I still think that critique was fair. But I’ve started using Claude Code for the past few weeks after all the opus 4.5 hype, and I need to update my assessment: Claude is actually pretty good.
I used it to re-write crapslesscraps.com from scratch, and I am very pleased with the results. Here is the before & after:
Before
After
In addition to looking way better, I went from this insanely complex project for something so simple:
I recently returned from a work trip in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’ve always enjoyed playing live craps, but I discovered a new fondness for bubble craps, specifically the crapsless variant. If you aren’t familiar with craps in general it’s the famous game where everyone stands around a table and make bets on numbers while one of the players, called The Shooter, rolls the dice.
A lot of folks shy away from craps because they find the game confusing, but it really isn’t. At its core, it’s just making bets on the outcome of the dice roll, which can be any number between 2 and 12. As there are the most ways (6) out of 36 possible outcomes on two die to make 7, it is the most commonly rolled number. On a regular craps table, the way most people play is on the Pass line. On the pass line, 7 or 11 wins on the first phase of the game or the “come out” roll, while rolling a 2, 3, or 12 loses. Any other number becomes the point. From then on, the goal is to roll the point number again before rolling a 7. That’s it.
So now that you’re a craps expert, crapsless craps is basically the same game except 2, 3, and 11, 12 can also be points. That’s really it. If you roll one of those numbers on the come out, they become the point, and you’re trying to roll the point number again before a 7.
Like I mentioned above though, craps is just making bets on the outcome of the dice roll. So you don’t have to play that way. You can bet on any single number, multiple numbers, all the numbers, or even that all the low numbers or all the high numbers, or all the numbers that are not 7 will roll before a 7 appears (called the ATS bet) which I managed to hit during my business trip on the last night I was there:
Anyway, when I got back home I wanted to play more, just for fun with play money. I looked, and there are different craps games I found online, but no crapsless craps! So I decided I would just write the game myself from scratch using some new frameworks while having an opportunity to test out some different AI tools and development patterns. Whenever I do this kind of stuff, I always have a strong instinct to make whatever I end up making available to other people, free of charge and free of ads or anything like that, just like other tools I’ve built for myself like my 5/3/1 workout program generator or any of the little games I made like Draw! or Lucy’s Adventure (Speaking of Lucy, my dog the game was named after, passed away 2 weeks ago at 16.5 years old 🥲).
👼
Anyway, I found the domain crapslesscraps.com was unregistered so I registered it then set up an auto deploy pipeline for merges to my master branch in version control to deploy the game there:
So, if you like craps or want to learn more about it by playing online with play money, there is now a crapsless variant available for free at crapslesscraps.com 😊. If you have feedback for me about the game or find a bug, feel free to contact me.
As I mentioned in my last post, I was able to hook up with a local team from The Greater Gaming Society of San Antonio and participate in this year’s Global Game Jam. Global Game Jam® (GGJ) is the world’s largest game creation event taking place around the globe. This year’s theme was “lost and found” and the team decided that a private investigation / noir type game would be fun. So my teammate Ansley spun up some art and Wes composed some music and we got to work. We ended up naming the game “Chase Ventura: Kid Detective” – a mystery game where you have to find clues as the neighborhood kid sleuth to “solve cases”.
The game’s title screen
Overall it was a super cool experience. I was lucky to have a great team; they produced super quality assets to work with and were great at communicating and providing feedback. I wish there had been more time to implement all of the ideas, there was just too much to do in such a short amount of time. I guess that’s the nature of game jams though. I also wrote the game’s systems from scratch and that detracted a lot of time as well. Unfortunately with four hours to go and tons to do, I had to strip virtually every idea out of the game to get something shipped, so you basically get a cut-scene, and then walk around the neighborhood and talk to the various characters Ansley created. Fortunately I feel like our team was on the same page and the game, the art, and the music fit well together. Here are some stills from the game:
I put up a little time-lapse of the last four hours of the Jam condensed to 10 minutes (the deadline was at 5pm CST and I think I submitted at 4:56pm):
I’m super thankful to my wife for being supportive as I basically spent 48 hours binging over code. Also a big thanks to John and his team over at the Greater Gaming Society of San Antonio for putting on the event and helping me get on a team to participate.
If you haven’t ever done a game jam I think it’s a great exercise from a development perspective for a few reasons:
Even though I broke every programming best practice, from DRY to bad spaghetti code, the time constraints force you to move forward with the mistakes and take the least path of resistance at every turn, forcing you to write a lot more code and figure out problems quickly on the fly.
