Absolutely, though I feel like Smash Bros in particular has a much wider ‘play area’ before you get to the point where you HAVE to be using the more advanced strategies (at least in comparison to other heavyweights of the genre, your Street Fighters and Mortal Kombats and Tekkens and whatnot).

Absolutely; Smash Bros is one of the best designs in terms of ‘low skill floor, high skill ceiling’ EVER. (Nintendo in general is really good at that approach.)

It’s definitely a hard thing to do, just in general - to try and put aside our own perceptions and histories with whatever concept and grasp that someone else might have a totally different understanding of any given idea!

‘It just sounded from the article like there was a desire to mash buttons that overrode any sensibility to bother learning how the game worked’.

There’s definitely a weird correlation between ‘taking pride at being good at a thing’ and ‘being aghast others aren’t good at said thing’ amongst certain people, for sure.

This is very true; hell, Tetris only has, what, two buttons - ‘turn block’ and ‘go faster’ - and it’s still entirely possible to be bad at Tetris. I’ve heard. From some people. Certainly not me! But other people. Who are not me. (I’m bad at Tetris.)

I kind of assume a lot of these are ‘an incident happens elsewhere’ (on Twitter or somewhere), followed by ‘the article gets written omitting the initial incident so as not to pay out validation to the jackasses involved with said incident’, but then that lack of discussion of the initial incident can feel kind of…

I feel similarly about fighting games: I actually enjoy them conceptually, and I even enjoy playing them - against the AI on lower difficulties, at least - but I’m both not very good at them just in general, and I’m also terrible at picking one. Specific. Fighter. To focus on. At the expense of all the others.

Reading this, I was very confused about the part where ‘Dermot Mulroney is a newcomer to the franchise’, and actually had to go to IMDb to confirm that he wasn’t in Scream 3. Because I apparently can’t tell Dermot Mulroney and Patrick Dempsey apart.

I get that perspective, but my stance is more that the ‘who they tried to steal from’ part really doesn’t matter at all; ‘stealing is okay so long as we don’t like the victims’ isn’t really a legal (or moral) perspective I think it’s a good idea to take. (For that matter, I’d say the same about ‘you’re talented,…

Thanks for the info; that’s not too far off from the US, though here it sometimes depends on both the state laws (assuming it’s not a federal crime) and the judge’s discretion.

I’ve got to disagree on this one. If it was just ‘we hacked in to prove we could’ that would be one thing, but this was explicitly for the purposes of extortion.

And then, of course, the inevitable ‘this is just how football is played! Everybody pulls the football away, if the options are that or let the game be dela... I mean, letting Charlie Brown kick the thing! Are you just going to blame poor Lucy when it happens in every football game ever?!’

I’m curious about Cyberpunk still - I actually picked it up on sale a month or so back (I said I wouldn’t do so until the next-gen console versions were available, since I figured that would be a good indicator as to when most of the bugs were ironed out). But I do think it’s a fascinating bookend, in that they built t…

I honestly think this may be one of those things where primarily console gamers (like myself) underestimate the influence of GOG, and PC Gamers (like yourself, presumably) overestimate it, and the truth’s somewhere in the middle. I definitely think GOG engenders a really passionate response in its users - I just don’t…

The vast majority of that is a fine defense of GoG... which is really a relatively minor factor in Wild Hunt’s success. I very much doubt a significant percentage of players of Wild Hunt picked it up because of GoG’s fantastic work on DRM-free games, regardless of how important that work is.

Please see my response to Prime Directive.

Yeah, I phrased that a little poorly: the larger point I was trying to make was that Bethesda pre-Skyrim was much more successful than CDPR was pre-Wild Hunt, just in terms of awareness or cultural impact, so the success of Skyrim didn’t feel nearly as ‘out of nowhere’ as Wild Hunt’s did.

The thing about Bethesda is that I feel like ‘Skyrim’ matches ‘Wild Hunt’ pretty well - in terms of how hugely popular both games were, and in how much goodwill they generated from fans - but to get to Skyrim, Bethesda went through Daggerfall, Arena, Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, and published Fallout: New Vegas,…

See, I definitely think there’s room for Ciri as a protagonist: I feel like Wild Hunt was a satisfying conclusion to Geralt’s story, but kind of the whole point (to me) was that Ciri now gets to go out and make her own stories, rather than to have everything about her be focused on her heritage/position*. So what we’d…