Ronnie

Nice one pal, glad to hear you're back for a bit and in a bit of a better place.

Absolutely. Ridiculous thing to say.

I'm gonna say it, I really like how Mario sounds so far. Don't mind how the thread is handled, I just came on here to appreciate the Crazy Cap store from Odyssey in the background of an early shot. Oh and the way the Cheep Cheep in the bag eyes him up is hilarious.

Fantastic. Looks stunning. They've made Mario very endearing (not that he wasn't in the games obv)

Great show, much tighter than previous years. Lots of cool announcements. Jedi Survivor, Earthblade and the Mario Movie clip were the highlights for me.

Earthblade (Celeste devs' next game) looks great, but man 2024

looks fantastic as expected

Those expecting all these years to be this incredible showpiece full of insane new reveals, will naturally be disappointed. Not sure how anyone can expect this pop up show to be that. Those going in with managed expectations for a few cool trailers will likely enjoy it. I'm looking forward to the Jedi Survivor gameplay, maybe some Starfield and the Celeste dev team's new game that they've teased a trailer for tonight.

Again I'm not saying that tactically it annoys me the most. Just that when I played SMK the lightning bolt was something rare and cool, now it happens all the time.

I figured I'd be corrected on my post. Never said SMK aren't the biggest cheaters in the series, I just enjoyed how much of a rarity the lightning bolt was back in that game.

Just played the second pack for the first time. That ice creamed themed level at the end was great! Original course I believe? Shame the visuals aren't up to scratch compared to the base game (Mario Circuit SNES looked rough af) but there's still lots of fun to be had.

Custom items is a great feature. Finally I can turn off blue shells and the lightning bolt, which was fun in SMK on SNES cause it showed up once every 2 or 3 races, as opposed to what feels like 2 or 3 times per race like MK8.

The exploration in this game is such a huge let-down. Treasure chests are everywhere but they almost always don't require any puzzling to get to them. 90% of the rarer chests are literally just for turning left instead of right. Maybe the more open free-roam sections will have better puzzles or content, we'll see (if I ever get to one, feels like 10 hours of non stop linear gameplay) Everything involving Freya is awful so far. Her dialogue and voice performance is atrocious, especially during one mission a third of the way in. And the way Playstation first party games have been ruining the solution to puzzles two and a half seconds after you arrive at them can f right off. I thought it was bad in Horizon Forbidden West but it's much worse here.

I think they're all good, except maybe the very high pitched German one. Tbh I thought Chris Pratt's Ah-ha-ha-haaa and Wahooo! were both pretty much spot on.

That's the one! Yeah it's fun to manage each section as you go through it. The endless fetch quests leading up to it was a bit weird and tedious though.

I think it's a redesign. Miyamoto himself called it out as a redesign.

Happy to praise it all over again.

Glad they re-designed Donkey Kong, I was never a fan of the Rare design. This version is much better. Watched the trailer again this morning, still amazing.

Continues to look incredible. Mario seems a bit more of a goof than we're used to but obv that's prob just the usual hero's journey thing. Bit worried we'll end up seeing the whole film in trailers and clips by the time it releases so I might try and not watch any more till release. But yeah, as a Nintendo fan, hard to ask for better than that!

Fantastic finale to Andor, to a fantastic series. I'm pleased to see it's getting such overwhelmingly high praise online, many articles putting it alongside House of the Dragon. I certainly wouldn't disagree. The show is masterfully put together. Shame we have to wait two years for season 2.

Playing this at the moment, nice to finally have something to play on my PS5 again. It's predictably great, extremely high production values, good story-telling, fun gameplay. Thankfully it doesn't do that maddening Horizon thing where 80% of the '?' things you go exploring for, you don't have the tools for. I'm finding it very very linear so far though. I'm a third of the way through the game I think and there's been 2 side-quests available. Everything else has been these long drawn out main story missions. Tbh, the parts where I ran around and explored on my own have been the most fun so Amazing polish as you would expect although the third realm you visit, as well as being an incredibly long linear sequence, was also incredibly buggy. It felt like playing Jedi Fallen Order at launch there were so many glitches and animation bugs. But yeah, otherwise it's more God of War, which certainly is no bad thing, I figured as with most Sony first part games it would stick to the same formula. Looking forward to diving in more, though it seems like after that long drawn out story mission there might be another long drawn out linear story mission to follow...

And yet Violet and Scarlet are Nintendo's biggest launch ever. 10 million in 3 days. Why would they bother to change their ways?

Openworld games are popular for a reason. When they're done well they're great fun, and can exist alongside more linear games. BOTW and RDR2 both have incredible worlds to get lost in, same with many other titles. The problem is Game Freak aren't competent enough to make a modern technically proficient game, let alone a modern technically proficient openworld game. Taking a year off would help absolutely. Of far more important though would staffing up and hiring talented devs who actually know what they're doing in 2022.

That was a great setpiece battle. There's a few good ones like that in the game.