There’s clearly a deliberate attempt to make players see these monsters and associate them with Pokemon, and a lot of the designs have obvious similarities - even moreso than other Pokemon-likes. But claiming one creature is clearly a rip-off of another because of one or two design similarities - plant dinosaurs with…

Those aren’t really parodies. They actually do their own thing. Palworld’s hook is basically committing atrocities to probably the most successful IP in the world, and if it didn’t invoke specifically Pokemon, than there’d be no game.

Not speaking specifically to Palworld, I find kind of funny that in a post-AI world, you really can’t make a parody off an IP without being accused of using AI. If the purpose is to riff off of Pokemon, than essentially you’d want to invoke Pokemon as much as you can while skirting copywrite.

Ah, my bad. Thanks for the correction. That’s a real bummer. I have the gamepass version downloaded waiting for my work day to end but my group will be on the steam version.

Sucks ass when Game Pass versions of a title are watered down and lack feature parity or cross play with other PC store fronts.

Actually to be more specific(I looked it up), the Steam version allows 32 players per server(but no cross play). The Xbox store PC version(IE the gamepass one) only supports the same 4 player co-op mode but does allow cross play with the Xbox.

The edgy Pokemon with Guns angle got this on a lot of peoples radars but as far as early access survival games go, this one is well put together.  I played it for about an hour on my lunch break and was digging it.  Gonna get one tonight with my son to try co-op

You see how this whole article is structured, right? It begins - literally the opening sentence - by acknowledging this could be an “embarrassing gap in our knowledge”, then I repeatedly mock myself for reporting 23-year-old news throughout, and then finish by mocking us again by suggesting we’ll report on a Wii egg…

I’m 46 and I spent an awful lot of my time playing my GC at the time. Thanks for your concern.

Did... did this “article” time travel from 2002?

Makes me wonder the average age of the Kotaku writing staff and if they even played GameCube during its era. 

Maybe new Kotaku staff did not know, but old Kotaku staff were aware:

23 Years Later, We’ve Discovered An Amazing GameCube Easter Egg

I feel the same way. The combat just doesn’t look very interesting or satisfying. I’m still going to play the game since it’ll be on GP but I’m struggling to find anything to really get excited about from what they’ve shown.

It’s Obsidian, not Bethesda or CDPR.

Read your comment before I watched the video and thought that was harsh and it couldn’t be that bad, then I watched the video... And maybe I just don’t watch a whole lot of game developer previews anymore, but that presentation was straight out of 2006.

“It’s stacked!!!”

Most of us game devs also don’t want to use gen AI voice acting. It only makes this company and executives trying to avoid paying voice actors happy.

I don’t think that’s the issue - it’s not that voice actors will get paid for doing nothing, it’s that 1) only some voice actors will get paid for doing nothing, 2) those voice actors have to be ok with their voice being used in ways they wouldn’t normally consent to (low-quality acting, saying things they wouldn’t…

If a game hasn’t been written by human beings or voiced by human beings, it shouldn’t be bought or played by human beings either.

Speaking as someone who bought a Dreamcast in college just for Soul Calibur and Sonic Adventure, Heroes wasn’t underrated.  It’s as exactly as mediocre as it’s average Metacritic score would lead you to believe.  I think the only thing it really has going for it today is that so many worse Sonic games have come out…