FWIW, Dragon Age got brigaded hard by hard-right anti-woke trolls (and Skillup outright lied in his review, which has been passed around like a bag of chips). It’s truthfully excellent, with great storytelling (leaning very hard on horror) and great character writing, with the most fun gameplay of any Dragon Age game.

A word to the wise, as you say you don’t normally buy games - do double check whether your Mac is new enough for the game. I don’t know exactly how specs work on mac, but I would hazard a guess that anything older than, say, 2019, won’t be able to play it.

Ffs, there’s no conspiracy here mate, the game is meeting expectations. The problem is there are a lot of trolls trying to tear it down because trans people are in it, not that the writers are calling out bigots.

Star Wars. God help you if you actually like The Acolyte or the sequels, they’ll flay you alive while they harass everyone involved in the making of.

Seems they’re starting to, given Dragon Age won’t be using the EA App

Orb.

All This Shit is Weird:

The Dalek_Thal Story

Fuck, I definitely drank too much, how the fuck did it cycle back to 2008?

Please don’t be Bioware, please don’t be Bioware…

Seriously mate, you didn’t warn about the TVTropes link? Some of us need to go to bed!

Hey mate, I’m doing a quick response rn and will return at some point to properly write up a lengthier response!

The claw can happen in Frontier if you’re running the default controls - I’ve been playing in Portable mode though, which uses the Tri Classic Controller scheme, although my experience was it’s a pain in the backside to figure out how to change the controls if you’re not used to Freedom Unite’s menus (Frontier was based on Dos)

As for the variety, Frontier boasts something like 188 unique monsters including subspecies, rare species and other variants. Each of these has their weapons (to no one’s surprise). In addition there are two unique weapon classes that haven’t appeared in any other games - the Tonfas which are basically very short dual blades that punch and give air time, unique buffs and a powered-up explosive attack, (think a proto-Insect Glaive), and the Magnet Spike which is the most unbalanced thing I have ever had the pleasure of using in a video game - it simply melts most G Rank monsters. Further, the game has an extra layer of difficulty above G Rank called “Zenith” which includes fifteen unique variants of existing monsters, which has similarities with Deviants from GU. If Frontier does appeal to you, I recommend you track down PewPewDojo’s discord, they can get you set up with a private server.

Can relate to your comments about GU, it’s a massive game and honestly even after playing it for nearly four hundred hours over the span of the last five years I’m still discovering new stuff.

I’ve always been intrigued by Wild Hearts tbh, never had the chance though (it came out during my thesis and just kinda slipped by). I really do need to try it though.

Hello fellow Monster Hunter! Similar experience, but it gets worse as someone who really likes Monster Hunter Frontier - because not even die-hard classic MH players will touch it, because of the perception that it’s “too anime”. It’s sad, because honestly it’s a great time, no other game in the series has Frontier’s level of variety.

Can’t concentrate at work, and so stressed that food doesn’t seem friendly.

But maybe things will work out this evening. Either that, or it’ll get much worse. Definitely feeling at a crossroads.

Yeah, blinked the other day. Now this bloke keeps following me and telling me I’m in Hull.

That’s fair, I apologise for being as defensive as I was.

Honestly that’s 100% the right way to play it - it is such a laugh, the writing is really tongue in cheek, and the gameplay is really, simply fun, so I really think you and your mate will love it!

Quite a lot honestly, but the trailers are really awful in terms of advertising what the game actually is. It’s a survival game with management sim elements, using creature collection as its core gameplay loop. It feels weirdly cohesive in terms of mashing together these styles - kinda like Dave the Diver in that regard.

Far as I’ve been able to tell, it was first announced in 2021, so it’s been in development since then, at latest.

There’s no evidence whatsoever of AI use (lot of accusations, but actual devs have spoken out and challenged them). Really strikes me that there’s a non-zero number of people who feel somewhat threatened by this game’s existence, considering the death threats the dev team has reportedly been receiving.

Far as I can tell, the original port’s apk isn’t region locked, so much as the play store page is. Either that, or people who didn’t buy it before the netflix port went up can no longer view the page.

Link doesn’t work in Australia I’m afraid - lots of corporations have a big thing for giving us the shitty end of the stick.

Really? How? I’ve been wanting to play World of Goo again but the only version available is the netflix one

Honestly it’s a combination of the battlepass system and the stage design causing constant, very fast-paced combat. The stages are too small, so players are funnelled into the middle of the stage. This also causes spawncamping if the matchmaking is even slightly unbalanced (which it is most of the time), as one wipe will allow a team to push all the way into spawn.

Previous Splatoon games were very good about this - most stages were abstract shapes, with a lot of terrain, meaning combat was rare, and the game encouraged painting over fighting as painting would net the most points on a per-match basis. Splatoon 3’s new maps are all thin, straight lines, which forces players into that central killzone.

The battlepass, along with some very poor decision making around the results screen, which shows the winning team celebrating, means that losses feel bad. The matchmaking similarly punishes winstreaks by forcing losestreaks, usually matching you against people above your skill level, but on a team with players below your skill level. Whilst this is very addictive, it makes losing feel genuinely awful, and a losing streak causes tilting due to the FOMO of the battlepass.

Hope this writeup makes sense. I view Splatoon 3 as a genuinely bad game because of these factors, and greatly prefer Splatoon 2.