Letting your team dictate the idea and direction of the game takes you out of your comfort zone for games or projects you would normally make.
Reviewing your own code after the fact gives you an opportunity to review what you could have done to make the code better / more extensible if you had ideal conditions.
While it was stressful, It’s also great fun in general. We also ended up taking second place out of our portion of the GGJ, and I am pretty happy about that 😀.
It looks like it has been about 2 months since my last post 😬! November and December were crazy months for me in both my work and personal life. 2020 kept coming until the bitter end…
When I wasn’t up to my eyebrows in work, I carved out some time to finally work on and complete the multiplayer board game I had been working on since September:
Cavatars (Codenames with Avatars – clever I know) is a fully functioning multiplayer game playable in a web browser. I developed it in JavaScript using NodeJS, Socket.io, and Phaser3. The full source code is on GitHub:
It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever written but it plays like it was intended. What I was most surprised about when testing it with friends was how well the latency responded across multiple states. We had players in California, Texas, and Nevada with the server being located in San Francisco, and there was no visible lag:
Cavatars’ maiden voyage 🚢
Far more importantly though, the project allowed me to meet all of the goals I set when I started this project. All of the decisions I made when developing the game were for specific purposes:
Far greater proficiency in JavaScript, which I considered my weakest language at the time.
Better understanding of multiplayer gaming, client/server network architecture.
Learn Phaser3, a framework I have never used before.
As one of my friends pointed out, there is no real purpose to the movement of the characters other than the fact it was to hone in on the movement for later projects down the road – which brings me into some of the stuff I have on the table for 2021.
Building on the art kit I purchased and set of skills I developed to finish Cavatars, I have decided to start working on some other, longer term projects:
Working on a Final Fantasy Tactics type game with my friend Travis. The game is yet to be named and we are in the very early stages. Travis brings a wealth of game knowledge and experience to the table and will handle most of the mechanics, balance, and lore. I will be handling all systems, programming, and development.
Working on a longer term MMO passion project. These sprites and this art kit are perfect to put something like that together, so why not. There aren’t many 2D mmos that have come out in recent memory, so the idea of chipping away at one over the next few years seems exciting!
Working on a smaller game to ship earlier, I’m thinking about a 1v1 multiplayer PVP arena type game.
Aside from that, I reached out to The Greater Gaming Society of San Antonio which is a game development community in San Antonio that apparently has some folks participating in the upcoming Global Game Jam taking place this week, January 27-31. With any luck I’ll be able to connect with a team and follow up with a post about my experience 🙂
While working on DRAW! I decided to commission a few artists on Fiverr to create the art assets. My idea was to commission about ~5 different artists and choose my favorite as art for the game. After about a week I decided to use assets from the very talented @penzilladraws who is an incredible Danish artist and was very easy to work with. While I ended up using this art in the game and won’t be directly sharing the assets here, I encourage you to check out their work on Fiverr and other places. Here is a screenshot of what the assets look like put together in my game:
The other four artists made great work as well, but I didn’t end up using it in the final project. I have never been a fan of mixed and matched assets, but I also don’t want to leave this hard work sitting on my desktop in a folder called “Fiverr stuff I’m never going to use” so I have decided to share the art here for anyone to use 😊.
Original Text | Posted here with Author’s permission.
A couple of weeks ago I played (and finished) A Plague Tale, a game by Asobo Studio. I was really captivated by the game, not only by the beautiful graphics but also by the story and the locations in the game. I decided to investigate a bit about the game and I was surprised to see it was developed with a custom engine by a relatively small studio. I know there are lots of companies using custom engines but it’s very difficult to find a detailed market study with that kind of information curated and updated. So I decided to write this article.
Nowadays a lot of companies choose engines like Unreal or Unity for their games (or rather, that’s what people think) because developing a custom AAA level engine requires lots of resources. I decided to list here some of the most popular custom engines with the team-sizes and notable titles released with those engines.
Most of the engines listed here have been developed along the years with multiple iterations and multiple video games, those engines have gone through multiple versions or even complete (or semi-complete) rewrites from scratch, with an engine name change. Also, important to note, most of those engines use multiple middle-ware for specific functionalities (Platform, Physics, Network, Vegetation, UI, Rendering, Audio…).
