Withywarlock

Practically speaking? Money hired to pay voice actors and time to code in those voice lines. Nintendo can afford it, but what do they gain by spending that money and effort? Otherwise in terms of sentiment, I like to imagine the characters' voices myself in the same way I prefer a novel to an audiobook/film adaptation's idea of how the character should look or sound. Nine times out of ten whatever voice the devs had in mind will be inferior to the one I would have liked, but then in reality would I really care about the chosen voice actor? Right now I'm just discussing this in a vacuum, which then begs the question, what gain is there if I'm not going to notice it all that much in-game? The option is always good though, especially if a company like Nintendo can afford it. Nor am I. If Nintendo did add voices to their characters even if solely to spite me I wouldn't care. Well, I would be flattered because they think I'm worth spiting. I can believe they can afford it, absolutely, I just don't see the "so much more" it would add, least of all to a Pokémon game. I find its story is better told through its spectacle: the exotic lands you come across, the quirky items you'll use and the increasingly powerful Pokémon you challenge yourself to capture. I can't say I have played it, but that seems excessive. I don't mind the mumbling when I have the option to skip through it and the dialogue is either meaningful or kept to a minimum (Super Lucky's Tale is awful for this, especially when doing the no-hit achievements.) If the main character's silent I hardly see much point in the NPCs having so much work put in, unless they have dialogue choices that match the quality of those of Obsidian's games. Banjo & Kazooie had clever banter with NPCs, which Yooka-Laylee tried and wasn't quite as good with but you have to expect some hits and misses with these things.

I was going to suggest POD (Planet Of Death) but its grimy 90s 3D visuals suit it. To bring that back all cleaned up would make it the PON (Planet of Niceness), and that won't do. Getting modern controllers to work with it would be grand though. I loved Blur to no end. It's the nicest middle-ground between tonally-grounded street racing games and kart racers. I need that to make a comeback. I hadn't played much of it and remember even less, but I thought it was OK at best. Then again that's all the more reason for a comeback: to improve on the original formula.

Correct. "Featured" is putting it generously: putting him to the side of another, less noteworthy character in the game subtitled Spyro's Adventure is a sign of things to come. There's a game of Spot the Difference below. That was Lightseekers. I say was because it evolved into a what appears to be a pretty decent card game, and is free on Steam. The shortlived TTL component was mobile only and was an ARPG but a bit more like Diablo than Skylanders. The toys themselves were decent: I had Tyrax the dinosaur engineer who could equip a hammer and other goodies that were sold seperately, like how Starlink lets you attach different weapons to your ship.

Citation needed. Yakuza 0, my favourite example of side-quests that exist solely to be a break from the tone of the main story, disagrees. I'd go as far as to say that overemphasis of this thinking like in Of Orcs & Men and Spiders' other games (Mars: War Logs, The Technomancer, GreedFall) is ruinous because it pads out the game to the point where it gets worse the more you complete. The necessity to complete side quests because they're "supposed to support the original game's plot" can prove fatal rather than beneficial. It could be that there's too many side quests, but Of Orcs & Men is only 12 hours long if you complete all its side-content which ties into the main story. If side quests failed to meet your requirements, and assuming your requests are reasonable, surely they wouldn't exist? Then again I think an obscene amount of games require editors and yet Dying Light's completion time will be in triple figures, so what do I know?

I should've clarified: the kinks - including eye strain and headaches - need to be worked out. Those are problems my partner and I had using the VR headsets at York's Van Gogh Experience. It was especially bad for my darling because she has syncope (fainting spells brought on by blood-oxygen content mishaps), so if she'd played any longer her motion sickness might've got the better of her. It's happened to cows, so there may be a depressing chance of it coming to us. 🤷‍♂️

I appreciate that but I've voluntarily disqualified myself from the Member of the Month system. You're free to vote for someone else now though!

I'm not prepared to say with finality that "it's fine" because it would really depend on your local laws and how well they're enforced, not to mention the minefield that copyright legislation is. Even in the UK where we have some of the more clear-cut rulings on emulation, it still requires a good read to understand. In terms of malware coming from ROMs that depends mostly on the site you get it from, and how good your antivirus is. Just because I've had no issues doesn't mean others don't or can't. Your best bet is to play them on the games on their original systems. It's not the end of the world if you can't. ^^

I probably will... eventually. I no longer feel the need to get into the latest season immediately, especially when either in this game or at some other stage there's going to be a loss of progression from the previous games. Even when I was unemployed I didn't have the time to chase the Battle Pass. No, I'm focussing on my job and hoping that when the campaign comes down in price that'll be worth a go. It's doubtful. As I said in another thread it's just war crime pornography at this point. As @Kane99 says, the fatigue is real. Let it go the way of Guitar Hero for a few years.

