Smithicus

honestly worried Atari's acquisition of Nightdive is starting to erode Nightdive's quality and integrity

I never play these type of games outside the Hyrule warrior series, but honestly Age of Imprisonment is great. I am constantly impressed by how good Koei Tecmo is in building these games with all the moves, mechanics and wildness going on the screen. Plus they just fill out so much more of the back stories. I just wish they had gone with a canon story with Age of Calamity

@Oldstalk and what do you think Chinese cinema culture is? look at the Chinese box office. Their new thing is AI. their movies are AI movies. Just because you call something a culture doesn't mean it's good. That Japanese anime director was just on the news today saying everything has become slop, and 90% of productions are trash. He is not wrong. This is all slop culture and I am just saying Avatar does not have legs for the long run. Financial success does not equal good cultural product with legs and legacy. How come people love3 and respect Lord of the Rings more even though it generated less at the Box Office? Have we become so vulgar and jaded by muh economic success that something making money means it's good. Are Facebook and instagram good things because they make tons of cash? no, its just the slop market. I know you love Avatar but anyone can gauge the public sentiment just by asking and reading around.

@BrianJL well, we will see. I dont doubt it will do well in China, but its been a terrible year for Hollywood and western audiences, and it will be interesting to see A3 bucks the trend and does numbers.

I mean bear in mind where this discussion started. the game is not even coming to Switch because it's not worth the cost of porting it over (i.e. no one is interested)

@Oldstalk yes, I am gonna say no matter how many Chinese you drive into Chinese cinemas to prop up these movies and your narrative that they are great cultural phenomenon (China was by far the largest market for Avatar 2), that it is all just bloat, and that people are essentially just consuming these movies in the same way they would some other throw away product. That's why these movies are throw-away, and why no one really cares. But of course when you can get the numbers bloated up with asian markets then you can all pretend these movies are great legacy franchises. Funko Pops also had their time in the sun based on great sales and global consumption.

@BrianJL but this is just money. What you are saying is that Avatar movies pull in more cash than Star Wars movies,, Indiana jones movies, Lord of the rings, James Bond, etc, etc, but this kind of superficial popularity does not correlate with legacy and popularity. We all know that Avatar is a dead in the water franchise culturally speaking. There is no hype for the next movie, or its continuity, but people regard avatar is a CGI slop fest that's good to bury a few hours in.

@BTB20 yeah, but you know this series is tired and it's not going to have a great legacy status or continuity. Money is one thing, but Avatar already feels dead in the water and everyone is going to forget about these movies as soon as they release

dragging out this franchise was such a bad idea. It so desperately wants to be a long time cultural phenomenon, like Star Wars or something, but just doesn't have it. The first movie was a thing and it should have stayed there

this one is a no brainer. For once the USA takes it. yet people going with JP in the poll

@Anachronism never played a monster hunter game in my life. wouldn't know where to start lol. but these prices are low...

honestly, I hate modern Pokemon games. they are just plain ugly.

Isn't there a bit of confusion here with the use of 'brand new entry'?

@Edwicket Hunters is an extremely good title, and amazing for a DS title. It is one of the most technically accomplished DS games. Of course the OG controls now aren't great, but I mean for the time Hunters was amazing

love how the JP one has Hitler in the sky as the big bad guy lol

honestly impressed with Air Riders. A far superior racer to MKW really. Air Riders has a good balance of the random/luck element vs actual skill and thinking about how to win strategically. Mario Kart games in the future really need to dial back the item craziness that feels very silly in many ways. Honestly don't think I will be able to go back to MKW.

@KociolekDoSyta pleased that wasn't just me. I was re-reading that sentence over and over...

I spent countless hours trying to clear the first R-Type on 1CC. got the final boss and was meant to keep grinding but got burned out. classic though. can't wait to play this.

@ear_wig having 'game has a learning curve' as a con is extremely insane tbh. Like games can and should have learning curve. Having insane difficulty spikes might be a con, but having a learning curve as a negative is just weird. Idk if that comes from the fast, ready and easy world we live in. might as well have 'game uses controls', or 'game makes you think' as a con

quip snarky humour is so overdone and tedious by now.

we got SMG2 and a package of both SMG games basically to promote the movie. Personally, I worry that Nintendo is basically shifting toward a movie focus because its big cash and just using its games as a promo base for movies.

ArtDink. they also done Carnage Heart for PS1

SEGA must have got a massive boost from the Sonic movies

I should play a DQ game some day

not that I am some kind of purist but I hate this. Hollywood/Netflix is so bankrupt of ideas they are pillaging the video game scene and its legacy for never-ending race-to=the-bottom content to feed eternal demand. My hope is that publishers just say no, we are letting you defile our product, but I mean given that Konami handed over major franchises like Castlevania I dont have much hope.

