Comments 562

Re: Review: Lair Of The Clockwork God - A Humorous Attempt At Mashing Together Two Opposing Genres

Fath

I... actually might have to get this, for nostalgia's sake if nothing else. I picked up the first two Ben and Dan games off a Steam sale years ago for like... under a dollar for the pair, and I was fairly shocked at how much they simply made me smile for something that looked like it was put together with MS Paint and some sort of freeware point and click engine from the early aughts.

It felt distinctly like a one-off project (despite there being two of them), a college band sort of thing, something a couple of buds had a grand time putting together one magical summer before life really took hold of them. I never in a million years would've expected Ben and Dan to resurface a decade later on a Nintendo console of all things.

I think I'm this game's target audience. Like, specifically; the first Ben and Dan games were SO under-the-radar bad-first-impression indie that it feels like I'm probably the only person (besides, somehow, the reviewer) who ever actually noticed them.

Re: Talking Point: Are Shiny Pokémon Too Common These Days?

Fath

As someone who's sunk way too much time into gacha games, I know the formula for a Skinner box when I see it by now. Shinies are clearly being used as Pokémon GO's "six-star" units - its power-creep rarity tier introduced once the player base has become so saturated with the vanilla game's "five-star" top rarity units (legendaries, or perhaps max-IV pokes, in this case) that they aren't enough to keep players excited anymore.

Any game on this sort of trajectory will eventually burn through their new hotness just as surely as they did the old. If shinies aren't already too common (though it certainly sounds like they may be), it's only a matter of time.

Re: Random: Pokémon Masters EX Twitter Hashtag Is Earning The Game The Wrong Kind Of Attention

Fath

That reminds me of an unfortunate domain name problem my ol' alma mater had a while back... one of the casual abbreviations everyone on campus used for Oregon State University since time immemorial was "OrSt," until one day somebody in marketing realized that the most popular official web alias for the university was www.orst.edu.
Go Beavs!

(To this day, the URL itself still works, but you'd better believe there was a massive, collegewide push to get it scrubbed from all official references and documentation.)

Re: Review: CrossCode - The Zelda-Like RPG You Never Knew You Wanted

Fath

@Rhaoulos The whole "love letter to such-and-such game" metaphor that's been popular in recent years is honestly pretty weird, and frankly a bit creepy. Iif there was a really great girl at your school that everyone liked - let's call her, say, Lucca - would you want to hang out with some rando dude just because everybody was always talking about how he writes love letters to Lucca?

IMHO, the only love letter I'm interested in a dev writing is to me, the player.

Re: Japanese Game Director Swery Will Rewrite At Least One Scene In Deadly Premonition 2

Fath

I fully respect transgender people changing their names to recognize their gender (and being referred to with such), and have no opinion of note on this proposed revision itself, but the term "deadnaming" is some cringeworthy emo garbage.

I'd like to hope that a healthy transgendered person isn't so self-loathing that they view their past as a person that's been outright killed and buried. The past is a part of all of us, and we wouldn't be who we are without it, for all our strengths and beautiful flaws. That's just as true for trans people as it is for the rest of us.

Re: Feature: How Do Switch eShop Discounts Impact Game Sales?

Fath

Maaan, the life of a dev is tough if that kind of sales graph is what they call a success. Much respect to these guys and their perseverance (I admit it's flown under my radar as well, but I've seen some gameplay of Death Squared, and it seems like the perfect "hidden gem" sort of game to do this analysis on).

Re: There Are Reportedly "No Plans" To Fix Deadly Premonition 2's Awful Frame Rate

Fath

What a disaster. You would think that devs would have learned from the example of the Mona Lisa by now - however polished its graphics were, that thing could only ever run at a fixed framerate of 1, tops, and performance that bad tanked its sales down into the single digits, relegating it to being a laughingstock of history for its commercial failure.

I mean, that's just how art works, right?

Re: Waifu Uncovered Mixes Bullet-Hell With Boobies, And Even Comes With A "One Finger" Mode

Fath

@Inc Nothing wrong with overthinking things in my book; it's not thinking things all the way through, or managing to get it all down in words, that causes more problems IMHO.

