Ori is my favorite Metroidvania series by far, and I love Metroidvanias. The most incredible feat is that the second installment actually surpassed the first. The first Ori was amazing. It was stunningly beautiful, had a compelling story, and the gameplay mechanics were fantastic.

For Ori 2 I would have been happy with more of the same. They didn’t have to try to reinvent anything, and yet they did in Wisps. Every tweak they made was for the better. The interface/mechanics changes rounded off rough edges I didn’t even realize were there. The story remained engaging and touching, and it had a real arc. And the graphics are even more stunning. I remember playing Wisps for the first time and just standing still and being amazed at the graphics. My character was standing still, and yet the entire screen was alive with movement. I was standing on a branch, and the branch was slowly bouncing with my weight. The leaves were gently blowing in the wind. Blades of grass were swaying. It was incredible.

The two Ori games are some of the best games of any genre I’ve ever played. Big fan, and I’m excited by that studio’s next game.

You can make this a macro and trigger it with just a hot key.

Select Start Recording in the Macro menu. Open the search dialog, in the “Find what” field just type three characters: “:.*” (that’s a colon, period, and asterisk). In the “Replace with” field enter just a single colon. Switch search mode to “Regular expression”, and make sure “matches new line” box is not checked, and hit Replace All.

Now Stop Recording in the Macro menu, and then Save Current Recorded Macro. Give it a name and optionally a hot key, and note you can run it from the Macro menu or the hot key.

I want to be excited about this, but I just don’t believe I’ll actually be able to get one for retail price. For much of the RP4 lifecycle they prioritized corporate sales, and regular consumers were out of luck. I don’t have a lot of faith in them right now.

I’ve been a Prime member from the very beginning, but I’m seriously reevaluating whether I should drop it. The value proposition is decreasing for me. At $99 I thought it was pretty good considering the perks like video and music. But then they crippled Prime Music a few months back so it’s a shadow of what it once was (pushing you to subscribe to Unlimited). Now Prime Video is getting ads. Those “extras” are becoming less compelling. So I’m paying $140 annually for just free shipping? Hmmm, these numbers don’t add up anymore.