My favorite part of Super Mario Run was the Kingdom Builder. I liked making rainbows and setting up some environmental storytelling.

As I mentioned a bit ago, when you defeat enemies in Hyrule Warriors dropped rupees get automatically collected but dropped materials and weapons become pickups that just sit there unless you go collect them.

These items are crucial to long-term character advancement, so I’ve been carefully getting all the drops as I play, which has had a significant detrimental effect on my experience. Musou games are about moving quickly; you really should move on from an enemy the moment it’s defeated. It’s detrimental (and unfun) to wait around for it to have its death animation and drop its pickup and go collect it - especially if your last attack happened to have significant knockback. Worse, you can continue to juggle them unintentionally after they’re already dead, which just delays the animation further. And the worst are enemies who have scripted things they say when they die, because they’ll just sit there defeated on the field until the message queue clears and they can say their line, and then drop their pickup. And the cherry on top is when these delays cause you to miss an optional objective or an A-rank by mere seconds.

Well, it turns out the pickups are a lie. You can ignore them completely. You still get the dropped items automatically when you clear the mission.

I have no idea why they still have enemies drop these items and leave them on the field and play an item pick-up sound and display a “Material received!” message when you pick them up. It really makes it seem like you have to collect them manually, which misleads the player into a much less fun way to play the game.

Really glad they fixed this for Fire Emblem Warriors and had the dropped items immediately vanish and display their collection message.

Much of the confusion in the difficulty debate is because we often talk about difficulty when what we really care about is focus.

Take Pathologic 2. It’s a game about trying to survive and solve mysteries in a plague-ridden town. It’s got a strong narrative and prominent survival mechanics. The reviews I’ve seen lament how much the latter gets in the way of the former. From Brendan Caldwell’s review:

There are a bunch of meters: stamina, hunger, thirst, health, exhaustion, immunity. . . . On paper, you should be exploring the town, figuring things out, piecing this unearthly story together. But most of your time is spent trading bits of old brain and rusty scissors for a tin of food just to keep a meter down. It takes over everything, an unwelcome distraction from the intrigue of murder cases and bizarre architecture of the town’s stranger buildings.

After receiving a lot of feedback to this effect, developer Ice-Pick Lodge is adding a “difficulty slider”. Their announcement post is worth reading in its entirety, but the takeaway is “[W]e’d rather give people a tweaked experience than none at all.”

That’s great, and I applaud Ice-Pick for responding in this way. But I also find myself wondering - is this really about difficulty? Here’s another quote from Brendan Caldwell’s review:

If the intent here is to follow a Soulsian “hard is good” philosophy and apply it to the survival genre, this is misplaced. Souls games are about reaction, movement, and practice. You can’t practice finding a piece of bread. If the intent is only to keep the player feeling oppressed, strapped for time, exhausted, hungry and weary, well, that doesn’t mean I won’t also resent having to spend so much time doing the most boring species of meter-management in what could have been a captivating mystery.

Caldwell doesn’t mind that the game is hard or even that it’s dark - he minds that he has to devote so much time and attention to the least interesting parts of it. The bits that aren’t this game’s unique selling point, the bits that have been done many times in many games.

Ice-Pick haven’t said exactly what their new slider will do, but in practice for players like Caldwell it won’t really be a difficulty slider so much as a mechanical focus slider. Turning down a game’s ‘difficulty’ rarely means that characters now speak in Basic English and complex moral decisions get replaced with clear-cut black and white choices. What it does mean is that the survival mechanics (or in most games, combat systems) are less demanding and you can pay them less attention.

The difficulty debate (and certainly any response of the “you cheated not only the game, but yourself” variety) often misses that there are multiple different reasons to play most games. In addition to skill levels, physical capabilities, and amounts of free time, people differ in their interests. When someone is drawn to a game’s world, art, characters, story, etc., and finds that mechanical systems are getting in the way of what they came for, it’s natural to want to adjust the game’s focus to reduce those obstacles. Because of the misleading way these settings are often labeled, that means they are “playing on Easy.” But they aren’t here for the combat, or for the survival mechanics, or whatever. Mastering it is of no interest to them and is not worth their time. Like Peter Gibbons, it’s not that they’re lazy; it’s that they just don’t care about this particular source of difficulty. They’re trying to focus on what actually appeals to them and what actually creates value for them.

It always frustrates me to see Nintendo take a good idea, execute it half-heartedly, and then abandon it. Amiibo have been on the decline for some time now, but the latest nail in the coffin is that Super Mario Maker 2 apparently won’t support them.

The original Super Mario Maker was a shining example of good use of nearly every amiibo. Omitting that from the sequel is very much a vote of no confidence in amiibo, and mostly leaves Smash propping them up. Which I suppose isn’t surprising - Smash is already propping up Miis as well, and seems to be the only Nintendo franchise that has any idea how to be an actual platform.

A bit ago I speculated on why different people feel differently about punishment in games, and I have a new theory thanks to Arnold’s levels in Bubsy: Paws on Fire!

The short version is that different people have different thresholds for maintaining interest in repetitive content. The long version follows.

I just noticed that when you look at a game listing in Nintendo’s eShop, in either the website or the Switch store, if you already own the game it doesn’t show you the current price.

I just bought Thumper since it’s on sale for five bucks in North America, and if I view the listing in an incognito window, it shows as twenty bucks marked down to five. Viewed while logged in to my Nintendo account, it shows as twenty bucks. Viewed on my Switch, it doesn’t show a price at all.

I assume this is to prevent the frustration of buying something and then immediately seeing it on sale for less than you paid, and possibly related customer complaints/requests-for-belated-discounts. I’m curious if they have any numbers to suggest it’s worthwhile for that purpose, but naively it seems misguided.

First, I’m very skeptical that it even works. When you look at the list of what games are currently on sale, that doesn’t filter out games you already own. I check that list far more often than I look at individual listings of games I already own, and many times I’ve seen games for which I paid more.

Second, I’m not generally a fan of hiding this kind of information from the customer - and the website goes one step farther and presents inaccurate information. This could easily backfire - suppose I’m telling my friend that Thumper is cool so they ask how much it is, and I tell them it’s twenty bucks because that’s the price I see, and that’s above their threshold when the actual sale price isn’t? I doubt this happens a lot but I’d expect it happens more often than someone is upset to learn that the game they just bought is on sale now not from checking the list of current sales but from going to that game’s individual listing.

This just feels like a weird strategy to me, and I doubt the benefits outweigh the dishonesty.