MindWanderer

Clearly this is inspired by Rocket League, but without understanding what made Rocket League work.

Makes sense. After all, Valve charged us $10 for its delightful tutorial game, Aperture Desk Job, and it was well worth it.

Oh, wait...

Super Mario Maker 3 would actually be most exciting for me. I don't need ports, I have a Steam Deck.

Why is there confusion about the top USB port? We've been clamoring for a charging port you can use while in tabletop/kickstand mode since the Switch came out. Maybe for a real mouse, too.

It would make sense to sell short for at least a few months, because their sales are going to tank from now until the S2's preorder date, if not its launch date.

Tengen's version of Tetris was the first game to break $100 trade-in price at my local used game store. It was also the only multiplayer console version of Tetris at the time. Good to know they're not forgotten.

I had mine repaired, and they still drift. I need to dose them with contact cleaner every few months. My wife has a later model, and she doesn't use hers nearly as much as I do mine, and they still drift sometimes. If the Switch weren't at the end of its life cycle, and I wasn't mostly using my Deck anyway, I'd have switched to 3rd-party controllers ages ago.

Why does this list only include remakes/remasters of some games, only originals of others, and a mix for a couple?

Using designs that are closely similar to Pokémon ones is probably okay. Using their actual models and meshes is infringement. It's the difference between having a wise old wizard as a mentor and having him actually quote the Lord of the Rings.

The question doesn't draw a distinction between main game and postgame content. Lost Levels is some grade-A BS, but I did beat it because they knew what they were doing and put the 100 lives trick in 1-1. Unlike the last optional levels of 3D World and Odyssey.

I too have no idea which dungeon they found frustrating. They're all cookie-cutter designs, boring but certainly not challenging. My daughter solved them all except one without help, and she asks me for help with everything. And that one, she solved when I reminded her how to switch between levels on the map.

<Shrug> There are some good ideas there, like the permanent power-ups you can choose from, but a 2D platformer that'll take maybe a dozen hours to beat just isn't a $60-$70 game anymore. Even $40 on sale is pushing it. Indie developers are knocking it out of the park on this front. 2D platformers aren't even my kid's jam, so I don't see myself getting it at all. My backlog is full of more innovative games.

I enjoyed these the first few times, and then again when there were limited materials or a weird layout so the most typical solutions wouldn't work. But the rewards quickly became crap; I have about 30 stable tickets, and the food just clogged up my inventory. I might consider doing them all if there was a way to track them, just because I'm crazy like that. But the only thing worse than fabric as a reward is useless trophy "key items."

Voted this morning, then beat it this evening. The ending was pretty great, but the leadup to it left me wishing it actually was linear. Every line of dialogue seems to assume that it is. Link is kind of a jerk for not telling everyone what he knows, if you did things out of order, which includes doing the memories at all.

Anyway, 75.84% with everything useful unlocked. That's 420 Koroks (max upgrades), all shrines, all Lightroots, all Sage's Wills, all Bubbulgems, all unique armor pieces, and I think all unique weapons. And honestly the last bits were not fun. 295 hours, although a lot of that was screwing around with machines. I can't imagine extending the game by another third.

@Nightcrawler71 Have you gotten many armor upgrades? A lot of people seem to miss these. I spent a lot of the game in Froggy Armor since it was the easiest by far to upgrade to 60 defense, and at that point it takes a Lynel to deal more than a couple of hearts of damage.

@GoldenSunRM Same. My Shrine Sensor went off while I was exploring on the surface, and a fallen piece of rubble was right there. I wasn't about to ignore my Sensor! And that took me straight to the end. I didn't even realize there was a whole archipelago up there for another hundred hours when I did the quest.

I don't know how people can say the game isn't grindy. At this moment, I need, among other things, about a dozen Lynel Guts, about 20 Hinox Guts, 20 Smotherwing Butterflies, 24 Swift Violets, 21 Gibdo Bones, 15 Ice Keese Wings, a dozen or so Fire-Breath Lizalfos Tails, a dozen or so Gibdo Wings, 9 Bladed Stag Beetles (which I've never even seen) and that's just what I remember off the top of my head. None of those things are in quantities I'm likely to find naturally without grinding for them. Maybe the Gibdo Bones.

