Donkey Kong 64 is excellent, with amazing personality, great music, and great playable characters, but the minigames are sometimes a little janky and you have to love the characters, music, levels and aesthetics if you’re gonna be happy with all the backtracking.

So @CleoTheWizard as a “before you play” tip for Donkey Kong 64, know that there are five playable characters and you can switch at “tag barrels” and basically every collectible, item and action in a level only works for the right character. This keeps you engaged with all characters and the different ways they move but plenty of people understandably dislike the backtracking that comes with it. Most of all remember that less than half the collectibles are required to beat the game so don’t backtrack too much unless you want to, and consider playing the latest version of the "change kongs anywhere " romhack which lets you change characters with a button instead of a trip back to a tag barrel, it’s a very very well done romhack now.

Yooka-Laylee is clearly a spiritual successor but also clearly not as good as Banjo Kazooie. In many aspects it’s just slightly worse: There’s less personality, clunkier movement, less good music, the humour is less funny. Perhaps the largest downgrades are the collectibles placement and the world size. The positioning of collectibles is not so much beckoning you towards exploration and platforming challenges, as it was in BK, but instead it’s just putting things in arbitrary places. The world size is a downgrade in the sense that the worlds are larger, yes, MUCH larger, but also more empty and it simply means you spend more time holding forward on the stick waiting for the next bit of gameplay. Banjo Kazooie beats the other 3D platformers by this team because it’s comparatively fast-paced (not as in adrenaline but as in giving you lots of new things to do every minute and has very little backtracking), and it has the strongest music, theming and humour. As an N64 game, the controller had four directional buttons and most modern takes map these to an analogue stick which works very badly, but that’s not the game’s fault. I bought a controller for emulating N64 games that has enough buttons to avoid this. Yooka-Laylee wins on graphics. If anyone prefers YL to BK I’d love to hear why you feel that way.

The human checkout gives a better service but the shop does not charge me differently for different checkouts. For shoppers, the equation is simple.

Okami is “Zelda-like” in its kind of medieval fantasy, action-adventure presentation, and in the way towns and NPCs feel, and perhaps in some of its bosses, but really it’s not all that much like a Zelda game. Okami is an quite standard all-ages real-time-battles RPG, whereas Zelda usually have no RPG mechanics - usually Zelda enemies are defeated in just one or two hits, with little or no stats, points or inventory. Zelda games usually have a lot of focus on puzzles and dungeons, or dungeon-like outdoor areas, whereas Okami has no puzzles. On the other hand Okami is obviously very steeped in (often silly or humorous) Japanese folklore, whereas Zelda is very much less wacky and often a little more emotional and dramatic, and has its own bespoke theming.

I liked Okami but I felt it was paced really quite slowly, and the battles/enemies were a little too RPG-like for my taste, as in taking quite a lot of real time for even weak enemies. I felt it lacked the mechanical polish that Zelda usually does: I felt generally the movement was a little slow and difficult (except in very open areas) and most disappointing of all was the frankly poor recognition of what brush move I’m drawing.

TL;DW: In which Moonie considers 1) actual California legal definitions, 2) exactly what was said in Jobst’s, SomeOrdinaryGamer’s and The Completionist’s videos, and 3) innocence until proven guilty, and importantly points out that tax filings can and often are inaccurate (due partly to the law being extremely complex) and are corrected/settled afterwards (possibly with a simple small fine), and concludes that:

1. charity fraud is plausible but is only a midemeanour

2. embezzlement is not substantiated by publicly available information - saying you don’t spend the funds on expenses and then spending funds on expenses would probably be charity fraud rather than embezzlement

3. missing funds is not substantiated by publicly available information - most of the publicly available information is the tax returns but tax returns are not really evidence of your accounts because they might be wrong, that would be quite common and would not be serious legal trouble.

and that Jobst and SomeOrdinaryGamer are comically lacking in legal understanding and knowledge when you look at the seriousness of the accusations they make.

I don’t mind what sex my character is, my character is not me and I don’t see why I would mind what sex my character is. Like, especially in a video game, the scenario is usually quite fantastic and nothing that my character does (e.g. acrobatics, shooting, running for more than 18 seconds without collapsing out of breath, etc.) gives me a sense that they are a version of me. My character should be random or whatever the writers thought would be most appropriate for the themes or story or whatever.

(I did not watch the linked video)

Also, as I understand it, $600,000 is not all the money. Already last year’s tax filings showed more capital than that. The charity also has some money deducted for “costs” that is not broken down, and although I’m an outsider it doesn’t seem very cool because the charity hadn’t actually been doing anything so I can’t imagine donors feeling like costs of that size are warranted.

