I couldn’t stand Near A Tomato but have tons of hours in SB. I grant it has nothing amazing in terms of story, but it has enough intricacies of combat to keep it fun, even if none of those mechanics were invented here.
Nier seemed to operate off a single attack button a lot of time, and working off RPG mechanics gave so many opportunities for level disparity that didn’t serve the game at all.
I think the only thing that might get me to go over the $60 line is if a publisher takes a chance on a franchise/concept I’d like to see more of, which these days is rare.
While it is fraud, it’s murky waters when you realize this is what every Kickstarter does. Gamers don’t easily fathom the full sum of what it costs to pay qualified artists for a full development cycle. Kickstarters have only existed to prove to investors that there’s monetary interest in a concept.
It is my fervent hope that in a decade or less, the next Wolfenstein-style game is about killing ICE agents.
Downvoted for censoring “Gamers”. Go back to TikTok.
I know “worst” is an adjective that triggers a lot of content farms, but I still feel bad about these situations. Even the worst games, when they manage to be completed, are mountains of effort from the people involved; and as I understand it this was coming from one of IOI’s first publishing efforts.
This happened for me with Back 4 Blood.
Turtle Rock said “Okay, we’re done developing content. We’ll move on to new things now.” And people took that to mean it was a failed, dead, and worthless game. Whereas the active state where they left it was pretty solid, still runs, and I have a lot of fun with it. It just wasn’t built to be endlessly live-service.
I feel like, though it doesn’t come up much, we should conceptually separate “owning the game” from “having a physical edition”. Some games give you a disc, but barely offer ownership (remember CD keys?) while other games are only sold digitally, but are ultra-permissive with what you do with them.
I get the sense many indie companies would like to give people as much control as possible, but also can’t afford printing box sets.
King’s Quest VIII: Mask of Eternity. Even as a kid, I felt like it was a very strange gore-and-action focus shift for the King’s Quest series. Only as an adult did I hear the story of executive meddling that lead to the complete tone and gameplay shift.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2020/10/how-private-prisons-profit-from-forced-labor
It’s still kinda legal, just takes some extra steps and signatures, and a bribed judge - of which there are many.
That’s also setting aside people that are effectively slaves to low wages, unable to do anything but work with no chance for upward mobility.
Just to highlight some solidarity: Right groups celebrate that too. I don’t think any political spectrum takes the side of health insurance companies.
I mean, it’s the same situation as vaccine mandates. You’re hoping that it’s a perfect system of karma that reflects upon the user, but it’s not. Someone practices bad security or bad personal health, and it might not necessarily be them that suffers the most. (Botnet victims come in wide varieties)
I think owning your own device is a great ideology and I want to promote it however possible; I just don’t feel comfortable pushing that over general worldwide computer safety.
While I do believe in this, a common point brought up about civil rights is everything that Malcolm X and the Black Panthers did around the same time. While peace wins hearts and minds, even just passive shows of force can dissuade hateful pushers of violence.
Even Gandhi didn’t just sit back; his operation broke laws in order to make a point.
I’ma make a daring statement: I think Dark Souls must be a lot of fun once you get into a flow, but I think the game has a lot of bullshit in it that gets overlooked because anybody queasy about it is afraid to get called out with “skill issue” / “guess you want the game to hold your hand” when posting a review.
I like secretiveness, I like self discovery. There’s still a lot of ways DS applies that that are just lazy and wasteful of player time, and the Souls formula has rightly evolved in the many games since. Some of my favorite games took some design cues from DS (for instance Breath of the Wild greatly amped its difficulty from Nintendo standards) but left other design elements behind.
Unpopular opinion: The most-used operating system in the world must automatically apply security updates, eventually even overriding user preference if people never restart.
Right now it’s Windows. If someday it’s Ubuntu, they should do it too. If they don’t, we’d see giant botnets of every computer that people don’t want to update, all compromised by exploits.
To be clear, this doesn’t excuse MS for abusing this update cycle to push shitty products or AI features.
The video game market is extremely hard to “corner”. It can happen for professional software like document processing, image editing, etc, but far too many startups are interested in making games, and there’s multiple digital stores to sell them. Minecraft and Factorio even sold off their own websites. Clair Obscur recently outsold a lot of big publisher efforts, and definitely didn’t need Game Pass’s visibility.
They can corner one particular audience like Call of Duty, but can only push so many expectations on them before those gamers consider other games. They tried it with Fallout, complete with subscription, and it was massively unpopular.
I still haven’t seen the “no other option” scenario as so many claim. You could say $80 price tags do that, but if all prices are going up, that doesn’t track so much.
They also discount games if you buy them while you have game pass. So there’s some encouragement to try a game, find you want to keep it, and pay for a permanent copy should it be removed from GP (or the player decides to stop the GP subscription).
Still, I’m done with them because they’re done with talented studios, and are active participants in the Palestinian genocide.
I mean, I enjoy PS+, it’s just a matter of whether you’re okay playing a bunch of games on a known rental basis for the price point.
I enjoyed playing Texas Chainsaw while it was on there. Now the game’s dead. To me, not much lost as I move on to other games (and I do buy games too)
Which is why I included the last link.
And no, anybody that lives in LA can tell you the current protests are more peaceful than J6 even while having more people turning out.
I’m glad for your sake the event remained nonviolent.
There was one other event where a MAGhat tried to draw a weapon, a peacekeeper with a weapon fired at them, and THEY (the peacekeeper) killed an innocent person in the crossfire.
So while that’s a better turnout than a mass shooting, I fervently hope for tensions not to escalate.