I really wish I could be hyped for FH6, but I doubt the bland corporate-approved Horizon series will do justice to the cool Japanese racing aesthetic. Part of the fun, IMO, is the thrill of night-time illegal races with cheap sportscars.

Your other recommendations rock, though! I’m not a huge fun of the F&F series but I like the first few movies, and Initial D is a lot of fun. I’m going through the manga and I’m in love with the aesthetic. It’s been a hot minute since I last played NfSU2 but I remember it was incredible for its time.

I’ll also add an OG recommendation here: Racing Lagoon. It’s an old Square Soft PS1 racing RPG (a rather unique blend) that released exclusively in Japan, but has received a fanmade translation a few years ago. It’s really dumb, but it’s fun.

It’s gay as in, “cheerful”.

You must be miserable at all times while playing it.

Quit rewarding creative bankruptcy.

Nintendo sucks. Pokémon can fall off a cliff for all I care. Palworld is a tired asset flip.

There are tons of unique monster collectors out there that try to do their own thing without stealing other people’s work. Again, if they pulled that shit with anything else, it wouldn’t fly. You collectively decide it’s ok because Nintendo bad.

I don’t want to dispute anything you said, but it doesn’t disprove my point, either.

Palworld may or may not have forced Pokemon to be better. Their artstyle is still Unreal Engine asset-flip slop.

Why must you assume that I like, care about, or am willing to defend Pokémon in any way? Yes, I know of that same picture that must have been circulating for a decade at this point. Yes, I think that some of those designs are derivative. Yes, I also believe that Palworld’s art style is slop with no coherent thought process put into it, and everyone that says otherwise is delusional.

Palworld was an incoherent blend of (Pokémon-like) cartoonish artstyle and realistic artstyle that doesn’t blend in any way. Their preceding game’s artstyle was, likewise, suspiciously derivative of Breath of the Wild. This is in no way a judgement on the game’s quality or how it plays like, nor an endorsement of Nintendo’s IP, which I care very little about. It’s just me using my functioning pair of eyes, which anyone could do if they weren’t blinded by fanboyism or hatred for Nintendo.

And say what you want about that picture, but at least Pokémon, even in the very first gen, had a consistent artstyle. Palworld was straight up an asset flip. If the game is good and fun, great! Their artstyle is still slop, and it would be great if people stopped being so defensive of it, especially in an era where AI plagiarism is being normalised so much.

Coincidentally, those that look similar the most are not the simple animal-shaped ones.

Electabuzz, Lucario, Cinderace, Cobalion, Luxray, Aggron.

Yes, and those similarities end in book 1 of 11-and-a-half written by Jordan and were developed in different directions than LotR. Padan Fain is not Gollum but an alternative and equally powered entity to the Dark One, the Two Rivers are not the Shire but the remnant of a powerful empire, Moraine is no Gandalf, Lan is no Aragorn, neither Mat nor Perrin are Sam, and so on.

The recolored Cinderace is a recoloured Cinderace, there’s no thought process behind it apart from making it legally distinct from its Pokémon counterpart. There’s a difference between creating a derivative copy and creating a unique world with some superficial level similarities. Calling WoT a palette-swap of Tolkien or something that copies Tolkien is wrong on so many levels.

Uh, didn’t know Earthsea, Game of Thrones, Wheel of Time were Tolkien clones. And that’s the most recognizable ones, I could mention a few dozens fantasy books I’ve read in the past few years that have nothing to do with Tolkien outside of a very superficial reading. People who say “everything is derivative” are those who don’t have enough imagination to create something unique themselves.

Also, “survival game with a riff on Pokémon” is unique and I’ve never disputed that, because I’m not an idiot who thinks that Pokémon is the only IP allowed to do the monster collecting thing. “Cinderace but green” is not.

You can dispute that Palworld didn’t copy-paste Pokémon body parts and palette swap their designs to create their legally distinct clones, but I’d call that bullshit. People only side with PocketPair because they plagiarized Nintendo, which people (rightfully) hates. If it was done to anyone else, nobody would defend them. I can hate Nintendo and still posit that what PocketPair did was shitty and an insult to all the devs who actually take pride in their work and put effort in creating something original.

They wouldn’t feel threatened by Palworld if it wasn’t for the legally distinct™ designs because, at its core, Palworld is a completely different game that only vaguely resembles Pokémon on a very superficial level (the monster themselves).

I’m not talking about what went into court. Most pals are “legally distinct” monsters, but that’s what brought the game to public awareness, what started the comparisons with Pokémon, and why Nintendo hated their guts. Monster collectors have existed outside of Pokémon for decades and still do, Nintendo only sued Palworld because they copy-pasted their monsters with a different color palette.

They plagiarized a bunch of Pokemon and used the publicity generated to bring attention to their game (which admittedly has nothing to do with Pokémon aside from the aforementioned similar-looking monsters).

All the games featured in the showcase are part of a Steam Event: https://bit.ly/computerworlds

How do you “accidentally” record other people’s conversations?

I’m sad this is probably going to replace the older ones, like RE2make and RE3make did.

Is this an historically accurate Strand-type game?

Last time I replayed Emerald, me and my friends had a lot of fun playing with the custom phrases.

Point taken, I’ve edited the title. It was not my intent to disparage others, I’ve actually enjoyed playing Coromon.

The entire review is subjective and to be taken as such! Nothing I said is objective. This is just my favourite in a long time and I wanted to convey that - admittedly I fucked up the wording.

Yeah, the video puts a LOT of data together, but I don’t think it interprets that data correctly and the conclusion is skewed. At a certain point, it says “for every brown game, there’s a Just Dance or Super Mario game to balance it off”, which, sure, it’s technically true, but nobody ever accused those games to be brown in the first place.

There certainly was a tendency in using a more prominent brown/green filter and/or excessive bloom in games during that time. The video posits that it may be due to gamers aging (something along the line of “a player playing Kingdom Hearts on PS2 who then grows up and plays Gears of War on X360 may wonder where the colours went”), but I remember a lot of series turning brown that weren’t before: compare Ace Combat 4 to Ace Combat 6, Resident Evil 3 to Resident Evil 5, and even Call of Duty 2 to Modern Warfare 2.

EDIT: Some more examples among non-shooter series to demonstrate that shooters were not the only genre affected by this: Need for Speed Underground 2 vs Need For Speed Most Wanted, Deus Ex vs Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage to Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon. The latter puts to rest the theory that gamers think that games became brown only because they switched to more mature games as they grew up.

I agree with you, I just don’t care about gamerscore and I don’t think it has any relevance in any topic.

We all know she is not a gamer, we all know she’s an ex-AI exec and that’s why I think she doesn’t have what it takes to save Xbox. I just think that using achievements as a metric and being proud of having more achievements than another person is weird.

I also think that her setting up an Xbox account to play a month before her promotion is a stupid “how do you do, fellow gamers?” marketing pitch that I’m not sure why was attempted in the first place.