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Pretty sure this was my 2016 GOTY, and this is far from the only value-add they've done to the game since launch. I could see this motivating me to go back in for a third playthrough, though little more reason than "hey Dishonored 2 exists" is needed to get me interested.

I wonder why they're bothering to add things now, though. Was it commissioned by Bethesda just to lure people into making Bethesda accounts? Is it just something some staff at Arkane knocked out whilst blocked on whatever the hell that studio is working on now, that they figured they may as well ship?

...dare I get hopeful about the possibility of a Dishonored 3 announcement? (No, but a Dishonored 3 announcement would be sweet.)

This is an odd coincidence, I'm actually currently in the middle of my own first Far Cry playthrough. What compelled you to pick it up at this time?

It is a rough game to play in 2018. The movement isn't great, and I'm not a huge fan of the shooting either, which makes the at times really savage combat encounters feel especially unfair. (And I'm only about a third of the way through, so hearing that it gets rougher isn't comforting.) The story is indeed very cheesy, and I think the fact that it was released in the same year as Half-Life 2 (which I just finished a playthrough of) invites some unfavourable mechanical and visual comparisons. (Although maybe I need to bump the graphics settings up a few more notches.) (EDIT: yeah, I think the game didn't take my graphics settings the first time round. Game looked like a strong 2004 game when I got the settings to stick.)

That said, I'm actually far more disappointed by Half-Life 2. (And Half-Life, for that matter.) I've been considering writing up my thoughts on both of these games somewhere, though they're likely to inflame some people.

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I've been on a bit of a tour of shooters contemporary to Goldeneye and a little further down the road, ever since Die Another Friday compelled me to do emulator playthroughs of Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. (If you've never played Goldeneye or PD with keyboard and mouse before, give it a try. Once you have it set up it's incredible.) I'm particularly trying to figure out whether people who blatantly omit Goldeneye from recounts of the history of the FPS genre do so for any good reason, when it seems to mark the single most profound shift away from Doom/Quake clones and brought a ridiculous wealth of innovations to the genre. Thing is, I haven't been able to find any compelling campaign experiences that predate Goldeneye and aren't Doom clones (aside from maybe System Shock?), so that kinda leaves the hypothesis some have suggested that Goldeneye was ignored by its successors, which has led me to look at games in the 1998-2010 era and form a better picture in my head of what ideas developed where. I might just end up defaulting to the null hypothesis of PC master race gamers being assholes as usual, though.

The GameCube controller stands out to me as excellent relative to the terrible design of its contemporaries (seriously why the fuck did Sony think it was okay for the handles on the dual shock controllers to be unergonomically flat?), and held the title of "best Nintendo controller" all the way through the Wii and Wii U generations. The Switch Pro controller however is so good that it competes with the Xbox Elite controller for best controller in existence, so I don't see any reason to reach for a GameCube controller for Smash.

The octogate on the main analogue stick of the GameCube controller is pretty important for speedrunners, to the point where setups for various strats can need to be changed if a runner gets a controller with a slightly different gate due to manufacturing variance. Otherwise I think its continuing appeal may largely be down to nostalgia and/or familiarity.

Corsair K70 LUX with Cherry MX Browns over here. Took a while to get used to, at first it felt clunky and I was always bottoming out the keys hard. But when I actually got used to it, my wpm average probably gained a good ~10wpm (cf my typeracer profile), and I started to find the actuation force on my laptop keyboard hard to cope with at speed.

Your main goal in Smash is to knock your opponent(s) out of the arena -- that could be by falling through the bottom, or by being sent flying off through one of the sides or out the top. Knocking your opponent out of the arena will cause them to lose a life (or "stock") and/or give you a point, depending on whether you're a score-based or stock-based game. Last player alive or player with highest points at the end wins.

The percentage indicates how much force the next hit will you take will impart. When you take damage, the percentage for your character goes up. When you percentage gets up around 100% or higher, a smash attack gets pretty likely to send you flying out of the arena. If you ever get up to some silly percentage like 300%, even a random jab will likely send you flying.

I gave a bullet-point overview of the controls in another thread, quoted here for convenience.

I forgot tilt/smash attacks, which @spunkyhepanda chipped in:

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I don't think you need to worry about strategy to anywhere near the extent you seem to be. Just pick up a controller and mess around and have fun, it's a very easy game to understand at a casual level.