*Author’s Note: I tried to be as much accurate as possible with the information about the employees count (I checked the companies websites, Wikipedia or even the company LinkedIn) but take it with a grain of salt (some employees numbers could not be up to date).
The BIG Companies
*From left to right: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Final Fantasy XV, Red Dead Redemption 2
The below list is for very large companies, sometimes with complex corporate structures comprising multiple divisions (not only focused on video games) and multiple studios/subsidiaries also developing games. Some of them work with multiple engines, not only custom ones but also licensed ones.
The companies above invested in custom engines to have full control over the technology and also avoid the revenue cut imposed by licensed engines. Despite that fact, there are some big companies that in the latest years have chosen Unreal Engine for their productions, the most notable cases are:
Capcom is using Unreal Engine for the new Street Fighter IV/V titles
Bandai Namco latest big titles are using Unreal: Jump Force, Dragon Ball Fighter Z, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, Tales of Arise
Square Enix also moved to Unreal Engine for several new titles: Dragon Quest XI, Kingdom Hearts III, Final Fantasy VII Remake
Interesting to see that those big three are Japaneses companies, maybe a market trend for that country? Also, maybe related (or maybe not), the Chinese holding Tencent owns 40% of Epic Games, I bet it has some influence in the Asian market.
Middle-size Studios
*From left to right: Rise of the Tomb Raider, Uncharted 4, A Plague Tale
Here we have the medium-small companies that decided to create custom technology for their titles.
The number of employees could be a nice reference to consider because a custom game engine is usually developed in-house (not outsourced) but note that some of those companies could have a big number of people because they also have in-house artist/audio teams while others outsource those parts of the development.
It would be really nice to know how many engineers are working on the engine division of each company, I’m sure there would be some big surprises for the different companies, probably in some cases by the low number of them!
Also, it would be interesting to have more info about the tooling included with those engines, it’s really difficult to have access to that kind of information. Engines tooling is usually a hidden-secret (beside some GDC presentation or some quick showcase video).
*From left to right: Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, Death Stranding
Kojima Productions use Decima engine, developed by Guerrilla Games, despite not having a custom in-house engine, it’s surprisingly their accomplishments considering such a small team.
Media Molecule latest game/engine (Dreams) seems to have been developed by only ~15 coders, amazing!
Companies targeting one single platform, usually have less restrictions and can push the limits of that platform. Unfortunately, that’s a luxury that most companies can not afford.
Asobo Studio, the company that originated this market study is not that small…
Small-size Studios (Indie Studios)
*From left to right: The Witness, No Man’s Sky, X-Morph Defense
Here we have some really small studios that also choose to develop a custom engine for their games. Note that most of those engines rely on other libraries/frameworks for certain parts of the game, the common choices we find are SDL (cross-platform graphics/input), OGRE (rendering engine), MonoGame (cross-platform game framework, also relyes on SDL, SharpDX, OpenTK, OpenAL-Soft…).
One question many people could ask is, what parts of the engine are actually coded by the developers? Well, it depends, but usually coders take care of the screen-manager, entities-manager and content-manager as well as the wrappers/interfaces to the other external libraries.
Second question, what parts of the engine usually rely on external libraries/middleware? It also depends on the company resources but usually audio-system, physics, rendering, networking, ui-system, terrain-system, vegetation-system and some other pieces.
*From left to right: Factorio, Thimbleweed Park, Owlboy
On the following list (and the next one below) I added the publishing date (only +2012) and the link to Steam for all the games… there are not many games with custom engine from small studios out there and I think they deserve to be recognized and supported.
Hello Games is a very small studio considering the size No Man’s Sky game and custom engine. Really impressive!
Runic Games was dissolved in November 2017, the founders created Double Damage, not they are work on Echtra Games on Torchlight III.
In most of those studios the people in charge of creating the game engine it’s only 1-3 persons!
Lo-fi Games was a one-man team (Chris Hunt) for more than 6 years!
Some of the games in this list took +5 years of development!
Not many games… a couple of hits per year…
One-man custom engines
*From left to right: Stardew Valley, ScourgeBringer, Eagle Island
Finally, the list of the heroes.
Games developed by 1-2 people with custom game engines, engines mostly coded by one person! Respect.
*From left to right: Axiom Verge, Ghost 1.0, Remnants of Naezith
Creating an engine and a game from scratch to the point of publishing it is an extraordinary accomplishment, not many people in the world is ready for that. Almost all of them are 2D games, usually with very small budgets and developed along multiple years. Congratulations to the developers!
