TanukiTrooper

Same Vibes: "How My Kidnappers Unexpectedly Taught Me To Love Them" - Written by a Kidnapping Survivor with Stockholm Syndrome.

People with addictive personalities tend to gravitate towards Gacha Mechanics because they itch a scratch. Which is fine as long as they have enough self awareness of the time (and possibly money) that they are spending and know when it is time to turn off the app.

For me, with ASD and an unhealthy desire to 100% games, I LOATHE to waste my time and money on something that is random. So I tend to avoid games that have gacha mechanics as best I can. But for example, I almost 100%ed Dark Souls Remastered recently, I am just missing the Ghost Blade drop from the screaming ghosts that hold babies. Anyone who has tried to get this weapon before will know the suffering, only two of the ghosts exist, they are in a location that is far from the nearest bonfire, drop rate is 1% without modifiers, up to 4% chance max. I have made a pact with myself that I can try a number of attempts in a day until I get it. But I need to limit how much time I waste on it daily. But until I get it, it will sit on my mind that I don't have it.

So as you can imagine, if I get into Gacha games I would be screwed. They are a toxic swamp nightmare for people like myself. And when we were kids, I noticed my sister playing the Rocket Corner slot machine for eight hours straight a day because she found it fun. I am too well aware of the dangers of these type of mechanics.

Gacha should never be spoken about positively. They are dangerous and predatory and should be banned from gameplay mechanics. The only exception to random drops should be that you ALWAYS get something that is new. So the randomized pool shrinks with each item obtained.

Since Australia isn't involved, i'm assuming it must be streaming related. We don't get the Playstation streaming service due to our internet not being the best.

LOL Torishima definitely comes off as the ranting old xenophobic man in this clip that you cannot take seriously. It truly represents what is happening a lot in Japan though, there is a struggling shift in culture from younger generations that are fed up with not being heard. They've had the same government for decades because older generations own the political space with their massive aged population, and seniors don't like change. The final season of Aggretsuko did a good job of painting this scenario, where if a politician retires they just vote for the son or underling that has been groomed to follow the exact same line.

So instead the younger generations are turning to their workplaces and changing them. Someone said earlier that Nintendo doesn't pay attention to social progeression issues. Well yes and no, I think they pay attention to their workers and their needs and desires for representation. EG Nintendo treating employees that are in commited same sex relationships the same as those in married opposite sex relationships to make up for the fact that the government won't allow same sex marriage.

The same would be going on in development processes. The younger generations are taking charge and creating policies. It's not a surprise that Splatoon (by Nintendo's younger developer team) was one of their first games to ignore binary gender and simply have style. And then other games like animal crossing followed their lead.

As for the costume censorship. The game was made when the developers' workplace was basically all men. The current Square Enix has far more women in their employment with voices. So I think this is also a subtle culture change in Japan.

So the old man can blame America all they want, he is just showing that he is yet another old man in Japan that is ignoring the youth in his own country.

Surprised a CEO of a company that relies on Nintendo giving them early access to products to produce their own would be so candid about something that hasn't been revealed. That seems risky, potentially breaking NDAs.

Anyway, I think everyone was already assuming March/April 2025 release.

So rather than updating the game to make it less gambling adjacent, they are just going to stop making the game available. Gacha/loot box mentality needs to die in general. It's a terrible system that preys on compulsive people.

This reminds me of every Fromsoft Souls game and their tediously dull opening cinematics. I force myself to watch them once and then never again. I prefer being chucked into the middle of action and then have the lore and story built up as I play. Information dumps being the first thing you experience in a game is never fun.

Oh gosh, I felt ill watching that. All the warping textures was way too much.

@Joeynator3000 JWE2 has a sandbox mode where you can set an insane level of detail including whether or not you need to do research and collect fossils to build your collection of dinosaurs and facilities. I think most people just leave it at default, which is creative mode with everything is unlocked. You can also continue any of the park building campaigns/challenges beyond the achievement of all their objectives. So I am unsure how they screwed it up??? Maybe at the start of the game's life when I wasn't playing, but not now.

