@matrix @xianc78 The ability Sheer Force has a pretty hilarious bug which has been present since Black/White (2010) and never been fixed. The ability is supposed to power up moves that have a secondary effect (like burn chance, flinch chance, boosting stats, etc) but prevent that effect from happening. The bug is that, if the move has a secondary effect, it also prevents numerous other completely unrelated effects from triggering - it basically just stops processing any effects that would happen afterwards. This means things like item effects (eg Life Orb damaging the user, Red Card switching out the opponent) and numerous different abilities don't work if Sheer Force triggers, even though it's only supposed to remove the secondary effects of the move itself. This also only happens if the move actually has a secondary effect, so something with Sheer Force that's holding a Life Orb, for example, will take Life Orb damage if they use a move without secondary effects (eg Earthquake) but won't take Life Orb damage if they use a move with secondary effects (eg Flamethrower).

Life Orb Sheer Force is a pretty common strategy in competitive pokemon because of this bug, since Life Orb and Sheer Force both give huge boosts to an attack's power, and the Sheer Force bug removes Life Orb's downsides without actually removing its boosts. Despite how common it is, often being used in official tournaments since it's discovery over a decade ago, Gamefreak still hasn't fixed this bug - it's still present in the most recent games, aside from PLA which cut abilities and held items entirely.

@hj @matrix @Alex I thought they were usually good. Satoru Iwata and Yuji Naka immediately come to mind.

@xianc78 @matrix @Alex those are more like exceptions than the rule, which is probably why they tend to take higher positions.

@xianc78
I dunno. Japanese games to this day have often physics tied to FPS and piss poor PC ports.
@hj @Alex

@xianc78 @hj @Alex
I don't really know. Breath of the Wild, which is comparable to the last Pokémon game was also made by Japanese. I don't think there's much correlation between nationality and coding skill.

@matrix @hj @Alex Nintendo developers seem to be competent at least (not just talking about Iwata). I always found it impressive what they were able to achieve on N64 cartridges for example (Star Fox 64 should not be able to have that many voice clips). You also had Masahiro Sakurai, who while is more known as a designer than a programmer, wrote the enemy patterns in Kirby's Dream Land entirely in hexadecimal, and he was just 19 years old.

Wind Waker uses two lighting techniques on a system that doesn't support programmable shaders. Super Smash Bros. Brawl was able to do the same thing.

Even outside of Nintendo, Namco was able to include an intro with lyrics for an SNES RPG. Capcom was able to port some of their 32-bit games on the SNES while still looking impressive. Star Ocean 1 had a fully voice intro cutscene.

Modern game devs in general are pretty incompetent though. I can agree with that.

@xianc78 @matrix @Alex >wrote the enemy patterns in Kirby's Dream Land entirely in hexadecimal

I hate how people seem to be impressed by this while it's not really a good approach nor skillful nor it's good programming either. It's similar to ROTT's GADs placements or typing in code from 64'er magazine. It's autistic as fuck yeah but really more tedious than complex.

@matrix @hj @Alex Breath of the Wild is still impressive in that a lot of it's effects are in real time (most Wii-U games would have them prerendered). A lot of those effects are on par with Unreal Engine 4.