Review reads like it was written by someone who plays horror games for the exact same reasons the let's play community did back when TDD first blew up. 70% of the review is mechanics when only one of the three titles (" ") uses these mechanics more than 20% of the time (and even then, the entire mid-section of TDD is near-devoid of anything that isn't strictly light puzzles and lore building). No reference to just how impressive the narrative elements stack up to this day (particularly in AMFP, which got a cursory "immersive" tag in this review; ironic given you did note the types of games The Chinese Room has been involved with). No reference to the fact every mechanic considered revolutionary in TDD existed in prior Frictional titles, namely the Penumbra franchise. No reference to the fact the let's play community didn't have any horror games to latch onto when it first started its rapid expansion; TDD wasn't a revolution for horror so much as the let's play community used it as a battering ram to create the jumpscare montage landscape it so desired. It's not like they had many other choices at the time. I'd imagine NL limits wordcounts for reviews but it's honestly a shame this collection netted a writeup as vapid as the YouTube comments smattered across let's play episodes for the individual titles.
@Shiryu Eva makes alt accounts to defend herself in threads, I would take everything she's saying with a hefty pillar of salt. @SBandy earned some detractors in the Switch Lite UK thread which was a shame the thread quite literally ends with Eva being defended by a 4 minute old account that's only 4 comments (as of now) are on that thread.
As for this game, I'll consider dipping after a sale. Have fond memories of playing the second game on PC. Was often impressed with the level of detail regarding possible ways to silence your foes, from shooting their grenades to setting elaborate traps.
I know different departments do different things and this is a mean-spirited hypothetical but I often wonder how many cool quality of life changes we could get if the budget for a Mario Kart gacha were instead funnelled into the Switch.
already own this elsewhere but installed the demo and damn this is some silk. probably gonna double dip. only increases my excitement for rivals of aether's switch release.
@Travisemo007 spinoff games can be identical mechanically to a mainline game. They just generally aren't. Tekken has a few spinoff games that play just like mainline Tekken. The fact this game not only has different combat mechanics but also a storyline that doesn't link up with the BB canon makes me believe it's a spinoff.
So yea, I wouldn't be too concerned. A big portion of the BB community largely prefers Central Fiction so I'd wager the next mainline game will abandon the tag system completely.
shoutout to the ever collected PJ running his mouth in the comments and deleting everything once he realizes he looks a bit silly
id be very curious to see who the developers feel the target demographic for this game is because i cant imagine any informed person buying this game unironically
@Heavyarms55 You might find Detention interesting. It's more about atmosphere and philosophy than jumpscares or shock tactics. Has light puzzle elements and multiple endings. Same goes for the Amnesia games (which have just been released as a bundle on the Switch). The first Amnesia has a bad rap for being a jumpscare festival but it really isn't. The second is just a great little misanthropic story that's substantially lighter on horror as a gameplay element but heavier on horror being used as a narrative convention. Unfortunately too many horror games these days are all about jumps and shock tactics but there's still room for deeper stories to be told.
@KingBowser86 @gloom most speed games have categories. this category is called any%. any% means do whatever you want so long as you finish the game as fast as possible. then there is any% glitchless where you finish a game as fast as possible with no exploits. then there is 100% glitchless where you finish a game as fast as possible while finishing all quests and objectives, also with no exploits. that's likely the category that'd pique your attention.
it's worth noting any% runs are often considered just as hard if not harder than their 100% counterparts because the min-maxing is more intense. you could run a 10 minute game 30 times in 5 hours, but an hour-long game only 5 times in the same time. thus, room for error shrinks drastically. as unimpressive as that run probably seems, i have little doubt it's still pretty damn hard to pull off that quickly.
@OorWullie Yea I reckon you'll love Lost in Vivo. It's as close as we've gotten to a modern Silent Hill 2 I reckon, not counting mods like Cry of Fear and the likes. Really intense atmosphere at times.
And yea, absolutely adored Detention. Atmosphere trumps "scary" 99% of the time as far as I'm concerned.
Unfortunate to hear of yet another poor horror title. Would love to see something like Lost in Vivo get a port. I feel stylised horrors are more suited to the console than this sort of thing.
@SpaceboyScreams I don't think anyone cares about Hero at a top level. He simply has a lot of upset potential everywhere else in a tournament bracket. My region has no US-tier top players. I've seen unknown players use Hero and beat the best players we have here in bracket or at the very least take games off of them that they wouldn't typically be able to take.
None of this is to mention getting hit by a slow F smash doesn't make you a bad player. Your opponent can get a read on you. Why else would Nairo be able to take out Light's Fox with Ganon, or Zaki take out MK Leo's Cloud with Dedede? People get hit with slow F smashes quite often at a high level because they only get thrown out when a player is confident it will hit.
This goes double for everywhere that isn't the highest level. I hit a reverse Falcon punch in my first ever game against a top 25 player in my state. He absolutely destroyed me but I still got a read. Pair the fact that we now have a character who can kill at 0% if said read connects and luck is on his side, who also has a large command list, and during a Bo3 tournament set, you are fighting tournament nerves, an opponent you have to adapt to, and the fear of getting lucked into oblivion.
Which is why the only bans we've seen thus far have been for very small scenes like the South Australia scene. Honestly have no qualms with a community deciding what'll be best for their own growth because it is hard enough maintaining a competitive scene as is, let alone when you are an isolated scene with no top tier players.
@Mr_Muscle How so? This isn't a conventional tournament; official Nintendo tournaments don't mirror competitive Smash basically at all. The competitive Ultimate scene has been running on largely the same rules since the game came out.
@DarkLloyd Yea, can't believe an official Nintendo competition would cater to players who can't read a long command list in French, really quite pathetic.
