6 Recent Games That Put Crazy Effort Into Tiny Details

Every single stage is full of lovingly rendered little details that are easy to miss. For instance, if you pause and zoom out on Mr. Game & Watch's stage, you can see you're fighting inside an actual Game & Watch console from the '80s.

The Game Theorists did the math, and taking into account all the variants and such, there are over 1 sedecillion possible matches in this game. That's a number with so many zeros that if we tried to type it out here, it'd probably break the website, if not the Universe. Of course, we're just going to keep playing as Yoshi and poop opponents off ledges, but it's cool to know we have options.

For instance, multiple reviews have noted that the game is immersive without making you feel like you're about to become immersed in your thrown-up lunch. In fact, Ubisoft even worked with French astronauts to prevent motion sickness.

We must therefore assume that everything else in this trailer is an accurate representation of the French space program.

Another thing setting Space Junkies apart is the fact that, in a time when the FPS genre is dominated by battle royales, hero shooters, MOBA, and QBORT BLTs (we may have made that last one up), these guys are bringing back the good ol' arena shooter. You know, the ones that put the focus on the actual "shooting" part (ask your granddad about Quake 3 Arena if you're not familiar). It's worth noting that the game was initially criticized for being kinda light on content when it came out this March, but it has already started offering free updates to make up for that.

Most stealth-based video games are less about learning how to move around enemies undetected and more about exercising your memory. You watch the baddies for a while, learn their patterns, wonder why their butts look so much better in those pants than yours does, and then jump on them with a weapon. Sekiro doesn't exactly make Skynet a reality, but it adds little things to make the stealth experience way more realistic than your average "crouch-run to the next distracted guard" game.

One example is compartmentalizing alert statuses. Unlike in other games, being caught by one or two enemies in Sekiro doesn't mean you'll suddenly have like 200 bad guys from all over the map chasing you down to kill you. This is a welcome change, because it means you don't have to throw the "stealth" part out the window and turn things hack-and-slash the moment you step on a creaky floorboard.

And if you do alert multiple enemies, they don't automatically go after you as a unit. Some chase you down vigorously, some are slightly slower and fall behind, and some eventually get tired of running and go back to their station (presumably muttering something about not getting paid enough for this crap). This allows you to fight enemies one by one, and ... still die on your first 5,000 or so attempts, if you're like us.

But aside from performing missions, you can also donate your gear and be rewarded with useful blueprints, experience, bounties, or just the satisfaction of knowing that your trash is helping the needy. Many of these donation projects are repeatable in the postgame ... and who knows, maybe in real life too, if you get a taste for charity. Thoughtful details like these are why Mr. Clancy is our favorite developer.

Meanwhile, Dio Brando from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is excluded from more than half of the game's stages because he's a vampire, and thus can only fight at night (he's never heard of hoodies, sadly). Then there's Gon from Hunter x Hunter, who in the original series performs an attack so powerful that it leaves him in a coma. So naturally, if you use that ability in Jump Force, it takes him out of the fight.

Things like that might put off or confuse novice players, but let's face it, putting off and confusing people is a proud anime tradition. Fans wouldn't have it any other way.

Maxwell Yezpitelok co-runs a Nintendo-centric YouTube channel, NintendoDuo. Special thanks to Neil Raymundo for research assistance.

For more, check out How Video Games Are Turning Into Movies:

Also, we'd love to know more about you and your interesting lives, dear readers. If you spend your days doing cool stuff, drop us a line at iDoCoolStuff at Cracked dot com, and maybe we can share your story with the entire internet.

Follow us on Facebook. Game on.