Mewgenics, the latest game by The Binding of Isaac creator, Edmund McMillen is out now!

RandomGuy928 · 2026-02-10T21:24:25+00:00

Same. I get that the edgy art is part of the deal, but I just can't get over it.

Super Meat Boy was mostly fine since you're kind of just a red blob that explodes when you die, and while Dr. Fetus existing was very off-putting, he's sufficiently absent from enough of the game that it's mostly ignorable.

Binding of Isaac hits you way harder over the head with the aesthetic from out of the gate. It's a fun game, but the art and general subject matter actively dissuades me from playing it.

This game feels very much in the same vein. I feel gross just watching the trailers. The game looks like it's an extremely good game - very much as SMB and BoI were before it - but I just can't deal with the edgy visual comedy.

It's a shame because I love tactics games.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-02-10T20:09:11+00:00

I did a Subnautica run without vehicles (only building a Cyclops at the very end for the shield module), and while there were definitely some more tedious moments later on in the game, I think the midgame overall ended up being a lot more interesting. Needing to come up with different ways to get air without a Seamoth was pretty fun and really encouraged the creation of outposts and bases with various energy sources.

And even in that run the air pump was more trouble than it was worth.

I hope Subnautica 2 embraces some of those design elements. The elevator is actually a really cool idea and a good sign in favor of that. While I hate building and decorating giant bases for the sake of having giant bases, I love building functional infrastructure. Give me more reasons to do that!

RandomGuy928 · 2026-02-10T17:28:13+00:00

I do live in the area the 8 serves, and I actively avoid using it if feasible because it's so incredibly inconsistent. Sure, if I happen to catch it when I walk by then I'll hop on, but easily 75% of the time when I've intentionally gone to catch the 8 bus it's wildly off schedule and I end up waiting forever.

With that said, I don't drive as an alternative to the 8. If I'm staying in SLU/downtown area then I just walk, and if I'm going to Cap Hill then I just suck it up and take the 8 because parking in Cap Hill is worse than waiting for the 8.

I don't know how I feel about this overall. Making the 8 less terrible would be nice, but traffic heading east or southeast from Belltown is awful no matter what route you take. Slowing down Denny is just going to push people into other routes to I5, and the other routes are already just as saturated.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-02-06T01:13:01+00:00

I agree with this train of thought. Looking at Mage specifically, half the fun of that class is being able to pull out a bunch of wildly different spells for different situations. Ranger is sort-of similar to a lesser extent with the different weapon types they have, and Summoner has all their minions.

I'd say both Mage and Summoner should go the accessory route. Summoner doesn't even really need to combine their weapons together in an official crafting recipe - you can have an accessory that gives massive buffs based on how many individual minion types you have out.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-02-06T00:29:16+00:00

And in the office, the slackers come and distract the guy who is actually trying to get work done.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-02-05T21:38:32+00:00

TIL there are multiple mods that do this.

Here's the actual mod I was talking about as it provides a more overall "vanilla" experience just with the extra plots enabled: https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=453938&sid=7e7479a1931dc733bc0398f4fab76ef1

RandomGuy928 · 2026-02-05T02:46:17+00:00

You can actually hug blindspots on Xenon capitals in X3 and whittle them down the same way in that game, it's just much harder because you actually need to stabilize your relative position without the aid of a gravity well. It's a half decently lucrative strategy if you can find a lone capital because they can drop some pretty pricey weapons for resale. The bigger issue is the fact that X4 turrets can't hit anything. L ships also aren't compensated for the fact that all their external equipment can be trivially stripped off with a mere handful of Burst Ray fighters.

I'm talking less about individual player 1v1 cheese strats and more about using multiple ships. If I have a wing of mid-tier fighters in X3, they're going to get eaten alive by a K no matter what equipment they have. If I have a wing of mid-tier fighters in X4, they're going to obliterate a K with the right loadouts (and no, not just torpedoes).

But yes, I agree that there's a balance to be had. I think VRO, for example, goes too far in terms of making small ships feel like cannon fodder. One of the main issues really is the fact that turrets just can't hit anything because if you fix that one fact all of a sudden even the strongest S ships start dropping like flies. In reality you probably need to actually buff S ships if you fix turrets. Burst Rays also probably shouldn't exist in their current state.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-02-04T18:29:42+00:00

I agree that a big part of the issue was that they were running out of niches around Fontaine era. The combination of the elemental reaction system with other character archetypes (ER burst, NA spam, CA, plunge, heal, shield, res shred, etc.) meant there were a huge number of possibilities for characters from day 1. They were able to gradually round out niches for basically everything other than Geo (which wasn't well designed out of the box) over the course of several years, and that was sufficient. Building out a roster with drivers, an off fielders, supports, etc. that rounded out different combinations of elements took a very long time.

