I feel like Nintendo games have really been dialing it in on singular gimmicks, but I’m not going to bitch about it on a livestream while my audience derides me for an entire hour.
In Breath of the Wild, the focus of gameplay centered around the stamina loops and item durability. Honestly, I hated this and never completed the game because of it. Item swapping during the middle of a fight is so lame.
The Pokémon games were both bad and placed too much emphasis on their soulless open worlds.
Tears of the Kingdom rectified some of the issue I had with item durability and stamina loops, but the building gimmick became very tiresome to me, quickly.
Mario Kart World is probably one of the most shallow entries of the entire series, and he’s right. The open world gimmick doesn’t offer players much other than an opportunity to enjoy the soundtrack… which is incredible.
Finally, I got a good 4 or so hours into Donkey Kong Bananza before the terrain destruction gimmick started falling flat on me. I had fun, but I don’t see a reason or need to complete it.
All that being said, you know who is having an absolute blast with all of this? My younger nephew. Absolutely eating all of this stuff up, especially the ability to drive endlessly down the artificially populated highways of MKW and ability to basically level an entire map in DKB. These games are made for kids and kids are going to enjoy them more than we will. Nintendo’s games have mostly centered around children and teenagers.
Phil is old enough to have experienced the golden age of technology and gaming. These younger kids will never have that experience. Imagine my shock being able to go from playing Wolfenstein 3D, to Doom, to Duke 3D, to Half-Life 1 all within a neat 10 year span? This generation of kids will likely never be able to experience such a drastic shift in technology. The games we played as kids and young adults were so good that companies aren’t even trying to make new shit, they’d just rather remaster the old stuff.
I’ve become less interested in gaming as I’ve grown older. Phil has too, clearly, but this is his chosen career path. He whines about the Nintendo of yore being so great and modern Nintendo being so bad, but they’re doing the same exact same shit that they’ve always done. They’re making exciting games for a younger audience, and Phil has become old and resentful that the mysticism of gaming is gone. He hates that he can’t play the games he’d like to play because he has to be able to DoorDash food for the couch creature and himself.