Guild Wars 3, Anti-Hyped
I had intended to make a post earlier in the week, when rumors that ArenaNet were planning a big reveal at Summer Game Fest began surfacing. But since things were going to be revealed on Friday, I figured I may as well wait. In any case, the rumors are true: Guild Wars 3 is a thing.
I could not be any less hyped. In fact, I feel negative hype.
The trailer is whatever. It’s fine. The issue is that this announcement effectively kills Guild Wars 2 for me.
Although I haven’t been posting too much about it, I have low-key been playing GW2 for several sessions each week pretty consistently. My goals have mostly revolved around completing the weekly Wizard Vault quests to earn currency to purchase some of the account upgrades in said Wizard Vault (bag slots, etc), with some farming routes on the side. From a game perspective, both of those activities were in service of working towards additional Legendary items to share amongst my characters. And remember, getting a Legendary means you never have to worry about that specific gear slot again.
…until there is an entirely new game that obsoletes all your work.
This isn’t my first rodeo – I’ve played WoW for more than a decade, and every expansion had green gear better than your raid purples. The continuity though came in the form of cosmetics/transmogs, titles, mounts, toys, Achievements, a sense of pride and accomplishment, gold, etc. There will undoubtedly be Hall of Monuments deal wherein you can get some exclusive skins in the new game for having X or Y achievements in GW2, just as there was coming from GW1, but it is not the same.
I dunno. People still play “dead”/maintenance mode MMOs all the time. Of all the alternatives out there, GW2 remains a fairly unique example of one where horizontal progression means you can indeed do most anything you want to as soon as you hit the level cap. If I were solely interested in exploration or drinking in the scenery or whatever, then there would still be a lot to like. However, I still prefer form and function, and if not for the hitherto meaningful function of Legendary crafting, I don’t see much marrow left on the bones for me. Nevermind how difficult it will be acquiring the hundreds of components of these items once the population winnows down, events fail for lack of players, and economy withers.
We shall see, I guess. Guild Wars 3 is going to launch into beta in Fall 2027. No word yet on any plans for future content in GW2 leading up to that (or afterwards).
Impressions: Metaphor: ReFantazio
I will not be finishing Metaphor: ReFantazio. Primarily because it leaves GamePass in like four days.
Aside from that, there are a couple other things working against ReFantazio. The biggest of which is the fact that I literally finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 a week or so prior. In many ways, Expedition 33 felt like a repudiation (or perhaps more charitably, a “reimagining”) of the classical JRPG formula. I disliked the dodge/parry mechanics in Expedition 33… but will admit it has been a bit more challenging than expected going back to a fully turn-base system. Watching enemies just sorta attack me and being unable to do anything but take the hits feels bad now.
Exacerbating things, ReFantazio has a sort of rock-paper-scissures punishing design. Instead of everyone getting a single turn apiece, there are turn “orbs” that only get half used if a given attack/spell happens to trigger the target’s weakness. For example, if you cast a Fire attack against an enemy weak to Fire, your next character can use the remaining “half-turn” to pile on the damage. So, theoretically, if you were facing a boss with a weakness to Fire and all your characters had Fire attacks, you could get six turns in a row.
Problem is, this also works the other way around. Enemy hits your entire squad with an AoE attack and any of your characters happen to be weak against the damage type? Bam, extra attack, which could very well be another AoE one. Later on, if one of your attacks gets Absorbed or Reflected or whatever, you actively lose extra turns, because fuck you, apparently.
This sort of design is interesting… on paper. One of the principle conceits of the game is that any of your teammates can channel any of the Archetypes (read: jobs) you have unlocked. Recruit a knight-looking dude that literally starts out with the Knight Archetype? Make him a Mage. Make your whole team a Mage! Characters can also “inherit” skills from other Archetypes as well to really get some combos going. The problem is that all of this revolves around either looking things up ahead of time, or getting unpleasantly surprised by getting smacked around. There is even an in-game feature that shows you what the most-used composition was across all players for the dungeon you are about to enter, pseudo-Dark Souls style. Which… thanks, I guess?
The real nail in the coffin for me though are the time limits.