@TheFox Tekken 7 is actually my favourite fighting game of all time at this point as a massive fan of competitive play, but I could never in good faith recommend it to someone who wants a good offline experience because to say it is lacking is a severe understatement. SFV is worth it now as far as I'm concerned but it certainly wasn't for the first two years of its life cycle. If arcade mode is your biggest pull, I'd highly recommend checking out some of those older SNK and Capcom titles if you haven't then. In particular, Garou: Mark of the Wolves which you can pick up for cheap on the Switch eShop. Probably the perfect arcade fighter; it has aged like fine wine.
Also keep your ears to the ground regarding Skull Girls which should be out on Switch very soon. Has quite a lot of offline content and is all round a brilliant game. Probably the most unique fighter out there aesthetically. And of course, there's a new Guilty Gear just around the corner, and I have no doubt the next mainline BlazBlue will be more akin to prior games in the franchise with its offline content.
This was a blast with friends back in the day. Played the hell out of it both with close friends and with randoms I'd meet playing Halo 3. Great seeing it getting a port!
@qwertyzxcv Do you also judge the quality of an entire film by the first 30 minutes? I can understand not enjoying a genre but straight up calling a game terrible because you only put 5 hours into it is a bit shortsighted. Checking your game ratings, you've given Twilight Princess a 9/10, a game which has a reputation for an incredibly tedious opening few hours without the benefit of a fun first hour. It also doesn't have the benefit of being some kind of meta commentary; it is literally just a boring opening few hours. How did you manage to muster up the strength to plough through a clearly terrible game???
@TheFox Probably because this has been the BB title most heavily advertised to a competitive audience possibly ever. It was announced at EVO for one. The RWBY crossover was also hugely advertised so expectations for a detailed campaign to add to the BB canon just didn't seem sensible, at least to me. The fact the main gameplay loop is completely different to all the mainline titles should only be further indication. Tag team titles have also traditionally fared worse with casual audiences than 1v1 games with the only notable exceptions being Tag Tournament or DBFZ, and there's a good argument to be made that DBFZ would have sold just as well if not better if it weren't a tag team game because of the IP.
Also, idk what fighting games you own or have played, but while the single player content here is sparse, it is no where near as bad as a litany of other games, the aforementioned DBFZ and Tekken 7 being two very recent examples. Street Fighter V didn't launch with an arcade mode (took 2 years to add) and what it did launch with was much worse than what's on offer in CTB. None of this is to mention older titles like half the SoulCalibur games or a great deal of the old SNK and Capcom classics that were essentially nothing more than an arcade mode.
@talgore Half the point of the game is to subvert trite tropes like bland hub areas, repetitive combat, dull colour palettes, and so on, as well as toying with the idea of consumer patience and planned obsolescence. None of this would be clear to you as you ducked out 5 hours in which inadvertently makes you the butt of the joke. Obviously no one can force you to mine for the narrative gold within the sarcastic (see: bland) rubble but the more confident you get about your opinions on the game, the funnier the whole ordeal gets.
Kinda weird seeing how many people are upset at a game in a genre geared around competitive multiplayer experiences not having the most detailed offline spread. I'd understand complaints at the way this game has been updated (see: sparsely) and monetized (see: excessively) but there seem to be just as many people giving it the finger for not having a lengthy single player experience or for being too complicated.
@Kalmaro "My issue is that we can't tell if they are being consistent because we've got nothing to base their opinion on."
We have the fact that the numbers have words associated with them. It does not matter what those words were or how many numbers you threw in; every reviewer would still interpret them differently and subsequently inconsistency in this regard would be impossible, as I've tried to demonstrate numerous times. If you can tell me a system reviewers can use that fosters consistency that isn't strictly "have strong writing ability and be well researched and experienced with the topics you tackle" and doesn't require reviewers become robots, I'll eat everything I've said up until now.
"At this point, I'd prefer they skip scores altogether and just do Joy and Cons."
I've been making this point since my first response. I'd take it a step further and remove the joys and cons too because why the hell does a review need a TL;DR; if you are gonna spend money on a multi-hour experience then a 5 minute read won't hurt.
I implore you to read out loud everything you've said in this thread and ask yourself if anything you are saying is either contradictory or impossible to expect of a writer. I'm not getting what you are saying because your expectations don't apply to critiquing art. It does not matter how stringent or how freeform your rubric is for art critique; it is still up to the reviewer and the readership to interpret those rubrics with their subjective worldview.
@Kalmaro I must be losing my mind or something so let me get this straight:
>"the numbers are completely arbitrary" >but they aren't actually arbitrary because "you at least know which they liked more and where" which implies they actually serve a purpose >"the numbers are completely arbitrary" >but this whole ordeal started because of two fairly arbitrary numbers, being a 9 and a 10 >"the numbers are completely arbitrary" >but why is it ok for one NL reviewer who has autonomy and their own opinion to give a 3D open world adventure game a 10 while another completely separate NL reviewer who has autonomy and their own opinion gives a 2D isometric action puzzler remake a 9 >"the numbers are completely arbitrary" >so please add more arbitrary numbers so I can compare near completely unrelated games with said arbitrary numbers because it is mean that two reviews for completely different games by different people could have different scores
Like, every time I post a reply you say the same thing without noticing that you haven't responded to any of my points. An arbitrary 2 + an arbitrary 2 does not = a 4 with purpose. It equals an arbitrary 4. I haven't really got anything else to add here lmao
Majora's Mask remake was a dumpster fire. It saddens me how many people's first exposure to such a beautiful game was with the 3DS version. Ocarina of Time for the 3DS was such a labour of love. Such a shame Majora's Mask for the 3DS clearly wasn't.
@Kalmaro Yea, I noted that in the first line of my last comment, apologies if it wasn't clear.
How much detail does the site need to give you? I hope you realise that the more you try and define what scores mean outside of the review, the more difficult the reviewing process becomes. IGN even acknowledged this years ago when they dropped their weighting system that would appear at the end of reviews, tallying up the scores for individual components like gameplay, music, story, etc, and then having a final score on top of that. Having a point score is already stupid enough in the world of art appraisal; trying to define how things are scored further just doesn't make sense if you aren't explicitly reviewing things that you use like gadgets and tools.
