Withywarlock

Frequently, but then I feel most of these things exist to cover the developers' backsides when questions arise about higher difficulties. As is the right thing to do; consumable items exist to be consumed, crafting reagents exist to be used in crafting. The more games that have limited or otherwise cumbersome inventory systems, the better expiry dates on items sound. Players will soon use them and realise how beneficial they are, or they realise how useless they are and get out of the habit of hoarding. Save for Dark Souls and other such games that have greater emphasis on attrition, I have to wonder why most RPGs allow you to have such clutter and either don't appreciate them or completely destroy the economy with how much you make from selling them off. It's one of the few things I wish video games wouldn't mimic Dungeons & Dragons on: the inflation of loot and money adventurers get.

Not anymore, no. I realise that I'd end up doing what that famous Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 boycott group ended up doing, which filled up with people, err, playing Modern Warfare 2. The forementioned image is basically a meme at this point, its history frequently revised, but it always serves as a reminder of why I don't bother trying too hard when others don't seem that bothered either. Even then, I find most boycotts to be ill thought out and conveniently forget the same things going on in the wider industry, especially when the exact same problems occur in the companies they like.

I can appreciate this mindset, and yes, I do. Failing that I save-scum trying to defeat the threat before the character dies. Going with your example of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, I frequently try to defeat the first giant you come across before the Companions do so I don't get scolded and feel welcome for my inevitable joining. But there's all manner of RPGs where I do the same, I just can't quite figure out which ones. They're mostly Elder Scrolls ones though, I can tell you that much. There's a lot of opportunities for this in Spyro the Dragon, where enemies try to trap, chase and eat the fodder which Sparx can use to restore his health. Destroy the trap(per) and the fodder can go on its pre-programmed route oblivious that its life has been saved.

Lords of the Fallen. To say it's a Soulslike, it's incredibly easy to cheese to the point where it's virtual fondue. The number one mistake it makes, indeed one that should be taught in RPG design 101, is that it uses cooldowns for spells. Specifically the healing spells 'Shelter.' You can heal more damage than enemies can dish out save for one early boss in the Graveyard, and the game then simply becomes attrition. Because the game isn't all that great there's not much reason to play any other way. There's no interesting builds, gear progression, or character growth, so you might as well use the build that's guaranteed to win and get you the most achievements. In New Game+ it's the same, except that boss fights go on for far too long because your damage output healing yourself in heavy armour is so low.

Probably Final Fantasy Tactics, which I'd bought more for the name than the style of gameplay. Little did I know how much I'd come to love Strategy Roleplaying Games (SRPG) a decade or so after that one, and how isometric games would play a huge part in deciding what would be one of my all time favourite genres.

This is essentially the academic answer. A developer friend had told me that when he'd seen a video of mine, words along the lines of selling a sensation, not the product itself. Even then I'd find it very difficult to point to what it is I like about certain trailers. Dead Island and most World of Warcraft trailers hit all the right marks, and you'll always have people saying those people should make a movie, without considering of course that writing, recording, producing and editing a two minute trailer or what-have-you is not the same as making a 90 minute feature length film.

No, I don't think so. Publishers have shown for the longest time the "fee-2-pay" model works, wherein you have a free-to-play economy in a paid game. See Call of Duty, for instance, where your Battle Pass tends only to work in the free Warzone mode and the latest (paid) installment, and it's only good value for money when you play both. And with how public the feeding frenzy that is acquisitions has become, it should be concerning who will continue making games for money with more inventive ways of taking it.

Now that you mention it, I really would prefer to play standing more often. I only really play with a keyboard and mouse and my IKEA desk isn't fancy enough to rise or anything (well, unless I fiddle with the knobs under the legs... ooh matron). Should I end up getting Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, then I'll use a controller to play it and I will most certainly be standing every now and again for that one.

Pretty much this. The past three years have been unremarkable for game releases save for the ones that had catastrophic PR. The games that do well like Resident Evil: Village and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy have their five minutes of fame and then see their niches. Coronavirus has certainly played its part, but I also think that's going to be the way of things for the foreseeable future, just peaks and troughs. So many troughs...

I did in 2020 on a WordPad document, but I prefer The Backloggery. The little achievements and meters are an unusually good motivator for getting games done, and motivating my completionist mindset. If I can get one of the two games on my list done before the new year, and possibly a new full-time job, that'd be terrific.