The skateboard would've been in the third game, Year of the Dragon, but yes I remember that same love for it. I rate the games as thus: the first is the most replayable; the second is the best for refining the existing formula; the third is the most innovative, but I find one of the least replayable games because of its use of cutscenes, alternate characters, greater emphasis on minigames and greater difficulty. The first one, as you go on to say, is the one I play the most for its humble nature. It lets you go through the levels seamlessly and wastes no time. When I was waiting on my PC to be repaired, this was the game I played on the console itself rather than an emulator. Over, and over, and over. Got to 100% completion (sometimes completing the bonus level at the end), deleted my save and started over again. I'd probably completed it about 15-20 times before and after work whilst waiting for my PC to come home. Indeed. I recently did a Let's Play of the game wherein my main criticisms were the maps were too large and full of nothing, meaning you'd spend an extra 20-30 minutes trying to find any remaining dragon treasure/dragonflies, the enemy reaction times were stepped up (which is fine, given they've always been slow in previous games), and some of the minigames were flat out broken. I had to switch from the PS2 version to the GameCube version simply because a slide level didn't work and thus I couldn't get 100% completion. For anyone who would like to get into it, the GameCube version isn't as pretty but it's considerably less buggy (at least the GameCube version on the Dolphin emulator).

Welcome to VGR, we hope you enjoy your stay!

I've seen your posts here already, I have to say I'm enjoying your contributions. Please keep up the good work, and enjoy your stay on VGR!

Welcome to the forum, we look forward to seeing your posts here!

The Last Game Played thread, this thread's fine. Also, congrats on 6667 posts! I know the game, and I think I know the puzzle too (they don't get much easier going forward). I enjoyed what of it I'd played, but the twists and turns that story took did nothing for me. It requires a far more clever player than me to appreciate it!

I've already said enough times this week how much 'lazy' as an argument irritates me, but putting that aside for the moment, what's the problem with an unvoiced character? Indeed, what would a voiced protagonist bring to either of those games, especially with dialogue like "I like shorts; they're easy and comfortable to wear" or whatever that line from the first game was? Do the stories suffer from not having a voiced characters responding to things that are already happening in the environment? In either the case of The Legend of Zelda I can't think of anything the characters would have of interest to say to NPCs; it's more the world and supporting cast that do all the legwork in that regard. See that's my thinking for Pokémon and The Legend of Zelda: the protagonists, a blank block of tofu, absorbs the flavour of the world. On their own you're right, they're not very interesting but they're more vehicles for getting you through the interesting bits of the game. ~ I appreciate it may be too early to divert attentions to this idea, but what do we think of the Banjo-Kazooie school of voice... acting? That's to say characters making noise, but the written dialogue that still needs to be read to be understood. Do people want to actually listen to spoken words, or do they just want to hear something when they read subtitles?

I can take them or leave them. I tend to read dialogue bubbles or subtitles faster than the voice actor can speak them so I prefer to read at my own pace. There's also some lines of dialogue that sound better in my head than spoken aloud, and sometimes I prefer the idea of my own voice reading things aloud or internally rather than an actor's. @Shagger mentions the older Fallout games and there's some dialogue in those that would be pretty cringeworthy to listen to by a spoken voice. I for one do not particularly want to listen to the Chosen One on the subject of becoming a porn star in Fallout 2. I do however wish that the voice actors of Baldur's Gate had full voice-acting: the guy who said "YA GOT THIS COMIN'!" as one of the attack voices was always a pleasure to hear. Having him yelling about the iron crisis would've been a hoot. It's weird saying I'm fine with no voice work for a protagonist because my dream job is to be a voice actor. In the meantime I can just do silly voices for my D&D session recaps, so they can sound what I want them to. 🤷‍♂️

That's understandable, I myself don't have proof for my claims but it wouldn't surprise me if people were just posting to farm points. In fairness, the thread doesn't begin with or promote further discussion. Like I say it's harmless, but if I were to post each time I changed game (which is every few hours on a weekend) I'd having warnings coming out my ears for spam. I somewhat agree with you. I share the opinion of the late Totalbiscuit, to paraphrase, "casual gamers are people whose gaming revolves around their life, and hardcore gamers are people whose life revolves around their gaming." As I say, I understand why people change games, I was speaking to the low-effort posting of that particular thread. Thank you for your explanation though.