Say, if somebody wanted to comment that this game reeks of using titillation as a cheap cash grab to excuse bad and frankly soulless game design, and they were worried that the free uncritical publicity NL was giving them by publishing this article irresponsibly encouraged that sort of laziness, that would be a reasonable critique.

Or, if somebody suspected that this game might be dipping its toes into the seeming trend in modern games with sexualized content to allow, or even encourage, the player to strip and/or grope characters without consequence even when they're explicitly telling you to stop, and were worried that these sort of depictions might be giving kids real and serious misconceptions about what consent looks like in real life, that would be a valid concern under any circumstances that would be even more poignant given the recent stories of abuse in the gaming community.

Anyway, though, I recognize the pattern of just wanting to get a hot take off your chest, and remorse when it blows up in your face a bit - I've done it myself plenty of times. No hard feelings; have a good evening

Re: PlatinumGames Addresses Wonderful 101 Kickstarter Custom Fees, And Backers Aren't Happy

Fath

@mazzel I might've come across a bit callously, but a Kickstarter campaign is first and foremost a donation drive, and for their own peace of mind, people should never donate money to a cause unless they can first and foremost come to grips with that money disappearing without anything to show for it. Not everybody's cut out for the selflessness of charitable donation all the time, and that's ok. I really should've put more blame on Kickstarter itself, and the cottage industry of running its campaigns that's cropped up, for how much that first principle gets lost in glitter and FOMO, but it's also the responsibility of donors not to get distracted by it.

...That said, it's fair for anybody donating to a charity to assume that their contribution will actually go towards performing the charity's work, and it's pretty disingenuous, to put it mildly, for a charity to ask for money that they know they don't have a use for. Kickstarter kind of handles that by having publicly stated target goals that should tell anyone donating past that that they're throwing their money away for no real reason (and the W101 campaign's ludicrously lowball goal of about $50,000 should've been a huge red flag), but even so, I'll agree that Platinum's admission that the campaign wasn't really funding their game was pretty scuzzy.

I think there's room for your particular grievance and my general position to coexist, if I present the latter with a bit more compassion than I might've used at first.

Re: PlatinumGames Addresses Wonderful 101 Kickstarter Custom Fees, And Backers Aren't Happy

Fath

Kickstarter is a platform for people to drop money into for the privilege of bringing something into existence in the world. Anything offered to the backers in return is just a bonus.

The Wonderful 101 on Switch has become reality. Congratulations, backers, mission accomplished. If you're getting upset about anything beyond that, then you backed the project for all the wrong reasons, and should really stay away from Kickstarter in the future.

It's just not a preorder store.

Re: 33 Years Later, Japanese Famicom RPG Hoshi wo Miru Hito Is Being Rereleased On Switch

Fath

Hmm, where have I heard of City Connection recently... oh, right: https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/04/kemco_and_city_connection_apologise_over_new_switch_jrpg_revenge_of_justice

A port of a legendarily bad Famicom RPG being handled by the guys who just got caught red-handed plagiarizing "scenarios, settings, character settings, and dialogue" from another game in their latest release. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Random: Animal Crossing: New Horizons' Easter Bunny Really Doesn't Like His Job

Fath

@ummyeahnintendo Zipper first appeared back in AC's Wii entry, predating Five Nights at Freddy's by about six years. FNAF is a relatively recent derivation of the same childishly cheery cultural imagery Zipper draws on, not its source.

What I guess I'm saying is that it's not Zipper's fault if you've let some subversive indie game ruin your childhood for ya

Re: PlatinumGames' Fourth Reveal Turned Out To Be An April Fools' Joke

Fath

The joke of this video appears to be entirely buried in the static 2-second or so screen at the end, just before the W101 ad: the gist of it is that this was being announced as an actual arcade game, not a home console game. "Only $17,000; just 25 cents per play;" that sort of deal.

In theory it's a decent meta-joke on how alien the game development environment of the past would seem if transplanted into the modern era, but they botched the punchline by cramming it into a freeze-frame nobody's going to see, on top of obviously breaking the rules of the day by hyping this up beforehand.

Re: Review: ESP Ra.De. Psi - The Best Shmup On Nintendo Switch, Period

Fath

@MarkMSX Respectfully, I probably won't - only so many hours in the day and all that. I appreciate that you've gone to the trouble to flesh out the bio in your profile since my first post, though (it was completely empty when I clicked through to it this morning save for its creation date), to provide a background that people can indeed contextualize your review by.