I drink Diet Coke mostly, but I'm trying to cut down considerably by drinking water. I'm glad my tastebuds have finally developed enough (bearing in mind I'm 28, not 6) to find sweetened and sugary drinks too much to have all the time, when I used to exclusively drink Coca-Cola. Plus, when I get a buzz from water more than I do Red Bull or Monster, you know that the "gamer drinks" aren't doing diddly squat, and I'd rather have consistently high performance than peaks and troughs that come from excessive sugar and caffeine.

It was months ago when I read about it in Private Eye magazine so I'm not entirely sure, but it's honestly nowhere near as clean as the marketing says it is. I'm seeing conflicting figures, but they seem to be rising rapidly: 1.5% of global electricity consumed here, 7% there, and Greenpeace estimates it will go up to 20% of global electricity consumption by 2025. While this might be considered scaremongering, and it's a reasonable guess to make, there's undeniably a need to make improvements soon.

Much as I would like the option to be ever present, I don't necessarily want everything going to the cloud because of how much energy it consumes. It's better than a lot of solutions, don't get me wrong, but until things improve with cloud computing I don't want it to be used on something as trivial as video games. This is part of the wider discussion to be had about the Internet of Things (IoT), and the core tenet of the opposition: unless something absolutely requires the internet to function or be stored, it should not be connected to the IoT.

With all the cutscenes I've seen for the playable characters in Call of Duty: Vanguard, I think I'd honestly prefer live-action scenes to the animated ones. Granted, that's not solving the problem much, but if we're going in this direction we might as well do something unique with it. Remember the PAYDAY web series? I do, because nobody else seems bothered about emulating it, and it stands out among its peers as a result of it simply being live-action. But to the point you were trying to make rather than me barging in with my own opinions based off the title, Trailers seem way more staged, and despite the criticisms people such as us level at them... they work. Especially with microphones. But I know what you mean about Hellblade in particular. I didn't enjoy that as a game. I don't think I'd have enjoyed it any more as a Let's Play. But as a movie, a short film, as any other medium that fully embraces the cinematic qualities rather than tries to use video games for something besides gaming, I would've enjoyed it significantly more. The things they did with motion capture, voice acting and audio engineering were stellar, but being a video game didn't make any of that any better.

Preferably one that isn't named "the hunter," which was a phase that went on during the seventh console generation. If hunters were able to play video games, they'd go for the generic 'assault' class in online shooters. Honestly, I'm not hard to impress. I want an enemy that seems more clever. One that's willing to flank, use invisibility, or otherwise do something to aggrevate the player in a logical way such as tossing grenades to flush them out of cover, or provide suppressive fire to keep them hunkered down. It really depends on the game. My answer is with the seventh generation of consoles, keeping in line with my initial response.

Dog's Life was a really good platform-adventure game that is unlikely to be replicated any time soon, for better or for worse. The premise was you were a crude American Foxhound by the name of Jake, trying to seduce the labrador Daisy. She's dognapped, and you have to collect bones (with no small amount of Pedigree product placements) to unlock new levels and ultimately rescue her. For starters, you feel like you're controlling a four legged animal, which few games attempt and fewer games make feel good. Spyro the Dragon is just the sort of game for this when you pay attention to its controls. It would be a very different game if Spyro was a bipedal character, with or without flight. Because of this, there's platforming that requires long jumps which Jake suits, but also troublesome travel rounding corners or making tight turns. It had some interesting ideas; smellovision was essentially Donkey Kong 64's different coloured bananas for each character, except in first person, in black and white, and would encourage exploration if you managed to stay on track following the different coloured smells. You could also take control of different dogs to perform the tasks they're bred for, such as herding sheep, scaring off crows, guarding a property, getting into tight places, and so forth. In order to do so though, you may need to bribe them or beat them in a mini-game. Only a dog could get away with saying "oh goodie, a peeing minigame" as gleefully as Jake does. You could also defecate with a disgusting amount of detail, and you might have passersby comment on your dirty deeds. Chasing cats, stealing sausages, and getting pampered were some other activities you could involve yourself in. All in all, a fine game that proved to be a good few hours' fun and may provide some frustration for a completionist. It's definitely worth getting the PS2 out to play again at some stage. I'd do it just for the killer soundtrack.

It's more than likely we'll see a sequel. For all its faults and developer mishaps it still has a lot of name value, and there will always be opportunities to repeat unpopular monetisation methods, as well as exploit new opportunities to make money.