I have railed for years against plots premised on fake time-sensitivity – “rescue Ciri before it’s too late! Or take a few weeks questing, whatever” – so you would be forgiven for assuming I want actual deadlines. I do not. At least, not in long-form games like RPGs. So imagine my dismay when in the first post-tutorial section of ReFantazio I get notice that I must clear the dungeon within 10 days or else I lose the game. Also, each day is divided into two parts, so you can talk to one person in the morning, another in the evening, then time passes. Dungeon delving takes a full day though.
Is it a serious, tight deadline which you must relentlessly optimize? Probably not. But it was enough of a mental friction point that I wanted to look up what happened if you beat the dungeon early, which inevitably led to spoiling elements of the dungeon, and at a certain point the game unraveled, reductio ad absurdum style to the paint-by-numbers that it was. Stack Mages at this part, then switch to Brawlers, farm infinitely respawning enemies at this next bit because the final mobs are level 20, etc, etc, etc. I was already primed to grind levels considering the timer otherwise makes it more difficult to do so later, but seeing the solutions already laid out ahead of me flipped a switch into the off position.
Overall, it is probably my own loss. The plot looked interesting, I loved the frequent anime interludes, the UI is pleasingly hyper-stylized. It has a 94 Metacritic score, for god’s sake. Which, is somehow 2 points higher than Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, by the way.
But I’m really, really not in the mood for another lengthy game that is a chore to actually play, and certainly not when it’s leaving Game Pass in a few days. Metaphor: ReFantazio will either come back, get in a cheap bundle, or I’ll catch it on Youtube.
About that E33 MoCap
I heaped a lot of praise about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s (E33) character animations already, and yet I feel a bit remiss for not showing what I was talking about. Below is a Youtube link to a “behind-the-scenes compilation of several early-game scenes, which includes both the finished game sequence (sans official voice actors) + the motion capture actors.
I would not consider these to be spoilers, as they occur within the first 5ish hours of the game. But…
In my First Impressions post, I said the following:
Nearly 14 years ago, I was blown away by Mass Effect’s wink, and here in Expedition 33 I just witnessed a character search another’s eyes to see if they truly meant what they said. You know, her face close, the silence, her eyes going back and forth with purpose, debriding the layers of your soul. I don’t know how, but they captured it. The bar has been raised again.
Feel free to watch the whole four-minute video, but the soul debridement happens at around 3:25.
All of it is so ridiculously good that I had to look up whether Sandfall Interactive had invented some secret tech or whatever, because why isn’t every new game coming out like this? Did they pour 80% of their budget into mocap or something?
Near as I can tell… nope. Or, technically nope. Most of the magic outside the performances themselves comes from off-the-shelf features of Unreal Engine 5. So, in many ways the “secret sauce” had a lot to do with being a new, smaller team without a lot of tech debt being able to pivot to an entirely new game engine at the perfect time. As this article points out, most of the work they did in UE4 had to be redone entirely due to the engine differences. One could imagine how much work would be thrown away if instead it was in a custom-made engine. A larger studio with 500 developers with 15+ years of experience on a proprietary engine is thus unlikely to be able to match E33 anytime soon (if ever).
Which… goddamn. Talk about perfect time and place.
In any case, I am a bit more optimistic about the (gaming) future. Sandfall Interactive probably doesn’t quite qualify as an “indie” studio, but I do consider these smaller teams to be the best path through the coming industry implosion. That we get to enjoy premium facial animations while doing so is all the more a bargain.
Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 – Complete
I finally beat Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 (E33) over the weekend after about 50 hours.
I’m not going to go into specific spoilers in this post, but I’ll slap a Yellow warning just in case.
Undoubtedly, one of the burning questions you have after my prior two posts complaining about it, is “did the combat system get any better?” And that answer is… Yes. Technically. Right at the very fucking end, when it least mattered. And for largely all the wrong reasons.