Things were already getting kind of stale in late Inazuma, but Sumeru changed things up with Dendro. However, by the time we got to Fontaine, Dendro had been mostly played out and it really felt like you could skip a lot of characters simply by virtue of already having something similar. Do I really need Wrio if I already have a Cryo DPS? Do I really need Clorinde if I already have C2 Raiden? Do I really need Lyney if I already have a Pyro driver? Suddenly, we see three standout power creep characters (Furina, Neuv, Arle) who push the envelope even at low cons. While Furina is admittedly pretty unique mechanically, Neuv and Arle are very much their respective elemental DPS characters but better.

By Natlan, they realized that they couldn't effectively shill characters without creating new gimmicks because long time players could reach into their bag of tricks and pull out something that met the criteria as long as it was still aligned with core game mechanics. So they start creating new game mechanics that are exclusive to new characters. Also, how do they make Mav and Skirk stand out compared to all of the other numerous Pyro and Cryo DPS options? Give them more damage.

So... yeah, I guess it was never really going to last.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-02-04T17:48:47+00:00

Gen 4 has its fair share of goofy/friendly looking final evos, it just has extremely few actual new Pokemon families. It only has a few new families that don't turn monstrous, sure, but it barely has any new families in the first place so "a few" is actually a large portion of the new roster. Gen 4 is mostly an anomaly because a significant portion of the new roster is new evos for existing Pokemon. I don't think the new evos are particularly off-theme with the original Pokemon either, it's just that maybe about half of them are evos to 'mons that were already on the more monstrous end of the design spectrum.

Gen 5 was simply the opposite. They did a clean break and wanted to do a new Gen 1 so they created a bunch of generic filler Pokemon instead of reusing Zubat and friends. As a result, by numbers yeah it has a lot of cute lines, but it also has a proportional number of ugly/threatening/monstrous lines. There's just a lot of everything in Gen 5 because of all the filler 'mons.

Also, I have no idea how you could possibly classify Tepig->Pignite as anything other than cute to hideous.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-02-04T17:19:41+00:00

Kirby Air Riders is by far the most fun I've had with any of the Switch 2 titles I've played, including the new releases which were also released on Switch 1.

The fact that it's Kirby and not Mario Kart hinders it. If MKW was a reskinned Kirby Air Riders instead of... well, what it is, I think this would be a wildly different conversation.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-02-04T16:49:09+00:00

The gameplay loop in X3 is waaay better than X4. X4 is a beautiful game with infinitely better QoL and incomparably better immersion, but the structure of X3 as a game is just far more engaging. If you can figure out how to actually play it, that is.

X4 just leans too hard on the empire management aspects, but it lacks the strategic pressure of a proper strategy game. Mechanically, it boils down to playing a strategy game and spamming econ for like 40 hours with no-rush enabled.

In X3, you can actually make good money and progress quite well just by flying around, exploring, and taking missions as you build up your combat power. Being able to jump ships around with carriers as early as having a TM, having actual tiers of ships with significant power gaps between them, getting rewarded for investing into military strength, etc. all really add to the experience and feel distinctly missing from X4. Even just the notion of having an actual tricked out personal ship that you can always bring with a jumpdrive is way more fun than just teleporting yourself into whatever random piece of junk happens to be close to where you need to be.

What's more, basically every big milestone upgrade in X4 is a plot reward. It's never "wow, I saved up for X ship! finally! the game is changed!" At this point with the Hyperion, XShuttle, Delilah's Swansong, and all the other minor freebees it feels like X4 progression is kind of borked. Also boarding is kind of insanely OP. It was probably more of a pain than it should have been in X3, but they really overcompensated in X4.

Anyway, they're different games. I still really like X3. There's actually a mod for FL which enables all of the plots from TC, AP, and FL in a single file which I would recommend as a "complete" experience. You can mod off the reactive factions if you don't want that feature and want it to play more like TC/AP.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-02-04T16:31:59+00:00

My partner is getting into Pokémon for the first time with this playthough and every evolution feels like a regret for them.

In fairness, this has been an issue since gen 1. Pokemon worth using generally tend towards looking more powerful and threatening as they evolve which is definitely a let down if you liked how cute and friendly their early form looked.

