It’s weird how all 3 of Nintendo’s most prominent female characters: Peach, Zelda & Samus started out with green, red or brunette hair, but all of them became blondes in short order.

Someone at Nintendo has a thing for blondes.  

 

They do have a thing for blondes. The only reason they weren't all blondes to begin with is the limited NES palette! There's not really a suitable shade of yellow in the NES palette. Samus' hair was green due to using the same palette entry for the missile on/off indicator color. Peach was a dirty blonde as early as the Famicom box art for Super Mario Bros. That just leaves Zelda, who was technically a different character.  

 

I'm sure it's just pure coincidence that blonde haired heroines are more marketable as well...  

 

I wuff you for saying so.

 

Changing a redhead to a blonde is fucking heretical xD

Here’s one sure to draw some differences of opinion. I think us older gamers - late 20s to early 40s and beyond - need to just make peace with the existence of the micro-transaction. It will be a tenuous peace, but peace we must make because outside of a huge philosophy shift that at this point will need to come packaged with the Second Enlightenment, or a massive legal movement to have them banned or removed, they’re here to stay. They make money hand over fucking fist and any big wig in a publicly traded company that leaves that money on the table for a moral reason will find themselves perusing job ads by lunchtime.

Indeed if there was serious economic downturn that restricted people’s spending, I think the big pubs would sell the games for cents on the dollar if not free and just rely on the micro-transactions rather than keep a standard price and remove them.

 

I'm not sure if I've stated this before somewhere, but I am ok with micro-transactions, as long as they're cosmetic-only and they aren't something that's pay-to-win. Digital clothes for your character that do nothing other than make you look cool? Fine, whatever. That I can accept. Something that you need to buy in order to help you win at a game? That's undeniable garbage right there.

 

Yeah, I agree with this. Pay-to-win is garbage, loot boxes are garbage. Locking away portions of a finished game behind a paywall is also really shady; that includes on-disc DLC.

Anything cosmetic is fine. Also, I’m ok with paying for non-pay-to-win items that you can also earn in-game; for example the Season 5 characters and backgrounds in Street Fighter V can be purchased instantly, or you can buy them with fight points you earn while playing. The caveat with that is if the requirements for earning them in-game are outlandish and ridiculous (like playing for 10,000 hrs or some stupid crap), forcing most people to pay. If done right, it works.

 

You sound like you've had personal experience with that.  

 

Ghost of Tsushima's writing us horrible.

 

Growing up, I actually enjoyed playing the Radical-era Crash Bandicoot games (Tag Team Racing; Crash of the Titans; Mind Over Mutant) and playing Titans on my PSP everyday as a kid. They're not perfect, but I still think they're cool. One of the things I enjoyed about the Titan games were the characterisations (e.g. Crash is crafty and sincerely protective of Coco; Coco and Aku Aku being more fallible and comedic 'bros' to Crash instead of just being flawless straight men; Cortex betraying Uka Uka; giving Nina a personality AT ALL), something I wish Crash 4 did a better job of than what we got.

 

I agree, I think the game is great but people overhype the predictable and contradicting story. I finished the Iki island expansion and that story is also pretty mediocre.

 

If they are going to have characters be hypocritical asses to your face, they should have at least given you the ability to kill them.

 

Am I the only one kinda sick of remakes?

Like, I get it, companies want to introduce newer gamers to great games of the past, but I feel if anything, just remastering games works just as well. Prettying up the graphics and stuff.

Especially when some remakes cut a lot of things that made the originals memorable (looking at YOU Resident Evil 3 Remake taking out the clock tower among other things), or alter things because nowadays they're considered "inappropriate" to modern audiences.

I dunno... I have the same thoughts about movies and the remake insanity there, too.

 

That's one reason I'm fine with compilations.

 

My unpopular opinion is that Control is one of the most overrated games ever made. I just finished the story and it’s so blah. There’s one gimmick (telekinesis), the gunplay is super janky, and it has one of the most confusing and frustrating maps of all time (which seems designed only to artificially prolong the game).

It’s alright, a solid 6/10, but it doesn’t merit anywhere close to the praise that it received.

 

I don't remember Control getting much praise at all beyond that it was kind of interesting and if you could brute force them, all the RTX settings on PC made it look super pretty.

 

That’s simply false. It has an 80+ meta critic and won a lot of “Game of the Year” awards. Why Control is my game of the year

 

All the hype for Diablo 2 resurrected got me to re-install my old copy of the game. Diablo 2 used to be one of my favorite games ever, right up there with Super Metroid. After playing it for a while I've come to the conclusion that Diablo 2 is... still decently fun, but just okay. My reasons get fairly deep into the games mechanics, but since it's such a widely played game hopefully most can follow my logic.

My younger self really only played the game very casually. I never beat, or even played in, the final Hell difficulty. At the time of release I was just starting to buy my own games, both new and older games I never got to play. So I had a ton of games in my backlog. After playing through the game on normal difficulty with about four of the classes I was on to something else. My love of the game on a surface level enshrined for decades. Finally getting around to beating Hell difficulty was one of my motivators to re-playing it, and that's where the problems with the game's design really start to show. I can't be to harsh on it, Diablo 2 was defining a new genre and it was a huge improvement on the first game, but playing it now has shown me it's problems all too clearly.