To be clear, the combat system is the exact same as it always was. If you disliked having turn-based combat with quick-time events baked into it from hour one, you’ll still be annoyed with it way later. What eventually changes is that you unlock a large enough variety of Pictos and opportunities to farm the shit out of mobs for special items that permanently increase your ability to equip more of them, that mobs no longer survive your first turn. By the end of the game, I had one character that always acted first, and just spammed the Free Aim attack, usually randomly generating enough extra AP to keep going until everything was dead. If they ran out of AP, they did a Base Attack which hit twice and regained them 6-8 AP to use in their second, bonus turn.
Getting to this point was not a cakewalk. One of the key Pictos necessary for the build only dropped from an optional boss fight that took me over 20 minutes of Dodge/Parrying to defeat. And to even get to that strength required a lot of farming various other endgame zones for drops that leveled up your weapons.
The kicker though is that the game basically forces you down that path. At the beginning of Act 3, you gain access to the final dungeon right away. Which is fine, refreshing almost. When you speak with your companions though, they have “companion quests” available that send you elsewhere in the world… and those places have a MASSIVE, overwhelming increase in difficulty from what you have experienced to this point. I have never seen this design in a videogame before, probably because it is dumb. Having optional harder dungeons – the equivalent of Ruby and Emerald Weapon in FF7 – for flexing? Cool. Hiding companion closure quests behind said harder dungeons, which will ultimately result in you overpowering the final boss as a result? Not cool.
Alternatively… maybe you are just really good at Parries/Dodges. In which case, you will take literally zero damage from any encounter and (eventually) beat every fight without any issue.
You might be asking why I’m dwelling on the combat system when that is not why E33 won all the Game of the Year awards. I’m dwelling on it precisely because that is not why E33 won all those awards.
E33 has some of the best art direction I have ever seen in any video game. It has some of the highest production values of any soundtrack I have heard in any video game. Seriously, I was going to go through the OST and suggest some in particular to give you a taste, but goddamn there are 150+ songs and any one of them would be a signature track in any other game. The dialog and character animations feel raw and real. The plot can be trippy and gut-wrenching at the same time, leaving you with impossible choices.
All of that… and I hated playing it. I have zero issues with the way combat is presented, the UI is slick as hell, every new Picto acquired caused me to reexamine every possible synergy (which I enjoy doing). I’m not incapable of the Parries/Dodges, I just don’t like that they exist in the game. If they don’t bother you, or hell, if you enjoy that they exist? More power to you! No doubt E33 is a god-tier game for you.
For me though? I dunno. Back in the day, 20-30 years ago, I would routinely play JRPGs and say that story is worth any amount of repetitive grind. I am not certain that that principle holds anymore. If E33 were any other game, I would have dropped it after the first 5 hours and said it was just not for me. But E33 isn’t just some other game, it’s an entirely new bar that elevates the medium in all ways… but one.
So, there it is. Glad I played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, glad I experienced it, and glad it’s over.
GameNative
It took me several hours to set up my Retroid Pocket 6 (RP6) with all the emulators and copies of 30+ year-old games. Then I downloaded an app called GameNative, and within minutes had access to over 2000ish of my games across Steam, Epic, Amazon (?!), and GOG. And it is seriously changing the way I look at games and how I play them.
Probably.
In the likely event you haven’t been watching RetroGameCorps or TechDweeb videos for the last year, the handheld gaming scene is having a Renaissance moment. The nostalgia mining element has always been there – “Here is a $80 GBA-looking thing that plays PlayStation 1 games!” – but there are only so many of those veins to go around. Then the Steam Deck came and kind of blew open the more premium tier of handheld devices. In the last year or so, though, there have been some serious developments on the software side of things that allow for Steam to more easily communicate on Android devices without a lot of workarounds. This includes automatically applying drivers and settings and tweaks to get games to function correctly.
I don’t know all the technical stuff, but as Todd Howard would say: it just works.
…for most games. The RP6 I own has a chipset which is the equivalent to a 1050ti graphics card, for example, and only 8 GB of RAM. I’m not going to be playing Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur’s Gate 3 on this thing. However, most of the games I have (by volume) aren’t AAA titles. Hell, I spent like 200+ hours in March playing Mewgenics and Slay the Spire 2. And guess what? Both games fully work on the RP6 and include cloud saves. Granted, Mewgenics isn’t as controller-friendly as I’d like, but still!
