Malazan Empire: polishgenius - Viewing Profile - Malazan Empire

I mean, I wasn't reading it all the time.

Sword/Shield were very disappointing imo. Some cracking new Pokemon designs for it, but otherwise half-arsed almost everything. The graphics in S/V are absolutely laughable, and the glitches are silly too, but if it basically being the biggest N64 game ever made doesn't bother you, it's a much better Pokemon game than S/V were. It's true that the cities themselves are cooler and prettier than in this, where the focus really is on the open world areas for Pokemon to be in and most of the cities are villages with very little, but other than that, this is better in basically every respect. Including the fact that, like in Arceus, you can see the Pokemon on the world all the time (although you do have to battle to catch them, unlike there), whereas in the older games, the 'mons appear on the map only in the half-arsed semi-open areas, only some of them, and you still fight in tall grass. Also, not open world at all.
Also, while no-one is likely to be playing Pokemon for the story, this has some quite decent plotting, whereas Sw/Sh had neat ideas but... well, I barely remember it so eh.

I mean, possibly without going into it with the expectation of Pokemon actually moving on from the old formula, you might enjoy it more, they're not bad, but... they're a handheld 2D game dressed up in 3D. S/V as late as they are to doing it and as much as they tank graphically, move the concept on somewhat.

I would say that if you're coming straight from PLA you're far more likely to enjoy this on similar grounds to that than you are Sw/Sh. Far more freedom, far more open world, and even with the need to battle, far more of the experience of just tooling about, finding Pokemon. With, you know, your eyes.


On the HOME question: I'm pretty sure it's to encourage as many players as possible to play the game 'properly' and not just port over their teams from old games and hi ho. Mind you, I don't think it makes much difference to your glitch-out concern, since unless I've misunderstood it, adding a Pokemon to HOME removes it from the game you're adding it from, and adding it to a game then removes it from HOME? That's how BANK worked on the 3DS, anyway.

It does remind me though: when I'm home for Christmas I need to get a few quid gift cards on my 3DS account and connect Bank to Home and rescue my old Pokemon before the service goes down next summer.

Maark Abbott, on 29 November 2022 - 08:48 AM, said:

I don't think that's true. Sure, the Switch isn't powerful and that limits what you can get out of it, few games run at 60 and a lot of developers find keeping a consistent framerate hard unless they lock it out at 30 or whatever, but there are far prettier and more demanding games that don't have the issues this has. Hell, even Arceus doesn't chug like this at times. Put it this way, I'm so undemanding I barely ever even notice a framerate drop, but even I noticed when kids started kicking their feet at 5FPS or you got an eigth of a turn of the windmill between frames. Same is true of the pop-in- every game of any ambition on Switch, ported or otherwise, has pop-in at some point or another, but not usually whole mountains flicking into existence as you pan the camera round, or people popping into existence five feet away from you.

Whether it's fixable is another matter- I'm no game designer but I've seen people who have some knowledge speculate that it depends on whether it's because GameFreak just badly optimised what they have, or if they simply fucked up the design at a behind-the-scenes ground-up level. I do know there is one issue that causes it to slow more the longer you play that should be fixable, though.


I'm not saying that to put anyone off buying it, because I've been having an absolute blast, but visually speaking GameFreak have shat the bed, and it's not just coz of the hardware.






ps QT off the subject but have you played A Short Hike? It's a six hour game about a bird getting to the top of a mountain and yet it's as close to a distillation of what I loved about BotW as I've ever found. Sheer joy.

I'm not around on this forum as much as I used to be. Sadface.

I also don't read as much as I should, ironically on account of having more free time- I got so used to reading on my commute I've gotten out of the habit of reading anywhere else, and now I don't have one, I don't read much... must fix that.


Aaaaaaaaaanyway. I did recently finish The Fall of Babel. The fact that it took me most of a year might be a clue that I... didn't love it? It's weird because I'm perfectly fine with how it ended up (though it is a tease), especially the main relationship, and most of the explanations and that are cool, I just didn't think it needed to stop for an action scene every three chapters. I dunno. It was fine, I might like it more on a re-read.

On Chibnall's run overall I do feel kind of bad for him coz I think he mostly had good ideas- setting aside the Timeless Child, which I didn't love, also didn't hate like many, but I do get why it was hated- but he just couldn't keep control or lean into the consequences of what he was doing. Like, Flux had some great concepts in but it didn't follow through on many and then it just left the universe destroyed and... hasn't mentioned it since. Or the first season's problem with repeatedly accidentally imparting dreadful moral lessons because he didn't think it through when he was tying plots up. Nor did he have the ability like I say to craft great scenes or build continuing hype to keep a wider fanbase interested. I mean, even I was dipping at points. I liked it overall a lot more than some did, but it didn't seem to have any cohesive drive behind it.

I did think his run was really cool visually, he managed to wrangle the budget really well there, but I'm really keen to see what RTD can do without those BBC restrictions.

I dunno about Baby Boy but Snoop was great in Starsky and Hutch