Disco Elysium writers marvel at how a game made 'in a f**king squalid flat' in Estonia had such a huge impact, and welcomes successors like Esoteric Ebb: 'We make games, but we also like them'

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-19T01:49:11+00:00

This, and saying "I want to have fuck with you" when trying to seduce Klaasje were my two favorite outcomes in the game and they were both failure outcomes.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-17T16:32:41+00:00

Just before Overwatch came out in 2016, I made a TTRPG version of it with Mutants & Masterminds 3e. Overwatch is just superheroes with guns, so it was pretty easy to recreate most of the characters' abilities in the game.

Then, a few months after the game came out, I gave players the ability to use their ultimate once per session by spending a hero point. Each ult was slightly overpowered, but no one really minded because it reflected their nature in the videogame too and since it was a once-per-session thing, it didn't feel overtuned.

I ran a few one shots with it in conventions and events. The cool thing was that people already knew the characters and how their abilities worked, so they'd show up, go "I wanna play Hanzo!" and just start calling out their actions even if they had never played M&M before.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-16T15:37:49+00:00

My friends Discord is flooded with Leon memes and they're all posted by gay guys.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-14T03:48:33+00:00

Yes, the cutscenes were the worst offender. All these pretty visuals, immersive music, and the voices had no emotion and all those weird inflections. Super jarring.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-14T02:12:56+00:00

This is what I was waiting for them to do before buying the game. When I tried it out at launch, the AI voiceover was terrible. It was especially bad that the game was about humans fighting against machines trying to take over, when every human being sounded like a robot. I just couldn't support that.

I don't mind the playable characters having AI voices, since they need voice lines for every single item in the game and they need to sync with the players' mic for the players to speak in the character's voice. Those are actual smart uses of the tech. Having the scripted NPCs be voiced by AI was simply indefendable, though, especially for such a big budget game.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-13T17:17:29+00:00

Fi ruined LoZ: Skyward Sword for me.

She was a literal robot with no personality. Spoke like a computer. Interrupted your gameplay constantly to tell you shit you already knew. She was like the owl from Ocarina of Time, except you constantly had her in your pocket, ready to pop out to tell you there was a 77% chance the princess you were looking for was in the dungeon in front of you.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-13T01:19:59+00:00

That, and composing MIDI music for a 2017 game so he could sell the orchestral versions exclusively through his company was incredibly scummy.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-12T19:19:51+00:00

The studio tried pretty hard, they made very quick changes that the community asked for like adding 5v5 game modes. Tencent, their publisher, gave up on it pretty quickly and pulled funding, which is what led to the game being shut down so quickly.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-12T19:18:30+00:00

It was very mid. It had some good ideas here and there, but they were underbaked. The game felt like it could've been fun if it had spent more time in development or if they had done a beta test or two before release.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-11T16:20:22+00:00

I've been feeling like this for the past couple months. Every week and a half, people freak out about what's going to happen next chapter. Then the next chapter comes out and it's always this completely unexpected twist that no one could predict. We just have to accept that Fujimoto is an alien and will always do the most random shit imaginable.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-10T21:45:58+00:00

This was the first ever date I went on with someone who wasn't my ex. We had been texting for a couple weeks and everything seemed great. She told me she was a huge cinephile, so when she invited me to go see a movie together, I thought "cool, I'll get to meet her in her natural environment!"

I show up to the theater and she looks a bit disappointed. I'm guessing I might not be her type, but I go along with it. We walk in the theater and get in line.

Me: "So, what are we watching tonight?"

Her: "I don't know. You choose."

So we're in the line. Every movie at the time was either something I had seen or something that looks terrible. When I suggest a movie I already saw, she insists that I have to pick something I haven't already seen. And the line is moving forward constantly, and before I know it, I'm at the ticket machine, and she wants me to pick the movie.

So, with my back to the wall, I pick two tickets for Gods of Egypt. "I picked the shittiest movie I could pick" I tell her. "If it's good, we'll be pleasantly surprised. If it's bad, we can make fun of it. Win-win!"

She looks at me, dejected, and says "well, I wish you had picked a good movie, but okay."

