You know the times are dire when you find yourself rooting for Moscow Mitch.

If the last few years have taught me anything, it's that what you do is not important as much as the narrative that you are able to spin.

As long as TV news networks, podcasters, news outlets, and Musk's Twitter exist, people who are too ignorant to understand they are being lied to, or too lazy to parse credible information, will stay in the dark and vote red in the next election as well.
Democracy doesn't work when the electorate is too illiterate to cast their vote justly. They'll just vote for the next clown who promises them the moon.

I don't have a solution.

Thank you so much for writing these posts! Don't worry about slowing down a bit, I'm way more interested in quality instead of them just devolving into a boring streak of daily screenshots, and most importantly, it's supposed to be fun for you in the first place! It shouldn't feel like a job! You can't write good reviews of games if you are not enjoying playing them in the first place, or you're prevented from fully enjoying them by the rush of finding a new title for tomorrow's post.

As for this one in particular, I've had it in my wishlist for quite a while. I've enjoyed most of Dontnod's games and this one seems quite peculiar indeed. I heard a few divisive opinions on it, but you convinced me to give it a fair try.

I'm not a US citizen, but happy veteran day!

Electing Trump the first time was the equivalent of Brexit.

Electing him twice is the equivalent of setting your own home on fire, walking back inside while the house is still burning and taking a nap, hoping that the flames will only destroy your neighbour's house.

As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft.

In which case, Microsoft and other distributors will not release Unity games on their subscription services. This will harm game developers either way.

Geez, the internet and the tech industry as a whole is collapsing. Twitter, Reddit, Unity... What the fuck is going on in the last few years?

I pirated 90% of the texts I used to write my thesis at university, because those books would have cost me hundreds of euros that I didn't have.

Fuck you, capitalism.

I'm kind of used to devs releasing apologies for their games after a bad release and the following review bombing. It's almost guaranteed to happen for any modern AAA game, it's the sorry state of the industry. But now, we've reached a point where devs apologize for their games before they're even released. This shit is hilarious.

What's next? "We're going to release a game four years from now. You should temper your expectations, it's probably going to suck."

I mean, kudos to them for warning the potential customers, instead of lying to them or luring them in with nice trailers and trying to silence journalists by prohibiting them from showing game footage (I think I remember someone doing that...). Although I'm not sure how I should thank them. Should I buy the game because they were honest? Or should I not buy it, because, well, they were honest? I'm confused.

I work in a hotel.

One day, a family comes to the reception to tell me that their window is broken, asking me to change their room. I ask if I can take a look.

It turns out, they didn't know the existence of tilt & turn windows and were scared that the window was going to fall down lol

Had a friend unironically trying to convince me that Palworld is evil because it brainwashes people into liking human enslavement and shooting at civilians.

His favourite game is Pokémon, a game where you bond with your fire lizard by pitting it against other animals in a government-sanctioned tournament.

Of course he's also one of those people who spends hours lamenting the state of current Pokémon games, while also buying both versions of each game at day 1.

It's not the devs' fault, it's Sony.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were told one thing three days ago, and another one now.

Very rare China W.

You are underplaying the struggles of civilians in a war zone just because they happen to live on the wrong side of the border.

Civilians have all the rights to not want war on their country, at their doors, no matter which side of the border they are, and they are allowed to lament the incompetency of a government that hides critical information from them in an attempt to cover up its failures.

The Ukrainians have the right to keep fighting, and I hope they win this war. Putin is a criminal and he must pay for his crimes. This doesn't mean that civilians caught in the crossfire are being petty.

Respectfully, I believe this incident serves more as a learning opportunity for the admin team rather than a reason to amend the rules.

This isn’t the first time I’ve observed Rooki acting inappropriately for an admin of a community. As an admin of a (admittedly much smaller) corner of the internet, I’ve learned to interact with users in a way that is polite and ensures they feel safe and heard. This is at least the second instance where I’ve seen Rooki respond emotionally and rather adversarially towards users, which has, in my view, undermined their credibility, to the point that I hope to avoid future interactions with them.

