PT stands on its own in the horror video game genre IMO. Too many games fail to convey one of the elements of horror well, typically overusing shock and disgust as it’s hard to achieve psychological terror when your art medium has the potential for funny things to happen (like physics objects in amnesia deciding to fling themselves all over the room when you let go because they bounced wrong). Really interrupts the flow of the scared juice. The other half of horror games give you enough tools to completely defuse the horror after an initial few encounters (death stranding) or straight up don’t try to scare you situationally, just acting as combat action games with horror themes (later resident evils).

PT remakes for PC are in a good place finally, “P.T. emulation” being a bit closer than unreal PT to the source material as a project. How konami could possibly drop a project with star power like kojima+del toro is beyond me, especially considering reception to the demo was GREAT and it was slated to release while streamers playing horror games was still in vogue. Unbelievable fumbled bag lying there

It’s so hard to describe contact. It’s like a more exploratory Rune Factory with no farming sim element and swappable jobs like the final fantasy MMOs. I feel like the audience for the game wasn’t targeted well, as it fell in that era where “core gamers” stopped being a popular target audience (we hardly use the term at all these days).

Early in the lifetime of the DS, before the 3ds had even been mentioned, a ton of JRPGs released for the platform seemingly in a bid to become the next earthbound or chrono trigger. Most of them were very mediocre, but to this day Contact (published by atlus) and The World Ends With You (square enix) stand out as stellar titles to me. They represent opposite ends of the jrpg spectrum; contact is a grinding game with a very floaty story, whereas TWEWY has an intricate story and a penalty-free swappable easy difficulty setting to help new players cope with the (initially) awkward combat system. Both of them are stand-out in their own ways, with memorable settings and characters supporting the mechanical depth they offer.

Both of them are games that take advantage of the DS’s unique features, not the microphone but the touchscreen. While Contact is pretty easy on the gimmicks, only requiring you to occasionally peel a sticker or something simple like that, TWEWY’s combat flow has you use buttons to control the top screen while simultaneously doing multiple touch screen gestures, making the game difficult to master on the actual DS and unbelievably hard on an emulator.

TWEWY has since had a remaster and a sequel, but contact is seldom mentioned anywhere when I see the DS talked about. Worth a look!

Maybe you didn’t realize, but by volume, sales in the west for BMWukong were stellar. >4M sales volume (76% of 17.8 million sales were chinese) is performing well by any standard. It dwarfs the sales volumes of other recently popular Chinese titles, taking the top spot for sales in the west handily. Other games like the GuJiang series, dyson sphere program, the matchless kungfu, crimson snow, tale of immortal had substantially fewer players despite getting nearly universally positive reviews. This is the definition of breakout success, when you reach a new market.

For reference, this game is selling in the west as well as street fighter 6 and guilty gear strive, games that are performing far above a previous genre standard.

6 hours in and I have only experienced one issue: crash to desktop with no error just after the intro sequence. It didn’t happen on second launch and it allowed me to skip cutscenes I had already viewed easily, so that was good. I am not on the most powerful machine and it runs perfectly fine on the high graphics preset, so despite the huge focus on visuals it seems like enough optimization work was done.

Someone has never played a round of highlander.

You’re ignoring sales changes in favor of appearing to be right, and you asked for any evidence and found it yourself. In fact, you seem more concerned about being right than being correct - so I’m going to ignore you completely!

I think your take is outdated. Review bombs for non-gameplay, non-performance practices that do not affect the end user are commonplace today, and since the HD2 review bomb, have quintoupled in frequency. Racism and misogyny driving review bombings is also extremely old news, did you forget the general chatter surrounding the last of us? Nobody talked about the gameplay in a meaningful way, just the characters. Hundreds of medieval era games have been review bombed for “historical inaccuracy” and people complained night city (cp2077) had too many black NPCs. Hell, even ff15 had people losing their minds over the race variety of randomly generated townspeople.

I don’t need to provide evidence, you need to be aware of games discourse. These idiots are everywhere. It’s also worth noting that in a lot of cases, it’s beyond the capabilities of a developer to gauge how large a launch will be - and being impatient while they scale a service really isn’t “giving a review”, it’s complaining that you can’t play. Wayfinder is a solid recent example, they accepted help from Digital Extremes for their initial launch, then when those servers were far less powerful than they were led to believe, ditched their publisher and refocused the game from an MMO to a session-based co-op title (and it’s going great).

Tl;Dr: you are asking for evidence that is LITERALLY EVERYWHERE people talk about games online, from steam reviews to forum discourse. These have been awful places to learn about games for eons, and you come across as a reactionary that doesn’t actually play games when you give them undue credit

This got reduced, but they didn’t refund anyone who bought it in the few days it was actually like this. Just use SPT (single player tarkov) or project FIKA (formerly multiplayer tarkov/MPT) if you already have the game tbh, they both work fine now.

SPT allows for some really interesting AI behavior mods among other things, too. Worth it even if you can stand officials near a wipe.

Fortunately, votes don’t mean anything here

As long as we’re not talking games that have a ton of extra stuff going on like milsims or ultrakill, yeah I really do think controller is fine.

