Oh wow. I played the hell out of this game as a kid. Knew it from the thumbnail immediately.

The last game I recall breaking out pen and paper for was Tunic. You can definitely beat the story without, but the later puzzles call for it.

Heyyyy, high five! I’m not sure what my XI playtime is at offhand but I know it could be measured in years.

Yes, I almost posted this same line!

I still use Left 4 Dead’s “pills here!” any time I’m dealing with medication. It’s an involuntary reflex at this point.

Also not really a line but the intonation of Chadley calling out “Cloud!” when he starts a conversation is seared into my psyche. Kind of like a modern version Navi’s “hey!”

Was curious what combat 2.0 meant.

Sticky Combo Points: The gist of it here is that Combo Points now remain after battle, giving combo moves a lot more use overall

This feels like a good change. I always felt like combos didn’t get much use outside of boss fights due to them resetting every battle. I’m not sure this entirely fixes the other problem wherein I almost exclusively used Mending Light, however.

Agreed. There was a fantastic time for mobile games before things went downhill.

I have a strong memory of being in an apple store, finding a display iPad, and becoming enraptured by Plants vs Zombies. I would eventually get my own and put dozens and dozens of hours into the game.

Then EA took it over and turned it into trash.

I feel like I could have some fun with a remake of Descent 1 and 2.

+1 for sea of thieves.

I had a bad feeling when I saw another developer had picked it up. This sounds worse than I imagined.

It’s still there, although there’s a loophole of course.

4.5.4:

Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.

The “explicit opt-in” could easily be language hidden in a massive ToS that nobody reads. So I guess I wish Apple would do away with that entirely and start enforcing it.

Since the question is specifically about what Apple could make developers do, I’ll say this: enforce the App Store guideline rule about not using push notifications for advertising.

I very rarely enable push notifications on apps anymore because so many use them for spammy advertisements. This makes apps less useful than they could be if notifications were used responsibly.

In retrospect yeah. I was very excited just to see a trailer at all. After sitting with it for a while I’m kinda like, that’s it? To me it looks exactly like the recent Metroid Prime remaster (which to be fair I did really like).

I wonder if the reveal of the big baddie was intended to carry more weight than it ultimately did.

Still amped for this game anyway.

I love the aesthetic of this. I played the white label version back when it came out and then kinda forgot it existed till now. I’m not always big on rhythm games so I’m not yet sure if this will be for me. But I can already tell the OST is gonna rip.

Nice. I had this on my list already, this just makes me want it more. I’ll probably wait for a full release though.

Haven’t had a chance to play this patch yet, but I’ll say I’m impressed at how much they are reworking already. Even going so far as to throw out certain hammers for example.

I attempted Trial of Haste pre-patch and quickly realized I stood no chance, neat to see that being adjusted.

Vow of Forsaking got the nerf treatment. Probably for the best.

Same. “Plots” feels like a weirdly nefarious choice of phrasing!

There was a time in my life when my friends and I played a whole lot of Halo, particularly Halo 2 and 3. I never played online but we would have essentially LAN parties where multiple people lugged over their TVs and consoles and play for hours. It was a blast. In college Halo was the de facto way to spend Friday night if nothing else was going on.

Strangely enough though I feel no desire to go back to that.

Oh hi! I played XI from release until recently (with some breaks). IMHO the original story (basically up to Rank 6 where you defeat the Shadow Lord) is fine, but it’s really more of a prelude and setting up the stakes. If you stop there it’s not really worth your time.

Rise of the Zilart and Chains of Promathia (+ optionally Apocalypse Nigh) are pretty good from a story perspective. These can be completed solo. This is what I’d recommend playing through to anyone interested in the real story.

From there it’s somewhat diminishing returns. Treasures and Wings add some interesting bits to the lore. Rhapsody is actually great but will take a lot of time and effort and is probably only worth it to a die hard fan.

Played about 5 hours tonight and I’m loving it. I wasn’t sure how much content to expect for early access but this is more than I would have guessed. The combat feels really really good. Charging your abilities with mana starts to feel better once you build up some regen on it and you can use it more freely. It took me a minute to nail how to aim the long charged special but now it’s one of my faves to spam.

A few little surprises have happened that made me grin really big as a big Hades 1 fan as well. I did not play EA last time around but I decided this time I want to be a part of that experience and see how the game evolves.