I understand that managing LW, one of the largest and general-purpose instances, especially with Lemmy’s still rather limited moderation tools, is challenging, and I appreciate the hard work all of you, including Rooki, put into maintaining it and making it run as smoothly as it does. I'm NOT asking for their removal; however, considering that this is not the first time I’ve seen Rooki behave uncivilly and antagonistically towards users, I hope that this will be a formative experience for them.

(Edit for clarity)

Sony looking at the rotting corpse of Xbox and taking notes. But only the wrong ones.

This is meta enough for Kojimbo that it could be a true tweet.

Also, Relevant video

Let's add this to the list of shitty anti-consumer choices that big tech corporations have implemented this year.

IIRC Microsoft still hasn't reverted on their asinine choice of locking their console players into their overpriced branded SSDs.

I see mobile games as the natural evolution of flash games from the old days. I used to spend my time playing those games and I had fun, but I would never insist on them being the best experience I've ever had in gaming. They were just cute games to spend some time on. To use your examples, Minigore is just like Boxhead. It may be fun but there's nothing "genius" or ground-breaking about it.

In the end, gaming is just an experience, and our emotional attachment to it decides our rating. I hardly care about Call of Duty, but the people who spent their childhood playing online with friends rate it as one of their best/most formative gaming experiences. Surprise, people's opinions on things are subjective.

By the way, as you're the same guy who dunked on Uncharted, The last of us, God of war and Witcher for being games that rely too much on story exposition and have too little gameplay, you seem to have a preference for games with zero/near zero story and offer immediate gratification via gameplay. That's also a characteristic that lots of mobile games share, so that may shape your preference as well.

Personally, I rate mobile games very low because I hate their monetization and I despise touch controls.

Phil Spencer underperformed for 10+ years and yet he's still there.

Must be nice having the peace of mind that no matter how you fuck up, other people will pay in your stead.

The year is 2077.

Pollution and nuclear war destroyed the environment.

The economy is in shambles, big corporations rule over the world and exploit the powerless working class.

Crime has overtaken the country. It doesn't matter who you are: you are either one of them, or on the receiving end.

Breathable air is a subscription service, and price hikes happen every other month to please shareholders.

Game devs are still releasing games for the PS4 and XOne consoles. Nobody has yet understood the purpose of the next gen consoles. Every other day, someone screams "but muh exclusives!" to the sky. But no one answers back. God remains silent.

Why is this a sigh of relief? Nintendo has bullied an emulator's dev team and got $2.4 millions out of it. If I was an emu dev, I certainly would not be happy with this news.

Rewards is being moved from its own app to the Xbox app. Everything will keep working as usual.

Yeah, the price hike is fair, I don't think any developer has any problem with that.

The problem is that they broke the trust of developers, and I don't think that they'll ever recoup from that.

Damn, I knew the moon was just a slice of cheese, but I didn't know that neutron stars were a dairy product, as well. The universe really hates lactose intolerant people.

His performance may have drawn some gasps from the audience, but I doubt it had the same effect on his fan base. He was not there to speak to the US as a whole; he was there to speak to his die hard supporters - those who actually enjoy his racist, sexist, hateful remarks and voted for him in 2016 because of them; the same people who were willing to stage a coup in his favour in 2021, after four years of ignorance, pettiness and hatred.

His strategy against Biden was winning because it gathered him bipartisan support - even Democrats were dubious about Biden being able to do a good job - but now that that's out of the question, Trump has fallen back to his usual script, because it's too late to do anything else. After all, questioning Obama's birth and throwing sexist remarks against Clinton won him an election; why wouldn't it work again? Just stick to the fanbase that won you an election once and almost won you another the second time, and hope for the best.

The Bethesda of old is long dead.

The Bethesda of old who invented MTX with their $5-dollar horse armour?

Or the Bethesda of old who made millions by re-releasing the same game for 10+ years but refused to spend a dime to fix its bugs or give the players a functioning UI?

