So true, their environmental and world design is excellent. And the monsters look great too! But that only further highlights how much the characters look like ass.

Seriously. I’d been getting the itch to try the original two NMH for the past few months since I bounced off the first pretty quickly in the Wii days, and there’s no good way to play them otherwise, so this is pretty great.

I loved Bravely Default (up to the infamous time loop) and enjoyed Bravely Second, but man...that’s not a flattering trailer. If they’d like to delay a while longer to redo some (all?) voice animations, clean up some character animations, and add some more polish to the visual design, I’m totally fine with that.

I remember Bravely Second having a feature where you could opt into a series of additional fights after you finish the first one, which resulted in bonus exp and rewards. Combined with the fast forward and other QoL features, it made grinding a breeze and kept it interesting. I’m sure they could incorporate something…

I mean...this game is one of my favorites of the generation and one of my all-time favorite action games, and it’s certainly great looking thanks to the magic of the RE Engine. But would it really be that much better with ray tracing? I genuinely don’t think so. The majority of the environments fall somewhere between…

Every time I see the PS5, I’m reminded of that semester in architecture school where everyone discovered the hyperbolic paraboloid, the overly fancy term for “saddle shape” - where a plane curves up in both directions along one horizontal axis but down on the opposite axis. It led to a ton of ridiculously…

Cameron: “Okay, yeah, so I guess it’s like...I dunno...aliens, but...blue and...cats? Yeah, cats, people love cats. On dragons. Versus the army. In space. But it’s like a love story too. And a commentary on colonialism. And because it’s me the studio will give us the most insane CG budget, so it takes place on a…

I think the big difference is that Kathleen Kennedy and the rest of the Star Wars leadership managed the sequel trilogy like absolute shit (who films a mega trilogy without even sketching out an overarching story arc???), while Marvel and Kevin Feige have done wonders with their characters and storylines for the most…

I’ll second this as well - I used the Microsoft Launcher for the past few years and it worked really well. I only recently switched over to the Pixel Launcher (unofficial, I think, since I’m on a Samsung Galaxy) just to spice things up instead of paying to unnecessarily replace my aging phone.

Same, I think I was in college before I figured it out.

I’m in the same mindset. I’ve got boxes of legendary Pokemon in the Bank that I’ve never used accumulated from generations of games. They’re often some of the least interesting Pokemon to use, as much of my enjoyment is that factor of building a team from scratch and seeing each one power up and evolve, whereas…

I absolutely agree with everything you said. In my own personal experience, Sword and Shield greatly reduce the friction that’s been inherent in the Pokemon experience (building teams, leveling up, etc) which, along with taking away random encounters and a few other changes, feel like a huge step forward for a very…

Having loved this series since Gen 1, I’ve enjoyed almost all of these games as they’ve come out, but it’s very interesting to look back on them as a series. The first two gens defined years of my childhood, but they are incredibly hard to go back to after decades of QoL updates. Even HeartGold and SoulSilver, while…

The beetles crawling under the skin while the victim screams is still one of the creepiest monster movie ideas.

Okay, great, glad the moderate half-measure is the choice yet again, surely this won’t still be a huge fucking mess. But really...who’s this last debate for? I’m sure the three debates were scheduled eons ago, but they just feel especially worthless and out of touch now. An incredible number of people have already…

All very true, I’m glad you agree! Although it does feel silly to continue to ignore my backlog in favor of replaying a bunch of 40-120 hr JRPGs...but that’s its own issue!

It’s interesting, because my gaming habits have actually gone in the opposite direction in the pandemic. Playing games that are incredibly light and cheerful feels challenging in a way that it never has, maybe because I’m having a harder time suspending disbelief or something like that. Instead I’ve been drawn to…

I understand the desire for a great homebrew portable, but $400 is just bananas. At that point, you could buy a Switch for $300 to play just about every retro console up to the Gamecube on a bigger screen and probably with better ergonomics, and still able to use Gamecube controllers (or $200 for the Mini, although I…

I was lucky as a preteen that we got a PS1 at the end of that generation, as everyone else was getting into PS2 so the older games were dirt cheap - a highlight of my game collecting that I will never reexperience is finding Star Ocean 2, FF Chronicles & Anthology, and a couple other PS1 gems for $5 each on a…

This is a broad one, but any game design that is blatantly wasting my time. That can be anything from FFXIV’s shitty fetch quests or Destiny’s quest for slightly bigger numbers, latter day Assassin Creed’s endlessly repetitive open world objectives, unbalanced or unnecessarily grindy JRPGs (or completely unnecessary…