Now that I have a little more time, I'd like to go into detail as to why this is such horseshit.

-39 Seconds- The implication that the PC release was of the quality standard they intended and that's extremely hard to believe. 1/many

Time to overanalyse the #BowsersFury trailer! :D

(This is a thread!)

To start off, the giant Super Bell has cat accessories that neither existing variant of the bell has. Funny. It also makes a meow, unlike the regular Bells.

Semi-open world? Guess this adventure is very much like 64 or Odyssey.

The Goombas are a different colour to the Cat Goombas in the regular game. Likely because they act like regular Goombas, and so are "cat Goombas" rather than Goombas with the Super Bell transformation.

Junior has his Paintbrush from Sunshine, which is cool. But it has a Junior emblem, just like in official promo art for Super Nintendo World!

Thread about THE MOON

So this week I was playing the game 'To The Moon', which is fantastic (later I'll post my review here). The amazing soundtrack was created by @Reives_Freebird and @supershigi.

When the 'Moon' subject shows up, I always think about the mythology of this celestial object, and also about the differences between languages to refer to this object.

To be exact, what I really think is: why the hell "the moon" is a masculine word in German (der Mond)?

On this matter, I also think about the Sun: why is it feminine in German?

Nonetheless, I'll focus on the Moon in this thread.

Cyberpunk 2077 is not fun: a thread

Thanks to someone generously lending it to me, I’ve been playing for the past couple of days. As a Japanese person, its really been nothing but bad vibes for me.

I’ll list them in no particular order below:

Character Creation: lots of presets, little to no customization.

Can’t change the size of any of the facial features (nose, eyes, etc) which really limited options.

ZERO, and I mean ZERO body options. You NEED to look buff, apparently, in a world where every body is possible.

This, of course, doesn’t even touch on the gendered voice options, which many people much smarter than me have covered.

Combat: basically Borderlands.

Weapons are your standard types; pistols, rifles, SMGs, with a rarity level and a calculated DPS. Nothing wrong with this specifically, but unlike Borderlands, its really difficult to tell from a distance if a weapon will be worth it.

There is color coding, but the icon is really tiny and won’t show up unless you’re close enough. A far cry from Borderlands, where gear is very clearly highlighted.

Rarer items allow you to customize them with more slots, but the mods are all +% buffs and difficult to grasp.

1/ GameStop is one of the most fun businesses to study for both its success and failure.

Relative to other specialty retailers, it dominated up until the financial crisis, but has since done very poorly.

But unlike Tower Records or Blockbuster, it is still in business

2/ Thanks to the tailwind gaming has provided, its revenues have grown long-term but EBITDA and margins have been terrible as the gaming world has digitized over the past 5 years.

3/ As I learned in @joosterizer book One Up, their early physical retail edge rested on counterpositioning: doing things Walmart and others couldn't:

1. Accessibility
2. Deeply trained expert staff
3. Tailored loyalty program
4. Custom inventory management for used game sales

4/ Accessibility

There are 5,500 GameStop stores, often more than one in the same mall (mostly because of EB acquisition). Can always find one.

They install ramps--not for wheelchairs, but for strollers because parents are the real buyer

5/ Trained Staff

As @joosterizer told me recently, try to go into a GameStop and stump a staff member. They can help you navigate much better than a generic retail employee. Creates loyalty and trust that wouldn't be possible if they didn't just focus so specifically on games.