Fath

You pronounce it with such a thick Japanese accent as to render the actual words all but unintelligible, in order to properly convey the native meaning of the title.

@PtM You mean, if Rockstar Games had exported their formula for violence and illicit mayhem into a realistic youth-centric environment - say, maybe, a prep school - and advertised it with a decidedly misanthropic name like, I dunno, "Bully?"

Indeed, we can only ponder .

@PtM Because it was a non sequiteur. Ness was attempting to make the (incorrect) point that violent games were more acceptable than sexual ones because the former take pains to present their subject matter in acceptable or fantastical contexts that won't be misinterpreted by impressionable minds; "mow[ing] down children with an AR-15" was a (decidedly not cute) example of such, but hardly the defining case. Wanton destruction, slaughter, and crime against and among civilian adults ain't ok either.

My use of quotes wasn't derived from an effort to misrepresent, but rather to concretely reference a point that had been made some time ago in the thread, unanswered though it still was. If you wanted to criticize me for anything, you would've been on steadier ground to do so over me necro'ing a dropped argument than what you chose.

@nessisonett "Well yeah, that’s why almost all games with guns and such are either fantasy settings like Doom or military games featuring ‘baddies’."

It's so cute that you've apparently never heard of this little series called "Grand Theft Auto," what with its most recent entry only being the second-best-selling game of all time and all.

@Silly_G Since Porygon2's a digital duck, you could just ask your local Kinko's or whatnot to print you out a two-foot high picture of it on some poster paper, and you'd canonically be set, more or less.

"I realized that I was in way over my head on this project, so I've decided to just blame the game and bail instead of taking responsibility or improving my skillset. Cheers!"

Wow, this comment section really overplayed a single bad joke into the absolute ground.

...Anyway, Lego really missed a trick by not naming this set the 'Mighty Mighty Bowser.' That's the impression that I get, at least.

"Diorama-style?" I must be missing something here; I'm not seeing anything in these high-fantasy XCOM battles to suggest such stylings.

I get that that's probably what Squeenix was going for with the name, but they've gotta actually earn the descriptor; just saying "This game is named DioField, please describe it as being diorama-styled" doesn't cut it.

I... honestly don't get the praise for this.

I don't think I'm wearing my nostalgia glasses too tightly when I say that the original game nailed its aesthetics fine using the tools available; just cramming in more frames and resolution does entirely nothing for me. In the battle animation, for example: yes, you can animate out Mario's one-two punch from its jerky original motion into something 'silky-smooth,' but you lose all the punchiness of the animation by doing so, which was, y'know, the entire point.

Technically, sure, this guy's put together an impressive tech demo for a solo project. But artistically, it only proves that sometimes less is more.

@GuyProsciutto ???
Gonna have to ask you to elaborate on why not.

I don't care how much ridiculous talent they throw at this game; I will never understand the appeal of these repulsive little vermin. Harumph.

So it's Sunshine without the core mechanic that made Sunshine amazing, rebuilt in Galaxy's engine without making use of the core mechanic that made Galaxy amazing?

Honestly sounds like the worst of both worlds to me, tbh.

Looks like some great deals here; I'm amused by that 49% discount on MH Rise, though. Just too damn proud to endure the indignity of having your game cross the threshold of being "half off," eh, Capcom?

This all sounds great and enthralling, but as someone who read his share of bog-standard CYOA books back in the day, but never came across this series, I'm still left with two fundamental questions, which I'm not sure can be answered without spoiling stuff:

• How intricate did the books get, really? Wouldn't they have had to have been limited by their medium to just boiling down to a fairly straightforward tree of if/then branches, however flashy?
• With all due respect to the game devs and their undoubtedly hard work, how difficult could it really have been to map and program this? Handling this sort of thing should be dead-center in a software program's wheelhouse; I'm extremely surprised that there would be any rules that a human page-turner could be expected to follow that would be at all difficult, glitchy, or really anything short of rock-solid when translated to code.

I'm not knocking the review or even the vision of the game here, really... but hearing that a product of a genre that I would've thought would be a slam-dunk perfect fit for computerization would be "rather glitchy" is worrisome .

"When you beat the ruler of all Whomps in the galaxy, he hits the ground face-first, revealing and his face changes expression shows the Whomp with some wounded pride."

My brain is short-circuiting something fierce trying to parse this sentence, hah. Anyway, cool easter egg/attention to detail.

I think the easter egginess some people are missing about this is that there's not supposed to be any way to get to the Mushroom Kingdom before saving Peach in order for this scenario to exist in the first place, and I'm scratching my head over how this was even done.

Am I missing something here?

Not to make this too PG-13 or anything, but wouldn't "the spawn of Castlevania and Blasphemous" be kind of, er, incestuous, considering the latter is pretty much already a direct offspring of the former? o_O

Fox's hands could use a bit of touch-up (fur-up?) to make 'em look not quite so oddly human; other than that, kudos on the ambition of pulling something like this off.

Video thumbnail: "Looks pretty cool!"
First couple'a 'storybook' pictures: "Ooh, such atmosphere and vibes."
Actual in-game screenshot: "...Oh. So this is just some jank RPGMaker litter, then."

