Yeah, just think that while the game awards were congratulating people and social media was abuzz looking back on the gaming year, a lot of the people who actually made those games were already laid off, watching that from the outside, at home. A reminder of something they want forgotten: that employees are not people or even team members, they are "human resources" of the shareholders.

This video was almost entirely excellent but I was so disappointed to see Karl cross over into being rude and unprofessional in a couple of places. I want micro-documentaries, not youtuber fights.

I won't tell my whole story but things were pretty bad for me. When we had a baby my wife quickly changed from a lovely person to just being abusive all the time. Abusive to me and the baby all the time, and told me it was my fault she was behaving that way, and telling me I should stop getting sad and offended because me getting sad is abusive, and that I shouldn't try to stop her being abusive to the baby, and I can't stop her being abusive to the baby. Then when our baby was older she would react to her mum's temper by sending me away and screaming at me to leave. I often had to make a choice between just walking away from my wife being screaming abusive to our child or pushing through and intervening even when they both screamed at me that they just wanted me to leave, which is what I always chose. Years of that has irreversibly mutilated our relationship. We're still together but we'll never be the same. Our child is nearly three now and has only recently stopped asking me to go away, and become very affectionate. My wife has been very slowly returning to someone I recognise, only losing her temper a few times a week, which is what I prayed for but it can't undo the damage.

Honestly I prefer console to PC so much, even as a fediverse user, linux user, someone who has a degoogled phone and uses a home server instead of a cloud, because I just hate having to worry if games are compatible with my hardware, or if controllers are compatible with my game, or if graphical oddities in my game represent supernatural parts of the story or that I didn't install the right NVidia driver. When it comes to games, which are leisure, I find I just can't relax with PC games like I can with console games. As for emulation, I can't enjoy my games like that at all becuse the worry that settings are wrong or emulation is wrong is just too much like work. So I love my switch and I'll probably love my switch 2 one day.

It's obviously nothing like a modern title but I don't think that's quite fair - it holds up in the sense that it's fun, it has good combat challenge and exploration, honestly it does. You do have to overlook lack of QoL features and the fact that you basically have to read the manual, but I don't think it's fair to mark a game down for lacking those things. It lacks the puzzles, NPCs and stories of later Zeldas but it doesn't try to have those.

Zelda 2 siimilarly lacks QoL features but it has excellent combat that's actually challenging, but fair, so yeah if you're open to it you could have a good gaming experience there.

I heard that it's an internet joke that his character asks for donations, in fact what he actually says in-game is something else.

They review graphical quality, not gameplay. They're very thorough and detailed, and generally very pleasant and positive and fair, and non-sensational and have no emotional manipulation engagement stuff

I found the gameplay of GTA 4 and 5 to be "drive across town to watch a custscene" at their core, but GTA4 is very enjoyable if you a) relax into it, stop trying to take control and just accept that you're kind of playing a movie, and b) get good at the driving, which has a surprisingly high skill ceiling. The feeling of just running errands won't fully go away but the story builds and the missions get more exciting.

Think outside the box. The remake could have support for up to 10 brothers, so long as you connect that many analogue sticks, and you control one per finger. Add a character creator, enhance it to a strand type game, support for more languages, skill-based online co-op, and reimagine it as an open-world sandbox. :')

Can you share the full story of the projects that you could predict could fail using maths?

I would hate it if games changed based on what they thought I wanted - I want to choose my content but if the content morphs underneath my hands according to a marketing algorithm then it's not respecting my choice. There seems to be some assumption that each person enjoys exactly one emotion.

I'm pretty sure people can like more than one thing. Like if I'm playing Resident Evil and some algo decides that because I watched When Harry Met Sally last week, it should replace the zombies with awkward dates 🤣.

The way they were infuriating motivated the player and makes it satisfying when you beat them, so being annoying was absolutely the right choice. The last Pokemon games I played were on DS where your "rivals" were nice and supportive and non-annoying and they were boring and I would have fastforwarded them if I could have.

She did have therapy, which probably helped a little, it's hard to know. I've never heard of postpartum rage before but that does sound like it, thanks so much for that link.

The human checkout gives a better service but the shop does not charge me differently for different checkouts. For shoppers, the equation is simple.

Gaming NFTs are a great idea. If I'm playing chess I want to be able to transfer over my items from other games, like a portal gun, to enhance the experience. NFT technology will permanently improve the gaming industry.

I did this too, on the GameCube collector's edition. It's hard but the difficulty didn't feel unfair! It was so satisfying when I made progress. Honestly this is such an excellent game.

Thanks

Excellent link, thanks

"explaining"... lol... I know what you mean but I have to laugh a little at that :P

It's pretty useless info even if you do understand it IMO.

These hint texts are definitely a flaw. https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-legend-of-zelda/ has some interesting discussion of how in several instances basically useful hint text got mangled into madness in translation.

Edit: specific link https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-legend-of-zelda/first-quest/#insane-old-man says that this isn't a translation, it's the tanslators freestyling for some reason, so it's a mystery why the text is so cryptic

By the way, fans of Zelda 2 may well adore Star Tropics. it has a similar feel. Although it's prettier, linear, and has more story, it also has challenging, rewarding combat. Your movement (and some but not all enemy movement) is on a grid and you can only move up/down/left/right and you can only face in those directions too, enemies deal contact damage, and you have mostly melee attacks so combat is a question of mastering a grid-based dance as you attack whilst avoiding damage. The soundtrack is wonderful too.