The fact that MS spent an entire decade fumbling the ball, and when it finally got it right and released a game people actually liked, immediately shut down the studio and sold the IP, is still highly amusing to me.

You can't convince me that it wasn't an inside job from someone who either secretly works for the competition, or who actively hates MS and wants it to fail.

I'm sure most of them have already been available on GoG for quite some time, I don't know what took them so long to port them over competing storefronts.

I feel the problem is not the industry but the fanbase. As of the last few years, it's become pretty common to see videogames become target of hatred for "going woke": H:FW's Aloy's "peach fuzz", TLOU2's Abby being too masculine, women not living to the average beauty standard, LGBT characters "shoved down people's throats", character editors decoupling gender and sex or using gender-neutral language, narrative being cringe because it targets millennials (as if older games didn't target young audiences, too)... The industry is going forward, but I don't think the fanbase is ready yet.

Sometimes I think the fanbase is regressing, even. I've seen people lamenting increased "politics" in their videogame, yet saying that MGS or FFVII or Bioshock are their favourite games. Gamers don't even pay attention to what they consume, they merely parrot whatever their favourite influencer says. "Woke" is a meaningless term that gets thrown around whenever they don't like something.

When I read of historical conquerors and dictators, I always wonder where the heck do they get their drive to do all that.

Like, I struggle to wake up on mondays, spend wednesdays hoping that the weekend comes soon, and on saturday I lay on the sofa and do nothing for 24 hours straight.

This guy invaded a foreign land he didn't need just because he felt barely offended by the words of its inhabitants. He should've appreciated the humour and moved on imo, but maybe that's just me.

Oversexualization. Panty shots, ass shots, boob physics, the same old jokes from the '80s about a guy "accidentally" groping a woman, guys peeping into a girls' space, suggestive poses, barely-disguised fetishes (included, but not limited to, harems, incest and pedophilia).

It got to the point where a friend would recommend an anime, I'd watch it, and walk away halfway through the first or second episode because it was just unbearable. Friends would tell me to turn a blind eye, but why the fuck should I put up with sexualizing minors in a show? I'd rather spend my time doing something that doesn't make me feel sick.

It also attracts the wrong kind of audience. Since the medium is so keen to produce oversexualized content, that's all people look for and talk about. Any anime discussion thread degenerates into gross memes about "flat is justice", "twincest is wincest", people patting each other in the shoulder while calling the other "man of culture" for sharing their kinks, and shit like that. It's so extenuating that, back when I was interested in the medium, I still actively refrained from interacting with fellow fans because I felt grossed out by them. Fun fact, I had a female classmate back in highschool who was interested in anime, and I thought that I could find common grounds with her, but no, it was the same thing, just reversed (she would only watch anime with sexualised boys).

The medium also forgot what its name stands for. I haven't seen "animation" in "anime" in years. It's just still frames and more still frames and whenever there's an action sequence, the characters will constantly interrupt them to explain or think about the thing that I'm already watching and needs no explanation, or having flashback sequences, because it's cheaper to animate. The fact that Ghost in the Shell and Akira from thirty years ago had better and more fluid animation than the shit they produce now is just sad.

The obvious answer is Pathologic. You play as one of three possible characters in a black plague-infested town in the russian steppe, trying to help people and survive.

As days go by, the situation worsens and, in order to survive, you are forced to make very hard decisions. Can you spare the food for the others? Will you rob someone of their medicines? Will you risk going to the most dangerous parts of the city, where the stench of infection permeates the air?

I'll quote The Nocturnal Rambler's review of the game, which is one of my favourite video game reviewers:

Making it to the end of a day is a genuine accomplishment in this game, considering all the work you have to do to stay alive, and that the game really doesn't care if you live or die. It won't hold your hand to make sure you get through to the end; it's entirely possible to make it through 10 days and then back yourself into a corner where you have absolutely no hope of survival, short of loading a save from a few (in-game) days ago. Or perhaps to save yourself the agony of replaying several hours of the game, you end up in terrifying, desperate scenarios where you have to sell your only weapon for a few scraps of bread, or murder a child for the medicine he's carrying while you're about to die from infection. That's true horror right there.

