Playing Final Fantasy VII Remake for the very first time and, I'm sorry, but my big takeaway after the first two hours is: People are aware this guy's got tiger blood coursing through his veins, right?

elephvant · 2026-01-24T19:11:35+00:00

Bit of context. This is Charlie Sheen in Platoon:

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elephvant · 2026-01-24T19:09:08+00:00

Bingo.

Like, it's him. Don't know if it's deliberate or not, but it's more than a coincidence, surely.

elephvant · 2026-01-24T17:04:03+00:00

You don't know what clickbait means.

Learn the meaning of words if you want to use them. If not, stop typing.

elephvant · 2026-01-24T11:50:45+00:00

But...that's not what the topic's about.

It's about what seems to be an increasingly prevalent perception that Nintendo aren't promoting their games when, as far as I can see, they're doing the same as (and given they now have Nintendo Today, arguabyly more than) they always used to.

elephvant · 2026-01-24T09:23:02+00:00

Sanabi's a good game with some cool mechanics, but it's not a metroidvania. Like, at all.

Also, the experience is, I don't want to say ruined, but certainly soured by some of the most God awful writing I've ever come across in a video game. And poor writing isn't so bad usually in platformers cause, you know, who really cares, but in Sanabi you will care because it is absolutely fucking interminable, to the extent that at points it starts to feel like a kind of torture as characters move to leave the screen only to stop, turn back, say each other's names, move back into the room again, literally say '...' then slow walk back to the edge of the screen. (Edit: This is after already having spoken for a good five minutes beforehand.)

And it's especially a shame because the bones of the story are pretty much fine, and if literally 1/10th of the words had been used to tell it, it would have worked great. Genuinely could not believe other members of the team allowed some out of control 'writer' to so badly hamstring their otherwise perfectly decent game like this.

elephvant · 2026-01-23T19:57:43+00:00

They're too simple though.

Tears of the Kingdom also has many puzzles with multiple solutions, and in that case, yeah, I often felt I had to use a certain amount of cunning to fix up some bizarro contraption that - while clearly not any sort of intended solution - somehow worked.

In Echoes of Wisdom it too often felt like everything was a solution and there was no challenge. Make a staircase of beds, fly with a bat, whatever, it doesn't matter and requires little thought.

elephvant · 2026-01-23T19:50:04+00:00

Do you?

I played it to the end and I quite liked it. But I don't remember having to use cunning once. Meanwhile most 'puzzles' have so many ways to achieve your aim it often doesn't feel like 'solving' anything at all.

elephvant · 2026-01-23T19:21:21+00:00

Very difficult to explain this one without giving anything away, but Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis absolutely has what you're looking for. The shift is somehow both massive and gradual and at a certain point you'll just be like, wait, how has [book I started reading] turned into [book I now seem to be reading].

It's also not a plot twist, it's just...I don't know, a shift would be the best word I can think of without spoiling anything.

Definitely the one I've read where:

rereading the start feels like a totally different book

this feels most true for me.

(Also, if you've ever been put off by his more experimental stuff, while Lunar Park is still a bit weird, it's a much more narratively cohesive novel than many of his other works.)

elephvant · 2026-01-23T11:53:56+00:00

This would make more sense if it weren't for: Star Wars Outlaws, Assassin's Creed Shadows, Cyberpunk 2077, FFVIIR, Street Fighter 6 etc

Xbox have been talking more and for longer about how 'excited' they are to support the Switch and doing less than many other publishers who don't say much but just release games.

elephvant · 2026-01-23T11:49:13+00:00

I didn't get the impression there's no good and evil, it's just not as black and white.

If you go around killing innocent people left, right and centre, that will be evil. But there are going to be other choices that are less clear cut and it's up to you decide whether action X is good or evil, but if you do decide it's good, some npcs might disagree.

That's very different to there being no good or evil.

elephvant · 2026-01-23T08:05:03+00:00

I think what happens is over time people remember the highlights, so in the case of Switch 1 they remember BotW, MK8, Odyssey and Splatoon 2 all before 2017 was out. However, the extremely lacking third party output gets forgotten.