@Kalmaro The fact you bring up the pros not matching makes me feel you are intentionally ignoring my main points because that's exactly what I've been saying this whole time. Reviews don't start at 10 and then remove points if the game slips up. You could quite feasibly have a review with more cons than joys that gets a 9 and another review that gets zero cons and only joys getting 8'd. It isn't just about what the games get wrong.
The number at the bottom of the page, the joys, and the cons are not the review. The review is the review. I implore you to open both reviews up next to each other and really pay attention to the nuance in the wording.
The BOTW review is quite clearly heralding the game as potentially genre-defining, a "landmark release", a game in the running for the best game in the whole franchise, and something groundbreaking in the open-world scene.
The Link's Awakening review quite clearly recognises that the game was "one of" the greatest games in the Gameboy era (hell, Nintendo Life even has a 2009 review of the original Gameboy release giving it a 10/10), a technical marvel, praises it as "one of" the best games in the Zelda franchise, and praises it as a phenomenal remake.
Ignoring all technical details, that still feels to me like one game is a hell of a lot more deserving of a 10 than the other. Do you honestly think stuttering is more important to reviewers than whether or not a game is quite literally going to alter the gaming landscape? Stuttering and game-destroying glitches didn't stop countless reviewers giving GTA V, Red Dead, The Last of Us, The Witcher 3, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and more 10/10s at launch.
TL;DR: the pros of Link's Awakening in the 2010's do not match up to the pros of BOTW, technical problems aren't as important as a game's impact on the gaming landscape, and the score + joys & cons are not the review
@Kalmaro I don't get the idea you read my comment properly.
10 means "outstanding" on Nintendo Life. Not "flawless" or "technically perfect". Any reviewer worth their salt knows that using perfection as a metric on a macro level when assessing art isn't very useful. Interstellar is pretty much perfect by every quantifiable technical measure (visual fidelity, music, story pacing, cast, etc) yet the vast majority of film nerds would consider something like Primer, a film made with a shoestring $8000 budget by largely one man, to be considerably better in the SciFi genre. Is that inconsistency? Or is it remembering that the digit at the end of a review is a closing remark, not the objective capstone of every single detail of the review that precedes it?
@Kalmaro BOTW ran considerably worse on release than this seems to and that got a 10. Not sure why people think a 10 is synonymous with "flawless" on a website that clearly stipulates what 10 means next to the number.
"Stealth games like Hitman were also used as a source of inspiration when designing the AI."
I know this would seem obvious given the relative lack of stealth games not about assassination attempts but hot damn that's one of the funniest sentences one could muster given the context.
@JDBaker And sacrifice the mechanic that gives Smash its identity? You'd be moving Smash towards traditional fighters. There would be no reason to pick a character who excels off-stage because no one would ever get launched off the stage to begin with. The entire balance of the game would be thrown out of whack, with characters like Little Mac skyrocketing to S tier from the depths of F tier and characters like Pikachu having entire aspects of their core moveset made near redundant due to matches being entirely centred around grounded neutral interactions. There are dozens of fighting games already based around depleting a health bar through grounded neutral interactions that offer a hell of a lot more depth and intrigue in this context than Smash would. Smash's depth largely comes from the fact that the percentage system exists.
@talgore "I loved the first level of NieR: Automata... then it dropped me into some open world bland area and I lost interest. I'm sure I'm missing out."
The levels of unintentional irony in this comment are reaching critical mass
I briefly lived in a farmhouse in Western Australia with around a dozen geese and they would often break out of their enclosure and congregate around the nearest car. Had to chase the geese with a broom up to the enclosure fence then pick them up one by one and lift them into the enclosure. Arguably a contender for the WatchMojo Top 10 Most Horrifying Chores a Non-Farm Kid Might Participate In as Cruel Byproduct of Entropy in the Universe list.
Treating this game as a celebration that Geese Howard can no longer counter-hit launch off of his generic low jab in Tekken 7 anymore.
@Heavyarms55 I hope I'm not misunderstood. It is a wonderful controller, arguably my favourite of the last decade. It is not a good controller for anyone who wants to play fighting games against other players competently though. It isn't a matter of holding it to different standards; it is a matter of acknowledging which tools are right for the job.
Take two people who've never played a game in their life, force them to put 10 hours into a first person shooter like Counter Strike, one with a mouse and keyboard and one with a controller, and it likely wouldn't come as a surprise to anyone if the player using the mouse completely stomped the controller user. The mouse is better suited to the context. Do the same for two players with Dark Souls PVP, and the controller player will most likely stomp the mouse and keyboard user. The controller is better suited to the context.
Likewise, dedicated pads and arcade sticks are a considerable amount better suited to fighting games than the majority of standard controllers, with the PlayStation controllers being the notable exception. It's also worth noting that every mainstream fighting game (Street Fighter V, Tekken 7, Dragon Ball Fighter Z, Mortal Kombat 11, Injustice 2, maybe Guilty Gear/BlazBlue/SamSho, etc) makes frequent use of the DP and quarter circle motions I mentioned above, as well as a litany of other execution-heavy commands all centred around the D-pad.
Anyone who wants to beat other players online owes it to themselves to not frustrate themselves senseless inputting the wrong commands on a controller not designed for fighting games. Fighting games are hard enough as is, with what few accessible and execution-light fighters that do exist (Flappy Fighter, Fantasy Strike, Pocket Rumble, Divekick, etc) being relegated to relative obscurity by no fault of their own. Until Riot Games win over the masses with Rising Thunder, the importance of dedicated fighting game peripherals for anyone looking to reach online competency isn't going to subside. I don't know what your perception of what even just a "decent" fighting game player is, but for context, it is often said in the Tekken community that you are a "good" player (not great, not even close) after playing Tekken an hour a day for two years. That's over 600 hours for a non-hardcore player to reach baseline decency, so hopefully that puts things a little more into perspective.
tl;dr the Pro controller is a ridiculously good controller. It is clearly not designed with fighting games in mind though.
