Ark has cryopods which do the same thing mechanically, the only major difference being that you don’t visually throw them. If you use the vague wording on the patents surrounding pokemon’s box mechanics, it falls easily under there, since you are storing a captured creature in a digital storage.

Nintendo is the KING of frivolous patents. They’ve lost cases on it before, and with palworld being a sony interest, I don’t think the usual financial bullying nintendo brings to the table is going to cut it on this one. They need an airtight case and their vague patents (and recent history trying to patent THE LOADING SCREEN and vehicle speed matching for player characters with totk being denied) is a bad look for them in a courtroom. Like the US, the holder of a patent in Japan needs to file suits swiftly to protect the patent, or they risk losing cases (like this one. See “laches defense”).

Palworld is back in the top 100 global bestsellers today.

They literally tried to patent the loading screen and mechanically locking a player object to a moving object ingame just after the release of TotK. Nintendo is the absolute king of frivolous gaming patents. Here’s hoping it’s their downfall. For an example of how seriously vague some of the patents they’ve been granted are, check out some of their current ones after pokemon sleep’s initial success (basically trying to keep everyone without 9 digit money out of the sleep app game space).

https://patents.justia.com/assignee/the-pokemon-company

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.

The ARPG WH40K Inquisitor - Martyr is unironically pretty good in its’ genre. All the live service seasons are accessible on character creation now, individually, and in offline mode. Pretty solid endgame, combat flow and selectable difficulty are different enough from PoE and Diablo to provide some unique gamer moments.

Someone has never played a round of highlander.

I was of this opinion until I moved in with my partner who had a bearded dragon. Reptiles move strangely, but this bearded dragon had been a classroom pet for the first few years of her life, and was surprisingly social. She’d make eye contact, gesture with her body, present her head to be gently pet around the bristles, and even flip over to be rubbed on the belly like a dog if she was not currently or just finished eating. Responsive with body language to some specific one or two syllable words like her name or the words for mealtime, and very aware of visual cues (like any of the objects she was handed a mealworm from, even just once).

I imagine a tarantula probably has some behaviors that would surprise me if it was conditioned as a pet and socialized, I know they have a fair number of ways aside from the bite to show displeasure or anxiety like flicking hairs and quickly shuffling away to show a defensive posture. I think it could be a fun experience and wouldn’t turn my nose up at it instantly these days if the opportunity came along; animal cooperation is a small joy even when it’s a bit foreign.

How would you refer to a he/they sibling

It would have killed nintendo to add an ethernet port. As someone who bought the dongle, having a wired connection will NOT save you from nintendo online being the worst gaming networking service ever devised. No game benefits from it, least of all actual nintendo titles like splatoon or smash. It’s not even a problem of speed, it’s wholesale reliability issues, constant loss of connection errors. If an ethernet port was available included rather than needing to be a seperate purchase, more people would realize sooner just how truly awful the paid nintendo online service is.

I’m just still mad that I could play phantasy star online for ten hours uninterrupted on my gamecube, but now there’s not a single nintendo title that has stable online. Pokémon might let you get a raid or two before needing to reconnect. Splatoon might get a match or three before needing to reconnect completely. Smash won’t stay stable for even one full match. It’s a complete tragedy.

Jokes are supposed to be funny to the audience, not necessarily the comedian, just so you know