Mr Party Hat

I'll be picking this up eventually, but my backlog is bloody huge at the minute. Plus I've just finished another playthrough of Odyssey, so I don't want to burn out on delightful platforming.

Yes, but this morning it showed me what my cat would look like if he were a dog.

I don't think the power or usefulness of AI is really up for debate. It's clearly miraculous how far it's advanced in such a short space of time.

However, it's very much still a tool. And if you're going to use it without oversight, you're going to look like a knob.

For example…

Might not need its own topic, but in the interests of diversifying from PWB…

I bought the pixel remaster of 6 a couple of years ago, made a dent in it and walked away. I've started again on Switch 2 and it's grabbed me more this time. It's the most 90s game I've played in a long time.

There's zero hand-holding. You spend half your time not knowing where you're supposed to be going, running around towns trying to get certain events to trigger to advance the story. Half the time it's a random NPC that you need to speak to, half the time it's something more obscure. There's a bizzare system (that I only know about from Reddit) where you have to leave certain chests closed until later in the game, when the loot in them gets upgraded. But there's literally zero way to know which, so you have to read a guide (or ignore that mechanic completely, like me). There's copious amounts of old-school videogame sexism.

The battle system is mad. One character has the usual magic. One has a 'tool' mechanic that seems to make all other attacks pointless. One plays like a character in a fighting game, complete with move combos.

It all adds up to something totally bonkers, and while I couldn't recommend it to everyone, I can see why it's considered a classic. The music is perfect too, of course, and there's a particularly gnarly CRT filter on the Pixel Remaster that looks like the telly in question has been used since the days of the BBC Micro.

The auto-battle function is a lovely quality of life feature too. As well as speeding battles up, it seems to remember your last inputs. So rather than stupidly attacking at random, you can trust it to always use Steal, fire the correct Tools etc.

If/when I finish this, are there any other essential Pixel Remasters I should pick up?

It depends on the type of game for me. Persona 5 is a handheld game, Mario Odyssey is a TV game. I'd never play God of War on a tiny screen, I'd never play Fantasy Life on a big one.

I'm not sure there's any logic to my choices. I thought maybe it had something to do with more 'epic' games belonging on a TV, but Breath of the Wild is a handheld game for me. So who knows.

There's definitely something in the intimacy you mentioned. Handheld gaming locks me into the game much more effectively, and I'm much more likely to have a 2-hour session in handheld. (Hand cramps be damned.)

The frustrating thing about the Switch 2 right now is that it doesn't run Switch 1 games in their docked profile. So you have a bigger screen, stretching what was already a low-res, muddy image. It makes a lot of the Switch back catalogue not worth playing, whereas you'd think it'd be fairly easy to serve up the docked version in handheld.