They literally tried to patent the loading screen and mechanically locking a player object to a moving object ingame just after the release of TotK. Nintendo is the absolute king of frivolous gaming patents. Here’s hoping it’s their downfall. For an example of how seriously vague some of the patents they’ve been granted are, check out some of their current ones after pokemon sleep’s initial success (basically trying to keep everyone without 9 digit money out of the sleep app game space).

https://patents.justia.com/assignee/the-pokemon-company

PT stands on its own in the horror video game genre IMO. Too many games fail to convey one of the elements of horror well, typically overusing shock and disgust as it’s hard to achieve psychological terror when your art medium has the potential for funny things to happen (like physics objects in amnesia deciding to fling themselves all over the room when you let go because they bounced wrong). Really interrupts the flow of the scared juice. The other half of horror games give you enough tools to completely defuse the horror after an initial few encounters (death stranding) or straight up don’t try to scare you situationally, just acting as combat action games with horror themes (later resident evils).

PT remakes for PC are in a good place finally, “P.T. emulation” being a bit closer than unreal PT to the source material as a project. How konami could possibly drop a project with star power like kojima+del toro is beyond me, especially considering reception to the demo was GREAT and it was slated to release while streamers playing horror games was still in vogue. Unbelievable fumbled bag lying there

It’s so hard to describe contact. It’s like a more exploratory Rune Factory with no farming sim element and swappable jobs like the final fantasy MMOs. I feel like the audience for the game wasn’t targeted well, as it fell in that era where “core gamers” stopped being a popular target audience (we hardly use the term at all these days).

Early in the lifetime of the DS, before the 3ds had even been mentioned, a ton of JRPGs released for the platform seemingly in a bid to become the next earthbound or chrono trigger. Most of them were very mediocre, but to this day Contact (published by atlus) and The World Ends With You (square enix) stand out as stellar titles to me. They represent opposite ends of the jrpg spectrum; contact is a grinding game with a very floaty story, whereas TWEWY has an intricate story and a penalty-free swappable easy difficulty setting to help new players cope with the (initially) awkward combat system. Both of them are stand-out in their own ways, with memorable settings and characters supporting the mechanical depth they offer.

Both of them are games that take advantage of the DS’s unique features, not the microphone but the touchscreen. While Contact is pretty easy on the gimmicks, only requiring you to occasionally peel a sticker or something simple like that, TWEWY’s combat flow has you use buttons to control the top screen while simultaneously doing multiple touch screen gestures, making the game difficult to master on the actual DS and unbelievably hard on an emulator.

TWEWY has since had a remaster and a sequel, but contact is seldom mentioned anywhere when I see the DS talked about. Worth a look!

Someone has never played a round of highlander.

You’re ignoring sales changes in favor of appearing to be right, and you asked for any evidence and found it yourself. In fact, you seem more concerned about being right than being correct - so I’m going to ignore you completely!

I think your take is outdated. Review bombs for non-gameplay, non-performance practices that do not affect the end user are commonplace today, and since the HD2 review bomb, have quintoupled in frequency. Racism and misogyny driving review bombings is also extremely old news, did you forget the general chatter surrounding the last of us? Nobody talked about the gameplay in a meaningful way, just the characters. Hundreds of medieval era games have been review bombed for “historical inaccuracy” and people complained night city (cp2077) had too many black NPCs. Hell, even ff15 had people losing their minds over the race variety of randomly generated townspeople.

I don’t need to provide evidence, you need to be aware of games discourse. These idiots are everywhere. It’s also worth noting that in a lot of cases, it’s beyond the capabilities of a developer to gauge how large a launch will be - and being impatient while they scale a service really isn’t “giving a review”, it’s complaining that you can’t play. Wayfinder is a solid recent example, they accepted help from Digital Extremes for their initial launch, then when those servers were far less powerful than they were led to believe, ditched their publisher and refocused the game from an MMO to a session-based co-op title (and it’s going great).

Tl;Dr: you are asking for evidence that is LITERALLY EVERYWHERE people talk about games online, from steam reviews to forum discourse. These have been awful places to learn about games for eons, and you come across as a reactionary that doesn’t actually play games when you give them undue credit

Classic “fuck you got mine” take from someone who has experienced no difficulty in decades with a field. If you’re ignoring the mass layoffs happening across multiple fields right now, ESPECIALLY in well-performing companies, I guess it looks like AI is not having much of an effect. Like if you consciously decide to not look at any business news at all this take could make sense.

In a week. The changes aren’t coming for a week. Nobody has quit because of the changes, they are quitting because they heard about an upcoming change they had the opportunity to read about on all primary storefronts the game is available on, excepting humble.