The first big problem is skill synergies. These were introduced in I think patch 1.10. What they do is if you put points in one skill, it gives a boost to a few other thematically similar skills. Younger me originally thought this was a great idea. The skills available from level 1 tended to end up a bit crap, but you had to put skill points somewhere. Before skill synergies, you either had to hold on to your skill points for later, or just accept that early skill points were going to be wasted. "Sound like synergies are the perfect solution" I thought. Here's the dark side of the mechanic. Most skills have two others that grant synergies, and the Sorceress has it even worse with fire/ice/lightning mastery totaling four. Want to be a sorceress with good lightning damage? That'll be 80 skill points. In a game where at max level you only get 110, and most people will only get to around level 88, so more realistically we're talking about 99 total skill points. Throw any ideas of making a character that does anything unique right out the window. Everything is about maxing that one damage dealing skill. Lower difficulties allow you to experiment with different strategies, but Hell difficulty is balanced around players using skill synergies to their natural conclusion.

The second problem is the way the game uses mana potions. They are way too common and easy to spam. This leads to two problems. First, your inventory gets filled with potions. This makes inventory management a true pain to deal with. Secondly and more problematic is that it allows you to spam that one big skill that you've been maxing as much as you want. You just portal back to town if you run out, and you rarely even have to do that because enemies are constantly dropping more potions. So much so that you can't even use them fast enough. It gets to the point that most build guides tell you to not even put attribute points into the attribute that gives you more mana. Just use more potions and get +mana on gear. Younger me actually avoided this issue because of past habits with other games. I was always the guy that horded potions in rpg's. So I did it with Diablo 2 as well. I even resorted to attacking in melee with my sorceress instead of drinking mana potions a lot of the time, because that's what you did in games damnit! Ration out your resources and bring out the big guns only when it mattered.

Then we get to uniques and runes. Uniques are items that rarely drop that have unique stats, and runes are items that allow you to craft gear that are very powerful like uniques. Both of these drop very, obscenely, rarely. You might even go through normal difficulty never seeing one. On lower difficulties this isn't a problem, you don't need the power boost to finish them, so they end up just being something to occasionally spice up a play through. But again at Hell difficulty these items start to become needed. So get ready to grind a lot. Runewords are also completely unbalanced, leading to the best items in many slots being very obvious, so they end up taking away decisions from one more area of the game.

On top of that, the actual combat mechanics are pretty basic. More recent games like dark souls and borderlands have Diablo's looting and character advancement, or close to it, while also being involved action games. Games that require a lot of moment to moment choices and reactions, and they're much more engrossing to me because of it. Diablo is just too basic to be engaging to me, while also being a little too involved to be turn off my brain fun like a classic beat'em up.

So there's just not much to the game when you get down to it. No strategizing around resource management, no coming up with a unique build, no action game mechanics to master, and very little finding loot that actually helps you. when I play the game I start feeling more like a bot running a really basic script.

I did end up beating it on Hell finally, so that's one gaming achievement crossed off my to do list, but I don't think I'll ever play the game again, and if it wasn't for nostalgia I don't think I would have gotten that far. Again, the game isn't bad, it's just not very good.

 

I maintain the opinion that Dark Souls III is, overall, the most well made of the three games (though I will admit to never finishing the second, so I really can't say much about it). While it lacks the pretty phenomenal world design of Dark Souls, and it's pretty unique "vibe" (the meloncholic reality is somewhat lost in the restructuring of the world in III, though traces of that yet-to-be remade feel of the first game can still be found), and some of the specific areas definitely could of been done better, I still think it's positives outweigh the negatives. For one, III has, without a hint of doubt, the best, most intense, and most exilerating boss fights I've ever seen in a game. Abyss Watchers, Nameless King, Dragonslayer Armour, Ocerios, every single one in the Ringed City DLC (save maybe the NPC summoning dude), Soul of Cinder, Vordt, the Dancer, Pontiff Sulyvahn, Lothric and Lorian, Aldrich, Champion Gundyr, and probably a few others whose names I'm blanking on. It also has the most magnificent plot of all the games. While it's essentially the same general goal as the original title, yet it differs with how much time has passed, how so many relics of the past lay crumbled, and barely representing what they once were. Because at it's core, this game is about holding onto the past, and how that negatively affects us. How we let fears tangle up our thoughts and ideals, our anxiety ruins the chance to make something greater than what came before. It's quite thrilling, and quite enthralling. It's a very special game for me, mainly because of the story and what it builds up to (this game has by far the best ending ever, the only other game I can think of that reaches its level of quality being Outer Wilds).

Also, the gameplay definitely caters to my impatience with strategy based gameplay, as the only things you need to pay attention too are timing and your remaining stamina.

 

I'm happy for Banjo fans,but not particularly interested in playing it myself.