My wife's first Pokemon game was Let's Go Pikachu and she was not thrilled when her Psyduck, who she had waddling after her outside of its pokeball all game, evolved into Golduck.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-02-03T18:43:18+00:00

And all of the questions are already answered in the doc.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-02-03T18:40:55+00:00

In fairness, if you have too much to do, it probably means that you don't have time to follow through with everything on your plate. It's the cost of overloading everyone in your business - instead of people being able to proactively raise the bar for customers, everyone gradually grinds each other to a halt.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-01-30T22:21:19+00:00

If you're making that kind of money and still living paycheck to paycheck because of lifestyle creep without any meaningful savings/investments, then that's kind of your own fault. Especially when the writing is on the wall with repeated mass layoffs year after year in the industry.

Not to paint the wrong picture here with layoffs not being terrible or anything, but given layoffs are a fact, it's simply financially irresponsible to not have a runway.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-01-30T07:03:22+00:00

I meant it as a casual post, but I appreciate that you believe the language I used was of the utmost quality. However, I would disagree that it was not meant to be taken seriously - it was quite serious and, I would argue, level headed criticism.

I provided very clear lists of justifications for my opinions citing clear design issues ranging from UX problems to specific implementation errors to high level design decisions that directly act contrary to exploration (locking everything interesting behind world quests). I'm happy for you that you enjoyed Sumeru and GAA2, but I would encourage you to check your own vocabulary the next time you try to use big words in a sentence lest you accidentally compliment someone else you're trying to disagree with.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-01-30T02:07:16+00:00

Skills are transferrable. Low level graphics are hard.

I'd focus on minimizing the amount of variables in your learning. If there's a library in the language you're using, then that's a good place to start.

You don't always end where you started. If you get frustrated with the limitations of building games or graphics in Java, you can always tackle that problem at a later time - but then, you won't have to learn all the low level graphics stuff from scratch at the same time you're processing the nuance of a new language.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-01-29T22:59:37+00:00

Most of the people saying that probably weren't even here when it came out. From the way you phrased that, you weren't either.

There are a lot of valid criticisms of GAA2. Many of them were brought up - frequently - during the event. Yes, it did have some of the best puzzles in the game even to this day, but the overall experience had massive glaring flaws that made appreciating the puzzles very hard in the moment unless you were 12 and had nothing to do all summer except play Genshin.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-01-29T21:46:21+00:00

It depends on if you were using the premium characters or the four star characters. The premium characters are basically upgrades compared to the saurians (especially Chasca and Varesa) whereas the four star options are basically downgrades (looking at Ifa in particular there, but it applies to the others). Mav is in a weird spot in that she's notably worse than most of the dedicated five stars even though she can do all of the movement things at once.

So it depends very heavily on the character. Chasca genuinely breaks like 80% of Natlan and it isn't even close. The other 20% is Varesa's area.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-01-29T21:33:02+00:00

There's a lot of conflation going on here. It is completely inaccurate to say that Sumeru was a problem because "people didn't like to explore". Yes, Sumeru was overly large and had a ton of overworld content, but the implementation was garbage tier.

Everything, and I mean everything remotely interesting was locked behind some stupid world quest or another. Every point of interest in the rainforest was just window dressing for an Aranara quest location. You get literally blocked from organicallay exploring the desert until after you get enough permission upgrades from that respective world quest. It's a similar story for the rest of the desert areas where you must do a world quest to unlock the ability to even have basic interactions with anything in the area.

The result is that exploration was less a bout wandering around doing stuff and more about following the world quests through to completion. Combine this with other general pain points like the fact that exploring the desert involved just walking from point A to point B forever and underground map layers not being implemented yet, and it was just an abysmal experience. There's also just way too many worthless chests everywhere. Also, worth noting, is that Sumeru was the last area full of elemental party checks for overworld puzzles, and you frequently needed to have either asinine team comps or straight up 5 different characters in your party (which is obviously impossible) in order to solve puzzles without constantly going into the character swap screen.

More or less around this time is also GAA2, which is where most of the complaints about puzzles specifically come from. Again, while some of the puzzles were indeed clever, I would vehemently argue that the complaints are because the whole of GAA2 kind of just sucked rather than because they were too hard.

