Dcubed

… many eruptions of screaming laughter were had at my expense… … worth it

… seems it did, because I took down Red Deck with my next attempt afterwards! Steel Card abuse + Lusty Joker + Polychrome Joker + Hearts Flush Deck is very good

Finally! I completed my first run! (With Blue Deck). About damn time! Hopefully other decks go a bit smoother, because that was tough; some of the unlockable Jokers do look pretty rad though…

Hey! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2011780/Yellow_Taxi_Goes_Vroom/ This looks good!

Oh? Is this not the same one? I wasn't aware that there was a 3rd game!

I assume that means you've already died at least once before? It's only a small thing extra that you get added to the ending sequence if you manage to get there without carking it, but it is a satisfying little thing. I probably wouldn't start the whole game over for it though.

And you call me jammy!? How the hell did @Glen-i catch up with me in Mario Party 1!? It ended up being closer overall than I was expecting though. @BowserBasher, so cruelly denied

I remember this game because it's the one that got bodied in magazine reviews of the time for being literally the exact same game as its predecessor. In fact, IIRC, this is NOM's lowest scoring game of all time, scoring almost zero... wonder what they would've thought of the modern sports title?

I ended Mario Party 3 the way I started it… kicking and screaming. And @S.C.G is a closet arsonist confirmed.

WTF!? There’s no form of gambling in this game whatsoever! You can’t make any sort of chip betting at all! The only reason why PEGI could possibly even say it promotes gambling is because it uses the hands and terminology seen in Poker… which, err… is a pretty damn stupid reason. Meanwhile, games with actual real-money gambling like EA Sports FA can happily get away with a PEGI 3 rating

Torterra’s design is rad as hell. He’s a World Turtle with attitude! Shame he was kinda booty competitively, all the way up until Gen 9 at least, but he gets by on rule of cool alone. I also love the Fire Butt Monkey line. Yes, Blaziken does render Monferno a bit redundant, but any Pokemon line with its arse and head permanently on fire is A-OK by me! Piplup is cute & cuddly, but its evolutions are pretty unremarkable unfortunately.

You’re right! That is a great idea! Huge missed opportunity just waiting to be capitalised on there! I’d buy it.

Maybe a HD remaster of MH4U? I remember that being rumoured some time ago…

That's shocking. But I suppose Embracer must be desperate at this point, and Gearbox is their most valuable singular asset (think they paid $1.2 Billion for them originally?) I wonder if anyone else would want to buy them directly off of Embracer... Or if they'll try going it alone again?

Oh dang! That's huge news! Microsoft are crazy for letting them go, but they could theoretically work with them on a freelance basis still... or even work with Nintendo instead! Most importantly... THEY'RE FINALLY FREE FROM THE CALL OF DUTY MINES!!! Now... Can we please grant Vicarious Visions their freedom next?

Embracer bought Sabre Interactive originally for $525 million, so they've lost money on their original purchase.

OMG! New update v1.9.102 is out now on Switch! (and presumably other platforms) New Stages! New Weapons! New Characters! New Music! New Stuff! No Announcement! Out Now!

I think you need to keep in mind that this is the direct predecessor to WWF No Mercy (or rather, I should say that No Mercy is the 4th game in the AKI Corporation/Syn Sophia series of N64 wrestling titles, following on from 1997's WCW vs. nWo: World Tour, 1998's WCW/nWo Revenge and 1999's WWF WrestleMania 2000, before No Mercy finally released in 2000). No Mercy was built on top of those three prior wrestling games from the same developer, so the team were much more experienced by that point and had built up a mature and well honed N64 wrestling game engine by the time of No Mercy's release. Of course WCW vs NWO Tour would be much simpler and basic in comparison to its later sequels. They were built directly on top of what WCW vs NWO Tour started. It never fails to make me laugh that the developer (AKI Corporation), famous for mastering the art of Alpha Male Ballet that is wrestling, would go on to eventually become Syn Sophia; makers of the ultra girly (and really good!) Style Boutique series. Talk about a change of face!

To be honest, I think that the answer to the question I proposed isn't as sinister as what @Julius is implying, but is probably every bit as damning... ... most publishers simply just don't know how to make anything else, and have no interest in making anything that doesn't target that traditional audience of 12-25 year old males. And on the developer side? At least 90% of them are male, and grew up playing games that were targetted towards that very same audience. They simply just want to make the kinds of games that interest themselves, and have little interest in trying to make different kinds of games... which means that you end up with a whole lot of homogonisation. Even as the traditional gaming audience continues to stagnate, die off and shrink, these publishers continue to cling to what they know because they're terrified of the prospect of having to learn how to target anyone else. It's the big reason why almost every single 3rd party fell completely flat on their faces on the Wii, and why they didn't even try to capitalise on that vast new audience that Nintendo handed them on a silver platter. Combine that with a roughly 40 year old history of women being ostracised and pushed out of the video game industry (and the wider tech industry as a whole), and this is the situation you end up in. The "gene pool" no longer has enough diversity to sustain itself. It's a multiple decade long ouroboros that is now eating its own tail.