@DennyCrane hmmm, not bad. gonna secure nightstalkergear as a web domain now

anything by Nightdive is a good thing

hmmmm. there is no way they are gonna just sit on 2 and 3. must be coming at some point

one of the RE titles I have never been able to finish. Beautiful renders and graphics, love the opening train setting, but something about it gets tedious I found. maybe its just because it was at the backend of the first RE model of doing things before Resi 4 mixed things up. Plus that limited inventory space and having to swap between characters became a chore.

hmmm, the choice been poor, uninspired graphics and environments or poor uninspired graphics and environments but slightly cleaner looking...

'ShinyHunters' and 'Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters', 'Crimson Collective'.

I like how they all have bad guy names and everything, but its funny how you will see the intel agencies and police go massively hard after one person for a fairly minor 'offense' until they catch them, and yet there are organised crime groups out in the open laughing and bragging about running extortion rackets long term.

@Liam_Doolan ok! thanks for the info

you gave this a 8/10 with very few cons (frame rate issues being the main con) saying it is a great game. I guess with the framerate issue fixed you would now do a 9/10? Do reviews ever get update when they fix these things relatively quickly?

@Vyacheslav333 Bloodrayne 3

@MTMike87 thanks for the explanation. game has gone through a lot of iterations. I am sure with the experience Bloober team have now they will make this FINAL edition as good as it can be

about frickin time. I had honestly lost any hope this would happen, so a pleasant surprise. 15 new levels is a decent amount of content as well if they are as long as the OG games levels were.

some British guy got jail time for carrying a Zelda toy sword that goes in the pocket lol. no joke, look it up. Def interested in these but gonna be sure not to take them to the UK

@Desy64 yeah. the price is obnoxious but that shouldn't be part of the reviewing metric. even if someone released a game costing 1million USD, the review should still review the game based on its merit as a game, even if no one would buy it.

@Athropos it says in the article a Switch 2 version is confirmed for 2026

@charliecarrot yeah, this all feels like it is just morphing into consolidated HR managerialism mode, with no character. ugh

didnt realise there were quite so many Atelier games. never had any desire to play or look into those games at all, but obviously must be popular

@FragRed well I am pretty sure Johnny Gioeli is not bringing this lawsuit on behalf of a publisher he had 25 years ago, but is bringing it so that HE can get so called royalties from an agreement that was never actually made. This isnt some weird thing where he is looking for royalties for someone else, but he wants to be paid beyond his original payment for making the track. You never see any of the other creative forces making the artwork or whatever demanding 'royalties'. he got paid to deliver a product like anyone else, no dev is saying 'I made this game as well give me some royalties'. But musicians act like they are an exception and should be raking in cash forever.

@Kamen-S he would have been commissioned to make the song, paid for that, and there was no contract for loyalties, but because the game had legs the writer feels they were unjustly treated not receiving further payments beyond their initial commission.

imo its a kind of entitlement of musicians. When someone is commissioned to make an art piece for a game (game cover or whatever) they get a one-off payment. they don't get royalties because that piece continues to be seen and used over the years. Same with writers and any other creative aspects. But musicians feel they should get cash every time music is used.

@WheresWaveRace its also just that Nintendo don't overthink or really give massive thought to these things anyway. They have admitted as much a number of times, and said that there is no coherence in the Zelda series. But fandom insists on trying to build coherent narratives (or 'lore') because I think when someone is a fan of a series it makes them feel uneasy to think that the people making the game are not working with a timelines and inter-connected narratives where everything makes sense. Fandom has these weird psychological needs and reassurances, but Nintendo mostly dont give much thought to narrative interconnectedness at all.

looks like the art work is hand drawn as well, and they really paid attention to that aspect. The 'Artstation' digital drawn style has become so ubiquitous it's hard to not to process digital work as a kind of proto-AI generic looking slop; and now that digital drawing tools are incorporating more and more AI functions into them it kind of in the end all just becomes AI art. Its great to see that old school hand drawn art again.

'Retro boomer-shooters are, of course, ten-a-penny these days'

hmmm, I wouldnt say so. obviously they are a thing, but they are way less common than 2D metroidvanias, rogue likes, or 2D scrolling games in general. It think Overkill was the last 'boomer shooter' one to release. Hasn't been much for a while.

@DarthXenos I wonder about these review criteria for insane durability. I mean 99% of the time what is needed is gentle-to-moderate protection, but it's usually 'can this survive a fall into a volcano'. I dropped my switch 1 without anything on it countless times. fell down stairs and everything, and nothing even happened to it without any protection.

Mario Kart World is such a poor MK game I would actually love to see Sonic take the mantle away and get good success for this title. I have never been a huge fan of sonic racers and always stuck with MK, but if this game is good I can see myself swapping over for a time

it has to be a bit rough for Daemon X Machina guys that Armored Core VI is still in the top 40 and has rebounded into the 20's whereas X Machina dropped out of the charts after 1 week. Glad to see Cronos still in the charts, although the Switch2 split on that is dismal.

@ImpromptuR no, I am simply interested in observing reviews, what others say about a game, and the inconsistency in reviews. other than that, you are reaching.