Some of those teams are formed by 1-2 people but probably growed at some moment and/or outsourced some parts of the development (art, audio…). Usually the publisher also helps with some resources (localization, marketing…).
Omar Cornut from Lizardcube is also the developer of Dear ImGui, a free and open-source immediate-mode gui library used by lots of AAA custom engines.
Some of the games in this list took +5 years of development!
I’ll start saying I’m biased, I’m really passionate about video games making technologies and I admire custom engines and game-making tools. I also contributed to custom engines ecosystem with my grain of salt: raylib and several game-making tools. I prefer a custom engine over a licensed one, it really feels extra amount of effort put into the product, usually translated into some specific mechanic of extra in-game details.
Said that, I must admit that creating a custom engine is a big endeavor and not many people are ready for that. I recognize Unity (and Unreal to less extend) have really democratized video game development, lots of small-medium size companies can use Unity today to quickly develop games and put them on the market, sometimes with very low budgets… But, still, lots of big companies prefer to rely on their own custom technologies.
From a game dev/teacher perspective I think students must learn how engines work internally with much detail as possible. Relying only on engines like Unity/Unreal for education to allow students develop eye-candy project in short-time is not the way to go. At the end of the day, someone has to write the engine and the tools!
Ramon Santamaria is a teacher and game developer from Barcelona, Spain and the author of Raylib, a simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy video game programming.
Kristen is out of town today which means I have some free time to drill down and work on my little game side project. The working title is “Lucy’s Adventure” (Lucy being the fox). It’s a Super Meat Boy/Boshy inspired platformer that aims to be progressively difficult, but in a non-bullshit type of way. Translation: death happens a lot, but the game telegraphs to the player how. The goal is for the player to feel like every death could have been avoidable.
After completing the game’s first two levels, aptly named “Baby Steps” and “Mechanics” I started work on level 3: the game’s first boss fight. In this fight, Lucy picks up an M16 which initiates a battle with the Boss of the first three stages: Lava Lord.
Sometimes when programming, the funniest and/or most unexpected things can happen. In my case, this usually is from a result of lack of understanding, a mistake, or more often: laziness. These two images sum this up perfectly:
For example, I didn’t want to redraw or edit sprites to have the gun move with Lucy, so the gun destroys itself and redraws every frame on Lucy’s position. It works great, and looks hilarious. Perfect.
😂
Even more funny was when I started programming the Boss’ A.I. It’s a pretty challenging process in itself, lots of function tail calls and recursion until certain conditions are met, signalling the boss to change states. I created some states to bring what I’ve considered abstractly to the game. When I ran my build, I just about lost it:
Holy…
The problem was obvious: I was calling the function that handled the Boss’ attack incorrectly. However, the outcome was better than if the game were working properly: it was harder to dodge, and actually looked pretty cool.
LAME
After I fixed it (he only throws a single fireball, which was the original intention) it felt… lame. Obviously the movement will be sped up, but a single fireball at this point seems unfulfilling.
I wonder if I should change it back. If I do, I wonder if creating so many instances of the fireball object like that will run poorly in some browsers or devices. I wonder if I should find a way to make it look like that properly without devastating that poor Android device running KitKat.
I wonder how many developers work on software and make mistakes that become features. It’s really a great feeling. I imagine it’s like painting a picture and spilling the paint bucket on the canvas. While you’re initially worried that you screwed up, on second look – that blotch kind of looks like something, let me add a few more colors. Wow, that mistake really made the piece!
At a minimum, I definitely think I need more fireballs on this canvas 🔥.
I think it’s safe to say that this is what Nintendo has been investing all its time in.
After extreme disappointments in both Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario Party, expectations were low to say the least coming into Super Smash Brothers Ultimate.
Nintendo, you did us so wrong
I wrote a brief post outlining exactly how the Switch’s Mario Party let us all down, but I didn’t get too much into Odyssey. I guess if I had to break it down in a few bullet points, it would go something like this:
Super Mario Odyssey:
Felt super cartoony – looked like a modern kid’s show.
It felt too easy, both to find the moons and moving around in the worlds in general.
It was brainless walking around, and when you completed a moon the map rearranged leading you directly to the next moon.
