The Thursday letters page talks about the special joy of beating Shadow Of The Erdtree, as one reader is sceptical about the Watch Dogs movie.
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Be more Nintendo
The same day as we got that Inbox letter about having newfound respect for Nintendo we get the story about them being wary of AI. I think we’re all going to have to admit it: Nintendo is the best video games company by a country mile.
They treat their employees the best (they’re hiring, not firing), they make the best games (objectively speaking, if you check Metacritic and OpenCritic), they didn’t get caught up in NFTs and lootboxes and all that nonsense, and they’ve had very limited interest in live service games.
I’m not really sure what complaint you can level against them except… their games aren’t often discounted. And that’s only because people are always willing to pay full price.
When things got rough for them their execs took a pay cut, which I’ve never heard of any other company doing, games related or otherwise. And their budgets aren’t stupidly out of control, because their answer to a problem is never to just throw money at it.
Whatever you think of their games, everything would be a lot better if all publishers were more like Nintendo.
Onibee
Taste the feeling
I really can’t say enough good things about Elden Ring and Shadow Of The Erdtree. I have no idea how they design a game like this, because it’s so intricate and open-ended it almost seems impossible. This is exactly the sort of game my seven-year-old self imagined would exist one day and I love it even when I hate it.
I was stuck for ages trying to get over Ellac Greatbridge and onto the Site of Grace beyond the camp there and was getting really frustrated, because I felt it wasn’t supposed to be that hard and I was making a hash of it. Then I finally beat it and the feeling of elation was second to none. I think that’s the game’s most impressive achievement: making you love it even as you spend hours hating it and cursing its name.
Taylor Moon
Relatively happy gaming
I know this has been mentioned before but I would like to know what things keep returning in games that cheese off GameCentral readers. For me, I love racing games but why do we always have to do races when you first play that tell you how to turn, accelerate, and brake. Surely even young ones know how to do that!
Also, I’ve had a couple of games where the game saves have corrupted and had to start again (looking at you Forza Horizon) but when I went to play online with friends I had to get so far into the game before it unlocks. Can’t we have online choose-able right from the start?
Finally, why can’t we have the option to customise our controls more on console? It grinds my gears when you have a selection of pre-sets but none of them suit me… arrrrrrrrgh!
Happy gaming everyone.
Rob
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Iconic hat
I see they’ve start filming a Watch Dogs movie and all I can think is… why? The only good Watch Dogs was the second one and that was eight years ago, so I can’t imagine what anyone was thinking when this film was first greenlit. Especially if it was in the wake of the awful Watch Dogs Legion.
It doesn’t seem to me that the series itself knows what to do with itself, so what is the movie going to be about? At this point a fourth game seems very unlikely so this is all very odd.
I imagine this sort of thing is going to become very common in the next few years though, as Hollywood snaps up any old game to make a film of. Funny thing is they probably could make a good film out of the basic premise of the games, but I don’t see anyone caring if they just make up a completely different character and plot.
Ishi
Licence to bore
I appreciate GC pointing out that those bickering over Yasuke in Assassin’s Creed Shadows are missing the forest for the trees. Ninja/shinobi were nothing like the way they’re portrayed in modern movies and games. It’s like thinking James Bond is an accurate portrayal of what a modern spy does.
Obviously, a guy sitting at a desk combing through financial reports doesn’t make for very exciting cinema, but James Bond isn’t pretending it’s realistic. Ubisoft has always banged on about Assassin’s Creed being historically accurate and it’s nowhere even close, for any of its games that I’m aware of. So I just wish they’d drop the pretence or, for once, take the opportunity to portray things how they really were.
Cole Slaw
Back to the future
So, at some point there is going to be a Fallout 5, so what do people want from it? I think a lot were disappointed that Fallout 4 didn’t really do anything new but what should a fifth one do differently? The location is important but I’m not sure Bethesda release how little it means to anyone outside of the US, given all American cities look very similar, especially when they’ve taken a nuclear bomb to the face.
I think we need to get away from the formula of doing the same thing but in a different city and switch up the timeline a bit. I think it’d be interesting to go much further forward in time, to the point where society is coming together and things are quite high-tech. Fallout 4 sort of hinted about this but you very rarely see a post-apocalypse world where things have worked out okay.
Or how about some kind of time travel gimmick, where things you do in the past change the future, so you can keep going back and try and make the perfect world. I’ve no idea how difficult that is to do but I thought it would be neat and something different.
karlsjojo
Keep fit
I really hope Rockstar don’t bring back the exercising gimmick from GTA: San Andreas. I don’t know anyone that thought it was anything other than a dumb idea. It makes no sense given there’s no real sense of time advancing in the game. It takes time to get fat or muscular and yet you’re playing these games for a few hundred hours at most.
Not to mention that the exercising and everything is really boring, preventing you from getting on and just playing the game. I’m happy to wave away the issue and assuming that constantly running away from the cops and other gangsters keeps you pretty fit as it is.
Burnst
Nintendo bingo
I am choosing to be hopelessly optimistic when it comes to the Switch 2, just because Nintendo seem to be on the ball at the moment and, let’s face it, we need some good news right now for gaming.
Trying to guess the launch line-up is a good bit of fun, so I’m going to give it a go and I think Metroid Prime 4 is a very obvious place to start. That footage from the Nintendo Direct looked a little too good for the current Switch, and it was the only Nintendo game not coming out this year, so I think it would be very odd for it to come out just months before a new console.
Metroid will be cross-gen though so I’m going to go with the obvious and assume that the main launch game is a new 3D Mario. Everything’s pointing towards Donkey Kong being a big part of it but I’m not sure what that would mean in a modern game, since there seems no obvious way to adapt the original – especially as Donkey Kong is no longer a villain.
I’m imagining it as a primarily co-op game, with the two acting as frenemies and having different abilities that can help each other. Knowing Nintendo that will link back to the hardware itself, so I’m going to guess it makes a bigger thing of having two Joy-Cons, which maybe will be more like standard controllers.
I’d also guess a Zelda: Breath Of The Wild remaster is too obvious for even Nintendo to ignore and then they’ll want at least one new IP, problem some sort of party game/tech demo thing like 1-2-Switch! Except hopefully better than that. I think that sounds reasonable; I’m going to put it all on a bingo card for when the announcement happens.
Grackle
Inbox also-rans
I’d almost forgot we’d had a GTA trailer already, that seems like so long ago now and we still didn’t learn much. I’d like to make a prediction of when the next one will be but I really have no idea, early autumn maybe? They wouldn’t make us wait a full year for another one, I don’t think.
Coola
I’ve noticed some advertising for Netflix’s games when out and about recently. I think it’s obvious they’re going to slowly increase their involvement over time until they are the Netflix of gaming. Which makes sense.
Cranston
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The small print
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