really fresh take on a 3d platformer character controller, the wall kicks in particular are nasty stuff (positive connotation).

adding a map was the right choice in the long run i think - even if i didn't need a map so much as a guide to remind me to go back to a certain place i hadn't considered after several loops of the game world.

you shoulda seen some of the tricks i pulled to get where i wasn't supposed to be yet. i did everything except for one of the switches for the theater key without getting a certain extremely useful powerup

There is a tendency when dunking on Bethesda games, to criticize them from the lens of their failure to be like other RPGs- The Witcher 3 is more cinematic and refined, Baldur's Gate 3 more densely written, Fallout 1 more actually good, so on and so forth. The truth is that Bethesda games suck much more tragically and pathetically on their own terms than in comparison to other games, Todd Howard who began his career with monumental works of termite art in the end forsook the dream of the Bethesda game. The dream of the bethesda game was always to create a holodeck, a simulation for you to inhabit totally- 'Why the hell would I pick up a spoon?' someone asks, perfectly reasonably expecting game mechanics to exist for gameplay reasons, but it's just that you can pick up spoons because it's something a person is able to do. Personally I think this dream is perhaps misguided, but nevertheless they pursued it, which is admirable in its own right.

"With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
The message you receive upon killing a crucial NPC points towards the commitment towards the holodeck dream, it will continue on even if you totally fuck up, and indeed there are generally ways around the death of those crucial NPCs provided you understand the simulation.

And fear of people misunderstanding the simulation is what drove bethesda to make many crucial NPCs invulnerable in Oblivion, you never know when you're actually in a simulation or not anymore, even as the NPC AI had become much more sophisticated with schedules, likes, dislikes and habits, the places you could engage shrunk, and then even the ambitious NPC AI in subsequent games was stripped back for ever more presentable and simpler systems, to the point of Starfield doing deliberately what Morrowind had done out of technical limitations 20 years prior: 24/7 vendor NPCs with no schedules, likes or dislikes, who exist only in service of the player.
But maybe most telling of all, was that in Fallout 4 they decided that the player need a good reason to pick up a spoon.

wherever tifa lockhart and vincent valentine go, i'll be there

shitty in a very distinctly cool way. makes me miss when i'd walk into the arcade of a movie theater or w/e in the late 90s/early 00s and chuck a few of my parents' quarters away on something barely playable that looked rad as hell to my idiot child brain. i love how easy it is to cheese the AI with spamming specific attacks, the whole experience is just a flailing mess and it rules. makes me wanna boot up power stone or something, it's been like two decades since i've even thought about games like this, but i know my life is only enhanced by their existence

tifa's design here makes her look like an action figure for pervert otakus, but w/e i like spamming triangle and juggling the bad guy when they're close and spamming tifa hadouken when they're far away and winning. girls are so cool. i like the powers dog that has a red XIII alt and the animorph girl and the guy who shoots rockets out his leg. don't like the old guy with the annoying stick or the yoyo cop tho. i'll play the minigames and quest mode someday maybe, idk just something about blasting through an arcade mode that appeals more to me in these types of games

adding this to my "games that would fucking rule at slumber parties even though i'm turning 32 in a week and all the friends i could have slumber parties with are productive adults who live halfway across the country from me and also i have crippling student debt" list! shirtless sephiroth tho

Oubliette has, either in 1977 or after its many years of subsequent updates: (clears throat, unfurls ancient scroll that rolls along the floor and out into the next room)

-First-person vector graphical dungeon crawling
-Procedural generation
-Online multiplayer in a persistent world
-Permadeath, if not for the fact other players can resurrect you
-15 playable races
-15 playable classes
-Enormous labyrinthine areas, including the city/castle.
-A more-robust-than-usual-at-the-time equipment system
-A full suite of trap mechanics that Wizardry directly stole
-A full suite of original (at least in name) magic spells
-A unique character progression system
-"Hireling" artificial companion characters
-A long list of combat actions such as "hide" and "parry"
-A long list of usable items, something not to take for granted
-BBS style chatroom bulletin boards in every tavern
-An in-game casino with blackjack and other minigames, roughly five years before Wizardry would even INSPIRE Dragon Quest, a series that wouldn't adopt this until its third entry.

That list is absolute absurdity. It is psychotic. It should be all of the evidence anyone needs before starting to think that Oubliette is one of the greatest, most important games of all time. Of course, nobody says this, because they have not heard of Oubliette, and if they had, they'd probably only say it until the played it. Oubliette, much more even than its direct predecessor Moria or its other forbears in dnd and Orthanc, is fucking impossible. This is because unlike those previous games, Oubliette is designed with large parties in mind. It is not meant to be played solo, and getting five or so people to stare at this thing with you for hours on end as you fumble blindly around the city trying in vain to find SOME kind of weapon shop, is a fool's errand.

I respect Oubliette immensely. It is, for its time, one of the most impressive video games I have ever heard of... at least, on paper. The simple truth is that almost nothing in any of the PLATO RPGs is "balanced" or "designed," and it's quite unlikely for a modern player to actually have a great, satisfying experience with it. I do not actually want to play any more of Oubliette than what I did here tonight. Nonetheless, its maker has my sincere admiration.

1. Love the new farm that starts with chickens. As someone who - before 1.6 - never left Year 1, animals had such a big initial cost that I avoided them. Starting with animals was much nicer. I got comfortable with how husbandry works, so when I had resources for more, I was more willing to make that investment. It was nice to get big into an aspect of the game I hadn't touched before!

2. Stardew Valley is better without the wiki. I tried avoiding it as a reference this time, and, oh yeah, giving gifts is interesting when you have to find out what people like! Not knowing what to have for bundles and requests made me keep stockpiles, which ended up being convenient all the time! Just overall, collecting knowledge is more fulfilling than checking reference material, and gives you the freedom to make interesting mistakes.

3. Not sure why the game clicked for me this run. To give credit to Stardew itself, the new progression is more compelling than what the game was like originally, and there's tons of small changes I like: fishing bait choices, new seasonal holidays, a hint system for secrets, hotbar quick swapping, a whole extra area to explore in the endgame! But to give credit to me, I was sick as hell and needed to melt onto something for a while. Maybe that's the necessary mindset.

4. I think the game gives too little away with fish; I made an exception to my guide avoidance pretty quick when I needed to hunt down fish. If Stardew saves every gift you give to a big journal, couldn't it save fish catch information (location, season, time, weather) after you reel one in?

5. By comparison, maxed friendship being stagnant is too generous. I want Linus to hate me when we don't speak for a full year because I'm too good at cooking and too blasted on coffees to visit the bathhouse.

6. For a couple years, I've felt the community centre, as a conceit, leaves you needing to always be plate-spinning rather than leaving you to do what you want. I still agree? But I decided to feel indifferent towards it, and did just do what I wanted. What I've concluded, now that I have more experience with the game, is it's where wiki dependency begins. You're asked to fetch a good you don't recognise, or a rare fish you can't catch; the instinct is google it! And after that, why not look up what rocks Abigail likes to eat? It's a slippery slope! The game TELLS YOU which rocks after you play long enough!! You don't have to open the wiki! Close your tab!!