Coming from the GOAT Super Mario 64 it just wasn’t comparable. SM64 was perfect, refined, crisp – hours and hours of secrets and replayability. Odyssey felt like watching an interactive kid’s show where you occasionally pressed buttons.
I also wasn’t really a fan of Smash Bros. Melee or Brawl. Much like SM64, the original Smash on 64 was so good, that every iteration that followed felt clunky and goofy. I’m a Kirby player, and I really hate how he played in both successors. I didn’t really like the control of the Wavebird or Wiimote either.
Nothx
So, needless to say – I was a little apprehensive towards dropping another $60 on a Nintendo title.
HOWEVER, it was apparent after about 5 minutes of firing this game up that Nintendo was completely worthy of being absolved for their previous sins.
R E D E M P T I O N
The second the game loaded up I knew we were dealing with a polished, finished game. Not a rushed ass game like Super Mario Party or a kid’s show like Super Mario Odyssey. This felt just like it did when I loaded up Breath of the Wild, I knew it was something special.
You only start out with 8 characters, but after every match, you get a chance to fight a random new character. The coolest part is that the winner of the smash fights the new character. If you beat them, they join the fight – lose, and it’s better luck next time.
There are some odd 70+ characters available to be unlocked, so not being presented with all of that right away and having to work for it is really cool. It feels so old school too, the characters aren’t DLC, they aren’t lootpacks, they just show up randomly and you have to beat them to get them – I love it.
You do, however, get access to all of the stages right away – and there’s a lot. Aside from adding some really neat stages, they brought back all of the best stages from the previous games and threw out the crap ones.
Publishers take note: this is how you remaster a stage or game. You don’t change things around, you don’t add an artistic spin, you don’t change absolutely everything (I’m looking at you FF7 remake). You take a winning formula, you update the graphics, and you profit.
The gameplay is as crisp as it gets, controls feel responsive and purposeful – anytime you make a mistake you’re flagrantly aware it’s your fault. Thinking back to melee and brawl, there were so many times I felt like clunky character control or shit controls caused so many unnecessary deaths. That simply isn’t the case with the switch.
The animations are BEAUTIFUL. The moves match up with the characters so well, and the final smashes are out of this world:
I love how they bring in early Nintendo characters and gaming pop culture as pokemon-esque items to fight alongside you. You might get a character from street fighter uppercutting your opponent, you might get Shadow from Sonic time warping them, or you might just get a full out game of pong where the projectile damages your opponent. It has a very Ready Player One feel to it, and it’s just amazing.
I haven’t even started the story mode yet, worked on any of the challenges or achievements, this review comes one night after playing some regular ole’ smash with my family. You best believe there was a lot of this going on:
All night the victory screen looked like this
I have so much more to say about this game and I’ve scratched about 0.5% of this game’s content. I’ll probably need to write an updated review or append this eventually, but for now – I’m going to get out there and enjoy everything this masterpiece has to offer. 10/10.
I didn’t think this level of disappointment was possible.
I was so excited for this game. I mean, really, really excited. The first week of October I was at my company’s annual get-together (my colleague clickysteve does this more justice than I ever could in his post) when this game released. A few people at the meetup had it, and were asking me to play – but I had other plans….
I had already pre-ordered the game and had snacks, booze, family and friends waiting on an epic game night planned back in Texas with a single purpose in mind: Game on the new Mario Party all night long.
The stage? Me, Kristen, my brother, and his girlfriend. All of us had played previous Mario Party’s, but would come into this night fresh – not knowing the boards, minigames, nothing.
Turns out none of that mattered.
The maps are small. I mean, extremely small.
We went from this in Mario Party 2 on the Nintendo 64:
to this four generations of consoles later:
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Even worse, all the randomness and skill is taken out of the game. No more Bowser, no more duel spaces, the mini-games are mehhhhhhh, and the worst part is there’s never any guess about who wins – even bad luck spaces or super bad luck spaces suck.
Where’s Bowser space where he randomly chooses to be nice and give you all someone’s stars? WHERE THE HELL ARE BONUS STARS?? Literally i’ve seen bonus stars for:
Ally space (WHO GOT THE MOST ALLIES??! RANDOM)
Spaces Traveled (WHO WENT THE FURTHEST, ALSO RANDOM)
The game places no emphasis on who won minigames or played strategically. Total crapshoot. Golden pipes are completely broken and can be abused.
So, to recap:
Minigame performance doesn’t matter.
Coins don’t matter.