As mentioned earlier, all this is changing the way I look at games in general. For one thing, it has me reexamining my entire decade+ Steam/Epic/Amazon/GOG libraries to see if there are games that I may have otherwise ignored/missed that could be more fun by virtue of playing on a handheld.
For example, I just played through the entirety of Celeste on the RP6. Was it a better experience than just playing on my PC with a controller? Probably not. In fact, I ended up purchasing a separate grip for the RP6 because I was getting hand cramps after playing more than an hour straight with the RP6. Although that might be more due to Celeste’s control scheme and precision platforming. The fact remains that I did stick with it and beat Celeste in little 15-20 minute increments in-between meetings, while waiting for other games to load, and eventually just in straight-up long sessions. Celeste is certainly more amenable for this sort of gameplay experience than other games might be, but it’s a proof of concept for me. Plus, as an Android device, the software manages to perfectly (thus far) suspend the game at a moment’s notice if something were to come up.
After reviewing my existing catalog, I have begun to pay more attention to all those ancillary (bundle) sales that I may have hitherto ignored. Just this past week, I picked up Journey and Donut County for just over $3 apiece. I haven’t played Journey in just about 13 years and I would probably enjoy it more on a larger screen… but the fact that I could play it (natively!) on a handheld? Yes, please. As for Donut County, that looks precisely like the sort of goofy fun I wish to be able to conjure up to fill in the gaps between moments.
Not everything is sunshine and rainbows, of course. I was initially excited to finally have an excuse to play Rain World, but everything looks tiny on the RP6 and there aren’t any in-game graphical options to correct it. Slay the Spire 2 has controller support already, but not touchscreen support that I can tell. As mentioned, Mewgenics is playable, but there’s no way I’m going to move the mouse cursor around with a thumbstick the entire game when I just want to move a few squares. I anticipate many such idiosyncrasies as I load into various games.
Overall though, I’m finding GameNative to be a game-changer for me. In many ways, this functionality was what I was waiting for the Steam Machine for. The Retroid Pocket 6 has video out capability, so it technically fulfills that portion too, if I were so inclined. All that is left, really, is to check its MineCraft capability. And wouldn’t you know, MineCraft is on Android and this is an Android device.
So, my guess is: “pretty good.” Better than on Switch? We shall see.
Retroid Pocket 6 and Nostalgia Horizon
I previously purchased and just now received (a month later) a Retroid Pocket 6 (RP6).
The total was $275. “But, Azuriel, don’t you already have two retro handhelds?” I do. “Then surely you are using them so much that an upgraded experience is warranted?” Hahaha.
Here’s the thing: I considered the RP6 a defensive purchase. Do I need it? No, my PC plays everything I could possibly want, including the very games being emulated. But will I always be able to power my PC to play some dumb game or another? Who knows. Plus, prices are only going up.
I’m not here saying that the RP6 is necessarily a prepping item, but I do know that it is a complete package that is capable of playing all the games I have nostalgia for. My prior handhelds could do up to PS1/N64, but the lack of an analog stick made those difficult (despite the PS1 not having a stick…). Plus, you know, it also does Switch, a bunch of Steam games via GameNative, Android ports, and some fancy shit like plugging into a TV and operating like a mini-console. We’ll see how that works out.
That phrase though, “All the games I have nostalgia for,” got me thinking. When I look back, the PS2 is very much the caboose of my nostalgia train. I technically had a GameCube and a PS3, but the library of games I played on those two combined are dwarfed by anything I played elsewhere. I never purchased a PS4 or PS5, nor any Xbox console. I pretty much went from PS2 to a straight PC, playing Battlefield 2, then Magic Online, then World of Warcraft, then a decade-long fugue state and yada yada here we are.
But… why? Why do I feel no nostalgia for games past PS2?
The simple answer that comes to mind is the coincidental end of an age: I had graduated college and started the 9-5 drudgery of adult existence right when the PS2 “ended.” That feels about right. At the same time though… it doesn’t really explain why I don’t feel nostalgia for games like Command & Conquer, Diablo 2, DOOM, and Fallout 1 & 2, all of which I played on PC within that same window.
