Lurker > Epyo

Fire Escape's GOTY stream has been fantastic so far.

I don't like January for GOTY, I don't care about 2023 anymore by then (or whatever year it is, its old news)

live audience sounds cool!

I love it! It's so true! After ten years of hearing Dan relate everything to wrestling, now Mitch is doing the same thing with Disney.

Such a breath of fresh air. I don't care about wrestling nor disney but it's so nice having a new topic.

_Blur_ posted...

I think you just have to change your mentality with collectibles. I was like this and had that problem with 3D World initially too. Eventually I learned to only replay the level right away if I actually wanted to experience the level again. Don't do it just for collectibles. You need so few Wonder Seeds to progress through the main game here. I just go back at the end of the main game to wrap up 100% and always have a good time doing it.

I'm surprised you enjoyed NSMBU so much (I did too) because that also has a lot of collectibles and easily missable secret exits.

Sure maybe the requirements are light, but there's no way for me to know how light, and if I completely ignore them, there's a chance it'll bite me later, so I can't. They've made it a central goal of the gameplay.

I just prefer how NSMBU never required the collectibles a single time, so I could comfortably ignore them unless I was in the mood for an extra challenge. Extra collectible challenges are good, but why require it, in a game where hunting for them is awkward, because the levels are not designed for hunting!

Secret Exits on the other hand, I'll never have a problem with those, those were in Mario 1/2/3/World so they're part of the series' core formula. If you don't like Secret Exits there's probably not a Mario game you do like, I bet.

I've mostly finished World 1, missed a couple levels I need to go back for...

I'm not a huge fan of the game so far, surprisingly! Which is weird for me, because I'm usually blown away by a brand new Mario game--Odyssey's in my top 10 games of all time, NSMBU is my favorite 2d Mario for sure. So, I'm not a "new game = bad game" type of fan.

But so far, it constantly feels like the game is playing ME, more than I'm playing IT. Something wacky happens, and I'm just making split second decisions analyzing what I think the level designer wants me to do. I feel like I might prefer to watch someone else play through it so I can just enjoy the spectacle.

It's also giving me a familiar stress about missing "key items" that are gonna block me later in the game, and constantly worrying about having to re-play entire levels to fix my mistakes, except my mistakes aren't really mistakes, I simply didn't think exactly like that level designer wanted me to.

(3D world also had this problem with its easily missed green stars which are required to unlock all levels, and sure enough, I wasn't a big fan of that game either. This game has the easily missed wonder seeds AND easily missed purple coin stuff.)

BUT I'm still very early, and it is very pretty =]

I've been thinking about bringing this up somewhere: I'm really enjoying Giant Bomb lately!!!

When Vinny/Brad/Dan left, I had very little hope, and indeed, it was really bad for a while, after that. I really couldn't stay awake for any of their content for many months after that. I was resigned to just enjoy Nextlander's podcasts and Fire Escape.

BUT since Dan came back, GB's been really great! It's not PEAK but it's very good.

Blight Club is the best thing they've got going on right now. It has similar vibes to some all-time great GB video content like Vinnyvania and This Is The Run, where they're laughing and struggling through a hard and/or bad game, saying "ugh are you kidding me??? The game is making me do THIS???" Also the combo of Jeff Grubb, Mike Minotti, and Dan is perfect vibes, they're all really funny to me.

Even UPF has been a lot more creative in 2023, instead of the old formula of "play 4 boring games for 30 minutes each" which got really stale.

But most surprising is the Bombcast itself. This is the best the Bombcast has been since the Ryan era. (I stopped being able to finish Bombcasts after like 2017. It was so dull. And the Beastcast was a million times better.)

BUT, everyone on the Bombcast right now is hilarious and silly, the vibes are so good. Jan's a fantastic host, Jeff Grubb is really fun and brings great industry knowledge. And any episode with either Bailey or Mike Minotti or Dan ends up being A-Tier in terms of comedy (and since they all rotate in constantly, pretty much every episode is an A-Tier). Also Bakalar is a great villain to cause some friction, otherwise everyone would agree too much on everything.

I think I heard it was datamined that such a "last one standing" mode IS hidden in the code, likely to be released at a later date.

ok I listened to the Neil Cicierega album and my mind is blown at the creativity. I'm guessing this went viral and I missed it? because it's like the best thing I've ever heard

The translation of all those cutscenes at the northern crater is so bad. As a kid, I understood absolutely zero of it, and even today I think I only understand like 80%.

That's my theory about why the earlier Aerith plot twist is the most famous one in the game--nobody could follow any of the others!

thank god, the other pronunciation sucked

fascinating "bumper hunting" strategy video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9tvDenI8do

ya thats disgusting

kyrie cracks me up

welp, I tried that strat and immediately got 3rd in a basic 99 race on Death Wind, a level I'm usually terrible at.

and then I immediately finished a grand prix, which is rare for me--I usually rank out on death wind. then again, I only got 16th in the grand prix results.

probably because I came in last place on Silence, like I always do. I just can't figure out how to do that S bend. Even if I slow down massively, I still can't do it without hitting a wall. maybe wild goose is just crappy at turning.

that all sounds pretty legit. especially because, my best results were in my first couple days with the game, when I was trying really hard to get the "finish a race without hitting a wall" badge, and that was basically my only goal, avoiding boosting and stuff.

this game OWNS

got 5th in my first grand prix, got 2nd in my first mini prix. they were so exciting!

i need to practice Silence more for sure, so hard.