@Zochmenos Fair enough; with how divisive differences of opinion can be on the internet, I'll celebrate finding at least one paragraph of common ground any day of the week .

@Zochmenos @Freek It wouldn't be so bad if it were just a limited piece of game memorabilia that you're waiting and competing for, and maybe that's all this generation of digital kids views a cartridge/disc as - a quaintly retro piece of branded plastic that just happens to have the game you're big on digitally inscribed onto it.

For the gamers who actually grew up on physical media, though, whose fundamental conception of a video game is a tangible, physical cart or whatever that they could hold in their hands and pop into their system instead of a digital unlock key saved to their account, LRG's modus operandi is manifestly terrible for a proper game publisher. Missing official release dates for months at a time, printing so few copies that it's intentionally difficult to even buy one online, much less find it on store shelves, and not even getting around to publishing some games until years after their release dates - that would've never flown back in the days when games were expected to physically release as a matter of course.

As a subscription merch company, Limited Run Games is going gangbusters. As a publisher, though, they're achieving nothing less than wrecking the fundamental model of physical game releases itself.

As somebody who hasn't played any Splatoon, I can confirm that I know, er, somehow even less about its characters after reading this???

@PhhhCough Nintendo's just a console manufacturer like Sony or Microsoft in this sort of arrangement; they don't own the code for games published on their system any more than the others would.

The cartridges might(?) need to be purchased directly from them, being a bespoke media format, and the game itself has to go through quality control and approval like any other, but aside from that, whatever publisher to hire, if any, to crank out physical copies, is the decision of the developer.

But will it be licensed for public dancing?
https://youtu.be/Hz1JWzyvv8A

LRG: "Yes, sir, what would you like?"
You: "Well, how about a little Shantae?"
LRG: "I'm afraid we're fresh out of Shantae, sir."
You: "Never mind; how are you on Unpacking?"
LRG: "Never at the end of the week, sir; always get it fresh first thing on Monday."
You: "Tish tish. No matter. Well, four ounces of Axiom Verge if you please, stout yeoman."
LRG: "Ah. Well, it's been on order for two weeks, sir, was expecting it this morning."
[...]
You: "Well let's keep it simple: how about DOOM?"
LRG: "Certainly, sir; that'll be one cartridge of DOOM, then."
You: "Yes, that's right."
LRG: "Ah, no sir, I mean the price for your order of DOOM will be one cartridge of DOOM; disabled or otherwise destroyed, if you please."
You: bang

RIP War Spear; the heavy weapon affixes (especially slowing all nearby enemies on kill combined with the enemies-take-damage-when slowed mutation) had made it an especially lovely option for carving through high-BC difficulties without getting overly bogged down. Ah, well, new content is still worth celebrating, at least.

@BabyYoda71 Don't worry, I hear ya; you abd the others here praising this show have done a solid job of establishing that it's surely more than the sum of its parts (or rather, just a single part even); the visual gag of the keyblade here's legit pretty funny, too.

I'm just sayin.

Maybe there's some running joke behind it, or it works better in motion, but urgh, I just can't get behind the mismatch of art styles in that still at all. You've got Minnie (and Goofy's body) in classic 1930's style, and its newsprint-grey primary coloration shared across all the characters, but then you've got Goofy's face looking like a rejected Ren & Stimpy design from the '90s, all on top of a watercolor background straight outta a '60s Tom and Jerry cartoon - and I don't even want to guess where Donald's coked-out, soulless, thousand-yard stare is coming from.

What the heck, Disney? I know you own pretty much every past, present, and future media property these days, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to try to apply all of it at once to the same cel.

This has to be the most bonkers thing to come out of Japan in at least the last three hours.

I'm not going to be posting my guinea pig's name for reasons, sadly, but he was a precious friend who I'd like to believe I did right by over his well-lived life.

Remembering the joy of having something to look forward to in upcoming video games once helped pull me out of an emotional slump back in college; while preorders certainly don't have an exclusive license to such anticipation, I can at least appreciate how they can help cultivate it. So there's that.

Sign me up for one o' those Kate Gray plushies if NLife ever decides to hawk the extras out of their digital storefront's trunk, though, as some publishers do =o.

Life in plastic, not fantastic.

Surprised that nobody's mentioned yet that this is something of a historic righting of wrongs for Pokemon, as the Azure Flute and associated event was coded waaaay back in the original D/P/P games, but never released. This will be the first (legitimate) time that Arceus and his kinda-bonkers unique musical accompaniment is actually able to be encountered in the orginally-intended context, over fifteen years after the fact.

That's pretty darn cool.

@-wc- The screenshots would seem to suggest that the expiration applies not only to the apology currency, but to any sources of free currency not paid for through cash, whether from their login bonuses (itself a fairly predatory tactic) or any other ways the player can earn it in-game.

Besides just being an entirely arbitrary anti-consumer measure with zero technical justification, that SE had to go out of their way to explicitly implement, it's a deceptive tactic that offers the illusion of consumer agency by offering what appears to be alternative means of obtaining rewards besides forking over cash for them, but in reality actively prevents players from actually saving up the currency over time that they'd need to do so.