I'm actually kind of surprised. It makes sense that the game itself would sell best on Switch, but I thought a lot of revenue came from micro transactions, and the Switch's Minecraft store is, and has nearly always been, unusably broken. Items don't even show their real names, just identifiers. Images don't load, navigation is poor, you can't even equip skins you already own. I can't believe they make any revenue off it at all.

Generally how much is locked behind completing one regional phenomenon. I went to Hateno and spent forever trying to get into the lab.

Also it was really dumb for them to not put Great Fairies directly on the recommended path like they did in BotW. Between that, Autobuild, Travel Medallions, and your first sanely-priced Cell upgrades, it takes so long to get basic game functions online.

@skydevilpalm Oh, didn't realize you were here! Then if I may make a suggestion: in Zelda, nearly every monster and interactive object challenges the player to ask themselves, "how can I beat this?" In Mario, they challenge the player to ask, "how can I use this?" Lean into that if you want to engage the community.

Meh. The Link's Awakening remake came with a dungeon maker built in, and no one ever used it. Making levels in Mario is fun because it's a giant sandbox with tons of vertical movement options and mechanics. Classic Zelda games are fun because of the design, not because of the engine.

I could have actually used some more stability. My TotK machines keep falling over!

Just like Minecraft, this will be something where I enjoy seeing other people's cool stuff but won't be doing any of it myself. I spend an hour trying to make a helicopter yesterday and all I made was a spinning abomination that wanted to die.

30, and it's actually kind of frustrating how little I've gotten done. Apparently a lot of basic functionality is locked behind doing one regional phenomenon, which I didn't realize. Went to Hateno by way of Kakariko and it was all pointless. For all its openness and sandboxiness, it feels a lot more linear than BotW.

My only complaint is that they look absolutely ridiculous and out of place.

It'll make more sense this way than having a plateau with an artificial killplane all the way around our.

That Z coordinate may or may not be meaningful. Dungeons could be in different loading zones like they were in BotW, so you could just get teleported to different coordinates. It would be really cool if the whole thing really were open world with no loading zones, though.

I knew the Switch version was buggy (the Marketplace hasn't worked in years, and online is terrible), but I didn't realize how comically bad the port is until I played it on my Steam Deck. Not the strongest system, but it can run gorgeous shaders with flawless performance, not to mention real mods.

@Alana I do not think you know what "a capella" means.

Rayquaza (Hoenn), Mew, or Celebi (Kanto+Johto) would make the most sense lorewise, but I agree that Unova is most likely from a marketing perspective.

That said, I don't know if the next Pokemon game will be a Legends. They're pumping out mainline games awfully fast. I was expecting this article to be about suggesting real-world locations (in which case, it's about time for Australia).

And if that's true, the next Legends game could easily be medieval Kalos.

My wife insists on starting one quest and finishing that quest, because she loses track of what she's doing otherwise (even with a quest tracker). I insist on picking up every quest I see so that I can complete it whenever it's convenient, and I don't forget to go back and pick it up later. Also she's not good with maps, so I have to make sure I stay on her screen at all time so she can follow me.

We don't play games together anymore.

With those three titles for inspiration, I was expecting a much more mature-looking aesthetic.

@Strumpan Thanks for that info! I never understood why evil Luigi had "Wa" in front of his name, since English, "Wario" is just "Mario" with an upside-down "M." I was about to suggest that after Walupeach, the next character could be Walupetoad, and then Walupetodaisy, and then Walupetodaitoadette...

I don't use an ad blocker, but I'm on mobile. All I see is, ironically, an ad for Black Friday sales at the Playstation store.

I would not get Minecraft for Switch. I have it, and it's buggy as hell. The store doesn't fully load and is full of placeholder names. Skins don't load properly. Load times are awful. Multiplayer fixes bugs but introduces new ones every patch. Cross-play is a disaster.

I did get Java Edition to play on my Steam Deck, though, and that's a 1000% better experience. If you're not married to the Switch, do yourself a favor and get that instead.