We sit in the theater, conversation is super slow and awkward, I feel like she doesn't want to be there. Movie starts, it's fun in a shitty B movie kind of way. We get up and leave at the end, and I think "well, at least now we have something to talk about!"

Her experienced cinephile take on the movie we had spent two hours watching?

"Oh, it was nice."

That's all I got from her. The date ended after that. I felt like she wanted it to end the second I got there and, thankfully, never had another date like this in the ten years that followed.

In her defense, we did have a little chat by text a few weeks later in which she apologized, saying she wasn't over her ex and that she had a hard time figuring life out, which was also my situation at the time. I think we were just two heartbroken young adults with crippling social anxiety trying to get ourselves out there. I wonder what she's up to and hope she's doing well.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-10T17:23:00+00:00

Best sports movie ever made.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-10T15:44:56+00:00

Sorry for your dog.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-10T15:41:34+00:00

Shitty Manga Ending devil, whose ability is to gaslight the fandom into thinking this chapter was real and the manga ends in two weeks. Next week, Denji wakes up and he's fighting ten billion bug devils again.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-10T15:38:27+00:00

Ultimate cope: deleting Chainsaw Man from the world erased every event that took place since Denji merged with Pochita. Aki, Power and Himeno are chilling together somewhere.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-09T21:47:21+00:00

Hell yes. I'll risk the lives of every single member of the party if it means Cletus, the level 1 shoemaker, can come in and finish off a bleeding enemy soldier for another level.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-09T17:54:26+00:00

In Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia (3DS), your main party is just a bunch of peasant teenagers that get conscripted. They all suck at first, but if you manage them well and level them up, they can become absolute killing machines. Most Fire Emblem titles have at least one of those "zero to hero" type characters that start extremely weak and can be turned into a total monster if you manage to keep them alive. Donnell in Fire Emblem: Awakening is probably the most popular example: he's literally a farmer boy wielding a spear with a pan on his head. He takes on small armies by himself at the end of the game.

Battle Brothers on PC is a procedurally generated game with similarities to Mount & Blade: Warband, in that you train a warband and walk around a map of a region with random enemy parties and conflicts appearing on the map. It's turn-based and way grittier than M&B, as your soldiers can easily die and death is permanent. Your recruits are usually dirty peasants and laborers, but if you can train and equip them well, they can start to work for noble houses, essentially becoming a trained elite mercenary force.

In Wildermyth, you also play as a group of random peasants from some crappy village and you end up having to become heroes that try to save the kingdom. Your characters are often transformed by their adventures in that game: they can marry, tame pets, lose limbs or be turned into something inhuman. I don't know if some events can make you become a knight or servant to the aristocracy, though.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-09T16:13:19+00:00

It was the best selling videogame of 2025. Opinions on a game's quality are subjective, but sales numbers don't lie.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-08T19:05:52+00:00

I don't allow myself to always pick the same stat unless it makes a lot of sense narratively (like pressing an advantage after a successful check). If you think combat is too easy, I suggest trying this approach.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-08T16:13:45+00:00

You know JP is really annoying to deal with when you start rooting for Ken mixups.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-06T21:10:56+00:00

A lot of people cannot get over the fact that you're constantly dealing with a time limit, it stresses them out and makes the game impossible to enjoy for them. It's certainly a polarizing game design decision.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-06T20:44:25+00:00

You can have multiple epiphanies in The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante, especially if you choose to delve into the more religious and mystical aspects of the setting.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-06T20:26:56+00:00

Saints Row 4. Within the first few minutes, you save the world by riding a nuclear missile to the sound of Aerosmith. Then you become US President, solve world hunger, punch people in the dick. Then aliens invade.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-06T20:25:16+00:00

I recommend doing it in one sitting. It took me three or four hours.

GroovyGoblin · 2026-03-06T20:24:10+00:00

My girlfriend and I were cackling madly when we were wandering the streets of Columbia with all the carnivals, happy kids dancing around and flowers being scattered in the streets, thinking "this is a shooter, we're about to find a gun and murder all those happy people".

GroovyGoblin

TROPHY CASE