It’s a lot of fun. Round-less has always been my favorite way to do turn-based. I wish they’d do more with field positioning too (like the final boss of Zero), but the character kits are almost always cool and I like that they are always throwing in a tweak or two for the battle system.

This is how I ended up almost exclusively patient gaming for years starting in 2013. I’d been locked into World of Warcraft for since its first release and Pandaria era was really the first time I started looking at other games to play. I had plenty to catch up on!

FF12, 13, 15, and 7 Remake were all big sellers. It’s more the recent, poor performances of Rebirth and 16 that have raised eyebrows (although I can understand the argument that 15 and 16 moved away from being JRPGs from a gameplay point of view).

The big names they are left with right now are FF14 (the other MMO), Nier (the brainchild of an auteur, not regular work product), and Dragon Quest. Maybe FF17 will be end up being more traditional, but with the way that series’ dev cycles have gone on top of the restructuring, who knows when that will surface.

Kinda telling that not a single one of those revealed titles on that roadmap is new. Not even a new game in an existing IP.

I’m not sure how much time they have before they start to be perceived as ceding their long-term dominance in their major genre. Persona 6 is around the corner, and RGG has also been growing.

I’ve made a conscious effort to start doing this in conversations in general instead of opening up a browser tab. Yeah, “just google it” is a thing, but asking is often enough if you’re not in a hurry, so why not?

When it comes to semiconductors, there’s always another grift.

Unfortunately, after AI, it’ll probably be military drones.

Can’t have that, can we 💅

They overhauled the skill system in 2.0, and the major bugs like police spawning were fixed a while back. There might be some stuff from early marketing that still never made it in. I know the rail transit system was one of the common talking points, and it’s in there now, but I wouldn’t call it an essential part of the game or anything.

That said, I first played it after 1.3 and I can’t say I ever felt like it was outright incomplete. It’s probably still the most technically impressive game I’ve played and it’s a fun sandbox. Solid writing and voice acting, too.

Full tank. Nothing gives me more anxiety than car anxiety.

I lived out this way once upon a time and miss it dearly. I never did get as far north as Tillamook Bay, but I have great memories of Lincoln City and Newport. Imagine my reaction when this game was announced, hah.

The photo in Chloe’s house of Arcadia Bay is one of Garibaldi, just mirrored. For plausible deniability, of course!

Freelancer would have been fresher in memory 15 years ago, and that’s one that had seamless intra-system travel. Gameplay in Freelancer even flowed better than NMS for getting from orbit to orbit and having encounters or discoveries along the way. It just didn’t have the on-foot gameplay. I had the same problem with loading screens in Everspace 2. Killed the flow. Whoever tries to do this again is going to have to make sure transitions are minimal.

And that’s what I don’t get about Starfield, conceptually. With this project scope, you’re not competing well with NMS for ship-to-foot or orbit-to-surface transition, you’re not doing better than Freelancer–a 20+ year old game–for all the in-space stuff, and the procgen hamstrings you with all the “Bethesda magic” their worlds are known for. It’s like someone said “let’s do Daggerfall in space” and went rigid top-down design with it, retrofitting whatever they could along the way to make a functional game around the procgen.

Every time I see that scene where the three of them are presented and the Narrator describes him as a “handsome young man…”

Yeah, goes back a ways! I feel like it has a knack for resurfacing after I’ve completely forgotten about it. I like what I’m seeing here with the gameplay.

To be clear, the main story in 3rd is kind of a side story for the Sky arc itself, but the rest of the game is massively important for the rest of the Trails series.

Something of mild historical interest is that Magna Cum Laude had some genuinely brilliant dialogue here and there. The abusive arcade machine and tabletop RPG scene still stick firmly in my memory all these years later, and there was solid comedic timing as well (“Are those my Funyuns?”). Unfortunately, more good lines are cut up into the minigames, which act out scenes with gamified dialogue selection. Many of the games probably have to be re-attempted to clear, too, and no matter how funny a line is, it’s not gonna be great the fourth time because you hit too many beers and can’t control the cursor. The game’s also very much a product of the irreverent college movie genre, which has aged in the worst way. Consent issues and all.

Al Lowe’s games were more highbrow, for lack of a better term, so they didn’t go quite as far off the rails. They seemed to be the kind of thing aimed at a Playboy Magazine reader. One of these, Love for Sail, remains my favorite of the bunch. I think they really hit their stride with the gameplay in that one, and the writing and the visuals were solid, though I’ve seen better in this genre since.

I didn’t see great reviews for Wet Dreams so that was an easy skip–I’ve been ignoring the series since MCL–but it’s interesting to see a high opinion of those games. I almost never see anyone talking about them, much less in a glowing way.

I ended up just switching

It’s a new publisher without a lot of price history too, so no idea what they are going to be like with this.

It’s ridiculous, and like they said, a bit too easy to break the game with. Just stack a couple multipliers and you’re one-shotting anything.

It is one deep rabbit hole.

The Great Ace Attorney! Just finished the third adventure. I’m a huge fan of the original trilogy and was skeptical this would measure up, but it’s been a brilliant evolution of the series so far.