FFXIII is the one that killed my interest in the brand, and the reasons for it then are just as valid now. I disliked the style-over-substance combat system which eschewed tactical nuance for a faster pace and a more hands-off role. That fed into my dislike of the corridor world design, where being able to see the…

So is the Rebel Collection a remaster of some kind, or simply a way to release them on Switch?

I’m glad you’re enjoying it. An important thing to remember is that Pokemon is very stuck in its ways. It’s one of those franchises where a new game is measured by fans primarily against other games in its series, rather than contemporaries in its genre, which results in some strange idiosyncracies that can be…

Nothing’s worth that getting sunburned.

Sword and Shield may be good games, and much love and effort may have gone into their creation, but that doesn’t make them immune to justified critique  and it doesn’t mean that people who feel differently to you have any less valid of an opinion. That goes for any game, particularly one with as long a history or as…

You can’t have art without politics. Overwatch is politics. Starcraft is politics. Call of Duty? Bhahaha you’d better believe that’s politics. Right now, the whole company is politics. If Kotick wants his company’s games to be apolitical he’s going to have to lobotomise a lot of them. And that would be political too.

It looks like early 3D RTS games zoomed all the way in.

Anthem wasn’t for me, so to speak, as a lover of Kotor, Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I hope that they can make the game worth playing, but it sounds like they still don’t have any idea of where to begin. That means it’s a long-term project which makes me worry they’ll take development efforts from the in-progress DA…

Why is this being posted again in October 2019?

I hope they fully understand why people don’t like frequent sequels to live service games. It’s not just that “prior iterations benefited from years of optimization”, but also because those games demand a significant investment of time and money, which is largely wiped over when a new version comes out.

This is a common thing in many RPG communities — choosing your character parameters randomly or semi-randomly. You can get combinations that make no sense but are great fun to play with anyway, and that takes you away from the tendency to minmax (something contrary to the spirit of RPGs, if you ask me).

I’d love to see this too. One thing I learned from the last time I played these games is that they’re each considerably larger than Link’s Awakening — they consist of more overworld space, have longer activity sequences between dungeons, and the dungeons themselves don’t have the cramped rooms those of Koholint do.…

I thought Rhys’s VA in Borderlands 3 did a good job with the character, finding a lot of the breadth he had in Tales. But Baker deserved the opportunity to reprise, and the reason he didn’t get it really isn’t a very good one. I dunno why Pitchford felt he had to claim Baker turned it down, or emit any of the geyser…

Mind-blowing? Try bloody heartbreaking. I didn’t realise games were capable of hitting you like that when I was nine.

Nooo! Killavolt screaming as he rains electrified death on the arena while also being extremely on fire has been a co-operative highlight of the game so far. I hope more bosses do it.

I really hate this school of Pokemon design, whereby they take a random inanimate object with few to no distinguishing features and then say “a ghost blob lives in here now”. Points off for the name as well, which is as horrifying as any the franchise has come up with. Hope to see more fun designs in the full game.

How have I not heard of this game? It looks and sounds incredible.

Honestly I’ve always thought of Insomniac as a Sony studio anyway.

Does Beyond do anything to help the mining->crafting->more mining loop? I coudn’t get out of that when I tried the game on Next.

The echo chamber following you around aside, this is a good article. Raging mobs hurling abuse at people is not excusable and it has given gamers in general a bit of a bad reputation. I’m of an era in which games came on CDs and didn’t have any client features attached to them at all, so I dont really have many…