Lurker > Xiahou_Shake

Tango was hardly a "husk" just because Mikami left. Going purely by his credits, he had very little creative involvement in any of the studio's output beyond their first game. It's important to remember that games are made by a ton of ridiculously talented people whose names most people never learn or even see. Tango was probably at the actual height of their game and poised to jump into even more prestige after Hi-Fi Rush, which is what makes this shuttering so tragic.

Man, they're still holding back enough software to do a Direct that isn't featuring the new console? Feels like they've been in wind-down mode since Engage launched and all the "obvious" guesses about what's cooking or otherwise delayed projects seem destined to be cross-gen if it's on the original Switch at all.

Yeah gotta say that promo photo doesn't do much for me. Definitely agree that it feels weird and cynical on top of really dumb that he's clearly not in any rush to save the city that's actively getting destroyed by what appears to be Vegeta behind him.

All of the anger I've seen and heard has been entirely aimed at Sony - most folks seem to feel that Arrowhead is "on our side" pretty much all the way up to the CEO since he was very publicly outspoken about this. Honestly this might just end up bringing the community even tighter together since it's being perceived as such a big communal victory.

Major Order Achieved

Tacos
Burritos
Nachos
Enchiladas

For being less than halfway through the decade, there's already a lot of strong contenders for this one! Weirdly much moreso than the 2010s, I think.

Gotta give this one to Alan Wake 2. Remedy demonstrated absolute mastery there of a craft that nobody else looks like they're even starting to practice.

If I've got this all straight, tomorrow is only the day when new Steam players are affected - seems like anyone who was already playing the game will have until the 30th, by which point I sincerely hope this has been sorted out in a less ridiculous way.

X

I was just picking up food at Wing Stop and there was a pack of dudes talking very angrily about this while waiting for their pickup. Can't remember the last time I heard GAMER RAGE out in public!

That's really weird - my experience playing with randoms has actually been one of the better ones I've had in a game like this. Only Deep Rock Galactic was better and that game is pretty unique in its community vibe.

Absolutely astonishing that Sony couldn't just be content to take the win, they just had to fuck it up with modern corpo bullshit. Extra hilarious because this game is legit a dream come true for them (an actually successful, beloved live service game) and they're bungling it with this nonsense that provides literally negative benefit to its players and is solely for boosting internal numbers and satisfying suits and shareholders.

This one's a good bit tougher. My first thought is Control - was the first game to really convince me that ray tracing was going to be a huge thing in the future (and is still one of the best showcases of it today) plus the amount of environmental chaos in firefights once you've gotten some powers unlocked is really a spectacle.

Feel like the Metro games also deserve an honorable mention here, especially 2033 which was one of the first games to really take a crack at the Crysis throne in terms of pushing the envelope in hardware demand. Maybe Red Dead 2 belongs here too but I haven't played it so I don't know!

Okay after sleeping on it I'm going to give it to Half-Life 2. Crysis is wildly impressive and a real technical marvel but honestly so is/was HL2 and that feeling of sheer disbelief upon playing it for the first time has never again been replicated for me.

Utawarerumono 2 + 3 really are that good and together are probably the best story I've ever seen in a game. That said while I'd agree they belong in the RPG conversation, the ratio of visual novel to gameplay is absurdly lopsided. You could go actual IRL days playing the games (2 especially) and not experience any gameplay at all. (Hilariously, my #2 story in all of gaming is 13 Sentinels, which is also like that!)

I've basically switched to using "ARPG" to describe stuff like Kingdom Hearts and Nier - it's technically not wrong to call them JRPGs and they do very broadly belong in that bucket but I think it's better to use a more accurate term that immediately gives a better idea of what kind of games they actually are. Really though we're at a point where a big enough share of Japanese-made RPGs have action gameplay that "JRPG" really just means "RPG made in Japan" which is almost completely meaningless as a descriptor so it might be better to just differentiate between "ARPG" and "turn-based RPG," though that still leaves out the seemingly increasing hybrid breed like FF7R, modern Trails and now Metaphor.

Tag!

Legit can't decide here between Half-Life 2 and Crysis.

HL2 is probably the most blown away I've ever been by graphics, and the physics it brought to the table via the Source engine made it feel like a multi-generational leap that none of its peers were even close to matching.

At the same time, Crysis set a bar for graphical fidelity and sheer hardware utilization that wouldn't be passed for generations, and legitimately pioneered a ton of graphical/rendering tricks that are still used to this day.

Splitting this by decade was a smart move!

Gotta say it's Half-Life. It really transformed the FPS genre and feels like a definitive turning point looking back from the DOOM style to more modern, puzzle-driven and story-heavy campaigns. The level of cohesion and scale of the adventure was nuts and the crowbar basically set the standard for what a melee weapon should be in these games.

Tears of the Kingdom

For all the reasons stated above - this game just casually dumped several systems that could have defined entire video games on their own and somehow made them all actually work really well.

Estelle
*Abstain*

That first match is horribly cruel, love them both dearly. But Estelle is Bestelle.

Light

Isaac's lack of descriptions was a legitimate artistic vision in the original game but Edmund McMillen has said himself that it straight up doesn't work anymore with how many items are in the game - he's said he'd like to see something like that item description mod officially added to the game. But yeah, for now if you're not on PC you're kinda just stuck with the wiki which is a great resource but a pretty shitty way to actually play the game.

Is System Shock Remake only just now getting to consoles? That's a bizarrely huge gap, it came out a full year ago!

Curious about Animal Well but Senua is the easy highlight in an otherwise pretty quiet month of catch-up for me.

skullbone posted...

In 2024 it's just weird to think of a fighting game that is primarily going to be played single player and then put away.