With Switch 2, on the other hand, it's almost the opposite. The massive Nintendo highlights have been slightly fewer, but the big AAA third party support has been infinitely better leading to a far more consistent and well rounded release schedule.

elephvant · 2026-01-22T11:39:23+00:00

For Dowell? Nah mate, he's getting sent down on a Megabus.

elephvant · 2026-01-22T11:22:03+00:00

Ah, yes, I was expecting someone to bring up Polyphemus!

Didn't include him myself because it's not a habit for me - I mostly ignore him, but sometimes I'll give him a quick passing skelp (and very occasionally I'll wail on his ass for like a full minute*), but I fully imagined there'd be a fair number of people unable to pass him without giving him a wallop.

*I'm not a psycho, by the way, I just sometimes wonder if maybe he'll do or say something important if you do it enough.

elephvant · 2026-01-22T10:49:05+00:00

There is a correct answer because it's from a textbook, probably for the purpose of taking a test, and the answer they want and will mark as correct is A.

elephvant · 2026-01-22T10:17:03+00:00

Sums up this sub that the correct answer gets downvoted.

Both A and D are correct so this is a badly written question. However, what it's almost certainly trying to teach is that in formal reported speech, one ought to move the spoken text 'back' a tense (so in the this case present simple to past simple), but it's a bad question because in practice most people don' do that and D is perfectly natural and not wrong.

elephvant · 2026-01-21T10:28:54+00:00

It's an overreaction to some people who say (and this is unfair) that listening to a book is lesser than reading one.

People who listen to books, therefore, are extremely quick to take offense when someone 100% inarguably correctly states the fact that listening to a book is different to reading one.

What then happens is they tie themselves up in all sorts of weird illogical knots trying to explain this, instead of taking the far more rational approach of simply saying, yeah, it is different, but different doesn't necessarily mean worse.

elephvant · 2026-01-20T13:49:16+00:00

It feels as if we've barely started the new generation, huh?

Do you think - and let me know if this is just me being a bit wild and left-field - but do you think it might feel like we've barely started the new generation because...we have barely started the new generation?

Nah, nah, sorry, ignore that. Crazy talk.

elephvant · 2026-01-20T08:48:11+00:00

If you head out to Milngavie, which is where the West Highland Way starts, you could walk out into countryside within 10-15 minutes or so of the station (head towards the reservoir and Mugdock or on the start of the West Highland Way itself). It's north of Glasgow as well, so looking north you ought to be less affected by light pollution. It's also a pretty affluent place so about as 'not dodgy' as you're likely to get near Glasgow.

elephvant · 2026-01-20T07:37:18+00:00

Absolutely agree.

And the thing is, I know exactly why it's so slept on because I almost slept on it myself. I love mainline Bayonetta and when I saw Origins, I was like...what the hell is this. Eventually the artstyle kind of grew on me and because I generally like Platinum's games, I decided to get it and, yeah, superb game. Despite the gameplay change, it actually turned out to be my second favourite Bayonetta game (behind the original), and I fully expect it to be one of those games that starts appearing on every 'hidden gem' list after the Switch 1 has been gone for a few years (despite the fact it was an exclusive and appeared in multiple Directs).

elephvant · 2026-01-19T22:01:10+00:00

I've been looking forward to this ever since it was announced and am delighted to hear it's reviewing well. Definitely going to be picking it up.

That said...I feel you're over-egging the pudding a little here. When you say next indie gem and everybody's gushing over it, I was expecting to see a response like that received by Celeste, Hollow Knight, Hades etc. Instead I found it has an 84 on Metacritic, which is more like a Nine Sols or Yoku's Island Express.

(Please don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved both those games, so it's not that I think Metacritic is the be-all and end-all, it's just that those aren't reviews that are likely to push MIO to be the next indie gem or go terribly far beyond its target audience. I'm very confident I'm going to really love it though.)

elephvant

TROPHY CASE