Mr Party Hat

Also, they literally JUST showed off the new Senua game. Jesus Christ can't we fire the idiots in management rather than the people actually making the games? At this rate, Sony and Xbox are just going to be CEOs and middle managers, with no developers.

https://www.eurogamer.net/compulsion-double-fine-ninja-theory-xbox-studio-closures-report

If they shutter Double Fine, they can actually fuck all the way off.

Sonic Crossworlds is absolutely wonderful. It doesn’t even feel like a home console game, it’s like something plucked from an early noughties arcade.

The Crossworlds mechanic is genius, the handling is great, and it’s visually beautiful. It’s a shame the characters are terrible; I can’t even fathom how much I’d love this if it had a roster like Smash Bros instead of… *squints at screen… Zazz and Espio.

But what a treat. It would be silly to compare it to Mario Kart World because they’re entirely different. But if I WAS being that silly, this is clearly better.

Elder Scrolls Online challenge difficulty has finally launched, and it's pretty transformative. There are 4 levels of difficulty, and I've gone for 'Seasoned', which makes you 100% squishier and makes enemies 50% stronger. I'm not a glutton for punishment; this just feels like the perfect balance where combat is still easy enough, but you actually have to think about the game's mechanics now. I spent last night doing stuff I've literally never done before in ESO: using healing/shielding skills, thinking about buffs, applying DOTs. It's always been bizzare to me that they included all these mechanics, then made the combat so easy that you never use them.

You can ignore the challenge difficulty, of course. There's more gold and experience for using it, but the real reward is that it makes the game genuinely enjoyable to play.

I thought it was a great series of announcements, made by people who have no clue how to build hype. (And, to be fair, who were subject to a shitty leak.)

If they'd not had that weird Starfox Direct out of nowhere, dropped the demo out of the blue today, and showed a bit more of Ocarina, it would have been an all-timer. Zelda, Starfox, a new Final Fantasy, Xenoblade, Kingdom Hearts… There was stuff here that people really care about.

I'm confused by everyone missing Mario. We know the Odyssey team worked on Bananza; I'm not expecting a mainline Mario game for years.