@Daniel36 LMAO I'm 40 and really enjoyed the movie. All the animated movies have been really solid, the vs Batman one is insanely good. Where the only half decent live action is the original 90s one, I do laugh when people claim it's the best. Rose tinted Nostalgia glasses much? As for the Michael Bay produced films, I couldn't even watch the 2nd the first one was that awful.

If you got them for free for playing x amount of minutes/hours of a game that would be great. But having to load up a game just to unlock the opportunity to purchase the icons is incredibly ridiculous.

They don't even have a mission to gain more coins for playing Animal Crossing 3 times. And that's the biggest problem with the icon store, there are not enough opportunities to earn coins unless you want to waste your life on their mobile games.

They really should have a static storefront that is updated weekly.

@BFahey3 Doesn't look like anyone replied to this. But:

United States:
DS = 51,100,000 (last reported 2009)
PS2 = 46,400,000 (last reported 2013)
NX = >38,800,000
360 = 38,800,000 (last reported 2013)

LOL I love everyone defending the controls, because they were god awful, among the worst for 3D platforming. I get they were using the d-pad to navigate 3D areas, but dang they were just atrocious. Considering Mario 64 released at the same time, it really highlighted the Nintendo difference. If they haven't fixed the controls this is a definite no-buy from me.

Hahaha, I like that this is now considered newsworthy because Americans are now getting vouchers. The rest of us who have been enjoying vouchers for years see this as akin to reporting "today is a Friday!". If it's anything like here in Australia all first party titles that are more expensive than a single voucher will be added, and pretty much 90% of (timed/permenant) exclusive third party titles that RRP above the price of a single voucher will be added. It's only surprising if a third party title that has no deals with Nintendo are added.

@Ryan_Again Because then it sounds like they are referring to a porn site? Also everyone still calls it twitter, stupid name change be damned.

I am dying for Pokemon DLC to become more like Monster Hunter. Where you have the list of events always available to you and can download them at your leisure. I also believe that mythical pokemon should be done as story content. The fact that they intended this in past games but then sometimes would never release the item that allowed you start the short story sequence is ridiculous.

But I cannot stand the go to the store method. I grew up in the country, so no chance getting them while young. And now that I am an adult, it's an embarrassingly awkward thing to do.

@Paperboy It's anything with a portable battery. Mobile Phone, the Switch, Steam Deck. Nintendo batteries are normally very easy to replace, the Switch is the first system I can think of where they have made it difficult.

I always liked that with my Samsung phones that I could easily replace the battery if need be. When they followed down the Apple path of no SD Card expansion slots and no access to the batteries etc, I was heavily disappointed. I am glad the courts have stepped in.

The only reason a woman with less qualifications would get a job over a man with more is because they weren't looking for someone that experienced. Really, that decision should be made before putting someone through an interview process, but that's not always the case especially if an interview quota needs to be met and there is not enough suitable candidates. I had been to an interview for a government job where a quota was in place, they were upfront about how many people they were required to interview in the application though.

I was part of a group selecting new team members recently, we were going through candidates and chucking out the ones with 10+ years experience and asking for over $100/hr. We have a budget to keep and what suited us was hiring three freshly graduated engineers that we can build up over hiring another senior engineer with a fixed mentality for $130/hr. Two of them were women and one man because the company as a whole is looking to hire more women in our very VERY male dominated industry, so we have that quota to ensure women are not overlooked. Because most straight men in this industry will always hire another straight man unless given a rule they have to abide by. The other workers don't know I am gay, so I hear a lot utter nonsense that spew out some of these guys mouths. The sexism, the homophobia, the racism. It would be nice if misogyny didn't exist but it does, and our quota is there to fight it. But don't think for a second that the women we hired were less qualified than the men that we also interviewed. Also, being a foreign company on another nationalities land, we need to meet a quota of hiring citizens of the country. This is out of respect for the country we are operating in. These quotas are here for a reason.

