Star Wars is an awkward example because it’s already pretty well tainted itself with mediocre films.
But yes, unironically I would actively stop looking for the shreds of good among the carnage that is the once-beloved franchise if I knew its creator, whose name is still tied to it and who financially benefits at least from the propagation of successful entries under that IP, would be just a little bit more able to get their awful views out there thanks to that success.
You take care of that part later, I guess. The whole point of the shower orange IMO is to go primal on it and tear it open and chow down without concern for mess or eating it efficiently. Leaving the peel to pick up afterwards probably just gives the rest of your shower a nice citrus aroma.
Honestly? I think they should be more disposable. You can do stuff like sell, butcher, overwork or fuse away your Pals (all of which are rather deliberate on the player’s part), but I genuinely think if there was some threat of permadeath or having them stolen by the Syndicate baddies if you get sloppy, it would give the adventure a greater sense of threat/risk. People seek out Nuzlocke rules for a reason, and currently I find the options for dropping your items and Pals on death don’t really make compelling gameplay sense (you just walk back and get them).
Setting/story-wise, Palworld supports that kind of thing so I figure it’s most likely coming as an option eventually. The game is on track for some interesting things, and as half-baked as parts might seem now, it’s already fairly fun. Definitely an addictive formula.
It’s worth waiting to see where they take it if the journey and developing those bonds with the creatures are a big part of the draw for you. I doubt you’ll get compelling turn based combat at any point, though.
I’m convinced that your average hardline “Roguelike means strictly ‘like Rogue’” player would even leave Mystery Dungeon games off the list. It’s such a useless genre definition if you can only point to a handful of games that would even meet its criteria.
Ultimately it’s a term that has long exceeded its original use case. Maybe to some it feels like calling certain modern shooters “Doom clones” again, but it’s just not generally useful as terminology if the only games it “should” define are reskins of Rogue.
Genuinely, people are shitting on it because it sells itself on a meme, is made by a dev with shady history, and likely has its creature designs aided strongly by an AI model trained on Pokemon.
With all that in mind, it punches WAY above its weight class. There’s shockingly little jank for an early access game this massive (it legitimately feels like a complete game worth paying for right now), the designs look super derivative but they’re nearly as well executed as the original Pokemon that inspired them so I’m still falling in love with everything I see, and the uniquely dark way they handle the subject matter gives it some sense of danger to the journey without getting in the way of critter companionship people seek out in a Pokemon game. I honestly can’t find much to fault at all. And any concerns that it won’t get future updates to smooth out rough edges, add more options and content are nuts, IMO. With the momentum this game has going, no chance the dev pulls out before making good on promises.
I wouldn’t say that anything Palworld is doing is groundbreaking on its own. Most critters feel like Pokemon parts and colors reassembled into new combinations. Exploration is a jankier clone of BOTW. The environment is way nicer looking and more interesting than anything from the last few Pokemon games but that’s hardly a high bar. Survival mechanics are uninspired. Base mechanics and managing active pals are pretty similar to Cult of the Lamb. But the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
I’d reach out to grab my smartphone only to realize there’s now two of them on my desk. I’m about to have a very bad day~
Going on about how “censored” everything is and how “certain political ideologies” are the only opinions allowed and anything else is “insta-banned” reeks of right wing extremism (hence, dogwhistles). I know I’m sticking my neck out to say so but given nobody has yet provided a single receipt/anecdote to back up their claims I find myself super skeptical at the idea that they’re presenting even a marginally balanced version of the truth right now. There’s a reason “certain political ideologies” (ie. the “eradicate trans ideology” and “destroy wokeism” crowd) are not accepted in decent online circles. There’s no room for that kind of hate, and I’ve never met someone on that side of things willing to hold an honest conversation on it. They just want a platform to be hateful.
This strategy reminds me of right-wingers I’ve dealt with in the past who complained about being banned from Twitter for ‘simply saying “learn to code”’. If you understand the context, the harassment, kicking someone when they’re down, the dogpile they contributed to, the absolute hate campaign their seemingly innocuous (piece of a) comment contributed to, there’s completely sensible reasons why a ban like that took place. But I know the playbook; these guys thrive in the darkness. The moment I start prodding into the nuances, they pretend they were trolling the whole time and basically ragequit. If they control the messaging then they can make themselves sound reasonable by tearing away context and presenting a whitewashed and often unrealistic version of what happened.