Is it because the PC “era” more fuzzy? I have changed computers several times over the intervening decades, but still interact with the games using the same keyboard and mouse interface. In contrast, I had to relearn like nine different controller types in that same period. Hmm. Nah, that doesn’t feel like a legitimate reason.
The only thing left that comes to mind is, perhaps, that the nostalgia is tied to specific (social) memories. Games like FF7 blew my high school mind, but it was further cemented in memory when I then started bringing all my friends over to watch the cinematics (after loading one of the many specific save files curated for that purpose). There was nostalgia for GoldenEye after probably a dozen or more weeks of split-screen multiplayer deathmatch parties. Facility + Proximity Mine only = hilarity ensued. I have some very formative (and social!) memories surrounding Command & Conquer that I may share at a later time, but few other kids my age had PCs available, let alone games for them.
Anyway, there it is. Retroid Pocket 6 acquired.
[E33] Back on the Horse
After a quick, 250-hour detour through Mewgenics and Slay the Spire 2, I am back on the Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (E33) horse.
It’s a very beautiful horse. Very sleek, powerful. Just wish I didn’t have to muck the stall all the time.
As before, it all comes down to the combat system. In short, I do not find it fun at all. There are certain aspects of the pre-combat planning bits that I do find engaging. There is a ton of customization when it comes to choosing which Pictos (passives) to have active, with synergies and combos galore. Indeed, the whole thing actively reminded me of Final Fantasy Tactics and the the Job system, where you could mix and match certain abilities together. Every time I pick up a new Picto, I start reviewing the whole list and see where it generates new interactions.
The actual battle execution is just not my cup of tea. I’m no longer “punishing myself” by trying to Parry every enemy attack, and just using Dodge instead. This has improved the experience quite a bit, or at least lowered the frustration, but fundamentally combat is still just a long series of Quick Time Events. You have to Dodge/Parry in games like Dark Souls too, but you can also strafe, run away, approach at different angles, and so on, which makes the Dodge/Parry feel less binary overall. Not so in E33.
It also doesn’t help that all the fun and exciting parts of combat are heavily focused on the Dodge/Parry mechanics. If you successfully Parry every attack in a sequence, you gain AP and deal immense counter-damage and greatly increase the Break bar. With the right Pictos, you also heal and get a bunch of other bonuses. Dodging attacks gives you like 1 AP total, if you have the appropriate Picto equipped. Granted, certain Picto combinations can give you AP for face-tanking if you don’t want to press buttons at all, but the point is that very clearly the game puts the ideal “Parry everything” reward front and center. So even though I am progressing through the game just fine, it certainly feels like I’m just not engaging with like half of it.
Which… is probably accurate, honestly. If this wasn’t Expedition 33, I would have stopped playing.
Luckily (?), it is Expedition 33, and I am committed to seeing it through. All the positives about the characters, the emotions, the evocative environments that remind me of Journey are still there. There is something special to be said about a game that compels you to take 5-10 screenshots a session, including of the dialog.
And so, I continue on. For those that come after.
More Impressions: Slay the Spire 2, pt 2
My original Impressions post for Slay the Spire 2 was about a month ago. At the time, I was merely whelmed with the experience. Since then, my time /played has reached 80 hours and I now have all five characters up to Ascension 10 (the highest) while playing on the beta branch. Suffice it to say, my overall impression on the game has improved quite a bit.
Incidentally, many people apparently agree. There are reports that Slay the Spire 2 has sold over 5 million copies while still posting some respectable concurrent Steam numbers:
So, what changed from my perspective? Well… my perspective.
There is the obvious point that this is an early access release of a game in which even minor balance changes can make or break the experience. Some things were indeed over-tuned and have since been nerfed and the gameplay feels better for it. But the real change for me was internal: I needed to “unlearn” habits and inclinations from the first game. Many of the cards and characters were seemingly ported over wholesale from the original, but that did not mean they could/should be played the same. Once I let go of the baggage and muscle memory, I was free to enjoy all the nuances that this series such a genre titan.