Just to touch on issues that arise in heavily male dominated workplaces:
My sister was the only member of her drafting team to be left out of a site trip due to the lack of space in the car. They decided to take male employees with less experience over her so they could have a boy's trip.
Blizzard's toxic environment leading to an employee death.
Chronic sexual harrassment. This is something that is happening in our company that we are fighting tooth and nail against. It's decreasing over time as we hire more women and given them more of a voice and presence in our company.

Once again, these quotas are here for a reason.

@sleepinglion Hmm... not really. He is not saying that publishers should give up their distributing rights but saying consoles shouldn't be a locked down environment that prevents games being played on any console. He wants it to be more in line with PC, DVD/BluRay players or even smart TV's hosting streaming services. EG you dont need a Disney brand DVD player to play Disney DVDs. Microsoft is pretty much the only one of the big 3 that releases their titles on other consoles.

@People saying there needs to be an option to turn it off:
Why? Just don't use the mechanic if you're against it, there doesn't need to be an on/off option. This isn't like Pokémon's Exp Share debate where having it on or off affects gameplay. Having this on will only affect your gameplay if YOU choose to use it. At the end of the day it won't lessen your experience, but it will enhance another persons.

@Dom_31 I'm guessing this is just filler so they can give people a chance to complete the story before releasing the next icons for TotK. The last set pretty much confirmed 3 of the sages. I could definitely see them receiving a bit of backlash for the spoilers. I know I had two of sages spoiled for me because of icons.

@nukatha Age of Calamity is set 100 years before BotW. The built world had decayed and returned to nature. It's like complaining how the built up pristine town and ranch around Hyrule field in AoC are demolished in TotK.

Neill Blomkamp is a director I want to love but when watching his films I realise I really don't enjoy his storytelling. I definitely don't want him anywhere near one of my favourite game franchises.

Errgh, not another evolutionary legendary. They are the worst. Trying to create a living Pokedex with these guys is always such a pain.

@victordamazio Hmm, I disagree. With them selecting which Pokemon to include in titles, it might be good to have a once per generation Stadium title that is targeted at the competitive market. They include all Pokémon in this one game, include only basic animations, so they don't have to animate walking, interactions etc for each Pokemon and go back to the basic 2-3 attack animations per Pokemon. Use Home as the source of the Pokémon data, and have a validation standard that checks that Pokémon are at the current competitive standard before being allowed to be registered for battle. I think if Stadium is to exist in the future, this is the way to do it.

@Chocobo_Shepherd Welllll they did say early 2023, but they announced that at the end of Feb. So their idea of early is a bit skewed. Hopefully with the update that is supposed to arrive by the end of April, fingers crossed. I'd wager they meant to say Home would be added first half of 2023.

Are they going to even acknowledge the save corruption bug? That needs to be fixed way sooner than two months away. How can they have events when people are too apprehensive to even load their games?

My dog always steals my toilet rolls...

Wait... Kelly Clarkson is a no longer a singer but a sub par talk show host now?

@Zach777 I agree, but I wouldn't call Game Freak one of the best programmers in the world. Nintendo's first party teams, Monolith Soft and Retro sure, but none of them are involved in Pokémon's development. If Monolith were allowed to help Game Freak from early on, the game would be in such a better state.

The map needs a major overhaul, they stuffed it up really bad. You can see inside the mountains and notice that the game is loading up to an extra two layers of terrain plus blades of grass and Pokémon load zones in an area that isn't meant be visible. That is a major drain of resources, and it is something I don't think they will ever fix, they are looking at quick easy way outs like population culling. Which also doesn't address the very apparent memory leak issue they have.

There's still a massive list of UI fixes they need to work on beyond performance issues. The Pokédex is an absolute joke, it doesn't remember where you were and there's no search function so returning to an entry in the middle is a chore. Changing outfits still doesn't have a prompt to tell you how to remove an item of clothing (press x), you can't reorder sandwiches so marked favourites are at the top.