What do you think of 3? I just couldn’t get into it and I think it’s that the 3D camera just makes it harder to see what you want to see and select what you want to select, as opposed to 1/2 where that was so effortless. That bad feeling stopped me from trying it thoroughly.

By the way, fans of Zelda 2 may well adore Star Tropics. it has a similar feel. Although it’s prettier, linear, and has more story, it also has challenging, rewarding combat. Your movement (and some but not all enemy movement) is on a grid and you can only move up/down/left/right and you can only face in those directions too, enemies deal contact damage, and you have mostly melee attacks so combat is a question of mastering a grid-based dance as you attack whilst avoiding damage. The soundtrack is wonderful too.

“explaining”… lol… I know what you mean but I have to laugh a little at that :P

It’s pretty useless info even if you do understand it IMO.

These hint texts are definitely a flaw. https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-legend-of-zelda/ has some interesting discussion of how in several instances basically useful hint text got mangled into madness in translation.

Edit: specific link https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-legend-of-zelda/first-quest/#insane-old-man says that this isn’t a translation, it’s the tanslators freestyling for some reason, so it’s a mystery why the text is so cryptic

Think outside the box. The remake could have support for up to 10 brothers, so long as you connect that many analogue sticks, and you control one per finger. Add a character creator, enhance it to a strand type game, support for more languages, skill-based online co-op, and reimagine it as an open-world sandbox. :')

You’re gitting gud. Keep going!

It’s obviously nothing like a modern title but I don’t think that’s quite fair - it holds up in the sense that it’s fun, it has good combat challenge and exploration, honestly it does. You do have to overlook lack of QoL features and the fact that you basically have to read the manual, but I don’t think it’s fair to mark a game down for lacking those things. It lacks the puzzles, NPCs and stories of later Zeldas but it doesn’t try to have those.

Zelda 2 siimilarly lacks QoL features but it has excellent combat that’s actually challenging, but fair, so yeah if you’re open to it you could have a good gaming experience there.

I did this too, on the GameCube collector’s edition. It’s hard but the difficulty didn’t feel unfair! It was so satisfying when I made progress. Honestly this is such an excellent game.

My parents can’t use windows but they can use Linux - their windows was covered in “you need to update” and OEM thingies asking them to consider the premium package and shutting down against the user’s will and adverts for onedrive and that ridiculous universal search feature that can find things on Bing but not your My Documents folder and the antivirus showing distressing messages about how your PC is dangerous unless you pay for the deluxe service. Not all of that is “Windows” it’s true but it’s partially Windows fault that uninstalling things is so difficult - some things are on the “add and remove software”, some aren’t. All of that is standard part of the Windows experience on the Windows ecosystem, even if it’s not all intrinsically Windows. So I put Linux on their laptop and GNOME just lets them easily use their browser, email and files without needing to dig through settings to disable tracking, without shutting down against your will, without saying you have to buy new hardware to update versions.

So there are points on both sides but don’t say that Windows is unarguably easier.

Edit: not to mention that using a package manger’s GUI is clearly easier - and easier to do safely - than getting software by surfing the internet for MSIs and EXEs.

I found the gameplay of GTA 4 and 5 to be “drive across town to watch a custscene” at their core, but GTA4 is very enjoyable if you a) relax into it, stop trying to take control and just accept that you’re kind of playing a movie, and b) get good at the driving, which has a surprisingly high skill ceiling. The feeling of just running errands won’t fully go away but the story builds and the missions get more exciting.

Gaming NFTs are a great idea. If I’m playing chess I want to be able to transfer over my items from other games, like a portal gun, to enhance the experience. NFT technology will permanently improve the gaming industry.

I would hate it if games changed based on what they thought I wanted - I want to choose my content but if the content morphs underneath my hands according to a marketing algorithm then it’s not respecting my choice. There seems to be some assumption that each person enjoys exactly one emotion.

I’m pretty sure people can like more than one thing. Like if I’m playing Resident Evil and some algo decides that because I watched When Harry Met Sally last week, it should replace the zombies with awkward dates 🤣.

I did this - on the Zelda Collectors’ Edition on GameCube, so save States weren’t available. I did have to use an emulator to practice the final boss without the 10 min runback 🙄 , but after practicing I repeated the feat back on the official hardware.

I did the whole game without any guide. It was SO satisfying. On both the NES games, if you can read the context clues, every required secret is fairly clear. And the game is really fair! It is hard, it’s true, but it’s very fair! It felt very good to master the combat. This was a great gaming experience.

Later in life I felt that Dark Souls had very similar vibes except in 3D (and except for a bad feeling from having a heavy story that it’s hostile to telling you what it is 🙄)

On the remote chance you don’t already know - definitely check out Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages. They have the same engine but have much cleverer gameplay and dungeons and much deeper stories.