I never used a guide or anything either, I was 13 when I beat it the first time, but finding that one missing key always trips me up for at least a few minutes.

The Water Temple.

“Pretty capable” will get you dunked on in the PC gaming world. For what I’ve seen PC gamers actually recommend I could buy 2-3 modern consoles.

Although the concept of it being in a Sonic game was pretty silly (and an entire path to play through no less) and the character is really annoying, I heard that even the Big the Cat fishing mode in Sonic Adventure (originally on the Dreamcast) was even good, gameplay-wise. I have played it but I don’t have much experience in other fishing games to compare it to. The only other fishing (mini-)game I have for comparison is the fishing in the 3D Zelda games. Between the two I think I prefer Zelda, though.

(Finally) finished Fire Emblem Fates Conquest and started my run in Pokemon Alpha Sapphire. Got to the first gym slightly under-leveled, and the Nosepass almost swept me, but in the end I cheesed it by using Destiny Bond with my Ralts. I was hoping it and my Torchic would get some XP from the battle since they’re both going to be on my main team, but not losing to the first gym was more important, lol.

If I play anything on Switch it will probably be more Kirby’s Return to Dreamland. I’m on the ice world and it looks at first glance like this is a really short game, but I do know the plot twist so maybe there is a bunch more content coming. I’ll see.

The console looks like a nice upgrade and I’ll get one eventually, but with most games also releasing on Switch 1 at least for a while and not much announces for it that interests me right now, coupled with a personal financial situation that prevents me from comfortably affording a console regardless of its price, I can wait on it for now.

Ubuntu 8.10 in early 2009, after Windows Vista otherwise bricked my laptop. I’ve distro-hopped on a few occasions but most of my 16 years of Linux have been on Ubuntu. That said, I moved away from Ubuntu after a failed upgrade to 22.04 LTS, to OpenSUSE and then to KDE Neon, now I’m on Nobara and couldn’t be happier.

Like I mentioned before, “tutorial pulls” are part of that hyper-generosity that gachas will commonly have for new players to give them enough of a dopamine rush to hang around and be more likely to spend more later. That generosity will not last and can’t last or elee the game will not make nearly as much money. Give it another week and you will find that the supposed good luck runs out, as well as the free currency offered for things like logging in, and then it will start requiring a ton of grinding or real world money to acquire the necessary currency to get to the “pity” in order to ensure you get a top-rarity item. That’s how gacha systems work.

Most “pity” systems require hundreds of pulls beforehand, which unless someone saves months worth of free currency for those pulls, can be very expensive in real world money to get the currency to afford. In a way, pity systems are just designed to increase the amount of money players spend.

The difference is in the details, that with other paid DLC, you actually get the thing you paid for, guaranteed. With a gacha, if they’re promoting some super-strong character, weapon, etc. that you want and you buy currency to spend in the gacha, you are not guaranteed to get that item or anything of the same quality/rarity in any of those pulls you make. It’s all random chance, gambling at its core. Exceptionally good or bad luck can start playing psychological tricks on you, such as FOMO (there will always be something stronger coming soon), sunk cost fallacy (you’ve already dumped this much into it and got nothing, what’s the difference with this much more?), and before you know it, if you’re not watching carefully, you’ve spent far more in in-game and/or real money than you realized. That’s far different than a one-time purchase straight-up for a cosmetic or weapon to use with no further need to spend any more, and that’s what gets people hooked like gambling. You may not have experienced this much because gachas tend to be very generous to new players in order to get them started out quickly as whales fodder and get them hooked on the adrenaline rush of “winning” in the gacha system before the gacha currency starts to dry up on them.

I mean, it can be both at the same time. The games may be good as games (I play a few myself) but the mechanic can also be extremely predatory to those who have a problem with gambling and/or controlling their spending.

Outrage farming is getting really tiring overall, not gonna lie. It’s OK, everyone, we can feel other things aside from angry and life will go on.

I’ve just seen a bunch of videos about it, haha.

The one notable time I can think of a game trying the dual perspective thing with the gamepad was Star Fox Zero at the end of its life cycle, and it was not received well at all because it made the control and aiming way too complicated since it was too much of a challenge to try to look at both screens at the same time. Can’t think of another game that tried something like that, but I did see a good number of games that used the gamepad for inventory, like the Zelda games and Monster Hunter.

Lack of advertising and its business model of the hardware basically being produced by licensees tacked on to other electronics products of the time ended up crippling consumer awareness, and the price point was the big nail in the coffin, at roughly $700 in the early 90s you really had to commit to wanting one. Unlike most other console companies, 3DO couldn’t afford to sell the hardware at a loss because they didn’t have much, if anything, for first party games to make up for it. It had some games that look like they’d be decent, at least a better quality library overall than arguably the Jaguar and definitely the CDi, but it’s that tough cycle in gaming where you need good games to sell consoles (especially at $700, in any time) but third party devs won’t make good games for consoles that don’t sell.

TBF, the poor sounding soundtrack was likely as much to do with the GBA hardware as the music itself, they did what they could with the GBA’s God-awful sound chip. The type distribution isn’t great but Diamond and Pearl’s in Gen 4 is even worse (Platinum fixed it in Sinnoh though).

This looks like any Nintendo launch lineup I can remember: one “big” game they think will draw people in just for that (in this case Mario Kart) and not much aside from that. The fact we’re even getting more than one additional first party title is comparatively impressive, but overall Nintendo launch lineups are pretty much always sparse. I think you’re right and we’ll see the “real” launch window lineup around the holidays.

I like big content and I cannot lie, you other brothers can’t deny

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Tired of government censorship, whether it’s left or right wing. They both do it, and it sucks either way. Then both sides will “champion free speech” when they’re not the ones in power.

I recently purchased a copy of Alpha Sapphire since I haven’t finished a Hoenn playthrough yet. Looking forward to finally finishing a Hoenn region run!