TheMightyEthan

Free of Healthcare

Shouldn't it be the Isle of Amour?

Would you say it's a... game changer? ?

Nobody was killed, so hopefully we can keep from escalating further.

See, I feel the opposite. In order to fit in that size and have any kind of reasonable battery life the thing is going to have to be very underpowered compared to something like a gaming desktop, which means you're going to get all the headaches and fiddliness of PC gaming combined with all the performance trade-offs of a console. If I'm going to get console-quality gaming anyway, I'd rather just play it on an actual console and save myself all the fiddling. @Mister Jack Nintendo didn't invent that form factor, before the Switch came out Sony had the Vita and even before that Sega had the Game Gear.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild BotW was obviously a great game, but even beyond that, it really encapsulated a lot of the changes gaming went through this decade, and it managed to do it without losing the magic of the series (*cough*Assassin's Creed*cough*). It took a series that had been largely the same formula since Ocarina of Time*, smashed it to bits, and rebuilt it from the ground up, while still feeling like a continuation of what came before. Where previous Zeldas were divided into the overworld and dungeons, with progress gated by specific items, and puzzles that cannot be completed without them, BotW goes full open-world, with system-driven gameplay. I don't know of anything more 2010's than open-world, system-driven. You get every ability/item within the first couple hours of the game, and if you want you can completely ignore everything and run straight to the final boss (not that it's easy, but it's possible). On the flip-side of that, the game is very good at sign-posting where to go next, without railroading you into it. My problem with lots of open-world games is that they're too open, they feel too aimless, and I lose interest without a clear mid-term goal. BotW always has that mid-term goal, which allows you to screw around to your heart's content, but then as soon as you get tired of it and want to progress the narrative it's fairly clear where to go next. And it accomplishes this without cluttering the map with icons. The only icons on your map are the one quest marker (which you can determine which quest is tracked, or turn off completely) and ones you place there yourself. This means you don't just play the minimap, you actually look at the world and figure things out from there, which sounds like it could get frustrating, but the world is so well designed that you rarely lose your direction if you want to find it. The Hyrule of BotW feels huge, and open, and empty, without being desolate. It's post-apocalyptic, but it's a green post-apocalypse. There are a just few small settlements, that truly feel like remnants of a collapsed civilization, clinging to life in the wilderness. The emptiness makes it the most real-seeming "wasteland" I've yet played in. It's not Rapture, where the lore says there's a semi-functioning society still, but the world looks completely destroyed with only crazed psychopaths in sight. Nor is it the densely-populated wasteland of Fallout, which has too much civilization for how disorganized the lore says it is, but simultaneously too many hordes of bandits and monsters right next to the settlements. Each village in BotW feels isolated from the rest, but also like it could be reasonably self-sufficient, and the monster camps are close enough to be threatening without being so close as to make you wonder how the town is still around at all. And on a more minor note, the towns feel like actual towns, unlike the "towns" in Fallout that consist of two houses and five people, with one quarter-acre farm. In short, Breath of the Wild exemplifies the trends of the decade, while also doing them better than any other game I've played. Honorable Mention: Prey, for similar reasons to Zelda. Talos has all the charm of Rapture, without the ludo-narrative dissonance of there supposedly being a functioning society still around somewhere, and the systems-based approach to problem solving is a joy.

Yeah yeah, I couldn't come up with a clever name for the thread... Ace Combat 7 This game was really great. Out of 20 missions, there was only one that pissed me off, which honestly for this type of game is kind of amazing, and even that one was fun to actually play, it was just hard to get enough points within the time limit and the repetition got frustrating. I was impressed with how varied they were able to make the missions feel, considering at its core there's really only two types they can do: attack ground targets, or attack air targets. Hopefully the next one doesn't spend so long in development hell.

Yes, but why?

Yeah...

I agree. Even at the end when it had a little oddness it was charming, because it was the sort of oddness that would be at the end of a Ghibli movie.

That Starcom Nexus looks really cool. I'd never heard of it, but now it's on my wishlist. ?

I got $50 in PSN credit for Christmas and was trying to decide what to do with it, and I was kicking around the idea of getting Nier: Automata even though I already own it on PC, because the PC version crashes whenever it tries to load an actual level due to my TV supporting HDR (even if I disable HDR). I had tried everything last year when I wanted to play the game, I installed FAR, disabled HDR, any crash fix I could find, and nothing worked. Well today I thought before I buy a second copy I'm going to try one last time, so I uninstalled the old version of FAR, installed the new one, booted it up, and it ran without issue. So now Nier: Automata is back on my backlog...

Thank you Mr. GOH! for the bonus gift of Disco Elysium! I had kind of forgotten about this game, but it looks amazing. I hear there's no combat, which sounds incredibly refreshing, and I look forward to playing it!

Holy shit, Ace Combat 6 was 12 years ago? AC7 is great though. It's the first game I've owned that actually makes me want a VR headset.

Shadows of the Empire is the greatest game of all time, you take that back!

@FLD See, I thought TLJ was better than TFA, so as soon as they announced they were bringing JJ back my interest did a nosedive. And wasn't Rian Johnson originally going to do the last one too, and they just fired him after the internet backlash to TLJ? Because if that's the case then he would have been the one having to "pick up the pieces", so it doesn't make sense to say he didn't care.

@Pojodin Jesus, that's an impressive list. And a clear backlog is amazing. I seem to bottom out at 3, I've gotten it that low repeatedly, but never less.

I also have been playing Ace Combat 7, and man I got frustrated Mission 6. It seemed completely impossible until I finally googled it and learned that at the very beginning you can kill a few fighters and several bombers while they're still on the ground, and that provides a few thousand points right off the bat. Even with that though I still barely won, I only had like 1000 points to spare. I only mention all that because Metal brought up Mission 6. Aside from that mission so far the game is fantastic and I've been absolutely loving it. And even Mission 6 was fun to actually play, it was just frustrating to lose repeatedly because I didn't have enough points, but it hasn't affected my overall view of the game at all.

That sounds like an amazing idea. Instead of rolling shit at the end and going "well that was pointless" you've actually made progress toward what you actually want.

Holy shit, the eyes make all the difference.

We cancelled our Netflix sub recently, we were caught up with all our shows and are waiting for more stuff to build back up before we re-subscribe.

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (Switch) I'm super late to the party, but I'm glad I joined. I think I'm finally becoming a person who likes JRPGs. I don't have a lot to elaborate on, it was just an all-around pleasant experience.

I did try the FAR mod and PCGW, and neither helped. I'm an idiot for it not occurring to me to get a PS4 copy...

I keep going around and around in my head about getting a new, bigger monitor, and it's all because of Nier: Automata. That game crashes when I try to play it on my TV because my TV supports HDR (which makes the game crash even if you have HDR disabled), so to play it I'll have to do it on my monitor, but my monitor (20") feels so small compared to my TV that I don't want to do that, so then I go "maybe I should get a bigger monitor", but then I think that's stupid to get a bigger monitor just for one game when I have my 4k TV hooked to the computer that works for every other game, then I come back around to but I really want to play Nier: Automata...

@MetalCaveman You use the word "fun" a lot, so I'm wondering if I've completely misapprehended that game. Based on the aesthetic and what I'd seen of it I assumed it was another slow slog type zombie game, like The Last of Us or whatever. Am I wrong? Is it more of a joy-to-play type game?