The beginning of this headline had me mislead.

I read ‘creepiest publisher’, and with the state of the industry these days I immediately thought it was going to be some exposé piece on a toxic culture of workplace misogyny, and sexual harassment.

Glad it’s actually a cool studio doing interesting things!

I suppose it happened because from a mainstream perspective handhelds like the DS and PSP were far behind dedicated systems in terms of graphics, and so the expectation was never there to have “triple A” visuals - neither from consumers nor industry.

Made for very fertile ground in terms of games that had budget, but still had a long leash to go and get wacky.

Wow yeah. That must have been a really infuriating gameplay issue, no wonder players were upset with it.

A shame the game was so rushed or I’m sure the dev would have fixed that in code.

Reading your comment I got worried about disk writes, so I’m glad this info is on the website:

Replay data is stored in RAM by default but there is an option to store it on disk instead.

Sensible design decision, because writing video to your SSD 24/7 wouldn’t do anything good for the lifespan of the drive.

What was the bug and workaround? :)

To me, the unspoken premise of the game is that you’re a kid in 1986 with a parent or cool uncle who went on a business trip to Japan and brought you home a Famicom and a copy of the original Zelda - months before the console even launched outside Japan.

The whole game is about replicating that sense of childish fascination and wonder.

The ‘Alien Language’ game manual is supposed to mimic the feeling of trying to read the Japanese manual that came with the game, muddling through as best you can with the pictures, and a few random English words they included just because English is ‘cool’ in a gaming context.

It’s a very fun mechanic, and my favourite thing about the game.

I haven’t! I may give it a shot :)

You should definitely go back, it’s so fun to learn about the inscrutable manual pages.

Rather than feeling like I was four, my experience was more like as if I was a kid in the 90s and my Dad was a businessman who brought home Zelda from Japan but it was all in Japanese and I didn’t know Japanese lol.

One thing to note about Tunic is that it has really good accessibility options. You can go in and give yourself extra hearts, or you can even turn on invincibility if you are really struggling and need to.get past a tough part sonyou can continue with the.story :)

I have a soft spot for Myst too, so I totally understand this. I own the “big box” PC versions of all the Myst games up until V (Revelations) which are the only big box games I still kept. It was magical to me at the time, Riven especially which I used to play together with my mother so there’s fond memories there.

When the textures are high-res but the model is low-res

I would dare say you are right

What a twist :) I like it when games subvert your expectations

Yay <3

It’s great that you can trace your love of music back to that specific game. Go ahead and share! I’m not really a musical person myself and only just started learning piano as my first ever instrument. That’s one childhood regret I’m working on fixing :)

I think as adults we’re still looking for a game that recaptures that childhood wonder.

One game that comes very close is Tunic, which is a zeldalike with a lot of spirit. I won’t spoil it for you or anyone else who may not have played, but it’s brilliant and I highly recommend it.

Best enjoyed on a lazy Saturday morning snuggled in a blanket pretending you’re nine years old again.

I love how you didn’t mean to read the whole book but totally got captured haha. Definitely a formative experience :)

I’d never heard of that game or the associated editor, but it seems fascinating.

I just had a poke around on the site, and it gives me some very good and happy vibes of how websites used to be, and the cosy communities that they hosted where all the regulars knew each other by name. Or by handle rather, since nobody ever uses their real name on the Internet, right? ;) Good times.

Influential how? :)

Competence through necessity! :)

I remember making custom maps for the Star Trek: Armada RTS with the in-game editor, and I tried my hand at making some Half Life maps, too. For me that didn’t turn into any big community like your experience did, but it definitely helped me to believe I could be a creator of things, and looking back that was probably important :)