Denis Sinner, Creator of Monster Sanctuary, joins us to discuss his recently released monster taming meets metroidvania title.
What was most interesting about our conversation though was how mainstream monster taming games like Pokemon have sacrificed strategy, challenge and innovation, for simplicity and to make their games as accessible as possible to a young audience.
If a game is too easy, can it truly be fun?
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Spiders: "We're going to cut straight to the chase so you're not left wondering: After a long period without clear answers, we have received confirmation that Spiders is being liquidated.
What does it mean? This means the company as a whole no longer exists. We'll cease our functions immediately. The planned DLC will release via Nacon, and then-- well, that's it.
We're sorry that it's come to this and would like to thank each and every one of you for your support over the years.
If you have any questions or run into issues with your games, please contact Nacon directly as we'll no longer be able to reply."
Where's the lie though
Even GameFreak have gotten a point where they don't seem able to make big Pokemon games without them sacrificing a shit load of features that came below. They just think adding a new silly gimmick will bring people in.
What I've started doing for challenge in pokemon games is constantly swapping my pokemon out. In early games you had to choose and build up your team, but Pokemon games now make that too easy and OP. Swapping out your pokemon gives you a challenge and helps you fill in your pokedex.
Still, wish there was a hard mode.
S&S isn't balanced out well enough. I've played plenty of JRPGs and most feature a shared EXP system so that unused characters don't become complete useless later on, but this just doesn't work well in Pokemon. I stopped playing after Fire Red and with those games I always found myself sticking with my starter for everything. In Shield I had the same problem cept I rarely bothered switching my team and went on to beat the game basically just using Inteleon.
Then there's three different EXP candies on top of rare candies on top of jobs ontop the excessive amount of exp you can already get from wild battles. There's no to battle at all. There's no need to even breed cause you can get perfect stat pokemon in raids and just use a mint. I guess this helps get to the online competitive modes much quicker but I just can't get into Pokemons boring turn based battles, and it's impossible to play in co-op battles with friends with the awful link code matchmaking and lack of messaging on Switch
I don't mind these other monster collector games becoming what pokemon can't. It actually gives other monster collector games a way to stand out apart from Pokémon. Pokémon for me personally is a perfect experience that us older fans needs to realize will never be what we want because the game is for kids and they make this clear ever iteration. So instead of complaining about something we literally can't change lets put that desire for something more into these indy games like temtem and others.
I'd settle for being able to skip the cutscenes. They're miserable.