The toys weren't particularly good quality nor were they that accurate in representing the characters they were based on. The only positive thing about them I can say is that they were difficult to break as they were fairly solid and didn't contain additional flimsy parts, and the paint work was good. Beyond that, the sandbox content wasn't enough to keep people interested and the abilities per figure weren't worth the cost. I've always loved the Jungle Book and wanted the Baloo toy but from what I gather from the wiki he was only available for the Toy Box mode of the third game , where you make your own maps. There were other Jungle Book items such as King Louie's Monkeys from the second game... but that meant owning two games. There were a couple of other figures that I would've liked, but between the pricing and their functionality it wasn't worth it. I decided to quit Disney Infinity so not to get down about it. What you never had, you'll never miss. You are right to ask why Disney Infinity flopped though. It's strange because they've got some of the world's most well-recognised brands and didn't give them the attention they deserved. Toy Story 3 had a better sandbox mode, and that was based on only one of their intellectual properties and didn't have any toy supplements to go with it! 😖 Oh God aye. I remember walking into GAME one time and not 6 months after its launch the game was down to £15 for the Starter Set. NintendoLife penned this article talking about a price reduction to £10.99 before it'd been out for a year. The decision astonished me. Ubisoft announced it after Toys to Life had died already, committed to releasing it and quietly vanished into the ether. The only interest it got thereafter was news of its discounts. If I do get it, it'll be out of morbid curiosity and to achievement farm, not because the concept is particularly good and the toys didn't look all that great either. The way it hooked onto the Switch controller was neat though.

@Heatman @Justin11 I hope you're recommending these games based on their modability as that's what the OP's asking for. If they would like other games in general, I'm sure they'll ask for those as and when they're ready. ~ One of the most popular games for modding is Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, which in the same breath has to have mentioned the Ultimate Apocalypse mod. I don't make the rules, but I am legally obliged to say it contains Titans, Baneblades, and so on and so forth. Otherwise, in addition to Blackangel's suggestion of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the older two games - III: Morrowind and IV: Oblivion - are heavily modular should you want to add stuff to them. Hell, you can even play Oblivion in Skyrim, and Morrowind in Oblivion with the Skyblivion and Morroblivion total conversion mods.

That isn't true either. They've (whoever 'they' are, which is a conversation for another thread) always been 'greedy' (see the Video Game Crash of 1983), greed being another word that is ruinous to discussion because it's too satisfying to develop on and creates circlejerks. I will say we saw an uptick thanks to the greater emphasis on online functionality (online subscriptions which are no longer necessary; DLC; Season Passes; Online Passes; Battle Passes; 'Beta' Access from Pre-Ordering, et cetera), but let's not pretend that their customers haven't provided custom to continue doing this. Unlike '83, we're still waiting to smugly say "pride comes before a fall" (and I'll be there with everyone else here.) Putting workers at risk is indeed awful and you're right: lead designers and publishers don't often care, and production can go downhill as a result. We're just repeating the same points though. Now that this has been addressed, we're going to bring this back on topic: what are people's thoughts on boss battles? Anyone who wants to talk about greed or laziness can do so in PMs or another thread, and that goes for me also. As ever I invite people who haven't yet contributed to the topic at hand to do so, or those who have contributed to add something new to discussion. Thanks to all who have made their contributions so far.

Please tell me if I'm wrong about this, but if I'm reading this right you're saying I'm correct... and then proceed to say that laziness is still a factor? What I'm saying is that laziness is not a factor in game development. Lazy people don't exist in the game development: they all got fired about a decade ago and were replaced by younger people who can work harder for less money, in a never-ending meatgrinder. Indeed, but it's not often that happens. A lot of work goes into them, and sometimes due to time constraints or budgetary concerns, among other reasons that the current version of the boss has to be the final one. The lead developers of World of Warcraft would use raids as some sort of currency: "we could do that... but it'd cost a raid tier." So they wanted players to choose between content other than bosses, or bosses exclusively. Apparently not enough people thought both was an acceptable response to such an asinine statement, and that's why the game's tanking subscribers: everything before bosses exists solely to get you to fight the bosses until the next string of bosses comes out, and when those bosses come out the past ones mean nothing. In WoW's case one still needs to put a lot of effort into the bosses though: a bad boss now means lost subs, even when it'll be irrelevant tomorrow.

