Picked up Paper Mario TTYD on Switch to see what all the hype is about, and yeah honestly all the OG fans were right about it. It’s the best one I’ve played in the series by a longshot.
Without context, I would assume Sticker Star and Color Splash released before TTYD - as if they were still figuring out where to go with the series, and would eventually evolve into something better as technology advanced. Then TTYD comes along, and not only has more mechanical depth, but also so much more life and creativity in it.
Most of the story criticism I’ve heard fall into a handful of categories:
Overall plot seeming convoluted and hard to follow (which is understandable when you throw both time travel and parallel universes into the same story)
Whitewashed portrayal of racism used for story aesthetics
Ending feeling confusing and/or unsatisfying
Certain story moments feeling out of place and/or undermining things that other story moments set up
I haven’t seen much in the way of players expecting/predicting plot twists.
The amount of time to build something like this seems like it would offset the amount of effort it would take just to write good character dialogue. AI tools are basically word calculators, which means you have to provide data for the LLM, which means time to produce this data, time to build guardrails, etc. Even in this implementation, they say they had to build guardrails so that they don’t say anything “harmful.”
There are also a number of lawsuits going on that will set a precedent for how training data can be utilized in commercial products. While I expect them to take the side of large corporations with vast resources at the expense of ethics, there’s the possibility that they will do the right thing. This will affect how AI tools wil be used in such contexts.
Here’s the source for anybody curious:
https://youtu.be/FwHMDjc7qJ8?si=UdaMXa7uJTqgZniu
Def worth a watch. Tony’s chocolate looks like a good alternative.
Wandersong is $7 USD right now and it’s a real gem if you like more casual games. It’s a 2D adventure game where you interact with the world by singing. It’s cozy and heartwarming, and I’d recommend it to anybody who might be into that kind of experience.
Also Prey is the opposite of heartwarming but it’s one of my all time favorite games (easily top 5) and it’s somehow $3 right now.
Same goes for the whole Dishonored series.
I’m not a big fan but my SO is really into it. They have the audio/visual presentation down but I feel like there isn’t enough depth to the gameplay to keep my attention. Plus I don’t like microtransaction games; it makes me feel like I’m playing a game that keeps reminding me it’s actually a storefront. All the customization options I want but don’t have keep turning out to be paywalled or require excessive grinding.
Playing multiplayer makes it more enjoyable though. Having a partner who is super into it helps me have fun by proxy.
Fallout 4
The changes they made to the game mechanics ripped a lot of the roleplaying out of the experience. I kept hoping to find a lot of what I loved about Fallout 3 and New Vegas in it, and never did.
It’s not even necessarily a bad game, but the aspects of the games that I found fun were either heavily reduced or removed completely, leaving behind an open world shooter with a bad story.
Fallout 3 released two hardware generations ago at around 8GB. Fallout 4 released last gen and sits at around 25GB. One generation later, Starfield is launching at ~140GB - almost 6x the file size of the previous generation.
I can’t speak for everybody, but my PC storage didn’t jump to 6x capacity in that amount of time, and my download speeds didn’t get 6x faster. But I imagine that’s why it’s concerning to some people.
Even just going by console standards, we’re looking at only a jump of 2x capacity between the Xbox One and Xbox Series X - or exactly the same if you have a Series S. It takes up over 20% of the storage Series S in just one game - with a mandatory install, unspecified patch sizes, impending DLC, etc.
Obviously there’s a discussion to be had of WHY the games are increasing exponentially like that, but on the surface that’s likely where the bulk of the frustration comes from.
I was thinking more like Silent Hill, except I can find any abandoned storefront and turn it into my base. And not just add crafting stuff, but full on furniture and decorations like Raft. Stardew Valley seems very built around the town and the farm IIRC and I want something that could be maybe more randomized like Don’t Starve, and then other people could drop in and play like Animal Crossing.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dicey-dungeons/id1368013995
EDIT:
Hit the comment button early by accident
Anyway it’s a turn-based dungeon crawler where your actions cost dice rolls. Multiple characters with very different gameplay mechanics, all in support of the core loop.
I highly recommend it. Probs put over 100 hours into this bad boi
What are your options?