In fairness I'm pretty sure this is still Mortal Kombat for the vast majority of its playerbase

Kenri posted...

Hades isn't a great roguelike but it's a fantastic action game with great characters and writing so I just played it with that mindset and loved it

Yeah this is pretty much the way to look at it. I agree that Hades isn't a terribly good roguelike but you're probably somewhere between 20 and 40 hours into it before that really becomes a crippling concern.

As a roguelike it's simply far too lacking on run diversity, and you also ultimately get way too much control over your runs. Like, if you want to get a certain boon loadout for a certain weapon you're able to make it happen like 95% of the time once you have your stuff unlocked, which just further ruins the sense of adaptability and impactful decision-making that all good roguelikes are built on. Really hoping that Hades 2 can address those issues cause if you combine Hades' storytelling and character performances with an actually well-designed roguelike you've got a potential GoaT on your hands.

Haven't played Rebirth but a big yes to both the original and Remake versions. Hilarious to me how many people don't like her.

7

CassandraCain posted...

Which other anime properties use the Ninja Storm fighting mechanics? I have never seen of any others.

Off the top of my head there's...
J-Stars/Jump Force
Kill la Kill
One Punch Man
Jujutsu Kaisen
My Hero Academia
One Piece
Demon Slayer
Saint Seiya

There are probably some I'm missing but it's definitely been a consistent complaint that "uninspired arena fighter" at least for a solid period was the default answer to what to do with an anime license for video games.

More than any other vocation in the game, Trickster needs a few vocation levels before it really becomes playable. Ultimately you'll want to get your ghost into position (potentially even in the air where nobody can reach him using the astral projection skill or where nobody can see it via the fake wall) and then pop the pawn buff and spam the AOE taunt as the enemy AI shatters to pieces and gets obliterated by the pawns they're completely ignoring.

Pawn buff and AOE taunt are non-negotiable and absolutely essential. Beyond that you can use your remaining slots either for the meister ability (can knock big guys on their ass,) the fake wall, astral projection or if you're feeling *really* spicy the fake floor so you can do set-ups that get enemies to jump off cliffs.

Xenoblade Chronicles - Monolith has worked some absolutely insane black magic getting unreasonable levels of presentation out of every platform this series has been on, but it all started here. The sheer scale of the environments here was amazing at the time by any metric, so seeing them on the Wii was downright mind blowing.

Every day I grow more happy that I've completely divested from social media and can ignore all of this toxic stupidity - the little I've been exposed to of the "discourse" surrounding this game and Eiyuden is totally mind-numbing.

On topic, great to see the game being received so well! Very exciting to see Korean studios really starting to step up to the plate with single player games.

If that choir drop comes in when you switch to turn-based mode, I swear to god

Absolutely love that you're doing this - it's fantastic to see someone with the know-how taking initiative considering what's been going on with this site of late.

Jobs tied to social links and the action/turn-based hybrid both sound absolutely genius. To be expected given the team but it also looks stylish as all hell. Definitely really looking forward to this one.

Super sorry to hear about this and all that other crap, dude. You did everything you could for Oreo and I'm sure he felt happy and very loved.

I'm already in the Discord but never use it since the chat just isn't for me.

I'd definitely consider going if 1) A significant portion of who's left here also went over and B) We used the forum mode, which is probably as close as we'll get to replicating what we have here.

Of course, as others have pointed out, this would really just be kicking the can some number of years down the road as Discord has also already begun its enshittification so it's just a matter of time before it, too, becomes unusable.

This thread just unlocked a memory

https://youtu.be/EaQR4EumjP4?si=E3HKAg2D5xkx0JlW

This was a moment in GameFAQs history

paramore twitter hornyposting

foolm0r0n posted...

God what a desperate time. Miranda's ass carried the entire industry solo for nearly a decade.

Bayonetta's ass was out there before Miranda's! Honestly I'm wondering if we have those two to thank for the industry-wide trend of huge asses that eventually led to 2B and stuff like even BotW Zelda having a huge donk

I've had the politics tag blocked since it was an option, but I really dislike the precedent being set here of banning topics outright, especially with the insanely heavy-handed way they're handling CE. (Which is a cesspit to be sure, but still.) If you look at what they're actually saying and consider what the overall mission of Fandom is there's little doubt that this board itself is going to be shuttered some day to spare them a rounding error, which really sucks.

I'm playing too and having a great time about 50 hours in. As I draw near to the end, though, it's really perplexing and actually kind of baffling how this game appears to be falling victim to the exact same stuff that made the original "the best 7/10 game ever." Like, I really just want to know wtf happened that they made the exact same mistakes on top of actually going backwards on some stuff like storage/equipment management being a straight up QoL downgrade from Dark Arisen.

Also waiting on the PC version, which thankfully should come out way faster than the first one did. (And with less double/triple exclusivity bullshit to boot!)

Reading some of those theories, the OJ case would've made for a great Umineko episode

This sounds like a great way to start WW3 and/or escalate the nuclear threat as high as it's been since the Cuban Missile Crisis

Wolves hunt in packs!

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
Final Fantasy X
Kingdom Hearts II
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

MGS3 is my favorite game of all time so it feels a little weird to put MGS2 here instead, but I can't deny that no game - no moment - quite captures the idea of the PS2 and the raw technological leap it represented for me quite like the opening of MGS2.

KanzarisKelshen posted...

(because iirc there just aren't aoe 3 star zerks)

I have a level 100 Spartacus and I won't stand for this disrespect

Edit: Well nevermind, I haven't played in so long I forgot his rarity was even lower!

Holy hell, that's an incredible pull, way to go!

Oh yeah I thought I was going nuts cause it kept loading like, an older version of the thread without a bunch of the posts I'd already seen last time I clicked into it. Not sure how that would even happen, really!