superiority complex. In my youth I tended to view nerddom as this sort of unsuspected underdog. I've since come to believe nerds are in fact the most narcissistic, nastiest, most self serving, power seeking bunch around. Interesting, my autocorrect underlined "nerddom". When I check alternate words, the only thing that came up was "domineer". Which, since that's kind of my point, may be wisdom on the part of autocorrect.

Time for my own unpopular opinion about Rare! Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise is the most fun and creative game Rare has ever made, full stop.

@NEStalgia Mario + Rabbids has little in common with AW, though. The combat system is a streamlined version of what we saw in the new XCOM games. If anything, Tiny Metal is the only AW substitute the Switch has really seen so far. Wargroove also looks promising in this regard.

Not sure if this is unpopular or just very polar opinion, I feel like some games should have option to go Easy-Normal-Hard difficulty, like, just the option to go for playing slightly relaxed or be more tense or something. (Something like Persona 4 Golden's?)

@Ralizah I'll agree that Valkyria is really the true AW parallel. Which Switch is getting. (yes!) Sega still does what Nintendon't and all that.

@darkfenrir There is one right way to play. Or so the internet (and Souls games) tells us. But yeah, I agree. 90's PC shooters ALWAYS had difficulty settings. Not sure why that's dissipated. Maybe because most big AAA games are always on Easy mode?

Super Mario odyssey is boring, for 5 year olds and is super easy! 😤😤😤😤

Chrono Cross was a worthy successor to Chrono Trigger!