I'm not gonna lie, if this was around during my Skylanders and other such Toys-to-Life (TTL) games, I would've picked this up in a heartbeat. It reminds me of the old U.B Funkeys which would have models connected by USB and have you do mini-games and a campaign and such. I have to agree that having one's own avatar would make me want to pick this up and give it a fair try. Until then, I'll keep an eye on it.

I'm aware of The Dark Crystal being a movie, I'm just having an autistic moment about "is it OK to mention a TV show based off the movie?" xD But yes, I've seen Labyrinth when my partner and I were having our first week staying together. The Goblin King is one of her favourite cosplays, and I have to say I can't imagine anyone but Bowie playing him. It's an incredible movie! Jim Henson and his Creature Shop have been involved in quite a few video games. Muppet Monster Adventure is a very typical 3D platformer but has some interesting enough ideas. And then there's, err, Rascal.

I'm not a fan of Silent Hill by any means but I do enjoy watching people play it. This will definitely be up there not as a purchase, but as viewing material. It appears to take all the right lessons from early survival horror, along with some of the wrong ideas from their imitators (distracting visual effects that don't add to the atmosphere, for instance.)

I like Dark Souls well enough, but I'll believe it when I see it. I can easily see this becoming another overhyped, underdeveloped mess, even if the gameplay so far looks fairly decent. Given it's open world, there's a lot more that can go wrong - thematically and technically - by default. I wish it the best, as I would any game, but I'm in no rush to see it out now.

It's hard to say without being hyper-specific (i.e zombie survival crafting open world) that a genre is well and truly dead. We can argue that their glory days are over, such as MMOs, where right now New World, Final Fantasy XIV and EVE Online seem to be doing OK but aren't as popular as when World of Warcraft was at its peak. But until there's not a single person playing that game, until there's not a single developer making one of those games, that genre is not - and cannot - die. They can however evolve. Dungeon crawlers in the style of The Elder Scrolls: Arena or Ultima Underworld grew into what we now know as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or Fallout 3. The days of Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar went on to inspire the self-aggrandising "immersive sim" genre with System Shock and Prey (2017). And speaking of roleplaying games, there's that many subgenres I can't even begin to count them all, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to find the dividing line between what is and what is not an RPG. Just when a genre is thought to be dead someone usually repopularises it, or there's an unseen surge of games. The real-time strategy (RTS) genre was thought to have been dead until people decided to just make them, and they got tons of money for it. And bearing in mind this is on PC, the platform for RTS titles. It's amazing how things come and go out of the blue.

I'm not sure if this counts because it's based on a TV show which is based off a movie, but The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance - Tactics is single-handedly the worst tie-in game I have ever played. It has zero artistic merits on any count, and I do not exaggerate. Its story does not appeal to TDC fans. Its gameplay does not appeal to strategy RPG (SRPG) fans. Its user interface is broken. Its graphical fidelity is unsuitable for the platforms it's on. Its soundtrack is barren, its voice acting nonexistent. This is the only game that I hated and did not develop Stockholm Syndrome for when playing it to completion. The fact that 1.5% of Steam players have completed this game on New Game+ tells me that I failed to properly inform the other 1.4%. I will forever kick myself for that. I would have to disagree about Disney's "incredibly average" games. I think as the generations went on you're right, but I think around the fifth/sixth generation of consoles they were pretty good. I hear a lot of compliments given to Aladdin and such for the fourth generation systems also.

This seems interesting, if rough around the edges, but I'm fair enough to give this a chance. I guess I'll have to play it for myself to see what's "old school" about it. Wishing you and your team the best!

If we're referring to the ESRB's "Adults Only" rating, it's not so much a matter of them selling, but stores deciding whether to stock them. Given Valve's lack of quality control and care to enforce it, lots of AO games sell on Steam. By how much, I can't say, but it must be enough for developers to justify updating their sordid titles. That appears to be one of the perks of digital distribution - if one platform won't have it, many other sites will and take that cut of the profits. With retail, if GAME won't stock it, ASDA, Tesco, and other supermarkets or specific game stores won't do so either. Given the ESRB is as worth as much as tits on a turtle these days, I reckon developers should call retailers' bluffs. Times have long changed since 'AO' was any different to R, or whatever the US rating system is. Plenty of games rated 18 by PEGI and the BBFC are (knowingly, blatantly, evidently) sold to parents for their children under that age. Not to rag on something because it's the popular thing to hate on, but can anyone tell me Fortnite's age restriction without looking, and see how much merch is sold to people under those ages? Furthermore, can anyone then tell me that ratings matter at that point?