Man I hope it’s ok to write this topic since I don’t mean to bother anyone right now as I just wanted to take a look at how the console industry fell apart in recent times by taking a trip back to the past.

Like what I am getting at is that I wanted to go back to older generations of gaming such as the Vita and 3DS because of how ownership works as it’s hard to explain what I am getting at, but man when I go back to the older era of gaming, something just feels so right.

My point is that I cannot believe what gaming has become nowadays with the way Sony is handling the console market that I often find myself going back to the older generation of gaming to see what I missed out on since e despite how the Vita didn’t exactly catch on when it came out in the USA, I am having so much fun with the system with games like Disgaea 3 that I have come to appreciate the stuff I missed from again older consoles.

For example, if TOTK kept to the framework in BOTW that they had with things like the Octoballoon (where mobs can drop special items that interact with physics items), it probably would’ve been my favorite Zelda game.

I think the mobs actively encouraged more “fun”exploring instead of the literal mines you’re expected to do for Zonai batteries.

What are some recommendations that regardless of the content of the piece of media in question, just make you raise an eyebrow?

I feel like the big one is shitting on something to recommend another thing. Even more so if the person receiving the recommendation is a fan of thing #1 already.

Personally, I remember when Mother's Basement was really gassing an anime called Re:Creators. It was a very by the numbers battle royale anime that kinda resembles Fate, but instead of historical figures, the servants were fictional in-universe characters. The show in itself was fine, but that video just felt like he was trying real hard to manufacture hype saying it was the next big thing. Like he really wanted people to start talking about the show and he really wanted to get associated with the hype.

Y'know, when you have like a 5% chance of any swing to hit critical and do like 3x damage, but through a combination of luck and pure skill, you can crit more often and harder.

Jujutsu Kaisen, for example, has two main examples. The first is the ever-hype Black Flash, which is basically hitting someone with such precision and a bit of luck, your attack becomes a lot stronger AND you get super amped as a result. It's so rare even someone like Gojo can't do it at-will, but eventually Yuji starts to spec in it and starts shitting out Black Flashes like he just ate a laxative.

The second example is Hakari's Jackpot, which gives him 4 minutes and 11 seconds of invincibility upon rolling a jackpot in his gacha ability. Normally something that would be incredibly unreliable, he's got so much luck he can spam that shit forever and become the greatest tank of all time. Essentially a defensive crit build

IRL, homerun leaders in baseball are probably the closest thing. It's one thing to get a base hit, but being able to more consistently hit a ball out of the park when there's a massive number of variables between ball speed and angle, wind resistance, swing angle, and all that other jazz is crazy.

"We were just in a Marvel Studios meeting room, planning movies all the way up to 2042," he told the publication in a transcript shared on Weibo, which has been translated. "Whether we can make it to 2042? Who knows? Will it be those movies? Who knows?" Speaking of the next stage of the Avengers movies, Feige added that they are a "beginning" of a new era for the MCU, and it sounds like the X-Men will be at the heart of that.

"It will establish a streamlined, simplified, single universe that we can keep up with," he explained. "Some things will be familiar, but many, many things will be entirely new. Going back to what we mentioned earlier about attracting young people and connecting with a new generation of audiences, that's exactly what the next universe will be about. And fundamentally, the X-Men will be at its core

Feige went on to say that "fundamentally, it's a universe, a multi-stage saga. Much of that is what we're working towards." He even confirmed what the next stage of the MCU might be called, adding: "We're constantly changing, constantly evolving, but having some guidance helps us act more purposefully… especially with X-Men – it's already had 10 movies, some very, very good, some I think haven't lived up to expectations – how do we plan the 'mutant saga' in a very grand way?"

I have no idea if this us leaning towards a full-on continuity reset or something of a soft reboot; Fiege's wording is pulling me both directions on that. I do find it kinda funny thst they're adamant on pushing X-Men as the main focus of whatever stage comes next; I guess Young Avengers isn't panning out the way they wanted.

Immaculate vibes.

While it probably applies to regular DBZ +, was rewatching the TFS Abriged and got to this line in Goku vs Majin Vegeta after "Geets" gives his whole emtional speech explanation on why he sided with the badguys.

