Stephen Totilo's discussions

I’m a lefty and also learned to adapt. Control options are good to increase games’ accessibility to people of all types, but I’ve been able to play using the same control schemes as righties my whole life. Read more

Game Informer did a rapid-fire interview with the game’s creative director. These are usually pretty fun. One neat detail from the interview: Mary Jane is playable in the game. Read more

I’m 90 hours into Origins and having a better and better time. It’s a very slow burn, but the quests are well-done and the game world map is breathtaking. I don’t love the new combat system, but it’s fine. Read more

Huh. Ok. I play a lot of Ubisoft games, enjoy a lot of them and see lots of variations among them. The company has some design tropes, sure, but they riff on them all the time. Read more

Sony and Microsoft support many of their first-party games with piles of free DLC. From what fans have told me, Sony rehabilitated Driveclub with about a year’s worth of fixes and expansions. Microsoft backed Halo 5 and Gears 4 with months of free add-ons to the games’ multiplayer. Read more

Yeah, the papyrus quests and the tombs are both really rewarding in terms of getting you to see interesting places. The first tombs I did in Origins were also underwhelming, but later ones have been creatively laid out and visually impressive. Read more

I almost went to google for the tree one in the Qattara Depression but figured it out. That was not one of my favorites. I still have a few more to claim and then do in the northwest of the game, which is the one section where I still have a lot to do (to say nothing of the expansions). Read more

Assassin’s Creed Origins is a good point of comparison. The execution there is very similar, though that game did require microtransactions to buy maps that reveal special locations on your map (tombs, for example) that you otherwise had to find just by naturally exploring the world. Prior AC games let you get those… Read more

RFG is possibly the best destruction shooter ever made. It’s all about this gun you have that shoots and dissolves individual pieces of buildings, so you approach encounters not just in terms of shooting enemies but with the ability to shoot out floors and walls or, say, the trestle of a bridge, beam by beam. I loved… Read more

Mystery solved via the game’s lead writer: Read more

Yeah, that’s been my interpretation so far. But I’m only a handful of hours in. For all I know, they reveal in hour eight that the rest of the world has been destroyed. Probably not, though! Read more

There’s a pretty funny answering machine message in an in-game phone about a guy who wants to run for office on a platform of shipping people who disagree with him to California and establishing a northern border wall or something like that that moves up one inch a year until all of Canada is annexed. So, sorry. No… Read more

Yeah, the game goes by briskly. Levels are very simple, even for Kirby standards and few of them have compelling conceits. It’s a very basic game. To be fair, Triple Deluxe was more basic than Planet Robobot, so we do have recent precedent for them making a better sequel once they have a good engine running on the new… Read more

An additional perspective from someone who isn’t as into JRPGs as Jason and played on a PS4 Pro:

I’m a little over three hours into the game and agree with Jason that the two big strikes the game has going against it are its soppy story and its ease of difficulty. Read more

That’s what I meant, but I could have phrased it better. I tweaked it. Read more

It’s not close to being a bad game. It has parts that people don’t like, but it is mostly very good and has some of the best character work in any game ever. Read more

I’m a little foggy on this, but doesn’t she then show up in the base playing the piano? I want to cross paths with the super-heroes who are mentioned in some of the audio logs. Read more

Good question and one that they addressed in the livestream that kicked off shortly after you left this comment. I quoted the creative director on that topic. Read more

It sold millions of copies (Ubisoft says it’s had 20 million players lifetime) and, while it had some very low low points post-release, was eventually patched and expanded in many excellent ways. Read more

My guess is so that the system interface runs as snappy as it does. The 3DS, Wii U and Wii all had lots of good system music and other clever system-level gimmicks, but they all ran sluggishly, especially the Wii U. This spartan Switch one runs lightning quick. Could be related! Read more