I just don’t see how this could provide any value. Assuming a new games comes out, there is literally no information to train on but the game itself. You kind of need existing guides for that and if developers have to write them themselves, you might as well add those with a good full text search.

On top of that, the age of guides seems kind of gone. Most games are quite on the nose about everything and tend to present more tutorials than you will ever need.

And lastly, I just don’t want to write stuff out on a console and neither do I want to wear some kind of microphone for my single player games.

I don’t think I ever found a potion before clearing the area. I remember stocking up on food, like you, and eventually stumbling into the merchant selling me fire resistant armour.

Ignoring your uncalled for insult, that’s just not how I play games.

Once I was free of the tutorial area, I set off in a random direction and did my thing. I completed multiple divine beats before ever setting foot in Kakariko.

If I wanted to follow the direct path as described by NPCs, I might as well go play a linear game. I got to the destinations eventually, but almost never on the beated path.

It’s a game about free exploration, it’s silly to expect the player to directly follow these instructions. Just make him part of the mandatory tutorial area or have him come to you after collecting your first 10 seeds or something.

I only found out about the guy after finishing the game.

God of War 2018

I gave it a full playthrough, but since then it has pretty much become my definition of AAA slop.

• The game is littered with “puzzles”. The solution is always obvious within seconds and on top of that you get commentary on how to “solve” it. They just waste your time.

• Stats don’t matter. Early on you get your first weapon upgrade, I think I tripled my damage. The very next enemy got some commentary about “showcasing” my new weapon. It took the exact same amount of hits as the same enemy type did before ugrading my weapon. Since weapon upgrade materials are fixed drops from bosses, everything just scales alongside you.

• The battle system in general is a slog. 9 out of 10 times throwing your axe feels like the best option. Even the post game bosses are annoying at best.

• Also, why is the camera so darn close. Your “cinematic angles” mean shit when the gameplay suffers from it.

• There are so many “cutscenes” that have you walk at a snails pace. If your “gameplay” can be executed by a rubber band on my joystick, then just give me a proper cutscene. Annoying me isn’t immersive.

• You get awesome godly powers - for as long as cutscenes are running. Your super healing and mountain splitting punches mean nothing against any random draugr.

• Probably some more things, but it’s been a few years.

The story was fine, but I would have enjoyed watching a cutscene compilation more than playing the game. In fact that’s what I did your second entry.

Pokemon is owned by GameFreak, Creatures Inc and Nintendo. Roughly split in thirds.

However, Nintendo also owns an undisclosed amount of Creatures Inc and I think parts of GameFreak, making them the majority holder of Pokemon as a whole.

GameFreak does release other games on different platforms. Notably, they will release Beast of Reincarnation on everything but the Switch 2 this year.

I deal with crack and I’m fine! It’s those damn addicts who are the problem.

It’s the same thing every time. Someone tries to stop a corporation from preying on vulnerable people and others jump to its defense because they “aren’t affected”. Have some empathy, man.

Psychonauts is really good and currently less than 2 bucks. There’s also a sequel, currently about 9 bucks. (Both in €)

I’m fuzzy on the details, but it went something like this:

• I set up long resource lines of coal, copper and iron.
• I needed a thing#1 and built a neat little package to build it, exactly to order and on minimal space.
• I copy pasted that design 10 times left to right along my resource belt line.
• Then thing#2 came along. Needed the same stuff and combined with thing#1 into thing#3. So I wrapped my resource belts, designed a second package on minimal space and also copy pasted it 10 times. So I had pairs of thing#1 and thing#2 with a line in the middle to combine them and a belt to collect them. Worked nicely.

Then:

• Coal was replaced by electricity. I had no space for powerlines.
• I got other types of the grab thingies, potentially simplifying my setup.
• Suddenly I got sorting, making my belt setup a waste of space (I had one line per thing/resource).
• All belts needed to be replaced by better belts.

Oh and:

• Thing#4 came along, needing 2 of thing#1 and one thing#2 with some additional resources. Since I built to order, I basically had to start from scratch or severly hamper the production of thing#3. Also, my packages didn’t work anymore without wasting space and/or entirely fucking up resource belt management.

Therefore, I designed stuff from scratch to fit the new requirements.

That’s from the very beginning, but after repeating this pattern a few times, I gave up. Building it non-optimized felt even worse.