Well, a VA friend of mine tells me that $4K is quite a reasonable rate for a job like this. Maybe it should be more, but you can't blame Platinum for offering fair industry rates.

Oh, and also, Jennifer Hale is credited by Guinness as the world's most prolific female voice actress. According to her filmography, she does about 4 notable roles a year. I'm guessing she probably does some more small roles, but even if that doubles the number, at $4000/role (and few of these are as major as Bayonetta), she'd be trying to live on $32k a year.

Jennifer Hale is voice acting royalty. I guarantee she got a much better offer than $4000. Whoever made these decisions must be kicking themselves now.

I just want them to compose new music for the Blaster Master Zero series. The original had such a fantastic soundtrack. The Zero games have great gameplay but utterly forgettable music.

Considering their "hair" is actually tentacles, some of these look like some pretty horrific mutilation.

Those Nexomon aren't new. At least two of them are the final evolutions of two of the starters. I know because I had them.

The original Nexomon is just not good. Evolutions are purely cosmetic. There are only 7 types, of which one is neutral, and the others each have exactly two strengths and two weaknesses. There are no in-game descriptions of move accuracy or power; you can't even tell if a move is just a status effect or an attack with a status effect rider. Most of the status effects do exactly the same thing (skip one turn). And of course there's the premium currency, which many items are gated behind (and, while there's some in chests and whatnot, it's not enough to buy even one item).

I hear Extinction is better, but save your money on the first.

Jitters is on my island, and I definitely wouldn't call him "ugly." He's supposed to be one of those drinking bird toys. It's funny that he's a "jock" despite being tiny, but he's not ugly.

Bella is more classically "ugly," though she's kind of cute. But if you really want ugly, look no further than Harry.

I keep seeing articles comparing this to Harvest Moon or Animal Crossing, when it seems much more like The Sims FreePlay or Farmville to me. The studio has a long history of forgettable licensed freemium games. This and Speedstorm seem to be its first big screen games, but I see no reason to believe they won't be equally crappy.

Which is disappointing, because if there really were a Disney-themed Harvest Moon or Animal Crossing, it would make billions.

I'm laughing at the "tiny" pokedex of PLA, with a mere 241 'mon, and discussions about whether or not it's adequate. 150 was plenty and to spare in my day.

@Hck That's just the DLC. I'm playing the base game only, also coming straight from the GameCube one, and it's definitely Animal Crossing. The crafting is a big change, but otherwise it's pretty much the same.

I played the demo. The one criticism I had was that, with the retro-style graphics, it wasn't always easy to tell what the objects were. Especially if you're a guy and you don't know what women's hygiene products, cosmetics, and clothing look like.

There has to be some difference between the ROMs, even if it's a single bit.

Back in Red/Blue, which I played on emulator, I "caught 'em all" by catching everything that could be found in Blue, then renaming my save file and loading it in Red. Worked just fine. So they've always been basically the same ROM.

Samus Returns was my least favorite game in the series, and this sounds like not only more of the same, but even further in that direction. Even harder boss fights are not appealing to me at all. I kind of felt like Samus Returns was more of a spinoff, since it was so drastically different and made by a third party, and I'm a little bit angry they went that route for a sequel. Maybe someone will make a fan demake; that would really appeal to me.

Chocobo Racing was my favorite kart racer. The special abilities, the spells, the graphics--keep in mind this was PS1, so compared to MK64 it looked amazing--and most of all the music. The remixes of classic Final Fantasy tunes were amazing. The only downsides were balance (which they've clearly addressed at least in part by taking away White and Black Mages' permanent floating) and that there were only 8 tracks. If there's a number of tracks comparable to MK8 (not even Deluxe), I'm sold in a heartbeat.

@Clarice They're at lower risk of death than the general population, but they're not completely risk-free. Also COVID often results in long-term costs to cardiovascular and pulmonary function, which can easily make a "world-class" athlete no longer one. "Long COVID" could end a career, instantly and completely.

I bought several games featured in Nintendo Power because I didn't realize that third-party games featured there were paid-for ads. There's no excuse for Astyanax, but I had a good time with The Adventures of Bayou Billy and Lester the Unlikely.