It's not an easy game and it's not a good game, even. It's old and dated and janky, but it's also full of charm and personality. I wouldn't say it's a game meant to be played, as much as it is an experience worth going through. You won't have fun playing the game. Even if you can overlook its pain points, it's an objectively oppressive game that will make you feel miserable from beginning to end, and increasingly so. I wouldn't say it's for everyone, and I don't mean that in an elitist way. Some people simply won't stand this much bleakness during the time they are supposedly spending to find entertainment.

At the time I'm writing this, recent reviews reached mostly negative (29%), and all-time reviews are mixed (64%). Which is honestly a lot more than it deserves, but I would hardly call that "riding Bethesda's cock".

It's probably just a matter of big games getting more votes, because of name recognition. This is just a popularity contest, after all.

EULA are probably unfair due to the imbalance of rights and obligations between the parties.

This is the most important amongst the bullet points for me. Companies should not be allowed to hide shady stuff in the wall of text that you are required to accept to play the game that you have already bought.

In just four months, they have lost Toys for Bob (developer of Spyro Reignited and Crash 4), Arkane Austin (Prey 2017), and Tango (Evil Within, Hi-Fi Rush). I wish I had the money to casually buy some great dev studios, including the makers of a GOTY contender, and casually kill them off a few years later.

I know they are in panic mode right now, but I honestly don't know what their plan is at this point. I doubt even they know. Watching the situation from the outside, it's almost comical how MS has mismanaged everything for years. I live in Europe and I've never seen Xbox marketed anywhere. GamePass is supposedly their priority, and barely anyone I know who is interested in gaming knows that it even exists. The whole deal with the service was delivering first party games day one, yet failed to deliver anything worth buying four years into the new generation, while most of what they actually released was already in the works prior the acquisition. They bought dozens of studios, and mismanaged every single one of them. Fuck, they couldn't even settle on the cover for their game cases for half a year after their new box released.

The only good thing out of this debacle is that people have finally realized how utterly incompetent Phil Spencer is. I remember the days when fanboys were parroting his lies and kept talking about how "Phil is a gamer just like us", just because he showed on the stage in a shitty t-shirt. Too bad it took xbox fucking dying for them to realize, but I guess it's better later than never.

Oh don't worry, they hate foreigners playing soccer as well.

https://www.euronews.com/2019/11/09/racism-in-football-are-italy-s-ultras-the-problem-or-the-solution

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240120-milan-s-match-at-udinese-halted-after-racist-abuse-of-maignan

It happens every time. Pokémon Sword/Shield and Scarlett/Violet had the biggest launch in the franchise's history despite being (justifiably so) heavily criticized by pretty much everyone online.

People shit on microtransactions and always-online games but the top charts always show online multiplayer games are among the most played.

It doesn't make the criticisms any less valid; it just means that the general public is usually ignorant of them.

From the article:

"Conversion therapy," also known as “reparative therapy,” is a debunked practice that attempts to forcefully change the gender identity or sexual orientation of the patient, which has often been compared to "torture" by its recipients and health care providers alike.

I'm writing this because I was also making the same mistake. I read "Kentucky bans conversion therapy" and I jumped to the conclusion that a republican was banning gender-affirming surgery or something like that (also because I'm not American and I'm not familiar with who Beshear is: he's actually a Dem politician).

Fuck. It was one of the few remaining good videogame-related publications. They will be sorely missed.

Where to go from here?

"We’re excited for the launch of Black Myth Wukong on Xbox Series X|S and are working with Game Science to bring the game to our platforms. We can't comment on the deals made by our partners with other platform holders, but we remain focused on making Xbox the best platform for gamers, and great games are at the center of that."

It's a generic copy-pasted non-response.

You either die as a hero, or live long enough to become the villain.