They appear in Warhammer a fair bit.

What about Starfox 2?

I’m perhaps the outlier in that I felt like San Andreas felt like they’d thrown shit at the wall to see what would stick. Most of the extra mechanics didn’t land for me at all and I was pleased to see them gone.

That’s, uh, not what PIA means in this thread.

Excellent question! Commenting to follow.

The “open world craze”? I get disagreeing with design decisions but that seems a bit of an odd angle, given how long open world games had been popular at the time of release.

I’ve not played an open world game that was anything like Exodus. It was an interesting blend of sandbox and tight narrative.

I couldn’t really get into the early games, despite liking the concept, but loved Exodus. I could see how it wouldn’t suite someone who preferred the style of the previous games, but I think I would argue that “a third helping of the same” rarely takes a game series anywhere interesting.

A great many of the games I grew up with were descended from coin-op design principles and so were designed to delay progress as much as possible.

Whilst it’s an oversimplification, if the old price only got Y sales then a higher new price was always only going to get a subset of Y.

Console sales go up over time in part because the price goes down, broadening the customer base. Sure, the library gets bigger over time too, but that’s barely happening either.

I guess I’ll just have to buy even fewer consoles than I already am.

I should really get replacement batteries for my two PSPs.

I wouldn’t say “the worst” but the phrase “squandered potential” looms large.

Little Big Adventure 2.

It’s a massive game with both a 3D open world and isometric gorgeousness. Some character progression (not experience points), full voice acting, and a lot of character.

In many ways it set the bar for me in terms of how much a game should contain and the level of quality I expected.

I’ve heard this said many, many times, but I’ve yet to see an actual source on it.

I collected Orks in 3rd edition. I have the big black book, I have the codex, I was subscribed to White Dwarf. I don’t recall seeing anything like that at the time. I could be wrong, of course, but you’d have thought I’d have seen the source by now.

No idea, I was responding to their first paragraph.

That Ork stuff is a meme. Their tech works, it’s not powered by imagination. They’re an artificial species with vast amounts of knowledge embedded in their DNA. How to build their tech is literally in their blood.

Edit: I see a lot of upvotes for an unsourced meme text. In recent codices they’ve explicitly added the “psychic WD-40” to the lore. It didn’t exist before but the internet memed it into canon.

So far GW have not added “gun works through happy thoughts”, either now or historically. I’m being definite about this in the hope that someone will prove me wrong out of spite.

As the parent of a tiny child this is great to see. I couldn’t give less of a shit about violent contents in games and ratings based on that sort of unproven rubbish. However games that deliberately implement dark patterns are literally designed to be dangerously manipulative and that I want to be able to make informed decisions about.

Don’t reinvent the wheel, learn the Baguette on Snails framework!

I prefer writing JSON by hand. The whitespace stuff in YAML is just such a nuisance as far as I’m concerned, which is odd as I have no problem with it in Python.

As someone who works with YAML regularly:

Fuck YAML.

I’m sure if you just AI harder things will improve.