Sakuna, of Rice and Ruins is about a goddess in a fictional but very shinto-adjacent religion in a country not quite, but not entirely unlike Japan. She’s the daughter of her pantheon’s God of War and Goddess of Harvests. She bashes monster heads and she sows rice, and both are important.

Fun and light-hearted, with a small cast of quirky likeable characters.

The quotation marks are a nice touch. Quality trolling.

It was technically always licenses for every video game ever commercialised. It’s just that a publisher has no practical way to control what happens to someone’s floppy/optical disc/cartridge/whatever physical media.

Has it ever been something else? Nobody using “woke” seriously has ever been able to define it.

Hoopa : “Just gonna drop a bunch of those legendary idiots for shits and giggles. Catch, trainer!”

Single joycon is barely usable, but the Wiimote was terrible for sideways holding.

Its shape was clearly never intended for it, and the d-pad was absolutely awful, one of the worst I’ve used.

The d-pad worked as buttons (which was how most games used it, in vertical mode), but for movement it was very stiff and almost impossible to get diagonals. For a console that featured virtual console heavily and needed a lot of classic controls, that was very bad design.

Until they give a “better” reason, I am going to assume the one they hinted at is true, and Microsoft just decided that it was worthless because it wasn’t “Mikami’s studio” anymore. Honestly, I already suspected it.

In which case, fuck them. These games were not made by one person, a studio is bigger than its director. And the rest of them didn’t get even one chance to prove themselves.

Truly shows how little they value the people who make their games.

Well, I don’t think they’re putting up a very good show right now.

It’s not AI, it’s a window on the diseased minds of poor bastards who experimented with some lovecraftian horror from outer space.

Yeah, I like that plot twist better.

Motion Twin is an interesting studio. They have a completely horizontal structure, they keep their studio small (10 people at most) on purpose and they’re more like a partnership of independent developers agreeing on common projects.

Most of them also seem to prefer switching to completely something else once they consider a game is done. Dead Cells is a special case because after a year part of MT wanted to keep working on it, so they created their own, more traditional studio Evil Empire and hired people just for that.

But then, things at MT apparently didn’t go too well. They spent months vetoing everything because no game concept seemed good enough for everyone to agree on it. The lead dev on Dead Cells tried to push them to at least try something, it didn’t go well and they pushed him out instead.

He talks about the whole thing on his blog : https://deepnight.net/blog/going-rogue/

Looks like there has been quite a bit of turnover on the studio since Dead Cells, and very little news, and since we’re talking about a studio of 8-10 people, it’s a bit worrying.

There have been 4 paid DLCs, Castlevania is just the latest.

However, I agree it’s been all worth it until now. Every new area feels like a new experience with cool new gimmicks, gameplay has been refined with stuff like the backpack, we got cool free indie crossover stuff…

And Return to Castlevania has more love for the series in it than anything Konami has done in the last 15 years (which is not saying much, fuck Konami).

I’m okay with the next DLC being the last. The game has had a fantastic life, and I wouldn’t want it to go past the creators’ motivation and start becoming bland. Excited to see what Motion Twin and Evil Empire have in store now (though Motion Twin’s situation seems a bit complex).

Maya is a genius compared to Pearl. Poor girl was introduced as a little kid and they decided she’d stay a toddler in a grown-up body for the rest her life.

The game is a financial failure… after a week of early access? And it was supposed to stay in early access for at least 6 months?

What did they expect exactly?

That actually sounds like a good way to do this. Not sure how practical it is.

Yeah, I agree with that. Installing freaking rootkits on people’s personal device, with the express purpose of identifying them and knowing what their machine contains, is not OK. A multiplayer client should be as lightweight as possible and shouldn’t be able to fuck with a game.

Even if they agree not using your data for anything else, the next security breach on their servers will make that promise useless.

And I am not sure why one would trust big publishers to have any kind of ethics anyway. Do you remember Activision’s patent to manipulate matchmaking? That would specifically match players to reward those who buy microtransactions and create pressure on those who don’t?

Yeah, totally trusting those manipulative snakes with my private data with a big “do not watch” sticker on it.

Difference I can see with traditional gambling (e.g. Texas Hold’em) is that it’s not in the instant, they actually want you to speculate on virtual “ownership” and spend now while it’s “cheap” to earn later in a totally happening glorious metaverse future. Yes, it’s very pyramid-y in nature.

Some of these “games” are empty shells of of a virtual world where you buy plots of land and then expect it to become more valuable, maybe build a virtual store or boring asset-flipped “resort” on it, rent part of it to someone to do the same, etc. They’re landlord fantasy. Except some may really believe in it.

If you’ve got the time, Dan Olson made a pretty good video about that stuff :

https://youtu.be/EiZhdpLXZ8Q?si=8FNV45vDy60SaNqz

A bunch of cryptobros who don’t really have an interest in playing video games started to think “what if everything in a game was a cryptocurrency, and what if instead of playing for fun, you invested in the game to earn more money?”

Seriously, “play-to-earn” is the thing they want to make happen. They took all those boring trends that make shitty microtransaction-fests feel like a job, and they saw a future where stuff like this would actually be your job.

They kind of had their store. Wolfire games created Humble Bundle, then it became its own company and now belongs to IGN.

If they kept going for the initial spirit of HB instead of letting it become just another way to buy on Steam, maybe they’d be that competition.

Good news if you ever spend Thanksgiving in Hyrule, they have actually edible (and mostly harmless) birds, including big juicy Eldin and forest ostriches.

Also, if they’re not extinct and you’re looking for very big game, you could always try loftwing.

It was either in the first two or in the second one.

I am not sure because I know I got it from the second bundle, but that one included the games from the first humble bundle too.

Though I already had it on the Wii for quite some time at that point. I knew the original flash game, Tower of Goo, and I’d spent so much time messing around with that thing, I was pretty excited that they made a whole game around it.