I’m a little confused by how this game differentiates itself from Dead Space, exactly, other than current gen graphics. From this review, it seems like it’s a worse execution of the same concept. What exactly makes it ambitious...?

I’ve been playing on a Lite with the game saved to an SanDisk Ultra Plus 128gb card, and the game’s been running consistently smoothly.

Yeah, the exams draw directly from the lessons- and often from the lesson directly before the exam. They’re… all very simple, really. 

A negative review from Kotaku seemed like a foregone conclusion considering the coverage so far. 

I appreciate the major reduction in grind. For the first time, I was rotating through a group of a dozen Pokémon instead of just six. I was getting to try new ones, while still reliably using some of my earliest catches. It didn’t feel like a chore. In previous titles, if you cleared the trainers in an area, you were…

I wouldn’t say the game is in “disarray” at all. I completely beat the narrative and never encountered a single one of the meme-worthy glitches. Game did crash on one occasion, but that’s all. Frame rates were consistent. Models loaded and animated correctly. I would expect some kind of consistency across play…

In a post-Cyberpunk world, I get developers not wanting to overpromise and overhype, but it’s still wild how little we know about Starfield. I assume there’ll be a marketing blitz in the new year, but for a brand new IP we don’t have a lot to go on. All we’ve seen is fighting space pirates, which is something we’ve…

Not really sure how that happened. Sorry! 

(Ceruledge is awesome and worth the hassle) 

Charcadet is also a fairly rare spawn… unless you eat a pickle sandwich, which boosts fire-type spawn rates. Go to an area with few other native fire types, and you can have your pick of Charcadet. 

If it were up to Smogon, everybody would only use a handful of the same Pokemon and the same pool of moves. Thank god it’s not. They really can’t handle anything that disrupts their carefully crafted dynamic. I once ran a team that was built around entry hazards and disruptive forced switching, and the folks on Smogon…

I get it if there’s some sort of red flag that comes up, but, yeah, going through over a decade of tweets unprompted is weird. And then we get the inevitable dirt because there will always be something, and then we get the inevitable empty apologies. It’s a stupid, stupid cycle.

Yeah, there’s a weird lack of consistency. Some things look really great and polished, and then other things look like they came out of a game 20 years older.

Are you referring to the Poison base?

I’ve sank quite a while into the game thus far and while, yes, the graphics are on a sliding scale of jank and there’s a lot of pop-in (even on Pokemon summary pages and trainer customization screens), background NPCs moving herky-jerky, and load screens and some battle transitions seem to last forever when they pop up…

I’m about 10 hours in and haven’t really encountered these severe glitches. The game has crashed once, however, and occasionally when finishing a battle with a wild Pokémon, I’ll see under the map. However, the jank is real: very low res environmental textures, pop in, frame rate of moving elements in the background…

They didn’t explicitly say pirate it, they just told everybody it runs better on an emulator and also provided information on how to get it. It’s not bootlicking to point out that was an incredibly stupid thing for Kotaku to do, particularly with Nintendo. 

Played Violet for a couple hours last night and while it does slow down occasionally, have pop-in, and I did experience a lovely view of what was under the map when a battle finished, I also did not experience any of these severe glitches.

That possibility never even occurred to me! It seems like that would be pretty supported by what we’ve seen so far from her. Clearly we’re being set up for another showdown on Ferrix- an uprising that could spark a larger rebellion movement. Would be awesome to see Maarva having devised that.

Something about those alien fishermen reminded me of 1980s Henson Creature Shop creations, both in their dialogue and their appearance.