pikmin 4 is obnoxious as fuck… but i also really like it for some reason. the game definitely can’t get out of its own way. it has one of the same issues as TotK in that Nintendo is way too miserly about when and how quickly you can skip text/scenes - even when those things are, in fact, “skippable”.
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pikmin was the first series that made me feel like i was not a Normal Gamer because my opinion is that the first is the best and it’s downhill from there. i wrote a (relatively) scathing review of pikmin 4 after nearly 100%ing it:
glad to see similar opinions here
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Right there with you! I at least appreciate the cynicism of 2 as like a reaction to people’s criticisms of the first game (hate the time limit?thought the first game was too short? Have all the time in the world… to toil in the mines!! 
) but the experience of playing it is kinda miserable… 3 felt like a defanged 1 and 4 the same but for 2 only made extra egregious by the repeated content from that game. Gonna read your review and probably feel very vindicated haha!
Edit: Also see this post of mine from the switch 2 thread about how 4 totally pisses away a golden opportunity:
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What sucks about this is it is meant to be the olimar from the “bad” ending* of Pikmin 1 but rather than do anything interesting with this they just make it an opportunity to play a sorta challenge mode in amongst the main game. Very jarring and unnecessary feeling.
*spoilers for Pikmin 1
My thoughts on Pikmin 1’s endings are that they are reversed. In the “bad” ending Olimar’s hubris is punished and he becomes one of the Pikmin (he had no right to become their leader and send them on a suicide mission just to save his own skin). The “good” ending implies that you’ve forever fucked the ecosystem of the planet and the Pikmin start murdering everything that moves. There’s a final shot of your ship leaving the planet and a bunch of Pikmin onions leaving too to colonise other planets…
Sorry folks, that’s it for all my Pikmin posting… Gotta take every opportunity to discuss my favourite Nintendo game!
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I probably enjoyed the more relaxed pace of Pikmin 2 at launch but I can’t imagine going back to play any game in the series aside from the first. Haven’t played 3 or 4 and never felt moved to really.
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I just wanna get to the human house but they’re really dragging out the dandori and caves shit.
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Buddy, I have bad news for you about the things you’ll be doing in that human house…
Edit: on reflection there are some unique twists to the house area but they’re fairly minimal in the grand scheme of things.
It’s relaxed right until you reach any of the bosses, then it becomes one of the most nightmarish, stressful experiences in the whole series. I’m still haunted by that spider machine-gun hybrid thing that mowed down my entire fleet of pikmin 
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My boyfriend is a genius and figured out that by converting PSX games to PBP format you can get basically anything to run on a hacked 3DS. I’m playing Final Fantasy IX now. It didn’t work at all in bin-cue format. This is amazing.
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Ooh, does this apply to the regular 3DS or just the new ones? I was always under the impression PS1 emulation didn’t work at all on the older models…
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Just the new ones
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I played maybe 7 hours of Proverbs today. At first, I thought “this is great. My eyes start unfocusing after awhile and that will force me to take breaks.” Then my pattern recognition became too powerful and I could passively rip through sections while listening to music. It is so much like when I was deep into Picross and Picross 3D. This is as much of a danger game as Balatro for me.
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I’m still playing Lies of P and I like it a lot. It has never become too difficult for me the way Sekiro did. There is a sort of parry mechanic but as with all such games I refuse to do it. (Okay, maybe I would if I could but I’ve learned through a lot of experience with From games that it’s just not going to happen for me.)
Some of the later environments are a lot of fun to explore. They are just punishing enough in places without getting overly frustrating. And the horror becomes more and more prominent as you go along.
One thing it took me a while to experiment with is assembling different weapon parts. I used the booster glaive with whatever handle I could upgrade to A in motivity for a long time. But it made a huge difference when I switched to the bone saw with the bramble sword handle. That combination has made even some of the boss fights maybe a little too easy. And it seems like some of the boss soul weapons might be even better.
I was glad Proverbs had an ending because I also found myself spending a lot of time with it until it was over. I’m consciously avoiding those other related games for now.
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Started playing Void Stranger for a bit just to see if it is something I’d be willing to dump apparently thirty-some hours into in the near future. First hour is neat but I am a bit unsure how this would scale up to what the game apparently becomes.
Also started up Outer Worlds as it struck me that if I felt that Outer Wilds was just sorta alright then maybe I’ll feel like Worlds is among the best games I’ve played in years. Anyways the first 45 minutes or so of it has been fine.
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Welcome to Void Stranger. (i also spent about two hours with it.)
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After 90 minutes or so of Just Cause 3, I think I have played enough. A lot of other games I’ve played have done different parts of this game better. And the writing and voicework make me groan but not in an amused way. There’s a few pretty cool mechanics in here, I can see why people liked this, but I’m just not down for 30 hours of this.
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as a champion of like mid-budget physics-y stuff with “understood the assignment” writing I thought it was the best of its ilk at the time but no one else seemed to really care and I thought 4 was kind of dull and grim
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That was definitely a put on my own music/podcast and just play it who cares game.
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ways i died in the aircraft tutorial in easy red 2:
- taken off straight up somehow, gotten confused and hit the ground
- gotten too low trying to resupply, exploded
- not gone back up fast enough after resupply, hit tree, exploded
- dropped a bomb while too close to the ground, exploded
- went too fast and flew into the back of the enemy aircraft, lost all control, exploded when hitting the ground
- didn’t pull up fast enough during dive bomb, hit the ground
game rules
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I love that game…two guys’ weird italian operation flashpoint ww2 tribute that also happens to be like the ideal of a kid playing bf1942 and going god i wish there were 200 guys piling up on each other at all times. Also for some reason it’s literally one of the loudest fucking games I’ve played in my entire life it’s so overstimulating that sometimes its hard to play more than 30 mins at a time
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