That’s honestly what I am worrying it would be, and what I meant by a huge part of the game being “impersonal”.

Daggerfall has parts that are fascinating, even long after its time.

Its custom class creator is rather fun. Its magic effect system too… despite some of the most intriguing effects not even working at all. Seriously. You can craft those spells, they just don’t do anything.

Its dungeons are intimidating in scale, and the 3D automap is both a feat and almost no help at all.

There are freaking linguistic skills, plural because there are like 8 different languages or so. They are mostly useless, because they just add a slight chance a monster won’t attack you, but since you don’t know when it works you’ll murder them anyway.

And then there’s the undistinguishable random quests and the grind.

Since most of Elder Scrolls nostalgia today is around Morrowind, it’s always interesting (and a bit funny) to find people (involved or not) who think the series started to derail with Morrowind.

I am not mocking them at all, I get it, Daggerfall and Morrowind are very different games with a different scale and focus. Daggerfall is also… quite overwhelming, and rather impersonal for 99% of its gameplay. I really don’t know what a “modern” Daggerfall would look like.

Can’t watch now so not sure what’s in the video, but Lands of Lore 2 was quite fancy.

Had a parchment scroll-like UI with animated burning transitions, did creepy chants at you to test stereo sound.

Funny thing, it tested your CD-ROM drive speed too (it used to matter). Of course on a modern PC, you’d have the whole game on your (much faster) hard drive and simulate an optical drive with DOSBox or something. The installer runs its test and literally says : “Wow, your drive is fast!”

I’d say LoZ: Echoes of Wisdom tried to be like this, unfortunately it’s a bit bland. Might be worth checking if you haven’t yet though.

For something I enjoyed more, CrossCode is a fun top-down action RPG, but it’s more of a sci-fi/fantasy thing and a bit more on the action side. It does have extensive dungeons with lots of puzzles though (often relying on switches, timing, movable blocks and clever ways to use your ball-shooting weapon).

Yeah, apparently SimCity itself was the result of Will Wright working on an helicopter shoot’m up and realising he had fun making maps for it.

That’s an interesting starting point for codifying a whole genre of games.

This is not how it has been working for some time. Item distribution is not about rank, it’s about distance.

Blue shell is kinda mid-range, and you usually get one when you’re not so far that you can’t profit from it (and even though it targets first place it also often disturbs second or third place if they’re close, either with blast damage or by making them try to avoid it).

If you’re too far to care about sniping the head of the race, you won’t get a blue shell but something that is immediately useful to you. Commonly star, triple or golden mushroom, bullet bill. Lots of bullet bills actually. I’d say those can be a lot more annoying than blue shells on 8.

Child of Light? Side-scrolling RPG, with a young Austrian princess waking up in a fantasy world. Very artsy and oniric, emotional but more on the hopeful side.

Good, Ubisoft, please continue giving me reasons not to buy any of your games again. It’s been like 10 years now.

It’s

Depends. If they’re already in a position of power, they basically win if nobody rises against them.

What often happens is they did try to stop the hero through the game, and failed.

Some games fix this issue by making the player trigger the change they want and bring the fight to the big powerful threat themselves, on their terms.

In fact one of my favorite RPG has the player characters being the ones trying to end the world as they know it.

I do think the extreme example, the old RPG trope of the big bad looming over in the red-tinted sky and being just minutes from firing the world busting laser while you finish your quest list, is rather cringe. Maybe don’t invoke this in a game where time is basically irrelevent.

I’ve played Tales of Monkey Island. If you’ve played Telltale’s version of Sam and Max, it’s pretty much the same kind of take. Probably suffers quite a bit from the episodic format, and puzzles are a bit straightforward compared to classic monkey island games. Fans of the series mostly consider it a huge letdown.

Can’t say anything about the more serious parts of the Telltale catalogue, I’ve never played those, but for having played this, the 3 Sam & Max seasons and Back to the Future, there was certainly a Telltale formula that started annoying me after a while. They went less and less subtle about crafting their dialogues so they all lead to the same answer, they clearly wrote their stories with an objective to reuse character models and assets, and they still used that in-house engine that looked and controlled terribly, barely improved through the years.

Sakuna, of Rice and Ruins is about a goddess in a fictional but very shinto-adjacent religion in a country not quite, but not entirely unlike Japan. She’s the daughter of her pantheon’s God of War and Goddess of Harvests. She bashes monster heads and she sows rice, and both are important.

Fun and light-hearted, with a small cast of quirky likeable characters.

The quotation marks are a nice touch. Quality trolling.

It was technically always licenses for every video game ever commercialised. It’s just that a publisher has no practical way to control what happens to someone’s floppy/optical disc/cartridge/whatever physical media.

Has it ever been something else? Nobody using “woke” seriously has ever been able to define it.

Hoopa : “Just gonna drop a bunch of those legendary idiots for shits and giggles. Catch, trainer!”

Single joycon is barely usable, but the Wiimote was terrible for sideways holding.

Its shape was clearly never intended for it, and the d-pad was absolutely awful, one of the worst I’ve used.

The d-pad worked as buttons (which was how most games used it, in vertical mode), but for movement it was very stiff and almost impossible to get diagonals. For a console that featured virtual console heavily and needed a lot of classic controls, that was very bad design.

Until they give a “better” reason, I am going to assume the one they hinted at is true, and Microsoft just decided that it was worthless because it wasn’t “Mikami’s studio” anymore. Honestly, I already suspected it.

In which case, fuck them. These games were not made by one person, a studio is bigger than its director. And the rest of them didn’t get even one chance to prove themselves.

Truly shows how little they value the people who make their games.

Well, I don’t think they’re putting up a very good show right now.