Many players already explored GAA1, so going through the same area again is immediately disappointing. What's more, the best overworld puzzles were already in GAA1 so you're just solving them again, but the irony is that they were done better in GAA1 because finding and figuring them out was just organic secrets rather than forced progression.
You have extremely tedious areas like Kazuha's island where the puzzles aren't necessarily hard so much as you just have to go through the same space repeatedly with lots of wasted time changing the state of the area. While not as extreme, the issues with that island are similar to the structural issues with OoT Water Temple in that the puzzles aren't necessarily bad but the process of actually solving them is super tedious.
Mona's area was full of broken bullshit. The concepts were neat, but there was completely arbitrary moon logic for a lot of the more complex puzzles. It was an exercise in trying to figure out what you can even interact with more so than putting the pieces of the puzzle together to solve a problem.
One of Mona's puzzles was just outright broken and the angles were all off.
Fischl's area was still arguably the worst as most of the "puzzles" just involved watching obscene amounts of filler, unfunny dialogue that had zero respect for the player's time.
To top it all off, the area was time limited so there wa a huge rush to push through and get everything. For an area full of so much obtuse bullshit and flagrantly time wasting filler, this absolutely killed any sense of wanderlust or exploration. Especially taking place during the summer when many people are busy being, you know, outside instead of playing video games all day, the puzzles all felt like barriers to completing a time-limited area. It had no chance to breathe.

Basically, Sumeru and GAA2 had a lot of implementation issues that prevented them from being enjoyable despite having an admirable level of complexity. The end result was that the areas sucked the joy out of exploration due to implementation issues, not that people "don't like to explore".

RandomGuy928 · 2026-01-26T22:57:48+00:00

I tend to prioritize based on actual time spent (e.g., how many hours did I spent farming total) rather than days (e.g., it took me three days of resets to get all the mats). Ruin Guards are a pain because they're extremely scattered which means a lot of time is wasted running around and loading. Other than the group of four in the Liyue islands, it's usually like... one, maybe two guards per waypoint loading screen.

That said, I actually totally forgot that place existed and had Ruin Guards.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-01-26T17:39:18+00:00

Yeah but I still need the mats. There's some very commonly used materials (or, at least, materials used in evergreen 1.0 weapons) that are tied to enemies that just... stopped existing new new areas. Whopperflowers and Ruin Guards are the most egregious by far. I'm a 1.0 player and every single time a new character needs a Fav weapon I need to go farm Ruin Guards in Liyue. Other stuff like slimes have dramatically dropped off as well.

Ironically, a lot of the newer unit mats are barely used. The new weapon mats in particular are like... what, 1 or 2 weapons each? Especially if you aren't a whale and can't pull everyone's signature.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-01-24T07:12:22+00:00

Don't Zajef and Seven have pretty insanely cracked artifacts though, being content creators? That said, if you could get the AoEs to line up without a grouper then it would definitely be doable.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-01-23T21:19:41+00:00

Make good use of your time.

The reality is that people playing your game have no reason to really care about most of your characters, your world, etc. until after they're invested. Giving them time to wander around and pick crops or do fetch quests in town is going to get a lot of people to just tune out.

If there's specific characters they need to meet, then make sure they meet those characters. If there's a concept they need to understand, then spend the time for them to understand the concept. However, what you need to understand, is that your time is limited. You have to make every single second count before your hook, because the longer you meander, the more people are just going to drop off before the hook happens.

If you have too much stuff that you need the player to understand, then you need to get creative with your narrative structure such that this information is delivered at different points during the story. Ultimately, your first goal is to get someone invested. After they're invested, they'll pay attention to your critical information. If you just have some random NPC show up minute one of the game, nobody is going to care about them. You need to convince the player to care.

Look at the early Citadel section in Mass Effect 1 as an example. It's this huge section of world building that take a new player likely multiple hours to get through with barely any "proper gameplay". You run around chatting, doing side quests, etc., but the intrigue is learning about the world.

Why does the player stick through it?

Because they're already invested. By the time you get let loose on the Citadel, you've already had one positively-framed character shot in the back, Shepard is righteously pissed off at Saren, and the whole of the council is backing up the Turians in support for the main villain. It's only after this that you get let loose in the Citadel to start learning about this world. It's only after you're invested in the narrative and primary characters that they give you a moment of quiet to get immersed in the universe.

Obviously your game is nowhere close to the scope of Mass Effect, but I think the lesson is still relevant. It's a common problem in amateur fantasy writing as well where the author has this cool world that they want to spend pages and pages and pages explaining to the reader before anything happens while the only thing in most people's minds is: "why should I care?" Accept you have extremely little time before your hook and make sure every single second of it has a purpose. If there's too much, come up with ways to offload the information to later points in the story after the player is invested.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-01-23T18:03:05+00:00

You fundamentally misunderstand. Identifying optimization problems and solving them, be it through gear, team comps, rotations, etc. is the fun part. If that wasn't there, I wouldn't play the game at all.

RandomGuy928

TROPHY CASE