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Cake day: September 3rd, 2023

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  • Fun fact, that’s why the immersion-breaking magic compass thing exists in Oblivion (and most open worlds since). Bethsoft devs explained it once.

    Stuff is relocated a lot in development, and this means having to rework all dialogues refering to directions, occasionally missing some. It was even more unfeasible for Oblivion in which all dialogue is voiced and would have to be re-recorded.

    So they just removed all directions from the dialogue and now you’ve got 100% accurate floating tags telling you exactly where to go, even when you are not yet sure what you’re looking for.



  • IMO 7 has a good part of what makes 8 good, especially better item balance (which had already been improved a bit in Wii, but not enough). And I really liked some of the tracks, though some of the linear ones did not convince me, including Rainbow Road.

    But 8’s tracks just blew my mind, both the originals and the heavily reimagined classic ones. And the ones from the DLC were even better (well, fuck Baby Park). 200CC being thrown in as a patch was refreshing too. The only thing that was not great and I know was not well received was the loss of actual battle arenas (fixed in 8 deluxe), but since I almost never play those I didn’t care much.

    I would have loved for 8D’s pass to be in the same vein as the base tracks, even if it had a lot fewer, instead of hastily recycling Tour content. They clearly went for quantity over quality for those. And the city tracks feel awful to play IMO.


  • Mario Kart 8’s gimmick barely counts as one. The game would be completely fine without anti-gravity, it’s barely noticeable most of the time. And of course, it’s not even new, it had existed forever in Wipeout and… F-Zero X/GX. It was just not a thing yet in Mario Kart.

    They didn’t innovate for Mario Kart 8. They just made an exceptional entry, probably my favorite one in the whole series.

    But for some reason, nah, after 2 decades without a game F-Zero needs to kickstart the next era of video games or whatever.











  • I’ve played Tales of Monkey Island. If you’ve played Telltale’s version of Sam and Max, it’s pretty much the same kind of take. Probably suffers quite a bit from the episodic format, and puzzles are a bit straightforward compared to classic monkey island games. Fans of the series mostly consider it a huge letdown.

    Can’t say anything about the more serious parts of the Telltale catalogue, I’ve never played those, but for having played this, the 3 Sam & Max seasons and Back to the Future, there was certainly a Telltale formula that started annoying me after a while. They went less and less subtle about crafting their dialogues so they all lead to the same answer, they clearly wrote their stories with an objective to reuse character models and assets, and they still used that in-house engine that looked and controlled terribly, barely improved through the years.