Persona related take:
There should be Persona stories set in non-Japanese high schools. I get that SMT is always in Japan, but they should do it anyway. The different cultures of high school would be very interesting. Also, they should maybe get some people on staff who can keep them FROM WRITING SHITTY TRANSPHOBIC CHARACTERS INTO EVERY GAME.
The director’s leaving, so hopefully they take the opportunity to excise the transphobia/homophobia with him.
Rain World is one of the best exploration games out there, criminally underappreciated, hugely important from a design standpoint, and not nearly as hard as its reputation.
In fact I would say it is less frustrating than Hollow Knight. While death comes quick, the “living world” aspect means that the challenge can change over time and different solutions can present themselves. In comparison, a game like Hollow Knight or Celeste presents you with an unchanging challenge and it is up to you to work within a narrow band of solutions to beat it.
It’s frustrating, if not sometimes borderline infuriating, that Atlas is essentially the sole AAA developer of note making social-sim/RPG hybrids right now, because the Persona games are unbelievably good when they’re in their stride, but they’re consistently dragged down by the bigotry of their writers. It’s thinking of what the games could be under better direction that makes their high points harder to appreciate.
You build these mental models of what these characters are like; their social links can really give you an attachment to them, which is what makes moments where the whole gang drops some casual homophobia all the more jarring and shitty.
Itch.io isn’t as great as everyone wants to think it is. It’s still a store front and has its own underlying issues that make it fall short for both developers and players.
That’s awful. I’ve been looking for a few minutes and I can’t find any mention. Any chance you have a link, or could point me in the right direction? I’d really like to report it. Feel free to DM me if there’s no way to do it without highlighting the word itself.
Here’s one:
Instead of rising up, gamers should sit down.
I know, it’s a scary thought.
You gonna say this, on Waypoint, the canon inventor of the food bed and laying down while eating.
Criminal scum.
HELL YEAH.
The best video game movie yet.
Though the Angelina Tomb Raider is on BBC iplayer over here on the UK. And I’ve watched it 50 times in the last year. I just generally have it on in the background. It’s not a great movie but I LOVE it. It is a time capsule of a pre 9/11 world. Feel they don’t make movies as silly as this anymore.
Spirit Tracks is an underrated game and has one of the best iterations of Zelda’s character in the series
Hitman 2016/Hitman 2 have the best framing/behavior of a third person OTS camera, and that only sounds weird because camerawork is actually super important to games yet almost never discussed. I’m biased here though because I’m a mark for stark/flat bottom-third framing and to me it’s a big (if subtle) part of new HM’s gorgeously hypersterile mood.
Game design has matured so much that we could probably make genuinely cool and diverse edutainment games, but barely anybody’s actually trying, or at least limiting attempts to iffy history and geography at best.
The most in-depth of this gen’s console games have so vastly outclassed old PC games in both complexity and approachability that every PC elitist meme is genuinely laughable shit at this point. Pour exemple, a ton of stealth-action and RPG games in the past 5+ years have outdone Deus Ex in most areas (except oops-radical-leftism, though that was still shaky at best in DX)
Deus Ex Invisible War is the most fun and cohesive example of what Xbox aesthetics will be remembered as as they slide into retro-nostalgia. There’s a lot of value to the design and visual aesthetics of janky overambition, it’s also what makes Oblivion so pervasively memorable despite itself, and why MDickie is the only true video game auteur (i have done no background checks on this person who make the funny games pls do not consider them or anyone else a video game auteur).
Game physics are aesthetics.
Human Revolution is mostly comprised of French-Canadian flavour racism.
Ending slideshows can be such an effective way to communicate final consequences to player choice, they can save budget on ending cutscenes, they’re so flexible and so utterly satisfying when there’s tons of them that i’m genuinely angry that better devs than Obsidian have yet to use them. Even kinda thin ending writing can feel super weighty when it’s a notch along a list of prologues to your actions, or affected by other ending segments (something that even fewer games have done). Any trepidation over them being too flat or underwhelming should be trounced by now, because most every choice-based game ending that’s tried to be flashy ended up being shit anyway.
Every cRPG would be vastly improved by controller support.
Is this a hot take? Since Xbox, basically, almost everything on a Microsoft console has also been on PC - so “console games” are mostly just… games. [Modulo Nintendo Switch titles, obviously, and presumably some PS4 exclusives?]. Plus, the “PC elitism” thing was as much about “we have much betterer graphics and bigger environments” than it was about “complexity” or “approachability”; this is still a core argument from PC elitism, and why people actually spend a thousand dollars on a GPU. (And, “old PC games” versus “modern console games” is, obviously, a biased comparison - assuming we get better at making games over time, comparing a 20 year old game to modern games on any platform, it would be embarrassing if the more modern game didn’t outclass it. - and, counter-hot-take-time: Alpha Protocol already out-Deus Ex’d Deus Ex anyway.)
The reality of scheduling and the need to get reviews out in a timely manner means reviews of long RPGs frequently read like reviews of an entire pot of soup. “The first bowl was great but by bowl 3 I was uncomfortable and by bowl 5 I wanted to die. 2 Stars.”