Basically the fight manaic but it's mutual, what are your faves that are sorta like that?

Bonus points if they're actually a king!

For me it's definitely Zatch Bell. Dude's badass and comes from an absolute gem of a classic shounen, but he's also an adorable little guy.

(Spoilers for Zatch Bell 2, largely character designs.) In the newest chapter of Zatch Bell 2 a certain someone showed back up and it once again highlighted something funny about the sequel, and that is even though Zatch is a good bit taller everyone else has also grown up in the timeskip, and often even more than he has. Tio has beefed up, while Brago has really beefed up, and even Kanchome is far from the little duckling he used to be.

The year is 2007

the world is a beautiful place, and Ubisoft was willing to bet on a new IP, instead of going forward with the established Prince of Persia. Mixing weird sci-fi elements and historic periods as its playground, Assassin's Creed 1 was a big hit, and by virtue of being an offspring of PoP, parkour was a big element in that game.

In Assassin's Creed 1, the parkour, and general gameplay interactions, follow the so-called "Puppeteer system". Eagle vision, which gives you new information on the screen through your special eyes, is tied to the ∆/Y button, since it's up on the arrangement of all controllers. X/🟥 and B/O are hand related actions, the former for attacks and the latter to push people away or grab. And finally , X/A is tied to your legs, either by blending and running slow, or by mixing with the run button, the right trigger of your controller, allowing you to run faster, climb walls and jump. The game encourages you to take the higher ground, not because it's by default faster, but because it's more practical. On the ground you could easily make your way through town while running and beat a parkour racer, but the dev team, realizing this, made so that bumping into civilians slows you down and eventually makes you trip and fall, wasting time in escape sequences, general traversal, etc. This movement system is very interesting to me, because it's very easy to grab it and make it "work" but it takes time to make it look and feel good. Directly climbing into a wall? It gets the job done, the game was made for this after all, but it is faster to wall cancel it, meaning run into the wall and jump sideways before you can start climbing said wall, and a well thought wall cancelling can make you reach a roof by the other side 1 to 2 seconds faster, meaning better locomotion for your performance around the missions, but for some people, it's just neat to learn something and master it. You are constantly looking at the environment to see the best next move. This is subtle foreshadowing for the fact that running with the right trigger allows you to also move the camera, and then commit to it by holding the X/A .

And then enters the grand and beautiful "GRAB BUTTON", a safety measure that is there in case you feel the game fucked you up, and you jumped somewhere you weren't intending. Hold O/B, and Altaïr will grab into anything possible, to cancel a nasty fall.

Into the Ezio trilogy, this control scheme was expanded with new gadgets, but there's not much of a radical transformation here. Hook blades are maybe the one element that shakes things up in 2? Allowing you to reach higher places with a wall climb. The city layout and its population still encourage you to go for the roofs, for better traversal, because people will slow you down. Assassin's Creed Brotherhood expands the scale of the map by a lot, and Revelations, due to many reasons, doesn't have much time to cook something up very interesting or well integrated, gameplay wise.

2012 arrived

and Assassin's Creed 3 is out in the stores. Beyond parkour, this game fascinates me due to the fact it is so tied to the end of the world that was so popular back in the day. 2012 was the year where pop culture really embraced it, with movies of varying quality and budget, and then Assassin's Creed, using it as a element for their sci-fi plotline. 3 does a total rework of the engine and its gameplay. The combat is more visceral, making Connor visually and in your control a force of nature, with finishers and a momentum that to this day feels great. This means a revamped parkour, due to the fact that the colonies did not have the same architectural "privileges" of past Assassin's Creed titles. AC3 would focus on the wilderness traversal, with Connor running through trees and the settlements being way smaller than past cities. This translates into a streamlined controller scheme, which is a bummer for someone who dedicated their time in learning the past iteration's quirks, but for the playerbase at large it was all fine. Black Flag and Rogue follow the same trend, due to release schedule (Once upon a time, Assassin's Creed being an annual franchise was a guarantee!)