@Heavyarms55 The point of a fighting game is to beat other players. The "end game" is to beat players who can beat the majority of other players. It's (ostensibly?) sport. To maximise the quantity and quality of play and practice time, you kinda need a peripheral that'll function at a beginner and tournament level simultaneously, and can put up with rigorous routines.
The Switch Pro controller works for beginner button mashing and not much else. The D-pad is one of the worst I've ever used, and that's completely fine for the casual player or anything that isn't strictly a fighter. But try performing even a rudimentary input like a DP input or a quarter circle consistently during a match and you are gonna be throwing the controller in a minute. You don't want to play against people who are good at the game with it because they'll punish every mistake you make as a result of a bad controller, and you don't want to practice with it because you don't want to develop bad habits due to having to compensate for an inaccurate peripheral (like avoiding DP inputs entirely).
This controller is certainly on the pricey side and only a select few controllers have had an accurate floating D-pad in the past but given the price tag, I'm giving PowerA the benefit of the doubt that this will still largely be worth the coin for prospective pad players seeking out a new controller. If the D-pad isn't good and the buttons aren't tactile and responsive, I not only fully agree irrespective of context that this is an overpriced controller, but I also actively condemn it.
I should also quickly note that while arcade sticks are indeed built like tanks, they are still massively overpriced, arguably more so than controllers for what they do at the mid to high end. The fighting game community actually has a lot of overlap with the hardware modding community because so many players end up building their own sticks (forking out a few hundred bucks for the same buttons on a fancier box can sting) for a fraction of the price with comparable rigidity. Controllers are a fair bit more complicated to put together so pad players have to make to with whatever the market dictates 99% of the time.
@Heavyarms55 Fighting games. All fighting game peripherals come with a premium. Arcade sticks and fightpads also near universally are missing buttons and features found on standard controllers. It is hardly an issue though because the people using these peripherals will sink thousands of hours into a single game with them. If it's ergonomic, responsive, and accurate, it's worth it for a fighting game player. I can tell just looking at the controller it'll be a better fit for fighters than the pro controller, even if the D-pad looks a little sus.
@Galenmereth The discrepancy between how some of the senior staff act here and how the likes of Alex and Zion on the YouTube channel act is alarming. I've always pictured Alex as the face of NL in my mind which is probably why this sort of stuff still surprises me, even if it's been happening for a very long time. Definitely tragic.
Why does @Damo always come to these threads to bash either poorly worded or extreme sides of the argument but never contend with anyone who has valid and reasonable criticisms? Why even bother showing up if you have no desire to make fruitful discussion? It's kinda whack dude haha
Comments 165
Re: Junichi Masuda Says Cut Pokémon Will "Definitely" Return In Future Games
@Xelha How many characters do you need lol
Re: Random: Nintendo's Latest Firmware Update For Switch Removed A Neat Effect
That's a shame. Was one of my favourite things about replacing drifting JoyCons!
Re: Review: Amnesia: Collection - A Masterclass In Horror That Has Aged Better Than You'd Think
Review reads like it was written by someone who plays horror games for the exact same reasons the let's play community did back when TDD first blew up. 70% of the review is mechanics when only one of the three titles (" ") uses these mechanics more than 20% of the time (and even then, the entire mid-section of TDD is near-devoid of anything that isn't strictly light puzzles and lore building). No reference to just how impressive the narrative elements stack up to this day (particularly in AMFP, which got a cursory "immersive" tag in this review; ironic given you did note the types of games The Chinese Room has been involved with). No reference to the fact every mechanic considered revolutionary in TDD existed in prior Frictional titles, namely the Penumbra franchise. No reference to the fact the let's play community didn't have any horror games to latch onto when it first started its rapid expansion; TDD wasn't a revolution for horror so much as the let's play community used it as a battering ram to create the jumpscare montage landscape it so desired. It's not like they had many other choices at the time. I'd imagine NL limits wordcounts for reviews but it's honestly a shame this collection netted a writeup as vapid as the YouTube comments smattered across let's play episodes for the individual titles.
Re: Review: Sniper Elite 3 Ultimate Edition - Gratuitous Gore And Dumb AI Can't Ruin This Likeable Shooter
@Shiryu Eva makes alt accounts to defend herself in threads, I would take everything she's saying with a hefty pillar of salt. @SBandy earned some detractors in the Switch Lite UK thread which was a shame the thread quite literally ends with Eva being defended by a 4 minute old account that's only 4 comments (as of now) are on that thread.
As for this game, I'll consider dipping after a sale. Have fond memories of playing the second game on PC. Was often impressed with the level of detail regarding possible ways to silence your foes, from shooting their grenades to setting elaborate traps.
Re: Nintendo Switch Lite Has Slow Start In UK, But Retailers Expect That To Change
@EvaEeveeFan @Mimikyu_is_Best
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"Mimikyu_is_Best Sat, 3:22am
@EvaEeveeFan Agreeable from a fellow autistic girl. i would feel attacked too lol."
Nothing fishy here at all lmao
Re: Nintendo Switch System Update 9.0.1 Is Now Live
I know different departments do different things and this is a mean-spirited hypothetical but I often wonder how many cool quality of life changes we could get if the budget for a Mario Kart gacha were instead funnelled into the Switch.
Re: Review: Ori And The Blind Forest: Definitive Edition - An Unmissable Experience
already own this elsewhere but installed the demo and damn this is some silk. probably gonna double dip. only increases my excitement for rivals of aether's switch release.
Re: Remaining DLC Fighters For BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle 2.0 Update Revealed
@Travisemo007 spinoff games can be identical mechanically to a mainline game. They just generally aren't. Tekken has a few spinoff games that play just like mainline Tekken. The fact this game not only has different combat mechanics but also a storyline that doesn't link up with the BB canon makes me believe it's a spinoff.