If you can aim assist snap as fast as someone can flick, it’s fine. A lot of games account for this and it pisses off the “m+kb is the only good peripheral” crowd every time despite their constant insistance that controller is worse for everything. Even OG overwatch had competitive controller pros (e.g. Malik); map knowledge, good awareness and positioning, control of resource locations (or power weapon spawns in older fps) have always been skills that contribute to wins as much as aiming well, regardless of peripheral. The best peripheral is the one you’re most comfortable competing with.

Maybe you should reread what you wrote.

Exploring the DLC instead of ramming your head against bosses LITERALLY makes it easier, providing ~60% damage reduction BEFORE ARMOR in the dlc zone via scattered consumables. You didn’t even try to play the game you are implying you want to

So literally no game avoids you labeling it clunky in or out of its’ time bubble. Got it. You are literally the definitive unsatisifiable customer and you’re loud about it lmao

Lmao, enjoy missing out on the nier titles, the devil may cry series, every fable game, kingdom hearts, the whole god of war franchise, asura’s wrath, and the new final fantasies. Hell, even skyrim has more committal animations. You’re talking about a lenient and forgiving version of animation mechanics that are present in basically every action RPG.

In the fighting game community at large, we have terms for people who blame the mechanics when they can’t come to grips with them, Scrub being the main one (as new players wildly hitting buttons at random on an arcade cabinet looks akin to “scrubbing them clean”). This is you. Your refusal to treat the game as it is, and expectation that it behave a way it doesn’t, is confounding to anyone who has put any effort into the title. The rules will not change just because you refuse to learn them. Stay furious though, I guess.

Some people like developing an artistic skill. This is that. Fuck up on the piano? Start that part over and get it right this time. Fuck up in elden ring? Start that part over and get it right this time. Both have acceptable amounts of variation that lead to success. Elden ring is in fact easier, because things can change that aren’t solely your skill level (stats/gear). There’s a lot of reasons the souls series and similar games are conducive to speedrunning, this loop of self-improvement is a major one.

When I read comments like yours, they come across as saying “practicing anything is stupid and I do not see the benefit”. It’s easy: practicing anything is fun and you only get to see the benefit after you fail, then succeed. If there’s some mental disconnect you have where you can’t envision success for yourself, or you think succeeding won’t be fun, it certainly isn’t the fault of the game or the community.

This is true. The only game to automatically detect my controller and display the correct buttons without going into a menu to change them in recent memory was Remnant 2. Extremely rare afterthought type quality of life is what we’re seeing complaints about now.

It’s standard practice. In fighting games, monster hunter, and a bunch of other games, really similar rules apply; you hit the button, an animation you know the duration and length of plays. This game has animation canceling, meaning you actually don’t have to wait for the return to idle animation to end before you can queue another attack or straight up cancel the animation with another (like a roll or parry). It’s literally made less clunky by letting you skip out of these committal attacks.

Your take is uninformed and you obviously don’t play much of the genre, ER is extremely generous outside of specific bosses in letting you just hit the roll button repeatedly after every action.

You sound like everyone who has ever seen me menu spells in a KH speedrun. You sound like someone who turns weapons off in ULTRAKILL. Neither of these are explicitly bad things, but the system in place (a scrollable selection menu in real-time) can be utilized at the same level of efficiency as a spell wheel; you just need to exercise your memory when you set up and when you use your belt items.

There’s a lot of titles that allow you to pause and utilize your menu. Dragon’s Dogma 2, for instance, allows you to pause at 0 HP and still use healing items, so long as you haven’t finished your dying animation or been knocked flat.

Dark Souls and similar games make a deliberate choice in keeping the game in real time when you menu, and there’s a lot of truly functional items you can keep on your belt to help those weapons: status items can help you finish applying a status when an enemy leaps back, the physick, stamina regeneration, many extremely powerful effects that they want a small execution and collection barrier on. Alone in the Dark (5) had a real-time menu like this too far before it was popular, and people complained bitterly about it, so I get where the complaint comes from.

Without dramatically reducing your available options or developing a completely different system of menus, the controls can’t really be less “clunky”. If horizon’s wheel and DaS’s menu aren’t for you, you may just not like how action RPGs control. If it’s about needing time for the menu, these specific titles may not really be up your alley. There’s a TON of games that operate the way you’re expecting, and at this point the community and developer alike are committed to sustaining this experience that provides friction. Friction is basically how you talk, from a design standpoint, about the difficulty of the game and why it’s present and what it does functionally.

If you don’t understand how friction and fun are related, the game was unironically not made for you, and misunderstanding that or not being eloquent enough to explain that has led to the “git gud” divide. The menus are meant to provide friction. The combat animations and the period you must wait before acting again provide friction. Being a relatively heavy RPG, you can overcome friction multiple ways, either through developed personal skill or overleveling or picking tools that the boss isn’t equipped to handle or statuses it’s weak to.

TL;DR of course the menus are clunky dude they’re based on a decades-long tradition of interfaces that provide gameplay fun. The fun is there for a grand majority of people, if you’re not having fun with the ball-crusher, nobody is making you use it.