Knack 2 looked quite fun, especially for new players to play with a family member.
The streets won't forget the quicklook of Knack 2 where they kinda wanted to keep playing because they were having a good time playing it. That game is totally fine, it just doesn't add anything new to the gaming landscape, but not every game has to push boundaries.
Pretty much all the games here looked like they will find a decent audience. Good showing, maybe 1 beloved PS1 or PS2 return would've be welcomed by me.
Raincode, Fire Emblem and Kirbster look neat. Harvestella could be neat given that it seems to be a Final Fantasy-esque thing but with more farming to it.
Various Daylife and Rune Factory graphically look like they've been developed 15 years ago. Not sure about those ones.
I too share a lot of food opinions with Dan and have similar issues with disliking the texture of certain foods that i do generally like the taste of, but would never eat on it's own. Some tomato-sauce through the food is delicious but i wouldn't want to spend 20 minutes eating a tomato that's 100% tomato and water.
I have experienced games where it felt like it's focus on realism has made it hard for me to parse what was really going on. I think about games like Dying Light and Wolfenstein, where the indoor environments has some cluttered tiny rooms where there are a ton of seperate items scattered around, most of which you can't interact with. But some things you can interact with. So it starts to feel like this very busy room with all it's objects is all part of a background, while the actual interactive layer that is the game, is placed within that background. So i kinda had to stop looking at all the cans and boxes as being part of the actual world, and ignore them so i could focus on the few items and interactibles that were actually part of the game.
Strangely enough i don't recall having that problem with colorful outside area's like Horizon, The Witcher 3 or Uncharted, although i can see how the yellow paint in Horizon can be hard to spot when so much of the environment is yellow too.
I do think that the game design itself informs all the design decisions in a game. If Breath of the Wild was a linear story-game where you had to hit a bunch of triggers in the environment to trigger specific cinematic events, and the game wanted to present you with some surprising jaw-dropping one-off environments throughout it's story, it could not get away with it's climbing system because you would sequence-break the game constantly or 'spoil' yourself on empty environments that get used later on in the story. On a similar note, if Horizon didn't have detective vision, they would have to simplify the environments greatly. Detective Vision is the industry's solution to create realistic-looking visuals while making it easy for players to always figure out what to do in that environment. Since they knew that the player would have access to it, they felt like they could fully focus on making the world look vibrant and colorful and rely on the detective vision to guide the players through the game.
Personally i don't mind that, but i can see the argument that if something is 100% all the time, it no longer stands out. A bit like how the Pixies are not a particular hard rocking band, but because they had a great loud-soft dynamic, the loud parts hit harder than a band that would play at that level most of the time.
Shoutout to Stereogum for being a fantastic place to find high quality music and with a quite neat cast of characters in the commentariat that have a knack for coming through with adjacent music to check out. Tom's The Number Ones column is fantastic too and has spawned it's entirely own set of readers.
Good to be on the other side of all the Kanye, Grimes & Phoebe Bridgers articles though.
'So i was kinda waiting for the earth to rotate' is a great Dan line. Never heard of the graveyard breath-holding game, but surely the tunnel hold your breath game is a Global phenomenon.
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