I could be wrong; for all I know this guy’s talking about truly god-awful subs like r/TrueRateMyFace (I forget what the name was and it doesn’t deserve to be remembered, as the mods explicitly support men posting their exes on there and actively ban commenters who “overrate” the scores they give out, while pretending they’re working with an objective measure of true beauty) but I haven’t experienced this egregious political de-platforming they’re talking about and it’s telling that they didn’t go into any level of specifics except to keep harping on the “censorship” point. Not every opinion or argument deserves a platform.
You really should!
I was big into Starbound pretty early but never quite felt the highs I got from Terraria. I would say if Starbound is up your alley, Terraria is a must-try. It’s great with friends, too, and if they’re anything like mine, the moment someone brings it up after a year or two, they’re always down for another Terraria playthrough~
I think what appeals a lot about Terraria is the world. It’s like a living thing in its own right. Biomes don’t just sit in place, and the world doesn’t just spring up on creation and stay static except for what you do to shape it to your liking. Building is less convenient than Starbound, but also more central. As you stretch out into the world, it quickly becomes your home. It’s so comfy and pleasant to come back to and build a new place. Upgrades and progression are kind of nuts, too. You’re always moving forward on some game-changing new accessories, new crafting items, new NPCs to buy neat stuff from. Even when it’s starting to feel like you’ve explored everything, your progression is set to change the world and make it feel new again.
Starbound felt like more of a streamlined story/experience built around the bones of freely exploring terrain as you like. Worlds have this No Man’s Sky effect of being mostly the same across the whole surface and populated by randomized variants of the same recognizable critters, but ultimately not feeling like there’s much unique to make them distinct from each other. They feel rather disposable, like you have all this space but it only makes it harder to determine where you want to set down your roots and develop a personal connection to a place. Ultimately it was challenging for me to keep pushing through when it was so optimal to leave systems behind once I got what I needed there.
I think Active needs some harsher falloff for older posts. I always seem to see multiple days-old posts on the top under Active because they keep getting new comments which appears to bump them right back to the top. Recent comment activity shouldn’t be weighted anywhere near as highly as the post being more recent, and I’d honestly prefer a fairly hard cutoff after 24~48 hours.
Wouldn’t seem like it should be a problem but the end result of using Active is that every time I refresh I’m seeing mostly the same stuff I saw several hours or a couple of days ago. Hot always ends up giving me super recent posts (last 30~60 minutes mostly) where the comments haven’t filled in much, while Active is leaning on too much older content. I find there’s no happy medium like I had with Reddit where every ~4 hours I’d have a mostly fresh selection to look at.
While we’re on the subject of DS classics, here’s an even more obscure one: Over the Hedge.
While admittedly it never quite got the time in the oven it deserved, being a release tie-in with the movie and put out alongside all the console versions, this one in particular was something special. It’s a third-person over the shoulder perspective stealth game with tank controls, sneaking into the hilariously well-protected homes of humans to steal their junk food. And if that wasn’t enough, it had you managing two characters in real-time by swapping back and forth between them, using their varying strengths to defeat the ridiculous laser alarm systems and traps along the way. It’s slow paced and relatively simple, and I used to have a blast finding ways to completely break the game because the devs didn’t have enough time to iron out all the kinks entirely, but it never quite got the attention it deserves for being such a unique labor of love.
I have to give it massive props for having so much creative heart when a tie-in for a mediocre animated movie has no right to be that good. The developers saw the opportunity to make something that put its source material to good work instead of just another hack-and-slash romp (like the console tie-ins were) or a minigame collection (like the later DS game (???) was) and their dedication to the craft of game development really shines through some of the jank involved in its presentation and sometimes wonky physics. By now, a unique take on a stealth game is nothing all that special, but at the time this was one that really grabbed me.
You (and OP) have awakened some deep memories with this one. I think they could make a pretty legit modern take on DQH Rocket Slime. Slingshotting around with a more fluid control system would make for an awesome time~
Your example is unambiguously plural. It’s not a good illustration of “they” creating confusion.
It’s truly not a problem. I could contrive a reason to talk about a couple (they plural) and a nonbinary person (they singular) and end up with sentences where you don’t know which I’m referring to, but the exact same issue happens if I’m telling a story about two “he” or “she” subjects. And it’s solved in the same way.