2014 arrived

and with it, Assassin's Creed Unity hit the stores, showcasing the power of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One... Except we know what actually happened. The game ran poorly, dreaming of reaching 30fps, and actually kissing the 20fps line more often than not. On top of that, the game was buggy to such an extreme at the time that Ubisoft had to apologize by giving a planned DLC for free. Visual glitches, traversals bugs, everything and more. To say this game was tarnished would be an understatement, which is a shame since its parkour has some great merits, even if the streamlining from 3 persisted. Ubisoft realized that a smart climb down animation would actually be very useful, and now we have it, with Arno being able to gracefully go up and down a chaotic Paris, a city where the verticality of the Ezio trilogy makes a return. Wall cancelling was lost in the divorce, but back ejects were gained in the custody, meaning it's faster to jump from one wall to the other to gain height than to simply climb a building, if you have the chance. It cannot be overlooked also that Assassin's Creed Unity looks sexy while doing it too. At the poor frame rates of the era, "feeling good" was debatable, but it was undeniable that the animations and their fidelity, while maintaining a good level of control, were a great achievement. Nowadays, Unity runs reliably at 60fps on all modern consoles, and I can say it really is a parkour system that benefits from that. At the time, Unity became the black sheep of the family, due to many reasons, like the bugs I mentioned, a present day plotline that felt like filler and a string of misleading marketing from Ubisoft at the time (Watch Dogs 1 was also in 2014, the infamous downgrade game controversy of the era).

Syndicate had no other choice but to scale back. To it's credit, it ran a lot better than Unity, but it's undeniable how some of the edge it was introduced was lost. The grappling hook sounds good on paper, but it's quite restrictive in it's execution. Rumblings of the development of Syndicate are still echoed, with leaked images pointing to a very different tone from the final game, so how that impacted everything else is kinda murky. People were still hurt about Unity, so Syndicate never had a grand time to shine.

2017 arrived, and with it, a new Assassin's Creed

Both the public and devs were saturated with the ongoing Assassin's Creed model, so the team at Ubisoft Montreal decided to do a radical shakeup to the franchise. No longer would Assassin's Creed be tied to its parkour, tower climbing and linear map progression. Origins would be an open world RPG game, in which the horizons were king, and buildings were sparse. Bayek, the main protagonist, would still be able to climb and jump high places, but the intricacies of parkour would be gone, favoring an exploration akin to The Witcher 3 or Skyrim, favoring mounts for quick travel, and small dungeons along the way for new loot. With this transformation, AC dropped the running button being tied to the trigger, and now your speed is fully decided by how much you tilt your analog stick. By default, Bayek is always running. For the new exploration and gameplay model? This works fine. The game still offers in the menu options a controller scheme resembling classic Assassin's Creed, so instead of a Dark Souls-Like for combat, you use the bumper and trigger to go down and climb, and the face buttons are there for combat. In my humble opinion, this works way better in these games, because you can climb around and jump and still have control of your camera. Odyssey is the same ordeal, expanding the scope even more and adding back ocean traversal, with ship battles and shanties of the Greek era.

In 2020, Assassin's Creed Valhalla arrived,

and to an untrained eye, it looked very similar to what I described about Origins and Odyssey. Big horizons, boat, Dark Souls-Like combat and very light parkour, but one small thing was added, to which we're carrying the cross to this day: Valhalla reintroduced a sprint button, and by default it is tied to the left analog stick. This seems fine, since some folks were claiming for a faster running option outside of mounts, but Ubisoft started to create a complex thread of decisions that make it more and more difficult to try and have a "classic layout". For starters, the game does not give you a pre-made control scheme in which you can play closer to the original, and instead you have to manually change it around by yourself. Giving the game some grace, the controller customization is pretty detailed, and everyone should strive to be like that in their games, but the quick and easy swap is gone. It's not impossible, but it's awkward.