Just did some looking and even Wikipedia says it's a spinoff title:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlazBlue
So yea, I wouldn't be too concerned. A big portion of the BB community largely prefers Central Fiction so I'd wager the next mainline game will abandon the tag system completely.
Re: Puzzle Rom-Com Felix The Reaper Dances Onto Switch Next Month
thats a title if ever i saw one lmao, interest piqued
Re: Review: Contra: Rogue Corps - An Ugly And Unfocused Mess That Shames The Contra Name
shoutout to the ever collected PJ running his mouth in the comments and deleting everything once he realizes he looks a bit silly
id be very curious to see who the developers feel the target demographic for this game is because i cant imagine any informed person buying this game unironically
Re: Review: Paper Dolls Original - A Horror Wannabe That Fails To Raise A Scare
@Heavyarms55 You might find Detention interesting. It's more about atmosphere and philosophy than jumpscares or shock tactics. Has light puzzle elements and multiple endings. Same goes for the Amnesia games (which have just been released as a bundle on the Switch). The first Amnesia has a bad rap for being a jumpscare festival but it really isn't. The second is just a great little misanthropic story that's substantially lighter on horror as a gameplay element but heavier on horror being used as a narrative convention. Unfortunately too many horror games these days are all about jumps and shock tactics but there's still room for deeper stories to be told.
Re: Mario Kart Tour Has A Paid Subscription Service For Bonus In-Game Rewards
given how lacking the Switch's online services have been, this doesn't really surprise me at all.
Re: Video: Someone Just Beat Untitled Goose Game In Less Than Four Minutes
@KingBowser86 @gloom most speed games have categories. this category is called any%. any% means do whatever you want so long as you finish the game as fast as possible. then there is any% glitchless where you finish a game as fast as possible with no exploits. then there is 100% glitchless where you finish a game as fast as possible while finishing all quests and objectives, also with no exploits. that's likely the category that'd pique your attention.
it's worth noting any% runs are often considered just as hard if not harder than their 100% counterparts because the min-maxing is more intense. you could run a 10 minute game 30 times in 5 hours, but an hour-long game only 5 times in the same time. thus, room for error shrinks drastically. as unimpressive as that run probably seems, i have little doubt it's still pretty damn hard to pull off that quickly.
Re: Review: Paper Dolls Original - A Horror Wannabe That Fails To Raise A Scare
@OorWullie Yea I reckon you'll love Lost in Vivo. It's as close as we've gotten to a modern Silent Hill 2 I reckon, not counting mods like Cry of Fear and the likes. Really intense atmosphere at times.
And yea, absolutely adored Detention. Atmosphere trumps "scary" 99% of the time as far as I'm concerned.
Re: Review: Paper Dolls Original - A Horror Wannabe That Fails To Raise A Scare
Unfortunate to hear of yet another poor horror title. Would love to see something like Lost in Vivo get a port. I feel stylised horrors are more suited to the console than this sort of thing.
Re: We Never Expected To See 'BDSM' On Nintendo Switch, Luckily It's Not What You Think
if it ever gets a sequel it better be titled DSBM, i swear to god
Re: Random: Nintendo Releases Another ASMR Video, This Time For Super Mario Maker 2
@Zeldafan79 @Yoshinator @PBandSmelly Here's how it works:
Some people find certain sounds and visuals relaxing. Other people don't.
Yea, that's about it.
Re: Nintendo France Bans Hero From Official Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Tournament
@SpaceboyScreams I don't think anyone cares about Hero at a top level. He simply has a lot of upset potential everywhere else in a tournament bracket. My region has no US-tier top players. I've seen unknown players use Hero and beat the best players we have here in bracket or at the very least take games off of them that they wouldn't typically be able to take.
None of this is to mention getting hit by a slow F smash doesn't make you a bad player. Your opponent can get a read on you. Why else would Nairo be able to take out Light's Fox with Ganon, or Zaki take out MK Leo's Cloud with Dedede? People get hit with slow F smashes quite often at a high level because they only get thrown out when a player is confident it will hit.
This goes double for everywhere that isn't the highest level. I hit a reverse Falcon punch in my first ever game against a top 25 player in my state. He absolutely destroyed me but I still got a read. Pair the fact that we now have a character who can kill at 0% if said read connects and luck is on his side, who also has a large command list, and during a Bo3 tournament set, you are fighting tournament nerves, an opponent you have to adapt to, and the fear of getting lucked into oblivion.
Which is why the only bans we've seen thus far have been for very small scenes like the South Australia scene. Honestly have no qualms with a community deciding what'll be best for their own growth because it is hard enough maintaining a competitive scene as is, let alone when you are an isolated scene with no top tier players.
Re: Nintendo France Bans Hero From Official Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Tournament
@Gridatttack Interesting perspective. I feel this would seriously ease up the pressure for intermediate competitive players.
And yea, Nintendo need to implement icons ASAP. G&W works because numbers are largely universally understood.
Re: Nintendo France Bans Hero From Official Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Tournament
@Mr_Muscle How so? This isn't a conventional tournament; official Nintendo tournaments don't mirror competitive Smash basically at all. The competitive Ultimate scene has been running on largely the same rules since the game came out.
Re: Nintendo France Bans Hero From Official Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Tournament
@DarkLloyd Yea, can't believe an official Nintendo competition would cater to players who can't read a long command list in French, really quite pathetic.
Re: Remaining DLC Fighters For BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle 2.0 Update Revealed
@TheFox Tekken 7 is actually my favourite fighting game of all time at this point as a massive fan of competitive play, but I could never in good faith recommend it to someone who wants a good offline experience because to say it is lacking is a severe understatement. SFV is worth it now as far as I'm concerned but it certainly wasn't for the first two years of its life cycle. If arcade mode is your biggest pull, I'd highly recommend checking out some of those older SNK and Capcom titles if you haven't then. In particular, Garou: Mark of the Wolves which you can pick up for cheap on the Switch eShop. Probably the perfect arcade fighter; it has aged like fine wine.