If someone gets a lead, there’s pretty much no way to come back
In fact: Nothing Matters.
It takes about three games to realize it’s just a time suck. There are some other modes – rafting and music mode…. they’re pretty boring too.
Ultimately, it just feels like a rushed and unpolished game.
First things first…. 10/10 on how I feel about my Nintendo Switch purchase. I never thought a console could get me away from PC gaming, and certainly not playing the same games (less optimized, and with a controller – which I hate) on a PS4 or XBox One (that’s still the iterations, right?).
No, I don’t want to play Call of Duty 10 or God of War 15. Just looking at the lineup for PS4 makes me feel bad for people who were ripped off by these garbage games:
Really? That’s the lineup?
Aside from the fact that the only games on the list worth playing: Far Cry 5, GTAV, and Fortnite are WAY better on the PC, look how many numbers come after the games. It’s the same old crap, served up on a different plate.
The ones to come – look like the best ones yet. I’m talking about the new Mario Party, and the new Smash Brothers.
But there’s one title that makes the attractive $300 price tag of the switch worth it by itself:
BREATH OF THE WILD
Oh my gawd.
I’m an adult now, so I don’t keep up with these games like I used to – and I had no idea what to expect walking into this game.
5 minutes after booting up my new Nintendo Switch and loading the game, I knew I made the right choice. I walked out of the resurrection shrine (where you start) and I was 8 again:
I turned to my brother like a puppy in the pet store: “OHMYGOD IS THIS HYRULE? ISTHAT DEATH MOUNTAIN? IS THAT HYRULE FIELD? CAN I GETAHORSE? HYRULECASTLE LOOKS AWESOME, WHATARETHOSE MOUNTAINS BACKTHERE, CAN I GO THERE??!”
My brother had a simple answer:
“Yes, that’s Hyrule – and anything you see – you can explore. No unreachable terrain, everything has content.”
I was hooked already, but that was just the surface.
The game starts you off in the center of Hyrule, on the Great Plateau. This area is massive within itself,
That area alone takes a longgggggggggg time to navigate….
….Then you zoom out:
Holy shit.
See this speck in the middle? That’s the Great Plateau where you start:
So right away on this massive starting area, the game wastes no time – and does something I love and wish a lot of other games would do.
It gives you all of the tools that you’re going to have for the rest of the game, right away.
Then it says: good luck! And you’re off into the world, you can go anywhere you want, check out anything you like. Nothing is off-limits if you’re clever enough (my brother told me you can go straight to Hyrule castle and fight Ganon, although I didn’t try).
The world is massive, immersive, and beautiful. There’s content everywhere. Animals running around, creatures hiding under rocks. I was 30 minutes into the game leaving the great plateau, making my way to the first place I wanted to check out when a pile of rocks I walked by started moving.
World boss?! But I’m so new! The game doesn’t care. If you step into an area you have two options: fight or flight. Being 30 mins old in my starter gear, I ran like hell and it was so much fun.
Even the “trash mobs” walking around the game are challenging. The hints on the loading screen are there to help and are to be heeded:
“Every fight is likely winnable depending on the strategy you take.”
No fights are Slash & Dash here. You’ll be working in every engagement you come across and you’ll pay for it if you don’t.
The mechanics are also super smooth, everything feels great and fluid. If you hit a head, it’s a headshot. If a mountain looks remotely climbable, it’s climbable. I’ve come up with (and seen people come up with) some insane combinations for things.
The game seems to invite this and purposely allows everything to be beaten in a seemingly infinite number of combinations if you’re clever enough. There’s more than one way to do almost anything in the game, at any time, in any order.
The freedom is intense. With such a large map and so many places to go – you’d think there would be a lot of empty spots – there isn’t. I have no idea how this game was optimized on a console that’s literally a tablet, but it amazes me.
That’s the whole system
There are so many puzzles, fights, areas to explore, main quests, side quests, hidden quests, odd quests – I’m through the main quest finally but I couldn’t imagine how long it would take to 100% this game.
Here’s the icing on the cake – for the people who have 200-300+ hours to clear all the “vanilla” content this game launched with – There’s DLC. Are you kidding me?!
The fact that people fit arguably the best game I’ve ever played on a cartridge that is about the size of two of my fingertips is freaking incredible.
TL;DR –
Nintendo Switch – $300
Breath of the Wild – $40
A gaming experience that you’ll never forget – Priceless.