It gets really really awkward when Mirage enters the picture. After years of the RPG formula, Ubisoft decided to bridge the gap between "classic" and "new" Assassin's Creed. Mirage would have RPG stats, with modifiers in form of gears, yes, but it would also favor parkour and social stealthing again. Baghdad is condensed, begging for you to climb its walls, and to gain speed through ropes connecting districts. This all sounds great, and to be honest, it kinda is, but once again, Assassin's Creed abandoned the "classic layout" scheme you could easily swap into, and you have to manually change it around to run with the trigger again, because I cannot stress enough how bad it feels to run and parkour around while pressing the analog stick. There's no sense of momentum, thanks to Basim's animations alongside the very binary stick nature of things making you wonder "...Am I really running? Did I forgot to press? Do I need to press again after jumping from one place to another?" It's just awkward as hell, badly communicated, bad bad not good. On top of that, more and more tools are introduced into the controller scheme, making it more crowded and harder to configure around to resemble the "classic" parkour, which to be honest we're already settling for like AC3 levels, the hopium for Altaïr and Ezio controls is departing.

A bit of hope, but still....In AC Shadows and Black Flag Resynced

Shadows looked to address some of the complaints of the

parkour system from Mirage, which was basically Valhalla's but stretched to the limit, to be as good as possible for a big city. In fairness, Shadows has a great feeling of verticality in its parkour, even if the big cities are somewhat contained. Naoe has some great options, like going prone, grappling hooking, tree, wall climbing, etc. Throughout the game's official support, they added toggles for you to turn off some safety nets, and try to fuck around with the traversal. Classic layout out of the box is not present, once again. Tinker around for one hour until it feels right, parkour nerd.

Black Flag Resynced is now the latest in the series, and it's paradoxically free and hindered. You can make certain moves that the original game removed, like wall cancelling! But once again, sprinting with the analog stick feels *bad*, since it's badly communicated through animations, the logic you carry from other games (like do I need to press it again every time I jump from tree to tree, as mentioned before) and worse camera controls, joined by the fact that the FOV is lower for some god damn reason (when in doubt, it's probably performance).

So, now what?

I don't know! Assassin's Creed seems to be flirting with this bridge between classic parkour and modern RPG elements. Ubisoft continues to reutilize tech they already built, which is a big W, 5 big booms for not throwing away what you build just to feel something. But at the same time, this control scheme is not working for the parkour crowd. I had to watch YouTube videos to see the best controller layout in Black Flag Resynced, and I had to accept new quirks that weren't there if I left it by default. I lost my shit when one channel went above and beyond and used Steam overlay to set the Xbox Capture button AS PART OF THEIR GAMEPLAY SCHEME. We're simply running out of buttons at this point, for a parkour that nobody really *likes*. I loved the combat, camera problems aside, but ever since Valhalla, Assassin's Creed became a series in which I'll spend 10 hours trying to find a controller layout that doesn't bother me, and that's insanity of fine caliber that I choose to endure, but it could...not exist to begin with, please.

Xbox is now bringing backwards compatibility titles to PC as part of a broader effort to preserve Xbox titles of the past.

The first four games that are available now in supported regions are:

• BLiNX: The Time Sweeper
• Conker: Live and Reloaded
• Crimson Skies®: High Road to Revenge
• Fuzion Frenzy®

Minimum system requirements: 

• GPU: Nvidia GTX 950 or AMD Radeon RX 550 or Intel UHD 770 or Intel Arc A310  
• CPU: Min 4 Cores Intel Core i3-8100 or AMD Ryzen 3 1200 or AMD Ryzen™ Z2 A Processor  
• RAM: 8GB  
• OS: Windows 11   
• Drivers and Versions: Latest Version as of January 2026 

Recommended specifications: 

• GPU: Radeon RX 68005 or Nvidia GTX 1070 Ti or Intel Arc A770 
• CPU: 6 cores and 12 threads Intel Core i5-10400 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme 
• DirectX Version: DirectX12 API, Hardware Feature Level 11 
• GPU VRAM: 8GB 
• OS: Windows 11 
• Drivers and Versions: Latest Version as of January 2026 

If you don't know what Stylized Realism is, it is when a piece of media looks realistic but has more exaggerated features. I was made more aware of this art style thanks to this Backloggd list.

My favorite example of this art style in action would be with most of the 3D Final Fantasy games (except Final Fantasy VII, which looks more animesque and blocky than the other games, and Final Fantasy IX, which is more cartoonish than the other games), with the best examples within the series being FFX, FFXIII, and the VII Remake games.