Also keep your ears to the ground regarding Skull Girls which should be out on Switch very soon. Has quite a lot of offline content and is all round a brilliant game. Probably the most unique fighter out there aesthetically. And of course, there's a new Guilty Gear just around the corner, and I have no doubt the next mainline BlazBlue will be more akin to prior games in the franchise with its offline content.
Re: Review: Castle Crashers Remastered - Addictive Brawling Action That's Best Enjoyed With Friends
This was a blast with friends back in the day. Played the hell out of it both with close friends and with randoms I'd meet playing Halo 3. Great seeing it getting a port!
Re: If You Want NieR: Automata Ported To Nintendo Switch "Please Ask Square Enix"
@qwertyzxcv Do you also judge the quality of an entire film by the first 30 minutes? I can understand not enjoying a genre but straight up calling a game terrible because you only put 5 hours into it is a bit shortsighted. Checking your game ratings, you've given Twilight Princess a 9/10, a game which has a reputation for an incredibly tedious opening few hours without the benefit of a fun first hour. It also doesn't have the benefit of being some kind of meta commentary; it is literally just a boring opening few hours. How did you manage to muster up the strength to plough through a clearly terrible game???
Re: Remaining DLC Fighters For BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle 2.0 Update Revealed
@Travisemo007 it's not a mainline game. BB has had spinoff games before. None of them play like the mainline games.
Re: Remaining DLC Fighters For BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle 2.0 Update Revealed
@TheFox Probably because this has been the BB title most heavily advertised to a competitive audience possibly ever. It was announced at EVO for one. The RWBY crossover was also hugely advertised so expectations for a detailed campaign to add to the BB canon just didn't seem sensible, at least to me. The fact the main gameplay loop is completely different to all the mainline titles should only be further indication. Tag team titles have also traditionally fared worse with casual audiences than 1v1 games with the only notable exceptions being Tag Tournament or DBFZ, and there's a good argument to be made that DBFZ would have sold just as well if not better if it weren't a tag team game because of the IP.
Also, idk what fighting games you own or have played, but while the single player content here is sparse, it is no where near as bad as a litany of other games, the aforementioned DBFZ and Tekken 7 being two very recent examples. Street Fighter V didn't launch with an arcade mode (took 2 years to add) and what it did launch with was much worse than what's on offer in CTB. None of this is to mention older titles like half the SoulCalibur games or a great deal of the old SNK and Capcom classics that were essentially nothing more than an arcade mode.
Re: If You Want NieR: Automata Ported To Nintendo Switch "Please Ask Square Enix"
@talgore Half the point of the game is to subvert trite tropes like bland hub areas, repetitive combat, dull colour palettes, and so on, as well as toying with the idea of consumer patience and planned obsolescence. None of this would be clear to you as you ducked out 5 hours in which inadvertently makes you the butt of the joke. Obviously no one can force you to mine for the narrative gold within the sarcastic (see: bland) rubble but the more confident you get about your opinions on the game, the funnier the whole ordeal gets.
and yea u sure got me xD
Re: Video: How The CPU Used To Cheat In Street Fighter II
Anyone who has even a cursory interest in 2D fighters owes it to themselves to subscribe to Desk. That channel is some straight gold.
Re: Remaining DLC Fighters For BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle 2.0 Update Revealed
Kinda weird seeing how many people are upset at a game in a genre geared around competitive multiplayer experiences not having the most detailed offline spread. I'd understand complaints at the way this game has been updated (see: sparsely) and monetized (see: excessively) but there seem to be just as many people giving it the finger for not having a lengthy single player experience or for being too complicated.
Re: Video: Digital Foundry Explores Zelda: Link's Awakening's Technical Wins And Losses
@Kalmaro "My issue is that we can't tell if they are being consistent because we've got nothing to base their opinion on."
We have the fact that the numbers have words associated with them. It does not matter what those words were or how many numbers you threw in; every reviewer would still interpret them differently and subsequently inconsistency in this regard would be impossible, as I've tried to demonstrate numerous times. If you can tell me a system reviewers can use that fosters consistency that isn't strictly "have strong writing ability and be well researched and experienced with the topics you tackle" and doesn't require reviewers become robots, I'll eat everything I've said up until now.
"At this point, I'd prefer they skip scores altogether and just do Joy and Cons."
I've been making this point since my first response. I'd take it a step further and remove the joys and cons too because why the hell does a review need a TL;DR; if you are gonna spend money on a multi-hour experience then a 5 minute read won't hurt.
I implore you to read out loud everything you've said in this thread and ask yourself if anything you are saying is either contradictory or impossible to expect of a writer. I'm not getting what you are saying because your expectations don't apply to critiquing art. It does not matter how stringent or how freeform your rubric is for art critique; it is still up to the reviewer and the readership to interpret those rubrics with their subjective worldview.
Re: Video: Digital Foundry Explores Zelda: Link's Awakening's Technical Wins And Losses
@Kalmaro I must be losing my mind or something so let me get this straight:
>"the numbers are completely arbitrary"
>but they aren't actually arbitrary because "you at least know which they liked more and where" which implies they actually serve a purpose
>"the numbers are completely arbitrary"
>but this whole ordeal started because of two fairly arbitrary numbers, being a 9 and a 10
>"the numbers are completely arbitrary"
>but why is it ok for one NL reviewer who has autonomy and their own opinion to give a 3D open world adventure game a 10 while another completely separate NL reviewer who has autonomy and their own opinion gives a 2D isometric action puzzler remake a 9
>"the numbers are completely arbitrary"
>so please add more arbitrary numbers so I can compare near completely unrelated games with said arbitrary numbers because it is mean that two reviews for completely different games by different people could have different scores
Like, every time I post a reply you say the same thing without noticing that you haven't responded to any of my points. An arbitrary 2 + an arbitrary 2 does not = a 4 with purpose. It equals an arbitrary 4. I haven't really got anything else to add here lmao
Re: Review: Super Mario World - Phenomenal Platforming Perfection
@the8thark honestly insane how many people on this site live and die by a digit at the bottom of a review
Re: Feature: A Look To The Past - All The Legend Of Zelda Remasters And Remakes
Majora's Mask remake was a dumpster fire. It saddens me how many people's first exposure to such a beautiful game was with the 3DS version. Ocarina of Time for the 3DS was such a labour of love. Such a shame Majora's Mask for the 3DS clearly wasn't.