Erin in The Office

I think he did say he's working on a lot of the episodes for season 2 simultaneously. Which would make sense, that that would cause a drought in the meantime, BUT all those episodes would be released closer together.

But knowing him, they'll somehow be released even farther apart than season 1's episodes were =]

blaster

GTM posted...

most of the things I need to upgrade require a lizalfos tail

YES and why are they SO RARE

_Blur_ posted...

Also also it's soooo dumb that they just stop giving you rewards for bubbulgems so early. There's so much junk to farm for upgrades, including 103 goddamn star fragments, that they really should keep giving you rewards for every 5 or so. What an odd design decision.

Yeaaah I kinda get it though. There are a LOT of caves, and you don't wanna burn the player out on them, unless they're really enjoying them and wanna get 100% of them.

It's similar to koroks--they wanted to have a ton of them, so wherever you go you feel like you're constantly finding them, BUT, they didn't want to signal to the player that they should keep doing them forever, even when they're sick of doing them.

Hmmm are you guys not skipping the repeating identical cutscenes at the start & end of every shrine? And the lightroot cutscenes.

I haven't done the math, but my gut would say that could possibly add like 30% to the total playtime.

Every lightroot's cutscene is probably like 1 minute long, and each shrine's start/end cutscenes probably are over 5 minutes each. That would add up to 400+ hours of cutscenes right there.

I'm 180 hours in, all caves done, all shrines, all lightroots, all main quests, all side adventures, all cutscenes, 2 side quests left, and I just beat the game! Also 360 koroks found but I won't finish that.

(Finally I can read this thread lol)

Absolute masterpiece, brought me to tears ~5 times, usually due to game mechanics I couldn't believe they implemented. Either my new #1 or #2 favorite game of all time.

I'd definitely put it above BOTW, mostly because the combat doesn't feel like a waste of resources in this game. You're guaranteed to come out ahead by picking up monster horns, which you have infinite space for, and are basically the weapons themselves (the base of a weapon doesn't matter that much, just what you fuse onto 'em!).

I think the only thing BOTW does better is the inside of puzzle shrines. The shrines were much more silly and creative in BOTW, you didn't know what you were gonna get! In here, they're usually very simple/short tutorials of one mechanic each time. Also the number of Rauru's Blessing shrines is absurd in TOTK, what a waste of loading screen time.

Of course, the combat shrines are 100x better in TOTK, admittedly.

---

OK here is my ranking of the types of repeated playable content in the game, from best to worst:

1-Caves
2-Temples (quests before you get inside)
3-Temples (once you're inside)
4-Combat shrines
5-Yiga (anything yiga related)
6-Temple bosses
7-Great fairy quests
8-Wells
9-Outdoor minigames
10-Penn quests
11-Puzzle shrines
12-Depths (exploring, mining, lightroots)
13-Monster control squads
14-Labyrinths
15-Addison
16-Outdoor bosses (gleeoks, hinoxes, etc.)
17-Pictures for stables
18-Koroks (non-escorts)
19-Geoglyphs
20-Koroks (escorts)
21-Green crystal escorts

that looks pretty bad

98% of my excitement for the PvE was the individual hero talent trees, so yeah, it's cancelled

Dang, this is a massive bummer, my most looked forward to game for years, besides TotK.

That talent system and slightly randomly generated replayable content, sounded so fun. I super enjoy the PVE modes but just needed a little bit of progression to spice it up.

I have a feeling this is partially due to the "return to office" stuff in the last couple months, and a lot of people quitting from that. I heard WoW just had to cancel a lot of ideas they were working on for upcoming patches as well.

I mean obviously it wasn't going well in the first place, since it's been taking them years and years, and obviously there's all the other Blizzard setbacks too.

You know, I don't really like "Run Away" much at all!

HaRRicH posted...

Ace of Base uses their music to tell the vibe of their stories nicely, like the doo-do-doo-do-dooo-doo-do-dos in The Sign and the sax in All She Wants That piano-hook in Another Night is just so hard to beat though. I'm taking Another Night over any individual Ace of Base song, but Ace of Base has more singles that hit both then and now. The Real McCoy had other good songs like Run Away, but they don't quite hit the same way.

Both bands have men that feel slightly out of place in their music.

Yeah I think I agree with all this

The question is, is it better than the early 90s Ace of Base singles? Tough call for me.

I listen to this song all the time, especially when im looking for something to listen to while doing chores or brushing my teeth or something. underrated

the music's good tho

and those first 2 levels of the first game are good

(and I actually do like the 2nd game, the randomness is fun)