Ironically, one of the biggest personal shifts came about from Reddit memes. Meet Snakebite.
Explaining a meme kinda takes all the fun out of it, but the short-ish version is that everyone was absolutely clowning on Snakebite as a F-tier card. I also felt it was absolutely terrible, especially considering Deadly Poison is a card that costs 1 less and almost grants the same amount. Then, one of the most famous Slay the Spire streamers, Jorbs, started posting videos about how Snakebite is actually a good card. The memes intensified. At some point during a random Silent run, I was offered Snakebite as a card reward and I was like “fuck it, let’s see how bad it is.” And, well… it wasn’t, actually.
It’s not an earth-shattering revelation that the community sometimes gets it wrong. It is also not uncommon for specific cards/abilities in games to be overlooked or work better in specific situations or with certain combos. In Snakebite’s case though, I legitimately felt dumb for how wrong I was about the card. To be clear, I’m not like excited to see a Snakebite being offered. But now I have a better understanding on why some cards are built the way that they are, and the niches that they occupy.
[Edit]: Briefly, what makes Snakebite much better than it appears is the “Retain” keyword. Retain means it stays in your hand instead of being discarded at the end of each turn. So, at a basic level, Snakebite helps improve the consistency of your turns by being available any time you happen to draw mostly defensive cards when the enemy isn’t attacking. Would two Strikes dealing 12 damage right away be better? Okay, play those Strikes then. Snakebite is for when you only draw one Strike, or the enemy has Thorns, or if you can leverage the full value of Poison (28 damage over 7 turns).
In any case, if you like deck-building roguelikes at all, Slay the Spire 2 is your endgame, even in Early Access. It will only get better from here.
Entry Point
I am flabbergasted how any of us beat videogames as kids.
Little Man has been playing a lot of videogames with me lately, with some mix of modern and retro titles. The struggle is finding what I would consider a good entry point to the medium. Back in the day, we obviously had no choice in the matter – “you get what you get, and don’t throw a fit.” I personally started on the NES with Super Mario Bros and eventually Super Mario Bros 3, but I always remembered how much better Super Mario World felt once the SNES came out. So, having tandem-completed Super Mario Odyssey (twice!), I thought that handing over the controller (or specifically the RG35XXSP) to Little Man and letting him play Super Mario World solo would be a good idea.
Spoiler: it was not.
Even when I took over to help him out of a particularly hard part, I came to realize how much of Super Mario World consisted entirely of hard spots. It is also difficult to fully appreciate how bizarre the concept of holding down the run button 100% of the time is in a platformer. Seriously, just try playing any non-3D Mario game without running. It’s painful. And yet… why build it that way in the first place?
Anyway, I backed off of Mario platformers and introduced him to Kirby instead. Specifically, Kirby Super Star for the SNES. This ended up being a much better entry point, for several reasons. First, Kirby has an HP bar, which means you can take multiple hits from enemies while you learn their attack patterns. Second, Kirby can float, which eases you into platforming elements. Third, you can create an AI companion any time you have a power, which immensely helps you with bosses and surviving the level in general. There were still some tricky bits to the game, but the “training wheels” helped Little Man build confidence and develop controller-based skills.
Once Kirby was exhausted, we moved back to Super Mario Wonder on the Switch. There is a lot to like how Nintendo designed co-op in Wonder. When one player dies, they come back as a ghost that can float around for 5 seconds, reviving if they touch the surviving player. Later on though, there are some levels in which being revived will result in you immediately dying again, and “giving up” simply means draining both players of any extra lives. At that point, I had Little Man play solo and try a given level 3-4 times before he could tag out. It took a while, and I ended up playing the final parts of the game entirely myself, but we beat Wonder a few weeks ago.
The next game I wanted him to try playing was Super Mario 64. “It’s got platforming, but you don’t die in one hit. Should be fine.” Spoiler: it was not fine. In fact, it was one of the most disillusioning experiences I’ve had in quite some time. I remember spending a lot of time with Mario 64. I remember fully completing the game with 120 stars. I remember it being a great game.
