my drafts before the forum reboot always contained a “HOT TAKE THREAD” for several years, that’s basically what this is! Cool! I knew someone would eventually do it so I don’t have to
Cubivore did cubism better than minecraft
Not everything needs to be made of clear plastic.
Original un-lit reflective lcd screens on portable systems like wonderswan, game boy pocket, are VALID AND USEABLE if you still live an outdoorsy lifestyle that used to exist in American culture with more prevalence prior to the internet. These original screens are gorgeous and have yet to be replicated, many games were designed specifically for that hardware and look best and can only be experienced definitively on said hardware. Not everything needs to have a backlight added Gdi. Stop throwing away original parts!
I like Dragon quest builders more than minecraft
Pokémon. Basically anything I say about Pokémon is a hot take that will ruffle feathers
Earthbound fans don’t understand earthbound at all
similarly animal crossing is misunderstood
Pokémon fans will put the franchise under such a microsopic lens, but have they even played bushi seiryuuden? It did what legends arceus gets credit for doing first
Shigesato Itoi no.1 bass fishing deserves a fan translation
Yoshi’s story is great game design
Ninja-kun for famicom is fun
I joined the forum to post said hot takes so I can’t begin to think of them all. glad to see people agreeing here. RPGs are quite a subject. In general I feel like people don’t even enjoy themselves while playing games anymore.
I don’t like most of Yoshitaka Amano’s character artwork. The Final Fantasy logos are great, but so much else that he does is illegible, and I’m glad his character designs had to be altered so heavily for 8 / 16-bit systems
I think the concept of “remastering” a video game is absurd bullshit. Video games are not transferred from 35mm prints, they’re always digital. The only things you could remaster, maybe, are FMVs and game companies don’t ever keep any of the files necessary to re-encode anyway. The idea that upscaling textures or recreating game models with more polygons is remastering anything needs to be rejected wholesale.
I’ll start with the disclaimer that I hold many of the actual games in very high regard. Though I think they nailed it with Maniac Mansion first up, and am disappointed they stepped away from that formula almost immediately.
There are two particularly grievous sins in video games to me:
Obstructing people from finding cool and interesting games
Encouraging or permitting people who are deliberately incurious about games to self-identify as someone who is the opposite.
The popular treatment of Lucasarts games encourages both IMO.
There’s nearly 30 years of post-Lucasarts adventure games that are essentially ignored or treated as irrelevant by many (Which would be bad enough even if you didn’t have the immense and obviously superior publishing output of something like Wadjet Eye in that period). And the genre was treated as ‘dead’
And when thinking historically, almost all other adventure games are ignored in deference to Lucasarts (Knowledge of the existence of Sierra is permitted as a sort of antichrist or adventure game Ialdabaoth to contrast against, thus elevating the perfect platonic form of the Lucasarts adventure game).
In this regard they function similarly to the modern use of ‘roguelike’ preventing anyone without pre-existing knowledge from finding the actual roguelike scene. Or the modern revisionist history of rebranding anything Japanese with a static first-person view and some text as a ‘visual novel’…
… which now that I type it out is probably enabled in part by the disproportionate importance placed on Lucasarts games in adventure game history.
Here’s a related kontrarian videogame opinion that is only kontrarian among a certain Gamers (derogatory), specifically sweatlords: Smash Bros. is one of the best things to ever happen to fighting games, and it took a while but Street Fighter and Tekken and all the like putting in Smash Bros.-derived control schemes is waaaaaaay overdue.
I don’t think 6 button + motion inputs should be phased out of fighting games, but they are undoubtedly an anachronism from a time period where console controllers were shitty.
Agreed! more of a guilty admission from me! I love fighting games but don’t love memorizing crazy inputs! and I love smash bros. shmovement! Would love to have a best of both worlds with slightly advanced inputs that don’t take a lifetime to learn! I am also not very competitive so I’m not very motivated to learn!
My Kongtrarian video game opinon:
Donkey Kong Land rules!
I dislike the Berlin Interpretation. It wasn’t accurate then and isn’t now.
But I always feel compelled to defend it purely based on how many people quote it mockingly, but omit the above part of it and/or have never played or heard of ADOM, Angband, Crawl, Nethack, or Rogue.
Maybe an embarrassing admission but I did not know that “roguelike” stemmed from an actual video game called Rogue and I somehow feel like that’s less cool
For me the last leg gave out when Sage was promoted as “healing through damage” but the end result was that healing is completely unrelated to the damage dealt, just a parallel effect of the action. We’re a far way away from Shadow Priest! (I also still enjoy my time with the game and very much enjoy who I play it with. The new trials are good!)
i’ve seen plenty of love for Sayonara Wild Hearts but i had a terrible time with it and the only redeeming qualities to me were that the soundtrack was cool and the artstyle was pretty