Ok, this game is good… … it’s damn good! Can see myself getting mad addicted to this Also has first class touch screen support on Switch in handheld mode. They clearly put a lot of work into making the touch screen experience very polished and nice to use. Very much appreciated, especially since touch screen support in 3rd party Switch games often feels like an afterthought. Makes it a perfect bedtime game! Pretty happy with my first ever run. Not bad at all

That's an interesting point there. In some respects, yeah, you're right. The Indie scene is looking rather saturated because so many developers have decided that they'd rather go it alone than roll the dice on an unstable industry that doesn't value creative freedom. And while going Indie is a huge risk in of itself, in many ways it's actually potentially more stable for developers than choosing to work in the AAA sector for a larger publisher. I don't see the problem of Indie saturation getting any better though, it's only gonna get worse as more and more developers get pushed out of the AAA sector and that ocean grows ever increasingly red. Ultimately, what this industry needs to do is to find new audiences to target. There are only so many 10-25 year old males to target who play video games; why are you not trying to target women, young children or older adults instead!?

Whelp! Guess that confirms that the rumours about the Nintendo Partner Direct getting pushed back to make room for the Xbox Obituary were true Ain’t no way that they originally planned to have two separate Direct events within a week of each other. Dare I hope for a new Pokemon Mystery Dungeon? Or is it time for the Black & White remake perhaps?

Same thing could be said about every video game sector, be it indie, mobile F2P, PC MMORPG or AAA console release. Luck plays a huge role no matter which sector you work in. Your risk is going to be a hell of a lot lower with a realistic, reigned in budget however. And as has been shown countless times, budget has no direct correlation to your chances of success. The only thing that does actually directly correlate with budget is your punishment for failure. Now. There is something to be said about a healthy rise in budget for a sequel to a game that has already been a success, but a 3x multiplier is certainly anything but healthy; especially when you have the luxury of having a ready-made game that you can build on top of and liberally pluck ready-made assets from. That is overspend for overspend’s sake. Spiderman 2 is another fine example of the exact same overspend. If you were to look at the game side by side with its predecessor, would you have any idea that the sequel cost 3x as much to make? Even though it reuses the same engine and most of the same world map? I certainly can’t see it represented in the end product.

The thing is... Tekken 8's increase in budget was entierly of his own doing. Nobody forced him to spend exponentially more on Tekken 8 than what was spent on Tekken 7. People would probably have been just as happy with seeing a game with a similar level of visual fidelity as seen in Tekken 7, just with better resolution and performance. Hell, the gameplay would've been better off for it; making it clearer and easier to read with better image quality, a more stable framerate (perhaps even a 120FPS mode for the super hardcore FGC enthusiasts), faster loading times and less visual fluff in way of the actual fighting gameplay. And to take another example from the Harada book... Tales of Arise. Its big selling point was that it was a big dick AAA budget expensive looking take on the Tales series; given 5+ years of development time. Yet it barely outsold the previous "disappointing" series entry, Tales of Beseria; despite having orders of magnitude higher budget. Instead of having these games release in a reasonable timeframe, made much cheaper with more focus on gameplay depth & content and "good enough" visuals, Harada is more interested in playing Keeping Up With The Kardashians for the sake of his own ego. In a world where affordably made games like Balatro or Palworld can become a runaway hit, the only person to blame for your own mismanaged budgets is yourself as Producer.

Well, I guess for you; you're already only using the Switch for 1st party games, so the idea of having no BC wouldn't affect you as much as it would me. I actually do enjoy playing 3rd party games on the Switch when they run well and take advantage of its unique features (and I do take advantage of that portability quite a bit); but these kinds of games are becoming vanishingly rare now. So if Switch 2 ends up having no BC, I'll just switch over pretty much all of my 3rd party game purchases to PC/Steam Deck from here on out; and join you with Switch 2 being a first party only machine. The age of the 3rd party exclusive, or even the 3rd party multiplatform game that makes unique use of Nintendo hardware, is all but dead now. So Nintendo better have a reason for me to keep buying 3rd party games on their console if they're not planning on keeping compatibility going.