By the time you finish the game, whatever you’ve seen so far will seem like the most normal thing in the world.

Definitely a lot of standard Kojima gameplay in there, among the apocalyptic Deliveroo simulator and bonkers 4th wall breaking.

a.k.a. how to own a social media platform without having to buy it.

Art of the deal.

So the police?

The Play Store works exactly as designed.

It takes a search term, turns it into a list of completely random apps sorted by whatever makes Google the most money in in app payments and adverts, and then shows it to you.

What more did you want from a store run by the world’s biggest advertising company?

They’re polished, but nearly all of them are too safe.

The ones that subvert things a little are always best for me, and these always get mixed reactions from people who went in with a set idea of what they wanted from it.

Red Dead Redemption 2 being a slow paced wild west simulator rather than Grand Theft Horse is a prime example. It didn’t play by safety and doing popular things. It did what they wanted it to be, and it’s all the better for it.

It is mental, but I also kind of wish he’d hire somebody else to write dialogue for him.

And maybe somebody to check all the women characters, and make sure he’s not coming across as being a little bit odd.

Anyone up at that time on holiday wears socks with crocs.

And then the touchpad never works quite right ever again.

And the RAM and SSD.

By having the battery cost almost as much as a new phone.

Depends if I agree with it.

Got plenty in my retirement pot, but I’ve been saving up bottle caps just in case.

Yeah, that’s not a bad bet. Profiting from instability seems to be his thing.

That’s the French nukes.

No need for it now. America is so shit nobody wants to go there.

Be Mexico building the wall soon to keep Texans out.

Man, am I glad that never backfired.

Still, we got Charlie Wilson’s War out of it.

She didn’t really explain much at the time though, and when she did it never got a lot of publicity. People thought she was just attacking Catholics as a whole.

All most people saw was her ripping up a picture, going “fight the real enemy” and then a bunch of smear articles about her going mental.

Imagine how much better off we’d be if “My country is in a bit of a state right now, but I’m going to choose to look at my role within that rather than blaming a convenient minority” could fit on a hat.

Yeah, it’s never been about what you say but what you mean.

My neighbour is black - fine.

Ugh, my neighbour is black - not fine.

And to add to that, it also gives you the tools for discovery. It’s not just “Ubisoft, but they hide the icons”.

The shrine detector (which can become an anything detector), the ability to look through binoculars or whatever it is and stamp a limited number of visible waypoints onto the map. Tears of the Kingdom gives you a slightly obscure ability to highlight all the cave entrances nearby, which you can then try to mark up and see if you’ve been there.

Other games have started trying to do some of this, but I think a lot of it is added late on in development and doesn’t really work well. Like Jedi Survivor gives you the ability to mark things with icons, but what for? You can’t see the markers when you’re walking around. There’s not really much to discover from a distance, and it’s pretty far from being a vast open world.

Is it perfect? No. The last few shrines are often a complete ball-ache to find, although a lot of them are just a generic fight and they’re pretty optional, it feels like you should do them.

Is it better than a world as a menu screen as offered by Ubisoft and those that copy them? Yes.

I think in general a lot of developers should take a long look at what they’re actually trying to make before going with the open world approach. It’s getting tired, and they’re mostly doing it badly.