I should've said earlier I meant hypothetically (@Kane99 above me is correct). I suppose one can technically sell their account but that's against the Terms of Service, et cetera! Agreed. One doesn't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs year after year, and even then I genuinely don't know what CoD could do to remain 'CoD-like' to people. I disagree with Kane's assessment of the stories shining. I once believed that with Call of Duty 2 - Modern Warfare 3, but even then MW was more interested in upping the stakes to unrealistic and in some cases just intellectually/emotionally insulting degrees. At this point it's pornography: which game can tally up the most war-crimes and make it arcade-y? The reason why we still talk about Spec Ops: The Line to this day is because of the single use of white phosphorus (among other things, but mainly that). The only memorable shocking things I can think of from a CoD game were, err, the bombings in London and that's because the 7/7 bombings were still fresh in my mind. Assassin's Creed: Origins was well praised, but there was a lot of worry about dramatically changing the formula. Out of the two styles I prefer the original, and I'd prefer the modern stuff taken out of it, but then I'm not the target audience and ultimately not making Ubisoft the millions of dollars the current style generates. "Ubisoft Game" just isn't for me, really, but I get what you mean. That's the first argument I've agreed to the relevence of the modern stuff. Throw in some tried-and-true crime thriller writers and one could have an Assassin's Creed game that encourages the Splinter Cell audience to step in and give it a look. Maybe even people who don't play video games...

No they don't (OK, publishers maybe). This goes for @Kane99's response with laziness too. There's time constraints, changes in priorities, being overworked, and more and more cases of sexual harrassment cropping up. Try making a boss battle when you need to sleep in the office, working depressed and frustrated to the point of injury and being treated sexually inappropriately while nothing happens about it. Laziness is an intellectually lazy response to the failings of gamedev. I'm sure devs fully appreciate the importance of a boss fight being memorable and necessary, and if they can't deliver there's no doubt in my mind there's reasons why they can't deliver on that experience. Speaking of gamedev, I wonder if bosses are left toward the end of the development progress or storyboard creation, and that's why they get less emphasis unless it's a boss rush game? That they'd rather get the beginnings and ends sorted out, especially story-wise, before focussing on the fights between.

I consider myself a fan and even I believe Activision-Blizzard needs to slow it down. I'm going to be done with CoD for a while knowing that a lot of my stuff isn't going to carry over into MW & WZ 2, so I'd rather just get what progress I can in those games as I wait and see how Microsoft's going to handle the release schedules. Even now if someone were to offer me the ~£50 I paid for Vanguard to wipe my progress from it, I'd probably take it. That's hardly a good sign of one's opinion of a series' longevity...

Is it? I've never seen a company refer to hype save for Payday 2's Hypetrain event (which, appropriately, was an utter trainwreck). There's a lot of marketing in advertisement, interviews, announcements, press releases, demos, trailers and so on... but 'hype' is a word I've only seen the audience use. I think this topic is nearing its end. If people have anything new to add to the topic, or if anyone who hasn't contributed to it yet would like to do so, now's the time before it gets locked to save post-farming.

I won't lie, I wouldn't be at all surprised if most contributions there were simply for points or post-count farming. The amount of names listed without further comment is staggering, but I imagine when that thread reaches its maximum post count (do they on this forum?) there can be rules for a future one. For the time being it's harmless. I'll list the games I'm currently on-and-off as well as their reasons: Super Lucky's Tale. Achievement farming. Played it before on the Windows Store and thought it was fairly neat, but I want the Steam achievements. Pretty decent platformer when it doesn't stop responding to my controller randomly and hasn't been patched in any iteration or release. Castle of Illusion, Starring Mickey Mouse. Achievement farming. This one's a bit weird in that it constantly comes and goes from the Steam store due to licensing issues. Those in itself aren't that strange, but for a Disney property and their mascot no less is disconcerting. Will the next time be the last time goes forever? It's a decent enough game but frustrating with how its spitefully hidden its few collectables are. I'm definitely cracking out a walkthrough for this one when I've seen it through to completion. Hell Let Loose. First-Person Entry Level Mil-Sim. A game that's only as good as the team you're with, HLL rewards using the full extent of your chosen toolkit and dedicating your squad to a particular purpose. SplitGate. First-Person Twitch Shooter. You use portals and jetpacks to get around and kill people with wacky physics in multiplayer arenas. Better than Halo: Infinite in every way it needs to be, and is Free-2-Play. Spyro: A Hero's Tail. Let's Play. Not much to say on this one, it's Spyro without going to different levels in the usual sense. I think I'd be disingenuous if I were to include two Dawn of War games, Frogun, Vermintide 2, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds just because they're currently on pause. I've many, many more games that I keep meaning to get back to but won't include them here for the same reasons.