travo said:

Ravenprose said:

Happy Turkey Day to yall's that like turkey!

I like buns.

I'm a breast man myself.

SupremeAC said:

I've seen these comparisions before, but they don't hold water, at least not in my opinion.  If you want to go with the Kinder Surprise's, you'd have to start by saying you've already been charged €60 just for entrance, and all the store sells are Kinder Surprise eggs.  Same goes for the CCG comparision.  CCG is actually a F2P model.

Loot boxes aren't wrong per se, it's the combination of them, in a triple AAA game with a pricepoint to match, and the fact that progress is actually tied to these loot boxes.  The vg247 article notes how having the right star cards really impacts gameplay, and not just by granting you different buns, but by giving you noticably higher health and manouvrability.  Stuff like that is just game breaking.

edit: I made a typo, that should have been 'guns'.  I'm leaving buns in though, it cracked me up.

CCG?

Pokies have a low price of entry. Kinder surprises may not be tied to progress, but things like Happy Meals where there's a limited set of toys are. Not to mention McDonald's monopoly, where you could even buy different buns for different quantities of chances to win!

All these things seem to be trying to take advantage of the same behaviour to me. The only difference I see is that loot boxes, like traditional gambling, give you nothing of material value in return; rather than what you're suggesting here, where they affect progress in the game. That seems to be a gamer's concern, more than a gambling concern. Gambling needs to create the illusion of material value, rather than be of material value. If it gave the player anything of material value, then it wouldn't be so lucrative for gaming companies!

For the record, I don't think any of these things are particularly good.

Except for Kinder Surprises which are awesome.

Since I've spotted a wild Aspro: I enjoyed your latest GU Podcast.  Good points on games not being able to achieve great feats of art.  I didn't fully agree while listening, but I've forgotten my arguments since then.

SupremeAC said:

Since I've spotted a wild Aspro: I enjoyed your latest GU Podcast.  Good points on games not being able to achieve great feats of art.  I didn't fully agree while listening, but I've forgotten my arguments since then.

Thanks AC. Wish I could be here more, but serioulsy I am on the internet for about 7 minutes a day. If you do have comments you can email me directly and I'll ready them on the show. Or comment on the site.

I never fully agree with what we say either, and sorry for the production values (audio wise), Episode 100 is back to our usually high fidelity.

Anyone have windows 10 and norton internet security? Is it normal for it NEVER EVER to find any threats in scans?

The E.T one must have taken some work to do. I mid air bike jump right in front of the Odyssey balloon taken from behind so its in shadow.

I can't believe there's never been a GTA game on a Nintendo home console still to this day. I mean that blows my mind. THE most popular non Nintendo franchise of the past 15 years and they never bothered with Gamecube, Wii U....even the Wii they could have ported the old PS2 titles to. You'd think at some point they would have just tested the waters.

Aspro, I've been listening to your impressions on Mario Odissey in the GU podcast, and I just had to disagree in typing.  You better get back to this forum and read this before it drops off the news page.

Some thoughts: you're comparing Mario to open world games, which I feel it is not.  It has large levels, yes, but it isn't open world.  All the levels are meticulously designed: the whole thing is good level design.  You don't see this level of craftmanship in an open world game.  You also bemoan how there is a lot of traversal inbetween the platforming bits, and how it's inferior to open world games because the traversal is tedious.  I disagree.  There is no other game in which just moving about is as enjoyable as it is in a Mario game.  There's such energy and enjoymant to be had from just hopping, rolling and diving around that I don't mind the larger distances you need to travel.  I'll give you the point about the Japanese rock gardens.  Odissey is, despite there being NPC's, an empty game.  There are no systems to mess with, there are only the challenges the developers put in.  But mario has always been like this.  In the galaxy games it just didn't show so obviously because there was no down time.

As for BotW: the land is supposed to be empty.  Cataclysm has come, it's dangerous to go alone, there's nothing inbetween settlements but wilderness and monsters.  There are many systems to mess around with here, but they're all based on interlocking physics and just not as visible as popping off NPC's with a sniper.

I guess BotW is empty by design, with a heavy relience on traversal, while Mario feels empty as a result of the devs needing bigger playgrounds to hide all the moons in.  I wish there were more actual platforming challenges in Mario, but I wouldn't go as far as to calling the levels 'empty'.  There's plenty to do, but a lot of it just doesn't rely on classic platforming.  Then again, I didn't think much of 3D world either.