These are some strange criticisms. Yes, there was a focus on games being “cinematic”. Yes, there was also a counter-culture to that, because there’s a counter-culture for every popular culture. No, Half-Life didn’t invent it; it iterated on existing ideas. Yes, others copied it, because iteration is far easier and more likely to be financially sustainable than outright invention. Likewise, others in the counter-culture didn’t copy it. There are pros and cons to that sort of design. If my friends and I both play through a game like that, we can reminisce and “hell yeah” and high five over our favorite moments. A more immersive sim “lite” design like Indiana Jones can easily lead to me getting the intended experience where Indy has to improvise his way out of a blunder by punching Nazis and my friend ending up in what he perceived to be automatic fail states (true story). The “detour” through Half-Life inspired games came coupled with those same years being littered with games that didn’t stick to its ethos.

The one thing I’ll agree with the author on is that we’re definitely currently living through the stark aftermath of this peak FPS era. It’s so rare now that a new FPS is made for me anymore. Maybe it’ll be Mouse: P.I. for Hire, but it won’t come with a split-screen deathmatch like the good old days.

Ubisoft is largely run by one family, the Guillemots. What seems to be important to them, above and beyond everything else, is running a company called “Ubisoft”. Their company has a lot more value if someone else can run it, but they won’t budge on that, so their stock has tanked over the past number of years, as they keep making bad decisions. They tried to partner with Tencent to take Ubisoft private, which basically means buying out all of their investors, but Tencent also wanted the Guillemots gone, which wasn’t happening. So instead, they made this new company that Tencent can have more control over, which gets the best parts of Ubisoft’s portfolio as well as a lot of the debts, but Tencent has enough sway to flip off the Guillemots and make decisions they think are better. Meanwhile, the Guillemots still get to run a company called Ubisoft into the ground, but they get to start fresh with less (or zero?) debt, so they don’t have to dig themselves out of a hole first.

I think you missed the sarcasm in the rhetorical question, but yes. It’s one of at least three or four movies I’ve seen utilizing the Dances With Wolves trope, though I’ve never seen Dances With Wolves itself, and that’s okay. It was entertaining.

Are you telling me The Last Samurai wasn’t skillfully made or imaginative? Nah, it was no masterpiece, but I liked it just fine. Having some westerners in Japan training their military on modern weaponry as the samurai are fading from relevance passes my threshold for “remotely historical”, and it’s definitely not a requirement for me that Tom Cruise’s character needs to have an American historical analog to meet that criteria. Any historical fiction will inherently have to change things about what actually happened in that era, after all.

Hey, I’m sure it solves a problem for people, but the easier solution is still just the absence of DRM, as much as Nintendo would not like to do it, and it introduces exactly the kind of complexity that Sony mocked 12 years ago.

You have to authenticate online on both ends, and it maxes out at two weeks, so no.

Hooray, new DRM?

Good thing I was expecting historical fiction then and not a documentary or even a dramatization of true events.

Yes, they do. I plan on playing some Persona games at some point.

I’ve been playing Borderlands 2 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance, both in preparation for their sequels this year. What I played tonight of the latter was a bit obtuse, and I’m hoping it picks up.

Last we saw Silksong, it was part of an Xbox marketing deal; that’s all I’m basing my hunch on. I doubt that deal is easily broken, and Silksong can write its own ticket with any marketing partner.

Except for Smash Bros., yes, but they created a really shitty vicious cycle. I don’t care if it’s first or third party; I’m not giving Nintendo any more of my money.

They actively harm the emulation scene, despite themselves being responsible for making it necessary. They don’t want to make their old games available for sale where those potential customers are; they want you to buy their hardware and rent those old games from them in perpetuity. We’re also now at a point, at least temporarily, where their latest games often play better if you emulate them than play them in the only way Nintendo makes them available legally, so buying games and playing them “the right way” is worse. Then there’s the whole thing where they actively stand in the way of competitive Super Smash Bros.

Yes, I have. It was very good, but at times, it was too long for its own good. Keep in mind I haven’t played a Persona game before, but there’s the loop of the calendar system combined with going into a longer dungeon. I know that it being an endurance test and a stress on your resources is a key part of the design, but each of those sections of the game were probably about 10% too long, and then you get to the ending, where the game probably should have ended about 20 hours earlier than it did. There’s something to be said about leaving 'em wanting more, and at the end of the game, it felt like they had long stretched my tolerance for reaching the story’s proper climax, as they kept trying to escalate it in ways that didn’t feel earned.

The UI looked nice, but managing archetypes in particular was split up among three different screens that were very unintuitive. I’d rather they focus on function before form.

You can, but I sure won’t.

It’s real, and it’s happening, but I wouldn’t count on hearing about it again until the next Microsoft presentation. I’d like to see some Mina the Hollower at this Direct though.

It’s also not pitched as being based on a true story. I take less issue with him becoming a samurai than surviving the last real samurai, lol.

Say what you will about the white savior trope, but wasn’t there a historical reason for Tom Cruise’s character to be there? Japan was accepting foreign influence and modernization at that time, from what I know of history.

Pelting the enemy with slings and arrows still works, but now and then they’ll still target me at range and land a hit. I don’t have a summoner in my party either, so I doubt I’d see a difference, especially at level 1.