What I apparently didn’t remember is the godawful camera. Like, legitimately bad. Even I had issues walking inside the castle, camera gyrating wildly while Mario starts drunkenly spinning in circles. Did the novelty of three dimensions paper over the terrible-feeling controls and camera? I let Little Man play for a bit, and then helped him get a few of the Stars to unlock other levels. I went into the Snow level and then tried the slide race… five (5) times. Never even made it past the first turn. WTF, mate.
Maybe it’s the official Nintendo emulator, maybe it’s the joy-cons, maybe the N64 claw controller was better at that specific task, maybe I’m just older and/or used to other (better) control schemes. Regardless… it just feels bad. It’s one thing to know you can’t go home again, but it’s another driving there anyway only to be surprised at the smoking ruins of your remembered youth.
Of course, there are games from that era and before that do hold up. I have no doubt that Super Mario World will make another appearance once Little Man is a bit older and has more platforming skills under his belt. And once he can read at an appropriate level, there are some classic RPGs that I would love to introduce him to. That said… yikes. I purchased Super Mario Galaxy 1 + 2 recently as a sort of Odyssey replacement (plus I never played them), and I’m starting to sweat. Surely this won’t be another Mario 64 moment… will it? And what do kids even start playing these days?
[Fake Edit] It’s been a while since I drafted this post, but we have since beat Mario Galaxy and are on the tail-end of Galaxy 2. Thankfully, it was not as bad as Mario 64… but it’s still a bit rough. For one thing: holy nausea, Batman! I cannot remember the last game that made me motion sick from its inherent design, but Galaxy’s whole schtick of running across little planetoids has not landed well.
That said, Little Man has made some significant progress in terms of timing and problem-solving in a 3D space. There are some aspects he Nopes right out of immediately – usually having to do with countdown timers and such, which is totally understandable – but there have been a few times where he has completed a full level by himself. Can’t wait to see if I can get him into the Zelda series next.
In An Age 
Gaming News Roundup
Jun 12
Posted by Azuriel
A lot of gaming news came out this week. Here is what I have been keeping an eye on.
Fable (Feb 2027)
I never got into the Fable series back in the day, as they were XBox exclusives for a long while. Technically, the first and third entries are in my Steam library, but Fable 3 crashing during an auto-save didn’t cut it in 2016, let alone a decade later. What is cutting things, is this 30-minute gameplay trailer.
The systems presented are very gamified, as I am sure the originals were as well, but I was impressed nonetheless with the overall game vibe. “Romance any random NPC” telegraphs that romance isn’t that deep, but maybe that doesn’t matter if you take a shining to a particular barkeep or general narrative. No doubt there will be forum posts detailing RimWorld-esque grotesqueries such as swooning the orphan whose parents you murdered for no reason.
But you know what? Good on them. When you build a sandbox, sometimes you are going to uncover some buried shit.
Anyway, I’m excited. It’s also going to be on Game Pass, so there’s that too.
Palworld 1.0 (July 10th)
After my original forays into Palworld two years ago, I have not touched the game since. While the zeitgeist has moved on, I was waiting for precisely this particular bit of news, e.g. a version 1.0 release. I do not have grand delusions that any developer takes versioning seriously, but if you are going to pick a particular point in time to make final determination as to the quality of a game, I figure 1.0 is about as good as anything.
You can watch the latest trailer here. It has nothing on the very original teaser trailer, but then again, nothing else really could.
Valheim 1.0 (September 9th)
Same deal as Palworld. Played for almost 50 hours five years ago, and stopped once I ran out of Early Access road (and encountered placeholder monster drops). I have some concerns about what I have heard about the Mistlands experience already in the game, but we shall see. Trailer here.
Abiotic Factor: Entropic Break (Autumn 2026)
I almost didn’t include this one, as I am not entirely sure how I feel about it. Specifically, Abiotic Factor is getting a DLC released later this year. Which is good! But I spent nearly 160 hours playing the game already, and I’m not certain whether I want (or am able to be) sucked in back in. Trailer here.
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Tags: Abiotic Factor, Fable, Gaming News, Palworld, Upcoming Releases, Valheim