That's an appropriate and professional response with which to address my initial skepticism. Thanks!

Re: Review: ESP Ra.De. Psi - The Best Shmup On Nintendo Switch, Period

Fath

"The best XXXX on Switch, period" is a very bold stance for a reviewer to take on their very first review for a site (I presume from a profile created yesterday). The review sounds very detailed and passionate, to be sure, but... reading it with a grain of salt seems prudent.

edit: see comments #32 and #55.

Re: Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore Will Be Censored On Switch

Fath

@Varkster (re: comment #120) This is a game I think I'd nominally have fun playing, but I'd feel like kind of a POS for supporting some pencil-pusher getting a power rush at deciding that I can't handle seeing a wedding dress and the game's original narrative content. Not feeling like a POS is more important to me than getting to play any one game (of which there are plenty of alternatives to anyway), so yeah, that's the deciding factor in me passing on it.

It's super annoying, especially because they had a perfect second chance to get things right after flopping with (not necessary causal) bad press over this exact stuff the first time around, but again, I'd rather be annoyed than feel like a POS. That's life.

Re: Classic Nintendo Mini Game Released In 1974 Found After 20-Year Search

Fath

@Averagewriter Only thing I came to the comments to find, not tired overplayed jokes. Oh well.
Looking it up myself, the last game is Space Ball: http://blog.beforemario.com/2011/06/nintendo-space-ball-1971.html?m=1
Kind of a cross between a motorized top spinner and a cup-and-ball toy. Article seems to imply that the guy already has one, but I think he might have its initial full-box release but is missing the specific blister-pack rerelease of this "mini game" series.

Re: Koji Igarashi Still Wants To Finish Two Castlevania "Episodes" With Konami

Fath

Going to play Dracula’s advocate here and say that the battle of 1999 may actually be best left offscreen. As it stands now, it has an almost mythic status - the epic final showdown between good and evil, where the endless war was decided once and for all.

If it was ever actually made, no matter how outstanding it was, it would inevitably become... just a game.

Re: One Mortal Kombat 11 Developer Had To See A Therapist After Violent Dreams

Fath

@Draxa
Patient: “So you’re saying I have PTSD? Gosh, doc, what should I do?”
Dr. Draxa: “Well, I think what would really help, y’know, with the stress, is if you quit your job and struggled with unemployment for a while. Good luck continuing to pay the bill for these sessions without your health insurance, btw, I know that’s gonna be pretty rough.”

Re: Nintendo Tells Mobile Partners To Limit Microtransactions So That Players Don't Spend Too Much

Fath

@Mgene15 You clearly have no idea how insidiously mobile “gacha” games prey on people’s psychology with respect to gambling, if you’re comparing them to paying $60 for a complete game.

Exploitative gachas can easily manipulate their target audience into throwing away several hundred dollars, not even for a complete experience, but for a single character, and without even a guarantee of getting them at that. It’s not uncommon at all to see people paying out thousands of dollars total on a single game this way.

The diiference between exploitative gachas and AAA retail pricing is about a hundredfold, and that’s being kind.

Re: Score Exclusive Spirits In The New Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Event

Fath

Limited-time collectables are a stain on the industry - it’s gamebuilding through threatening the consumer. “Buy and play our game now, now, NOW, or we’re going to lock this content away and you’ll NEVER be able to get it again!”

Maybe you could call it an evolutionary adaptation to compete for people’s dwindling time in a world where games are seen as a service, and players seen as cattle to be kept captivated and milked as a renewable resource, but if so, this is an evolutionary arms race gone terribly worng. Like Australia, where all the plants and animals evolved toxic venoms to compete with one another, and now the whole continent’s just one big deathtrap.

Re: Video: The Pokémon Detective Pikachu Movie's First Official Trailer Has Landed

Fath

Ok, I was completely over Pokemon generations ago, but consider me back on board. Mind = blown (even after a coworker mentioned that at work today that Ryan Reynolds was voicing Pikachu).

This will be, according to a quick search, the 22nd Pokemon movie. Of those, I've been legitimately hyped about exactly two of them: the very first one, back in 1999, and now this.