Any weird/controversial opinions? I’ll start. Before the remake, the best version of Resident Evil 4 was the Wii version. The Wiimote controls old Resi’s tank controls better than any other controller at the time. The PC version had a bunch of little bugs and detractors that the Wii version just doesn’t have.
I’ll extend this by saying that the Wiimote is actually pretty damn good for shooters, and particularly good for accessibility. Not having to cramp up my hands to press buttons is awesome for having arthritis. Aiming with the Wiimote and moving with the nunchuck just feel really natural, you barely have to move your fingers for anything.
Yup. As an adult with less time to play, you really notice how much AAA games are just copy and paste with a new area on a map or same mission, but different npc.
I just picked up the 2022 remaster of Pacman World from 1999. The game design in that game is so nice. Each level has new enemies and new platform mechanics. I feel like only indie games bring innovation like that today while AAA is just rinse and repeat. (For the most part anyway…God Of War and Zelda are good examples of companies doing it right)
I think that some of the problem is that AAA games leverage a high budget. That lets them do things that you can only do with a high budget. But in order to pay for the development, they cannot afford to move down the long tail very far. To be a financial success, they must sell many copies. And it’s safer to target a genre that is known to be able to sell to a large playerbase than to do something that has not demonstrated the ability to do so in the past.