As much as I have enjoyed the game, it's still an absolute mess of design that needed maybe another year or two in development.

Being in Australia, I have always redeemed vouchers for first party new releases. This will be no different and won't affect me at all.

@Sisilly_G The Pokémon Company would rather charge people extra than get compensation from Nintendo for being part of NSO. I'm usually against companies buying out other companies. But Nintendo should have outright bought Game Freak very early on so they had more control and say over the Pokémon series. The whole creation of The Pokémon Company has just caused more headaches and woes than actual benefits. I remember when Mario Maker released, Nintendo were finally allowed to use the Pokemon Amiibo for unlocks but unlike other characters such as Link, the Pokemon weren't allowed to have Pokemon soundtracks or sound effects. If it wasn't for Nintendo holding a third of the stakes in TPC and half in Creatures, Pokémon would have gone multiplat by now.

I never had an issue with durability. The weapons were in abundance and I only used top tier weapons against top tier enemies. It really put me in a postion to try all items. Where most games you would just default to the strongest and never try anything else. Lame and boring. I really don't understand the frustration with the system at all.

I'm extremely happy with the Switch format and would love to see a big upgrade for the next Nintendo console. No need to reinvent the wheel, the only thing it can't do from previous gen consoles is dual screen gaming. If they can manage that with the next console they are golden.

I love playing Salmon Run because I am not a competitive player and prefer co-op, but will on occasions play turf war. It really bugs me that they found a way to make Salmon Run not as enjoyable by adding a competitive element to it in Big Run. I tend to play with randoms, and sometimes my brother will join in, so we have little to no chance to get in the higher percentage bracket. I think we only managed the top 50%. You really need to be a team of friends you can communicate with and who have a high skill level to really achieve above 150 eggs in a round. Or be extremely lucky to land in a group of randoms where you all just magically understand each other and what you should do at every second.

They should just set up clear egg number goal posts for Big Run instead of percentages. So people aren't stressing about competing with each other especially against pros and are just aiming to reach the number set.

Also why doesn't Cohozuna drop more scales during Big Run? That is a massive missed opportunity, it takes forever to get enough scales to buy stuff from the Grizzco store, even if you kill Cohozuna every time you see it.

But who am I kidding, all the events in this game is a joke. Take Splatfest, whoever gets the most votes will always win, and this has lead to more and more people waiting until the second day to find out which team is performing the best and then join them so the other two have no chance.

@Dev9417 Oh gosh, that reminds me of one time I went back down to Overachiever due to pushing through the rewards of a bad map and weapon combo. Figured I will get back up easily enough, but no. The next cycle was Sockeye with a great set of weapons, but everyone kept constantly dying and more time was spent resurrecting them than killing the enemies. My score was always 3-5 times higher than everyone else after a wipeout. It was a frustrating cycle that only broke because I had the luck of someone else in a blue suit join the team so with two of us more experienced we were able to make up for inability of the other two and managed to get back to Professional +2. It's one of those strange situations where the game is easier when you hit the higher levels, usually Professional +3.

But having said that, I have bad days sometimes where work is on my mind and I am distracted. I'm sure everyone who has good badges has off days.

Considering the recent law case they lost due to breach of child privacy and unwanted charges to people's credit cards I hope people steer well clear of all Epic titles. Tim Sweeney has often spoken very poorly of gamers and desires to force gamers to purchase from his store by buying out PC titles and bullies those that dont sell out to him. I honestly think they are worse than EA, At least EA doesn't target children with loot boxes and micro transactions.

@Pokemaniacal That's interesting, my PS5 has just been gathering dust since I finished Elden Ring. I guess I also own a PC, so I tend to play multiplats on it except FromSoft titles as you can be invaded by hackers without the ability to turn off invasions while playing co-op. The Switch, once again, has been my most played system this year, followed closely by my PC and PS5 a distant third.

