I actually haven’t played the other two since they’re both very old games at this point but I do plan to try them out. Witcher 3 seems like it mostly stands on its own and you won’t be missing anything too huge when it comes to the story and characters from the other games. That being said, its a situation where knowing the prior games helps and you’ll understand the relationships better. If you bounced off of the first one though, my recommendation is just to at least read up on the characters and major events of the first two. Maybe watch a game movie if you can find one. I went in completely blind into the third game and it turned out fine so really you can’t go wrong, don’t let the prep for playing the game stop you from actually playing it.

Finally got around to playing The Witness and its a surprisingly good and simple puzzle game, I’m having a really good time so far.

I have many choices but here’s a few that really stand out to me

1. The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine If you’ve played just the base game of Witcher 3, you’ve missed out. I decided after playing the base game and waiting for a couple years that I’d go back for the DLC. I spent upwards of 100+ hours with this game on the hardest difficulty and the story in the base game is long, engrossing, and whimsical. But at the end you aren’t really completely satisfied despite several moving moments. Enter the DLC of Blood and Wine though and now you’re basically in The Witcher 3 part 2. This is where you leave the baggage of the main game behind and play out the best ending to any character I’ve ever seen. It’s full of adventure and new sights to see, its full of interesting characters to meet, and it captures the sense of love that Geralt has for the other characters. I legitimately cried at the end of the epic adventure when you sit down next to Ciri and just… realize that its over. Every good book I’ve ever read makes you really feel an empty heart to see the last page and read the final words on it. It felt just like that and I was sad to leave that world behind.

2. Kingdom Hearts Series Just an incredible game series that appears almost made for children but turns into a very convoluted and at times extremely beautiful story. Whats so wild about it is that the story is somewhat complex but the emotions throughout are so simple, pure, and understandable. It gets to the core of what we all feel and makes cartoons of our emotions and never leaves that space. And the music matched with those emotions is just the purest art.

3. To The Moon Its short, its sweet, it has great music, go play it and bring tissues. Its a sad tale with very simple gameplay but I listen to the soundtrack once in a while to this day and I never stop thinking about the themes of this game. What exists in this game is so thoughtful, thought provoking, understandable, and most importantly human. I can’t discuss the story at all without spoiling it but just go play it. It takes a few hours and I recommend never leaving your seat for the whole thing. You can probably even just watch it be played on youtube without commentary and get 95% of the experience.

Honestly the game play is very dated but nostalgia would go a long way to grease the wheels of this game to make it more entertaining. But I wouldn’t recommend playing on the harder difficulties and I wouldn’t play it on PC period unless you’re okay with some bad glitches. Either way they’re both short games so you’re really not wasting too much time to play them again even if they’re disappointing somewhat. It’s also still very fun to fling people around in both but especially the first game.

I actually think both games look really good for when they were released. Even now, TFU2 looks really decent with facial animations. The graphics are a shining moment in both games but the PC port is absolutely broken and ruins the visuals of both. Plus being stuck at 30fps in an action game unless you use mods (that break some aspects of the game btw) is kind of disappointing. I wish EA would’ve given us a proper port or remaster by now

There are several sections like that actually in both games where you’re stuck in sequences for way too long. Both games have a habit of having you sit there mashing a button for 20-30 seconds before anything interesting happens on screen and it’s just not great when games nowadays have moved on from anything like this.

Does the Wii version use motion controls? I’m assuming it does. If so, that would make way more sense and I can definitely see how it’d be way more fun to experience that way.

I don’t think that’s true. He was especially bad for the first bit of it but throughout he was stumbling over words, mumbling, he was hoarse. And then he got worse at the tail end too and forgot what he was even saying during his closing. Also what’s up with the listing things in numbers over and over and over? The whole thing was really awful to listen to and I’ve never heard him sound older honestly.

Older God of war games are a really good comparison, especially with the QTEs.

Not sure if my brain just works differently but I’ve always felt isolated by the laugh track. It’s always made me very uncomfortable to watch a show that isn’t funny and hear people that aren’t me laughing and clapping constantly. Makes me feel like I’m being manipulated by aliens into feeling fake joy or something, I hate it.

That is assuming that our universe is flat in the 4th dimension…

I mean, that’s partly true. From my keeping up with politics, some of the candidates actions are their own but about 80% of the job is what you described. Your party recommends actions to you and congress sets you up for most of your actions. Vetoing things is only common when the opposition holds congress.

I’ll highlight though that lately the presidents have seized more and more power and continue to do so. It started with Bush basically declaring war without congress and lately it’s been Biden doing things like canceling student loans and blocking the border up. Which I get that’s all power they’ve always had, but they’ve been reluctant to use it improperly because it’s so abusable. Now those robes are off and so trump will come into office and immediately write laws by himself basically

My prediction is that one of them doesn’t make it to Inauguration Day and the country panics as a result. Is likely? No. But on this timeline it makes the most sense

Aren’t the brand new LCDs still in stock an 15% off? Still a decent deal

I can’t say I share those feelings. While I think the 2D sections are just okay, they’re very short. I also think as far as pacing and traveling between fights, they did about all they could without distracting from the point of the game in my eyes.

Like yes you can make better platforming or exploration, but that’s not what the overall level is there for. It’s there for scale, setting, NPC conversations, etc. Add too much and you distract from the next fight, add too little and you might as well have a boss rush type game. Fine balance here and this is honestly the best I’ve ever seen a game like this pull off filler time.

That’s a whole conversation about filler in games but I think it’s harder than people realize to get this right.

From what I’ve read, the money goes to Microsoft. I got my copy via humble bundle subscription (a really good deal btw) so I got lucky. If it were me, I’d be looking for other ways to play it probably

That means a lot, thanks!

That’s totally fair and I don’t think you’re necessarily missing anything here if you bounce off of the combat. Still, it’s worth a shot even if you don’t typically like rhythm games. I wasn’t super thrilled about the combat initially but it grew on me pretty quickly once I found that beat.

I really wanted to prove myself wrong because you sound like you know what you’re talking about. So I went and looked it up, turns out I was right to say what I said. Most of the major games out there report that more than half of their revenue comes from whales and those whales make up around 5% of their paying playerbase, sometimes more sometimes less. And in some games, that revenue is 60-70% of the total.

So that’s why there are 17,000 levels which that vast majority of players wont ever see. It’s because they’re chasing 5% or less of their audience.

But when it comes to games that are much smaller, I wasn’t really exaggerating to say that a small handful of players can outspend everyone else. When you have a player base in the hundreds and there’s like 20 people spending 50% or more in revenue for you, it’s going to affect your road map. In a larger game though, that percent will still mean tens of thousands of whale players.

And maybe your experience was different, maybe the games you worked on didn’t operate that way. But the industry absolutely does. It doesn’t mean you can ignore the 50% of revenue coming from regular players by the way, I’m just saying that the percent that spends enormously has almost the same weight in changing the games road map as the majority of players sometimes. Which is crazy to me.

Here’s the relevant Reddit post that was one of the sources I found.

Candy Crush Saga now has nearly 17,000 levels in it, so you’d be very wrong about that. Your average player might get into the hundreds, above average maybe thousands, but 17,000? They’re fishing for whales and not even that many of them.

This problem is way worse than people think and most mobile games on the store have the sole entire purpose of only hooking a small handful of whales. Then once they do, they mold entire games around just a few people. These companies that run apps like Candy Crush actively change the price of lives per player and watch the statistics of what they’re buying and when. It’s so sinister and the entire industry survives off of gaming addictions and whaling.