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Cake day: September 3rd, 2023

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  • He’s not supposed to be still there. He is, but we can’t know that until TotK, and blood moons had stopped until he was reawakened.

    If you just take BotW as a whole, you’ve saved the world.

    I hated how original Xenoblade X (I haven’t finished the switch remake yet, so not sure about it) had a “fake ending” that didn’t solve anything, and didn’t even explain why shit was still going on, just so the game could continue indefinitely.


  • It’s not limited to those two, it’s very common, generally the norm, not having a postgame state when the stakes are too high. You’ve got two choices :

    • let the player come back to it after you beat the big bad, so you have to create new interactions to try and reflect that, and not change the world significantly so all the stuff that’s left to do is still available and makes sense. It often feels like saving the world achieved nothing.

    • show in the ending that the player actually achieved something big, to the point coming back after it would not be the same game, basically.

    How would you explain returning to BotW after killing the source of all shit and still having hostile guardians and blood moons resurrecting monsters?


  • It’s not a very notable thing, and we don’t see who the hands belong to, but it just seems like what they went for IMO.

    Cadence of Hyrule is pretty good, more forgiving and more of a connected map with item-based puzzles compared to Crypt of the Necrodancer. The map is reordered between games, but it’s mostly designed rather than fully procedural. It’s fun.

    It borrows heavily from a Link to the Past visually, but has references to many episodes. You’ve got enemies from Breath of the Wild, Gerudo, Goron, even a full Majora’s Mask inspired DLC.


  • I am more familiar with Forza Horizon, which is my own comparison point, but, yeah. It’s like they missed why those were fun.

    Also, those button missions. They’re slow to set up, they interrupt the flow of driving, they’re mostly easy enough you can still beat them while messing up completely and they don’t incentivize breaking records.

    Compare that to speed traps and danger signs in Horizon. You see them, you speed through them, you do stupid shit. No pause, no slow as hell camera move showing you the obvious thing you’re supposed to do. It’s all organic.


  • Until then it wasn’t a thing, but 8 is a precedent for new DLC tracks. The original had a great DLC with 4 extra cups of new circuits. Those are included in the Switch version. There is also the later pass that is made of recycled Mario Kart Tour content, but except maybe a couple, those are rather forgettable and disappointing.

    I am really not sure whether we can expect new tracks in World though. If they want them to work the same as the rest of the game, it would basically mean also designing a new landmass around them. It’s not impossible, but I assume it must be a lot of work.





  • I agree this one is great. But there’s another problem with World : it’s one of the 3 tracks or so that are actually new. Almost everything else is an old track they remastered a bit. It’s not badly done, but it feels stale.

    Base game 8 already had a lot of fully new, very good tracks. And 8’s DLC had some of the best ever, including a few cool crossover circuits.

    Even World’s music feels like they went exclusively for nostalgia. There is a lot of it, but every piece of music except this episode’s main theme is a remix of a previous Mario Kart or Mario game.






  • I don’t remember which movie did that but they had a subpar rating, like 2/5 I think, from one review in particular.

    They did a poster with a big wall of reviews behind the actors, names of magazines with the ratings they gave them, mostly choosing 4 stars/80% reviews and up, obviously. That one was there too… behind a guy, perfectly readable but just a bit obscured, looking like the rest of the (inexistent) stars are hidden behind him.



  • The AI answer mostly just parrots whatever the site that has won the referencement war is spewing. If it’s easy enough, it can luck out and find an easy ready answer on wikipedia or something. Beyond that, most of those high referenced sites are the shitty aggregators that already pollute the search results.

    I often search for the correct way to do do something. For example, there’s a lot of baseless bullshit in gardening. If there wasn’t an AI answer, I would not trust the first result and stop there, I would look for a few, check what sources they have. I would not even take the wikipedia answer at face value without at least confirming where they got their info.

    We know AI doesn’t do that. We have examples of it not even recognizing obvious parody, it can’t be trusted with recognizing unsourced shit.