As for the topic. I would love for them to continue the hybrid line. I think they should give up trying to innovate drastically with each console gen, it makes backwards compatibility nearly impossible. What I would like to see from the next gen switch is streaming to the dock capabilities so you can play games Wii U style. Not too sure if the tech is quite there for the system to stream HD images from your hand to the TV, but it would be awesome.

I imagine all the struggles Sony has been having producing PS5s has caused Nintendo to hold off releasing a product that they can't easily meet demand with.

The fact that they are trying to force people to play the game for hours a week otherwise they miss out on items is disgusting. This should just be added to a back library of items that are always accessible for you to earn with the in game currency. Essentially games like this decrease in value over time because you miss out on so much content.

That's good. Not a fan of Nintendo's latest interest in battlepasses and other limited time items. Nintendo no Fomo...

I wonder if Ash will age rapidly, The Last Crusade style.

I genuinely do not know, I love all sensations...

Just a Switch. I prefer Steam games on my rig. I also have a laptop that has civ, xcom etc installed if I really need portable PC games. Switch for everything else.

I'm just shocked Yahoo! still exists...

Says he is going to the grass gym city, then proceeds to the bug gym city. The actual Grass gym's city, Artezan, had far worse frame rates than Cortendo's, especially when you are doing the Sunflora hide and seek trial. Might as well check it out myself in a moment!

@Ability-King-KK
Strange World flopped because there was zero marketing and the film is pretty dull. It has nothing to do with the lead character being gay or a the inter racial relationship. It is essentially this generation's Treasure Planet. It will earn a cult following but it was destined to bomb regardless of the characters sexuality. I've seen massive Disney fans question what the film was simply because they only heard of it when news articles published that it was flopping.

Meanwhile Wakanda Forever is reaching 700 million very soon despite the lack of the original's lead, Aneka and Ayo being lesbians and the lead cast being prominately black women.

This game will only gain sales by allowing people to play as they desire. If it loses sales it will be due to an oversaturated farming sim market, art style changes and possibly poor quality if that's the case.

Need I point out that the Fire Emblem series has only been increasing in sales when they introduced same sex relationships? That is mainly due to the overhaul of the series, but introducing same sex romances didn't hinder growth.

So no, people like yourself seem to directly tie quality of a product to diversity. Which is definitely not the case. Products simply sell based on recognisability and quality. End of story.

I didn't realise it meant 1000 steps in one outing at first and couldn't work out why it wouldn't evolve despite it being the only pokemon I would send out.

@Bret Nintendo have consistently shown they are happy and even push for delays if a product isn't at the quality they want, and after playing Violet, it definitely doesn't feel like Nintendo's stamp of approval. I have had moments early on where all the textures just became flat colours and super ugly, or a shadow of a cloud will be passing over me that disappears when a character talks to me, so the lighting goes dark to light abruptly. Nintendo, have little say over the Pokemon franchise, they have equal shares in the Pokemon Company who is also owned by Creatures and Game Freak and sets the product release windows etc. Don't blame Nintendo when Game Freak has consistently been bad at programming and optimising since nearly every release of their titles. Game Freak has a massive turn over of staff, they have trouble keeping senior talent which is disguised as "We like to give young people employment", but I think in reality a lot of senior talent butt heads with the likes of Junichi Masuda. So this comes at a cost of poorly coded and optimised games. This has always very much been a Game Freak problem. We need to stop shifting blame. I enjoy Pokemon, but the games would be so much better if they listened to fan feedback, rather than crying in a corner when a game is criticised and then ignoring that criticism, and if they stop setting themselves unrealistic goals.

39 here, surprised there's so many of us around 40. It's also interesting to see that we are a stronger demographic than children.

@Eagly Ah King Toadstool...

Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe are among my least favourite actors to watch. I have never understood people believing they are incredible actors, as they both come off so hammy to me. So having them both in the same movie meant I was never going to see it. But I did buy the game because I enjoy Wayforward's titles and I heard great things. Not disappointed.