About the only advice I think is even worth giving is, you might want to use the A button more often than you might be intuitively inclined to.

Haven't looked into tutorials, but casually the game is incredibly simple. Here's a breakdown, I've bolded the stuff I think is most worth absorbing.

• A button for normals.Combining A with each direction gives a different normal, and in the air each direction combines with A for yet another normal.
• B button for specials. Again, direction+B gives different specials, though I don't know of any characters who have a different set of specials in the air.
• L or R to perform a grab. You can hold a grab, and you can hit people whilst you have them grabbed by mashing A or B. Inputting a direction whilst grabbing will throw in that direction. Some characters can walk whilst holding a grab.
• Up or X or Y to jump. Whilst in the air you get to do one double-jump. Most characters' up+B special serves as a triple-jump.
• Double-tap left or right to run. Pressing A whilst running gives yet more normals.
• ZL or ZR to shield. If your shield takes too much damage then you get stunned. Pressing a direction whilst shielding gets you a dash. Casual players basically never do this stuff, so don't worry about it.

You'd probably know more-or-less what you're doing at a casual level after an hour. Compared to the tens of hours of time investment I needed before I felt comfortable in games like Killer Instinct and Street Fighter V, it's easily orders of magnitude more accessible.

Lots of other people can comment on the single-player, I haven't touched it yet. The CPU player AI is fine for casual play, I'm having a pretty good time just fighting CPU players in standard matches and unlocking new characters.

@brackstone: has Valve been offering regional pricing to a lot of countries for a while now? They only just recently introduced regional pricing for Australia, so I just assumed most countries were seeing US prices. But maybe that was just because Valve was in a libertarian huff about the Australian government dragging them through the courts to force them into having to write a refund policy. (Or was it the GST evasion thing?)

Obviously it sucks if Epic haven't figured out how to regionally price their games so people in developing countries can realistically afford them, though. Hopefully they sort that out.

I don't think the Steam crowd are treating the withdrawal from Game Pass or Play Anywhere as the main issue at all. They just want all their games on Steam, and think it's not "positive competition" if they have to go to another storefront. For my part it would be annoying if I cared about Ashen at all, but it's by no means a travesty. It's up to devs, publishers, and storefronts to negotiate and arrive at a value proposition for a game -- part of that being storefronts and supported features and whatnot, as well as price -- and then I'll evaluate it as a whole and decide if I'm interested. I'm not entitled to Play Anywhere functionality, though it is a bummer if it's no longer on the table.

The only thing I could see being raised as a semi-legitimate argument is if someone bought into a Game Pass subscription anticipating Ashen being roped in. Maybe Microsoft would refund their $10 monthly fee in that case or something? Still doesn't seem like all that dirty to me.

I kinda put it down to Sony just not being able to hold on to their legacy at the time, but still, how the hell did Cloud get in despite Yamauchi's undying white-hot rage at Square's defection to Sony during the N64/PS1 era? These are strange times indeed.

I'm not sure whether this makes Banjo more or less likely. The licencing is probably not hard, but with how dated the character is and how much of a splash they seem to be going for with these reveals, maybe the bear and bird are just too easy.

^Also, Best Sports/Racing Game was Forza Horizon 4, and Best Fighting Game was Dragon Ball FighterZ. (Both obviously the correct choices.)

Yeah, they're probably going to need moves like this to draw a player base. Personally as long as the customer experience isn't nightmarish I'm happy to preference their store over Steam purely because I see no good reason to deny devs a better cut of revenues, but the store will be pretty spartan feature-wise in the beginning, there will be bugs, and people would stay on Steam out of force of habit if nothing else, so they need a customer-side draw. That is, assuming being the Fortnite platform isn't enough, and assuming that the store cut difference doesn't lead to sustained pricing differences or an outright dev exodus from Steam or anything like that.

A lot of weird stuff is happening around this. A whole lot of Valve fanboys seem to be losing their shit on Resetera about Epic maybe (probably?) moneyhatting a few games into storefront exclusivity arrangements. Some people are just prone to chucking a tantrum if their entire collection isn't on Steam. I think it's important for both players and devs to be able to choose their storefronts in ways which keep the storefronts on their toes, and that just hasn't been very viable until (hopefully) now.

I will say that I could imagine being a little miffed about Ashen disappearing from the Win10 store, though. That game was going to have Play Anywhere, which is an amazing feature.