Being on the patient side of things, two games I’ve played in recent years and didn’t enjoy were:

God of War (2018) - it just felt like AAA slop to me. Meaningles upgrades, tons of obvious puzzles at any corner - never throwing in even a single brain teaser, boring combat - the best option was almost always to throw the axe, that thing were you start walking at a snails pace to mask loading and/or play a cutscene and on top of that your god powers being mostly cutscene exclusive. Just your bog standard AAA game with no ‘friction’ - boring.

Factorio - it just feels like work to me. On top of that, going in blind, I just didn’t enjoy building something up just to tear it down again because I’ve unlocked something new changing the requirements. Once again, feels like a job in IT. Also, resource patches being limited just gave me the weirdest kind of anxiety despite never actually seeing one run out.

Honestly, it would be weird for any industry to start caring about ethics after all this time.

Not an endorsement of AI but a criticism of capitalism.

Personally, I don’t care about TLOU, but I don’t think you should be leading with a massive spoiler as the thumbnail. Others might give you a lot of shit for that.

Take my opinion with a grain of salt, for the most part, I’ve mostly enjoyed games released in the third generation and didn’t touch anything past the seventh. The increasing amount of handholding turned me off and degrading mega evolutions from the once advertised evolution of the gameplay formular to a mere gimmick broke the last straw.

That being said: The Gamecube games hands down. The intro cutscene to Colosseum has more story than some generations did in their entirety and instead of you just stumbling into the plot you are actually an integral part of it. As an added bonus, both games feature final bosses that actually fight back. I think Colosseum is the only Pokemon game I ever struggled in.

Of course, taking everything Pokemon into account, Mystery Dungeon is the only true answer, but I wanted to go with an traditional RPG first.

If you insist on mainline games, you’re probably right about the fifth generation. These games have everything you would need, but the execution itself is fumbled - and it has to be, since they questioned their own franchise at its core. Logically speaking, N is right and everyone else is wrong.

There are some interesting things in other generations, but it usually feels tacked on and isn’t actually relevant for 95% of the game. Like, the sixth generation had some nice ideas - but they are mostly implied or retold, without you having any urgency in the matter. Once again why I chose the GC games, two of the few games with you being part of the plot. In the early mainline games, you mostly happen to be there when story happens, in the later games, you sometimes only get told that story happens somewhere.

Reddit? The site with a search so bad, I had to use external search engines? Great idea.

Also, Reddit offers their own AI Q&A? The site that prominently poisend many Google AI summaries? What are they even smoking at this point?

Yes, there’s a main story event in the DLC with the single best piece of equipment - the Professor’s spectacles. Buy them, it’s your only chance!

Also there is some missable witcher gear in the very same quest, I think. Just get everything in the Borsodi Brothers’ venue.

Arch.

I’m vegan, german and into fitness. There really was no other choice. /s?

Also, it’s lightweight, you always get the most recent software, pacman is superb and it’s super stable. In about 10 years on multiple systems, I never had anything break. The worst of it are simple problems during updates, which are always explained on their website.

Lastly, there is the wiki. The single best source of Linux information out there. Might as well be using the distro that’s directly explained there, albeit a lot of information can be used on other ones as well.

With arch-install, you don’t even need to learn much, but learning is never a bad idea and will be great if something does break. Every system can break. Arch prepares you for that.

I don’t think they truly understand their audience. Everything before the endgame is just a tutorial in MH. Yet, they usually ship the endgame with the DLC .

Then again, it sells anyways.

Wouldn’t have expected anything else. The two types of people I’ve mostly seen buying the Switch 2 are those who are really into Mario Kart and those who are into Pokemon, for the extra frame rate.

Neither of these groups is known for buying 3rd party games - at least not the ones I know.

You see, that’s your problem. Companies don’t make games for any other reason than money. Since there are no microtransactions or subscriptions available, they quite frankly don’t care if you ever play the game after you’ve purchased it.

They moved a lot of units already and considering it’s only a side game with reused assets, they made a profit. Therefore, the game by all means is a success for them, even if nobody would play anymore.

Concurrent players also shouldn’t influcene future sales by much, since you only need 3 people at a time

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, above all else.

That being said, Shin Megami Tensei Devil Survivor 1 and 2 are awesome. They combine SRPGs with the usual SMT combat - I don’t think I’ve found something similar yet.

You move around like you would in any other SRPG, then you can attack enemies in range to enter normal turn based combat - however, at most, you can only play out 2 full turns before combat ends. Afterwards the next unit moves. Each unit represents a squad of up to three characters you will be batteling with, usually a human and two demons. Depending on your squad, you may have different movement, range and abilities.