It kept getting delayed so the release really caught me by surprise!

It’s on Steam, and it’s very short compared to a lot of games so long as you’re not too rusty with the controls.

I waffle between preferring Jet Set Radio cell shading and hand-drawn pixels on any given day.

I feel that sometimes realistic graphics are what a game needs- like some simulators or horror titles going for that form in immersion. We’re not quite over the uncanny valley in AAA titles, and pushing the boundaries of real-time rendering technology can lead to improvements in efficiency of existing processes.

Other times, pushing the boundaries of realism can lead to new game mechanics. Take Counter-Strike 2 and their smoke grenades: they look more realistic and shooting through them disturbs only a portion of the cloud.

I do miss working mirrors in games, though.

Once the encryption schemes are broken, it’s not just posterity, but every malicious actor with access to encryption-breaking tech will have a field day.

I don’t mind a large collection of data about me being made available to historians, I just mind that happening with my contemporaries.

A better comparison is with studio-owned movie theaters, which eventually led to the United States’ Paramount Antitrust Consent Decree (which was the law of the land for movies until the DOJ killed this ruling in 2020.)

I don’t feel that studios should get to have their own streaming services much like how I don’t feel movie studios should be allowed to run their own theaters.

For all of its faults, cable had a ton of competition between studios on the same distribution system, often with multiple channels with the same focus by entirely different studios. With current streaming services, ther are more accounts to keep track of, completely different (and often lackluster) UX between each streaming service which can make navigating a pain, and instead of competing with new content it can be just as- if not more- viable to buy up as much pop culture video content as possible and centralize it behind one studio-owned streaming services’ paywall. (Looking at you, Disney.)

If streaming services weren’t allowed to have their own studios, we’d probably have a better streaming landscape than we currently do.

This reminds me of the internet discussions around Avatar: The Last Airbender years back and whether it counted as anime or not.

To piggyback on this, I used to play Counter-Strike 1.5 (and later 1.6) a lot. There were servers that ran scripts to automatically chuck people into the air and deal them damage (often called a slap) if they didn’t change coordinates on the map for too long. Some would just auto-kick players for doing so. The anti-camper hate was common.

The server I frequented was far more lenient, but camping that prolonged the round(since dead players could only watch, and the rounds were 5 minutes long to make walking and crouching more viable) was generally frowned upon if they weren’t outnumbered or defending an objective.

Fair, but from back when I played a ton on my 360, a large number of a games’ achievements were progression-based, sometimes entirely. That being said, tracking optional challenges within the save game itself can also be helpful in some instances.

For example, if there are challenges that require you to not use special weapons at all, and then you violate the challenge requirements, it could be grayed out to signify that the player locked themselves out of anything related to completing that challenge in that playthrough.

Resident Evil 4: Remake already does this to a degree, though my thought is that it would be most helpful in long rpgs, where it may not be clear after loading where you are in story or what you have and haven’t done if the save hadn’t been touched in months.

I think Achievements are useful if they’re tracked separately by each save game. Minecraft does this, and I find it helpful when I return to a world save after a long time because I can use the achievements I unlocked to help remind me what I was doing and resume from there instead of looking at what clues may have been left behind.

I love New Game + mechanics. I think it’s a travesty more games don’t have them.

I hate excessive collectathons or overly repetitious cutscenes or dialogue. I love TotK, but the end-of-shrine bit got old real fast; I found myself missing pre-BotW heart container hunts where they could just be in a chest somewhere. I also feel exhausted just thinking about all the Koroks; I like trying to 100% save games, and the Koroks start to feel like work after a couple hundred in total.

I like when fps weapon recoil moves the player view with the recoil, particularly if the view resets back to where the player was aiming as the recoil cooldown ends. It’s satisfying and also gives the player an odd feeling of agency because the recoil mechanic lets them play “can I control the hose?”

I highly recommend Pathbuilder, as well. It makes sure all the math is correct and nobody adds more or less than they’re supposed to during character creation or level up while making it clear that something is off. You can even export the player info as stat blocks instead of as a character sheet. I used it to double check my party during character creation in FoundryVTT since it didn’t have nearly as many guardrails.

Here are my only gripes, and they’re all related. For context, I have the Android version:

-Unarmed Attacks aren’t automatically added to the Offense category; they have to be added manually, which adds some tedium since even character can make unarmed attacks unless otherwise stated. -A number of ancestry traits that add special unarmed attacks, such as Taloned Tengu or the basic Sharp Beak, aren’t reflected in the “Weapon” category for unarmed attacks, so you have to create a “custom” unarmed weapon to give the player, which adds tedium because you have to make sure you add all of the correct traits yourself and name it correctly. At least on mobile, you cannot switch from the custom weapon creation popup and the build tab without closing the popup first, meaning you can’t reference the trait directly in the app while manually creating it in the menu. -If any custom/modified equipment is applied to the character, then those abilities will be labeled as 3rd Party with no way to remove the trait even if you delete it from the trait field during creation. So anyone playing an ancestry that Pathbuilder hasn’t yet fully implemented will have “3rd Party” listed as a trait, adding unnecessary clutter and possible confusion. -Weapon creation requires picking 1-2 hands even if it doesn’t use hands, such as a jaws or s beak.

For me it was a bit frustrating dealing with these particular issues since I have both a Gnoll and a Tengu in the party, both of whom have unarmed attacks in addition to fists, including ones which wouldn’t use a hand.

If you’re okay with filling in some of the gaps, then none of this should really be an issue. Everything else about the app has been lovely.

Edited to clarify, add additional info, and correct a spelling mistake.