I’m not sure they “see differently” as much as this represents the relative complexity of their understanding of the game and how close they are to optimal play. More interesting would be a comparison between different pro players to see if there are multiple optimums.

Yeah I think you missed my tone haha. It’s just weird to say no Sonic games came out on Saturn. SA2 is still fantastic.

Yeah I was gonna say, that’s not exactly true...

It’s a design choice to have as minimal of an RPG experience as possible? Their RPGs barely have a distinguishable plot and recycle characters and themes. There’s a lot of recycling, in fact. So fine, it’s a lazy design choice.

Fire Emblem was fine! It’s at that point where it starts to collapse under its own weight and power creep, but they did more with it than I thought they would.

It’s not an unjustifiable opinion, though. I’m a casual Pokemon player that only picks up the game every 5 years or so and they just feel very low-effort. That’s why I can only play it every 5 years. They’ve made a nice sandbox and do a wonderful job of curating their world, but their RPG experience is average at…

I’m pretty sure that was tongue-in-cheek...

I love Nintendo. But Nintendo won’t be on that list of “doing it better.”

I am baffled a bit by the presentation of Shenmue 3. Just watched the trailer and apparently they just used all the original assets and code? I guess that’s one way to do a follow up but it’s been almost 20 years...

I’m pretty open when it comes to speed-running using glitches and other holes in the game’s code to advance. I really enjoy all of the boundary breaking and mechanics interactions and everything else that speedrunners do. But something about memory-manipulation still rubs me the wrong way, even though fundamentally…

You don’t remember Google video, the product they killed for YouTube?

I think this is the absolute best way to frame the conversation around this game. Game Freak seems to think it is trapped by its backwards-compatibility, whereas it is really just trapped in its own tropes.

I’m torn. I think anything that undoes this whole series as “part of the test all along” cheapens it. It retroactively removes all stakes from the game. Michael has had his own continual revelations himself throughout this, he clearly did not know how things worked. But similarly, for it to stick to the endgame of “oh…

To be fair, if you watch the segment, he actually did inadvertently hit the same judge who was scheduled to hear his case haha.

Turns out I was 15 years ahead of this trend. Coolest I’ve ever been.

Eh, probably something I’ll wait on till it comes down in price. I’m not sure I want to invest the hours into setting up the park like that yet. Sounds like it could be fun though. Thanks for the info!

I was hoping this would have a bit more educational value, but I’m not getting that from the review. The animals look amazing though. Any thoughts on if there’s a proper home school lesson to be had from this game, or is it all gaming busywork?

It sucks just as much to out-level your friends. That’s when I quit Vanilla WoW all those years ago.

The bottom is going to fall out one way or another. There’s also a large culture shift in tech and other areas that really drive advancement to focus more on skills than degrees. The top 100 schools or so justify their prices, but everything below that is going to lose all support save for those students who feel they…

Monkey Target was our jam. Many hours playing that in the dorm haha.