James Margaris

Graphic showing the different equipment the Cleric in The King of Dragons gets as you progress through the game

Feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to do a "The King of Dragons but the enemy drops 3 pieces of equipment and you can only choose one" thing.

Equipment progression in TKOD is satisfying even though you have no control over it.

Maybe Hades or Vampire Survivors was an inflection point where a lot or roguelike upgrades now are generic rather than themed to the specific game. In a fantasy beat-em-up I'd rather get a fire sword or "helmet of lighting blast" or new spells vs an abstract "air aspect"

Mostly agree with the Absolum reviews that say the roguelike elements don't add that much. I have two related griped about them: 1) I don't think they add that much and 2) I wish they were themed as equipment or spells or similar and not just "aspects"

The Valve version of the same game would look better and run at 90 FPS on my PC, simply due to different choices made.

I played the demo for a new Warhammer tactics game and it runs at 17FPS, and even with DLSS / TAA turned off and set to native res it looks extremely blurry to the point it kinda hurts my eyes.

What are we doing? We took a wrong turn somewhere.

Something that never occurred to me before, but that is extremely apparent with 2XKO, is that lab-heavy fighting games make for terrible viewing. If you go on Twitch and watch people "play" half of them are practicing combos in training mode, it's like watching paint dry

Looks cool I like games in the Solve 'Em Up genre.

This general class of problem is introducing new stuff when there a) isn't enough time left in the game to explore it b) there isn't enough space to use it (it crowds out existing content) and/or c) there's some sunk cost in the existing content in terms of upgrades or just player understanding

My experience with tactics games is mostly the opposite as the one described - I end up replacing all the guys I trained up with the new named units. But either way it doesn't feel great.

This is a problem in a lot of tactics games but this *class* of problems is pretty common.

In God of War 1 (the PS2 one) they give you a second weapon when you're 90% done with the game, after you've spent most of the game learning and upgrading your main weapon. (Which is more fun to use!)

In my experience almost all these games have the problem of late recruits either being useless or being good and displacing generic units you had been growing the whole game. Either way it pretty unsatisfying.

"Peacemaker needs a pacemaker as Season 2 flatlines."

My review of Peacemaker season 2.

If you would like to hire me to write dumb headlines I'm available, I know that's a real job because I read websites.

Gain Ground must be partially inspired by this. (Or maybe they're both inspired by something else) Same extra tall screen, very similar graphics style, same similar touches like thrown grenades that scale to indicate they're travelling in an arc.

Boomer list would have Unreal Tournament 99.

If that's the case it reminds me how WoW went from punishing players who played too much to rewarding players who played sparsely, by using new terms and reframing the conversation.

I think they basically made an "undizzy" that feels like a reward rather than a punishment.

If you hit the enemy a lot eventually you do a big hit that sends them flying and ends the combo. All the VFX and tutorial text and such indicates "this is a big damage thing you want to try for" but again I'm 90% sure it exists to prevent players from trivializing enemies via one long combo.

Having played the game I'm 90% sure the "cash out" mechanic is a pretty heavy-handed from of infinite prevention, similar to "undizzies" in Marvel vs Capcom 2 or the combo limit in Tokon. But the game tries very hard (and successfully) to present it as a good thing rather than a limit.

A black and white cat with yellow eyes is sitting, slightly tilting his head while raising one paw forward, as if preparing to punch.

My punch is the strongest. Wanna try it?

It's definitely one of her go-to moves, and surprisingly applicable!

I think recently this has gotten much worse with the rise of resentful NEETs. Online spaces have always been dominated by Too Online people but now there are a bunch of people who are online all the time because they have absolutely nothing else to do, and are horrible people to boot.

I don't mind, I just didn't say the title because I didn't want to spoil it.

It's "Colony"

Nobody is making progress on "are reviews different from criticism?" or "should games have difficulty levels?" or "is yellow paint bad?" etc etc. People just state their belief, hibernate for a year, then state that same belief again.

Discourse has become a bad word because most of it is bad. In particular video game discourse is endlessly repetitive, where people cycle through the same topics making the same points without progressing. There is no real point-counterpoint or advancement, so discourse should come with air quotes

Noted robo-racist Katherine Pulaski

@tolkoto.com After listening to your robo-racism on a podcast I just have one question for you:

this you?

I suck at Chess but I feel like it works largely because the space is very constrained, the sucky units are up front, and building up a solid structure important.

To make it work in a tactical game maybe you need some of the same components like strong zone of control mechanics. (Just spitballing)

I wrote a little more about that here:

bsky.app/profile/mark...

It strikes me as challenging to avoid a scenario where a player uses a couple of their most powerful units and neglects the rest.

Not that you shouldn't try but it's definitely doing game design on hard mode.

In Last Defense Academy you can use the same character over and over but they get gimped a bit after their first turn, which is how they incentivize using different characters without forcing it.

In theory if you do good enough game design the player is incentivized to use all their units, but "you have to move each character once" is a nice safety valve vs coming up with a super smart game design that makes every character useful.

Doing actual Chess rules seems a bit weird. Strictly alternating turns has some weird implications (that I wrote about regarding The Banner Saga here: www.gamedeveloper.com/design/when-...)

Also easy to fall into the player using their most powerful unit almost exclusively.

In Banner Saga player and enemy turns alternate, but you can't choose to move the same unit each time it's your turn.

In Last Defense Academy your squad takes a turn then the enemy squad takes a turn, but you can choose to move the same unit as many times as you want.

Those are close-ish.