Now I kind of want Fresno Kawaiicon to be a thing.

I think the reason these are so enduringly popular is that they’re not just Overwatch in-jokes or fan pandering, but genuninely clever surreal humour on top of all of that.

To be fair, actual 32-bit graphics mostly do look horrendous now. The reason this new wave of 32-bit inspired games look so nice is:

The visual style reminds me a lot more of Endless Legend than Civ. Those Hexagons. That tilt-shift, though.

“Avoid think police (or actually censorship, if we’re being more literal) like the plague” and “let’s let the think police do their thing to see what it would be like” aren’t really compatible viewpoints.

I hope everyone starts to appreciate geese for the big waddling fluff-bundles they are, and they become the next big viral internet animal.

Judging by the flag on the tank it looks like you’re playing as soldiers of the Federation rather than Gallia again, which is an obvious way of expanding the game’s scope (and let’s face it, they had probably mined everything they could out of that setting with the first three games).

...How is this not a “proper” game? It looks the same in terms of scope as Journey and their previous games.

The review doesn’t actually say anything like that. It says the protagonist is poorly written and feels like a thinly-veiled reskin of the main character from The Martian.

They’re not erasing his stuff from existence, they’re just choosing not to host it.

Me too. I thought it was going to be good, but totally predicted that it would only do a bit better than the Wii U. Very happy to be proven wrong. I don’t think Nintendo has been on footing this solid since before the Gamecube.

Shattered Memories is awesome and I will not hear a bad word said against it.

Breath of the Wild convinced me that mini maps need to go away. Or rather, that developers need to start designing their games such that they don’t require them.

Climbing and sneaking are often awkward. The overhauled combat doesn’t quite gel.

There’s literally no good argument against it

I’ve never had anything quite this severe happen to me, but I was on a plane coming into Dublin once that hit the tarmac a little too briskly and bounced what felt like fifty feet in the air before coming back down again.

I would severely question the idea that The Witness is stress-free.

I think stories like this and the galactic hub are eventually going to redeem No Man’s Sky in the public consciousness. It will attain a status similar to Eve, where people marvel at these crazy stories but rarely sink the time in necessary to take part themselves.

Playing the game, I repeatedly had an experience where I’d follow an interesting path that utilized a lot of these design principles, only to turn around and realize that the other direction was just as intriguing—to the point where I wanted to go back and explore the place I had just come from. It’s very impressive…

It would be cool if someone released an open world game that literally had no in-game map, so players had to crowdsource one themselves.