They're putting the "trick" in "trickle," in other words.

While just adding new content to a game through DLC doesn't have to be evil, those screenshots with their "login bonuses" and in-game ads are straight out of the slimiest crevices of mobile gacha hell. Disgusting to see lil' Chocobo done dirty like this.

The human brain's capacity for papering over the gaps around our selective attention really is amazing, and that's not a knock against Conan at all. If the mind expects to see the periphery surrounding the person it's focused on as a real room, and there isn't anything actively obtruding on it to tell it otherwise, then that's what it's gonna see.

If anything, it just goes to show that whoever it was O'Brien was talking to really was just that riveting .

Evolutionary, huh? Good, that should please everyone, then; if anyone doesn't like the direction the series is going, they can just hold B while they boot the game up.

@QuattroBajina Yes, I already said as much. You can't accuse the pot of calling the kettle black when what the pot said was "Looks like we're both black, then."

Since I haven't really done any deep dives into these games myself, I wasn't really aware of their regional inspiration yet - and I have to say, having it laid out through a tongue-in-cheek crackpot theory and debunking of the games being an ode to a fried chicken chain is a heck of a lot more entertaining than any "This is how our games have drawn inspiration from the real world, please enjoy" explanation would've been .

@Gwynbleidd I'll decline to take you up on your dare to drag the mods into this; seeing who can get the most of the other's comments deleted ex post facto is no way to win a debate, nor to make things that have been said magically unsaid.

It's quite rude to ignore someone you're still holding an active conversation with, but ignorance is bliss, as they say, so I wish you well in enjoying all the bliss you gain from doing so - but I'll remind you, falling on deafened ears as I may, that you were the one who first replied to me, so... maybe save yourself the trouble next time, and just don't start an argument with someone that you're not prepared to end.

@Gwynbleidd Indeed, it wasn't worth it for you to have bothered replying to anything after my first response to you, since after I confirmed then that I understood your disagreement with me, you've had nothing to add but insults. And while I'm more than happy to respond in kind, it's really not productive for either of us in the long run, so I'm glad to see you conclude as much as well. You have a nice day too; I'm sure both of ours will be much better for us not continuing this.

@Gwynbleidd Never said you did, mate, but only those who are looking to grab cheap clicks by putting out flavor-of-the-month Youtube videos flaunting off the latest gaming naughtiness should worry about Nintendo issuing these takedown requests; the others are fine and the internet as a whole should really try to not give a flying flip about them, if they're wise.

@Gwynbleidd You could have saved both of us a lot of trouble and cut out everything but your last paragraph, which amply demonstrates that you understand the core concept I was trying to impart (thank you), but just don't care about it - that you see the Deck getting popularly established as a bootleg Switch as being fair play that Nintendo's just going to have to suck it up and live with.

Everybody here indignant at Nintendo being anti-game emulation are, respectfully, missing the point. This isn't about game emulation; it's about console emulation.

Nintendo lives or dies as a company off of how many Switches they can get into households, both in direct profit from the sale of the system itself and in growing the userbase for first- and third-party game sales. The Steam Deck running Steam games is a peripheral threat to that install base, but at least one that Nintendo can uneasily coexist with due to the general lack of overlap between libraries and target demographics. When the Steam Deck starts running Nintendo games, though, that liveable, peripheral threat turns into a direct, full-bore, drop-in Switch competitor - and it does so by using Nintendo's own games as ammunition against them with flagrant illegality (whether an individual Youtuber is being a good boy and only emulating games they own or not is beside the point; what they're effectively marketing in their videos is a system being sold on the premise of enabling piracy).

Y'all think Nintendo's just gonna take that lying down? That's a hard no, and it's not even an ethical grey area this time. Emulate whatever you want on whatever you want in your own time, but don't be a dingus and fish for clicks by going out of your way to shill Valve's new hotness as a bootleg Switch.

I'm a bit antipathetic to the announced starters, but the game/world design here is giving off good first impressions for me. Always great to see any overtures towards integrating Pokemon into living, natural environments instead of sending them straight from tall grass to enballed battleslave.

• Green Fennekin
• Brown Totodile
• Duck that's giving off vibes of the incredibly wrong "Donald"
  And spaghetti names for all three straight out of the Random Pokemon Generator.

... I'll pass, thanks =/.

@BloodNinja Haha, totally fair; it was honestly a weird enough analogy for the reviewer to be making that the question of if I was misunderstanding it crossed my mind briefly on first read, too .

Hope you get a chance to get some quality rest in!

@JRokujuushi Ah, ok, thanks for the straight answer; shows how much of a non-player of the series itself I am, though I do still appreciate the experience it's aiming for and enjoy reading what other people make of it .

Um, so what is the song, then (and why is it not Totaka's Song, grumble grumble grumble)? Maybe I'm some sort of philistine, but I can't recall ever hearing it before.

@BloodNinja A Leatherman is the brand name of a range of Swiss Army Knife-like multitools, 'cept usually somewhat chunkier and built around a central set of folding pliers, instead of just a solid bar design.