Topic: Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door!!!!!!!

@Mana_Knight Yeah the tree section still sucks but I think they fixed the Puni AI so it's at less 80% less infuriating

@Jhena Not sure, I never 100%-ed the game. I’ve played it though and I never had a problem, so my guess is you can max everything. I think the leveling up goes really high, so high that Idk if you’d get to the when playing

.....This is so freakin' confusing...lol
Vivian is a girl, not a girl, MAKE UP YER MIND INTERNET!! xD

@Joeynator3000 Vivian is a 2-dimensional animated picture. Mystery solved.

@Joeynator3000 don’t listen to the internet, simply ask Vivian.

@Joeynator3000 It's pretty cut and dry that Vivian considers herself a girl - or at least a 'girl at heart' whatever version you play (just in the original japanese the other characters don't)

@PikminMarioKirby
Ok, thanks. I think I will concentrate on leveling FP and BP, at least in the beginning.

I loved the way the bridge was constructed. Nice a quiz.

@N00BiSH Lol. That is something. I have just managed to beat it and get the heck out of there. Thought I would be stuck for ages! Though, I know I need to go back to try and get that floating red badge box. Not sure how though!

About Vivian, now would be a good time to have the russian age rating system for games.

Edit: I trust Nintendo with this game though.

@N00BiSH Having just beaten Chapter 2, I can attest that I had a much easier time with the Punies this time around. I'm not sure if it's just me though or if their AI is actually better.

@Jhena What do you mean about the russian age rating system?

Ratings for any games can be a little arbitrary no matter the country, but this game got rated E for everyone. Smash Brothers ultimate is 10+. Metroid Dread is 13+. Bayonetta 3 is 17+. Seems approximately right.

@Joeynator3000
Girl but not girl = RuPaul?

One minor technical annoyance I've noticed, and there are a few games that do this. When playing this game in surround sound they throw pretty much all of the effects to the rear channels. Opening doors, footsteps, the works. It's fairly distracting because you're physically looking ahead of you at the character doing the thing but the sound comes from behind you

Worse, they seem to throw the music pretty much entirely through the front channels. Which by itself isn't an issue, game music generally isn't "directional", but it becomes so much quieter in the mix compared to stuff like footsteps. The music should probably be coming from all the speakers unless there's like a visible in-game source for the musics.

This certainly isn't the first game I've played with a horrible surround mix like this and it won't be the last. But it seems to me like such an oversight in so many games it's just a full on lucky dip as to whether a game gets it right or not. And there don't seem to be any reviewers or gaming media who even remotely care about it. Especially on Switch

I mean, there are games that get it right. Metroid Prime Remastered and TotK being obvious examples. Super Mario RPG also must've been alright given I don't remember being annoyed by it. But every now and then a game comes along where it's like..... how did you get so much other stuff right and do this wrong?

Ahh, well, lets just there's a reason why conservative western politicians have a kind cognitive dissonance when discussing Russia. The Russian state would probably not be opposed to the idea of taking a torch to cartridges of a game that had a trans character. But yeah, lets not derail this thread any further.....

I don't know why hitting the Tattle target is so satisfying.

I stopped using surround sound a while back, some games it wouldn't work right for me...and setting everything up required ten bajillion hdmi cables and crap. >_> lol

@Joeynator3000 I feel like surround sound has become less popular in the last 10 years; it was the hot thing... a long time ago.

I wonder how game devs decide to emphasize that with Switch games since half of the people are going to be playing portable and probably more than half of the tv users won't have surround sound. Personally I live in a flat and I have the tv in the one inner wall which isn't adjacent to other people; surround sound would just lead to noise complaints as well as being annoying to set up.

Intelligent Systems are obsessed with quizzes.

@Joeynator3000 @FishyS
HDMI ARC (and more recently eARC) are a thing and these days you can get soundbars with wireless surrounds. We're talking one cable setups here, excluding power I guess. Fairly accessible and, frankly, with how garbage built in sound is on modern TVs given they prioritise "thinness" a soundbar or some kind is almost required. IMO. Obviously you get what you pay for, same goes for AV hardware generally, but personally I'd take^ a $1000AU TV and a $700AU audio setup over a $1700AU TV with built in speakers

But yeah, I changed the settings to stereo and now it's fine. It's just a bit of a shame is all, the stereo mix shouldn't be better. Like, someone has clearly made a choice to put these things in the rear channels. Why? It's just not good. Movies pretty much universally get it right and even commercial TV pretty much universally gets it right. But games..... they just seem to get it wrong so often and I don't understand why

^admittedly my current setup is a $1600AU TV with a $1700AU audio setup but the point remains

@skywake Yeah unfortunately, for surround sound, eARC doesn't work with Switch, or ARC...so my sound bar, the Switch's HDMI has to be plugged into the bar directly for surround sound. NORMALLY my sound bar would transfer the video to the TV, but I swear the visuals degrade...a lot. It just doesn't look good, so I have to use a splitter...and yeah, multiple hdmi cables. lol