Re: Video: Digital Foundry Explores Zelda: Link's Awakening's Technical Wins And Losses
@Kalmaro Yea, I noted that in the first line of my last comment, apologies if it wasn't clear.
How much detail does the site need to give you? I hope you realise that the more you try and define what scores mean outside of the review, the more difficult the reviewing process becomes. IGN even acknowledged this years ago when they dropped their weighting system that would appear at the end of reviews, tallying up the scores for individual components like gameplay, music, story, etc, and then having a final score on top of that. Having a point score is already stupid enough in the world of art appraisal; trying to define how things are scored further just doesn't make sense if you aren't explicitly reviewing things that you use like gadgets and tools.
Re: Video: Digital Foundry Explores Zelda: Link's Awakening's Technical Wins And Losses
@Kalmaro The fact you bring up the pros not matching makes me feel you are intentionally ignoring my main points because that's exactly what I've been saying this whole time. Reviews don't start at 10 and then remove points if the game slips up. You could quite feasibly have a review with more cons than joys that gets a 9 and another review that gets zero cons and only joys getting 8'd. It isn't just about what the games get wrong.
The number at the bottom of the page, the joys, and the cons are not the review. The review is the review. I implore you to open both reviews up next to each other and really pay attention to the nuance in the wording.
The BOTW review is quite clearly heralding the game as potentially genre-defining, a "landmark release", a game in the running for the best game in the whole franchise, and something groundbreaking in the open-world scene.
The Link's Awakening review quite clearly recognises that the game was "one of" the greatest games in the Gameboy era (hell, Nintendo Life even has a 2009 review of the original Gameboy release giving it a 10/10), a technical marvel, praises it as "one of" the best games in the Zelda franchise, and praises it as a phenomenal remake.
Ignoring all technical details, that still feels to me like one game is a hell of a lot more deserving of a 10 than the other. Do you honestly think stuttering is more important to reviewers than whether or not a game is quite literally going to alter the gaming landscape? Stuttering and game-destroying glitches didn't stop countless reviewers giving GTA V, Red Dead, The Last of Us, The Witcher 3, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and more 10/10s at launch.
TL;DR: the pros of Link's Awakening in the 2010's do not match up to the pros of BOTW, technical problems aren't as important as a game's impact on the gaming landscape, and the score + joys & cons are not the review
Re: Demo Ori And The Blind Forest Before It Launches On The Switch Next Week
So excited for Ori. It's subsequently amping up my excitement for Rivals of Aether. Good time to be a Switch owner!
Re: Video: Digital Foundry Explores Zelda: Link's Awakening's Technical Wins And Losses
@Kalmaro I don't get the idea you read my comment properly.
10 means "outstanding" on Nintendo Life. Not "flawless" or "technically perfect". Any reviewer worth their salt knows that using perfection as a metric on a macro level when assessing art isn't very useful. Interstellar is pretty much perfect by every quantifiable technical measure (visual fidelity, music, story pacing, cast, etc) yet the vast majority of film nerds would consider something like Primer, a film made with a shoestring $8000 budget by largely one man, to be considerably better in the SciFi genre. Is that inconsistency? Or is it remembering that the digit at the end of a review is a closing remark, not the objective capstone of every single detail of the review that precedes it?
Re: Video: Digital Foundry Explores Zelda: Link's Awakening's Technical Wins And Losses
@Kalmaro BOTW ran considerably worse on release than this seems to and that got a 10. Not sure why people think a 10 is synonymous with "flawless" on a website that clearly stipulates what 10 means next to the number.
Re: PlatinumGames' Hideki Kamiya Grabs A Guinness World Record In Arcade Archives Ninja-Kid
When is he getting his certificate for "Most Twitter Bans by a Single User"?
Re: Random: 3D Movement In Untitled Goose Game Was Inspired By Super Mario 64
"Stealth games like Hitman were also used as a source of inspiration when designing the AI."
I know this would seem obvious given the relative lack of stealth games not about assassination attempts but hot damn that's one of the funniest sentences one could muster given the context.
Re: Smash Bros. Ultimate Players Aren't Happy With New Online Tournament Rules
@JDBaker And sacrifice the mechanic that gives Smash its identity? You'd be moving Smash towards traditional fighters. There would be no reason to pick a character who excels off-stage because no one would ever get launched off the stage to begin with. The entire balance of the game would be thrown out of whack, with characters like Little Mac skyrocketing to S tier from the depths of F tier and characters like Pikachu having entire aspects of their core moveset made near redundant due to matches being entirely centred around grounded neutral interactions. There are dozens of fighting games already based around depleting a health bar through grounded neutral interactions that offer a hell of a lot more depth and intrigue in this context than Smash would. Smash's depth largely comes from the fact that the percentage system exists.
Re: If You Want NieR: Automata Ported To Nintendo Switch "Please Ask Square Enix"
@talgore "I loved the first level of NieR: Automata... then it dropped me into some open world bland area and I lost interest. I'm sure I'm missing out."
The levels of unintentional irony in this comment are reaching critical mass
Re: Feature: How A Joke Hatched Gaming's Most Horrible Goose
I briefly lived in a farmhouse in Western Australia with around a dozen geese and they would often break out of their enclosure and congregate around the nearest car. Had to chase the geese with a broom up to the enclosure fence then pick them up one by one and lift them into the enclosure. Arguably a contender for the WatchMojo Top 10 Most Horrifying Chores a Non-Farm Kid Might Participate In as Cruel Byproduct of Entropy in the Universe list.
Treating this game as a celebration that Geese Howard can no longer counter-hit launch off of his generic low jab in Tekken 7 anymore.
Re: Review: GRID Autosport - Finally, Switch Gets The Serious Racing Game It Deserves
Ayyyy, a performance toggle. Take note, Blizzard.
Re: PowerA's Fusion Fightpad For Switch Has Been Inspired By The Sega Saturn Controller
@Heavyarms55 I hope I'm not misunderstood. It is a wonderful controller, arguably my favourite of the last decade. It is not a good controller for anyone who wants to play fighting games against other players competently though. It isn't a matter of holding it to different standards; it is a matter of acknowledging which tools are right for the job.
Take two people who've never played a game in their life, force them to put 10 hours into a first person shooter like Counter Strike, one with a mouse and keyboard and one with a controller, and it likely wouldn't come as a surprise to anyone if the player using the mouse completely stomped the controller user. The mouse is better suited to the context. Do the same for two players with Dark Souls PVP, and the controller player will most likely stomp the mouse and keyboard user. The controller is better suited to the context.
Likewise, dedicated pads and arcade sticks are a considerable amount better suited to fighting games than the majority of standard controllers, with the PlayStation controllers being the notable exception. It's also worth noting that every mainstream fighting game (Street Fighter V, Tekken 7, Dragon Ball Fighter Z, Mortal Kombat 11, Injustice 2, maybe Guilty Gear/BlazBlue/SamSho, etc) makes frequent use of the DP and quarter circle motions I mentioned above, as well as a litany of other execution-heavy commands all centred around the D-pad.
Anyone who wants to beat other players online owes it to themselves to not frustrate themselves senseless inputting the wrong commands on a controller not designed for fighting games. Fighting games are hard enough as is, with what few accessible and execution-light fighters that do exist (Flappy Fighter, Fantasy Strike, Pocket Rumble, Divekick, etc) being relegated to relative obscurity by no fault of their own. Until Riot Games win over the masses with Rising Thunder, the importance of dedicated fighting game peripherals for anyone looking to reach online competency isn't going to subside. I don't know what your perception of what even just a "decent" fighting game player is, but for context, it is often said in the Tekken community that you are a "good" player (not great, not even close) after playing Tekken an hour a day for two years. That's over 600 hours for a non-hardcore player to reach baseline decency, so hopefully that puts things a little more into perspective.
tl;dr the Pro controller is a ridiculously good controller. It is clearly not designed with fighting games in mind though.
Re: PowerA's Fusion Fightpad For Switch Has Been Inspired By The Sega Saturn Controller
@Heavyarms55 The point of a fighting game is to beat other players. The "end game" is to beat players who can beat the majority of other players. It's (ostensibly?) sport. To maximise the quantity and quality of play and practice time, you kinda need a peripheral that'll function at a beginner and tournament level simultaneously, and can put up with rigorous routines.
The Switch Pro controller works for beginner button mashing and not much else. The D-pad is one of the worst I've ever used, and that's completely fine for the casual player or anything that isn't strictly a fighter. But try performing even a rudimentary input like a DP input or a quarter circle consistently during a match and you are gonna be throwing the controller in a minute. You don't want to play against people who are good at the game with it because they'll punish every mistake you make as a result of a bad controller, and you don't want to practice with it because you don't want to develop bad habits due to having to compensate for an inaccurate peripheral (like avoiding DP inputs entirely).
This controller is certainly on the pricey side and only a select few controllers have had an accurate floating D-pad in the past but given the price tag, I'm giving PowerA the benefit of the doubt that this will still largely be worth the coin for prospective pad players seeking out a new controller. If the D-pad isn't good and the buttons aren't tactile and responsive, I not only fully agree irrespective of context that this is an overpriced controller, but I also actively condemn it.
I should also quickly note that while arcade sticks are indeed built like tanks, they are still massively overpriced, arguably more so than controllers for what they do at the mid to high end. The fighting game community actually has a lot of overlap with the hardware modding community because so many players end up building their own sticks (forking out a few hundred bucks for the same buttons on a fancier box can sting) for a fraction of the price with comparable rigidity. Controllers are a fair bit more complicated to put together so pad players have to make to with whatever the market dictates 99% of the time.
Re: PowerA's Fusion Fightpad For Switch Has Been Inspired By The Sega Saturn Controller
@Heavyarms55 Fighting games. All fighting game peripherals come with a premium. Arcade sticks and fightpads also near universally are missing buttons and features found on standard controllers. It is hardly an issue though because the people using these peripherals will sink thousands of hours into a single game with them. If it's ergonomic, responsive, and accurate, it's worth it for a fighting game player. I can tell just looking at the controller it'll be a better fit for fighters than the pro controller, even if the D-pad looks a little sus.
Re: E3 Reportedly Set To Be Rebranded As A "Fan, Media And Influencer Festival" Next Year
E3 execs: glances at charts
E3 execs: so EA make a lot of money, gamers must like sports right
Re: Review: Gun Gun Pixies - A Pitiful Perv-Fest That Also Fails As A Video Game
@Galenmereth The discrepancy between how some of the senior staff act here and how the likes of Alex and Zion on the YouTube channel act is alarming. I've always pictured Alex as the face of NL in my mind which is probably why this sort of stuff still surprises me, even if it's been happening for a very long time. Definitely tragic.
Re: Review: Gun Gun Pixies - A Pitiful Perv-Fest That Also Fails As A Video Game
Why does @Damo always come to these threads to bash either poorly worded or extreme sides of the argument but never contend with anyone who has valid and reasonable criticisms? Why even bother showing up if you have no desire to make fruitful discussion? It's kinda whack dude haha