I haven’t seen it nearly this bad until this year. This is the worst year I’ve ever seen for it, and Hoyo games are by far the worst

Congrats for lasting this far. I quit the anime world years ago when it became clear that that shit was becoming the norm, and 95% of products specifically catered to that demographic.

The fact that capital-G Gamers are still hell-bent on the GamerGate-era war against Kotaku is deeply amusing to me.

Gaming journos bad, something something.

I seem to remember MS claiming they were opening the “first AAAA dev studio” (The Initiative). Since then, the studio has been radio silent, lost a bunch of talent, and needed help from Crystal Dynamics to work on their first game (Perfect Dark reboot).

If that’s the reason, it doesn’t paint MS in a good light. Bullying small indie devs out of spite. Especially considering that, after saying that in March, Jyamma spent time and money to release the game on Xbox the same day as the other platforms.

But I honestly doubt it. Corporations are NOT people (even if the law would like to pretend otherwise) and they don’t think the same way as people. They don’t play favourites, they don’t play nice or bully others because they feel like to. They chase money, and that’s it. A game releasing on their platform is literally free money. This is just a fuck up on their part. If I had to guess, MS cut jobs and replaced them with AI and left a skeleton crew working on this.

You seem to really love Rockstar games.

Europe is in a very sorry state lately. A lot of far-right parties are gaining ground and/or winning the elections. Italy has elected a far-righr politician, France and Germany are very close to electing one.

I feel like the 2016 US elections have had a profound influence on ours as well. (Not faulting Americans for how the situation evolved, of course; it’s our fault in the first place).

The beauty of Final Fantasy is that, with each entry being different from the others, every game of the series ends up resonating differently with different people.

The “best” Final Fantasy varies greatly depending on who you ask, for a combination of factors, including nostalgia and subjective opinions on the different aspects of the game (story, characters, gameplay).

It’s what I love about this series. You may play ten games, but the eleventh will still surprise you in some way. Even if I don’t like a specific entry, I can still appreciate that they tried something new and unique, and I always look forward to playing the next one.

I started playing during the PS1 era when tank controls were the norm. I have no qualms with tank controls in other kind of games. To use your example, I genuinely think that REmake is a lot better with tank controls; modern controls conflict with fixed camera angles, because you may turn a corner and suddenly left becomes right, and the control scheme is clearly not designed with that in mind.

But in a platform game with very precise platforming sequences, tank controls and unresponsive camera were horrible. It made playing it frustrating to the point that, despite playing it a lot, I never actually finished the game, because I would always give up somewhere through the game. The farthest I went into Croc 2 was the fourth world (still don’t know how many there are), and iirc third world in Croc 1. As opposed to Spyro and Crash which I replayed dozens of times from beginning to end.

I won’t say that my experience is universal and I can definitely see people enjoying the control scheme, but I gave it a lot more than a fair shake and it never convinced me. I always had the impression that the game was fighting me and genuinely wanted me to fail.

I played the original countless times as a kid! It was a great platformer hindered by the tank controls, which unfortunately led me to prefer Spyro. If there ever was a game in need of a remaster (as opposed to a remake), it’s this one. Update the controls, and the game itself is still a lot of fun.

At which point can the market be considered saturated?

Like, I would imagine that there’s a finite amount of coomers willing to drop their wallets on skins or PNGs of their favourite waifu.

Honestly, the true ending is nothing to write home about. Sea of Stars is probably one of my favourite JRPG ever, but the entire last arc and both endings were a huge letdown.

I don’t have a reference to how it was before, but I tried Beyond once and it was terrible. I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone to spend money on such a horrible piece of crap.

I have way more fun filling the character sheet by myself. I use Emmet Bryne’s custom character sheets and the Spells 5e app when I need to reference spells.

Daily reminder that Peter Molyneux is a pathological liar whose only accomplishment has been giving us one of the most brutally accurate piece of gaming journalism to date.

Because he is. The person he is speaking to is a Nazi. there are other Nazis behind him. They probably dug a hole a left him there to die or something (we lack context for the scene, but it’s believable). Full scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e17p2IVDUU

Nice argument, Emperor Hong. Why don’t you back it up with a source?

People crying for these Russians, who are in relative safety and who were free to go, are just comical to me.

There is no “relative safety” in war and “free to go” means abandoning their homes and belongings, which is a fucking awful thing to do. Who are you, random armchair commentator, to speak like that?

Where were you when all these Ukrainian cities were shelled and other war crimes happened?

I was crying for them as well, just as I’m crying now, just as I will always cry for people caught in the flames of war, which is one of the worst experiences a person can be asked to live through.

Y’all think that having fucking empathy for civilian lives means rooting for Putin, which is not true. Putin is a dictator, a criminal and an abhorrent human being, and I hope he pays for his crimes. Here, I said it again. But this article is not about Putin, it’s about a woman lamenting that her government lied to the population instead of doing anything to protect them, and now she hasn’t heard from her elderly parents for days.

It’s something that I wouldn’t wish happened to anyone, ever. The fact that they are Russians doesn’t suddenly change the tale into a comedy. Laughing at the expenses of random civilians who happened to live under the autocratic rule of a violent narcissist is not something that I will ever condone. I can root for the Ukranians while also keeping my humanity. But apparently you can switch it on and off at will depending on who you are looking at.

I said nothing about Ukranians’ actions being unjustified, nor do we have any reason yet to think that war crimes are being committed in the area. If this brings them an inch closer to winning the war, I wholly support them.

Still, laughing at people suffering because of war is such an abhorrent behaviour to exhibit, and the fact that people are bending logic to justify it is wild.

You all should learn some empathy.

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.

I burned myself out of many a game as a kid attempting (and usually succeeding at) 100% them, so I learned my lesson. Nowadays I just play for fun and maybe go after the platinum if I liked the game enough. My time has value and I’m not going to squander it to “look at the minimap, go to waypoint/marked location, collect random collectible, rinse and repeat for 10-15 hours”, nor am I spending dozens of hours grinding some random activity.

For example, I did almost 100% all Yakuza Kiwami. Did all side quests and enjoyed most of the random activities! Iirc those I had most trouble with were karaoke and billiards, but I still had tons of fun learning them and gradually getting better at them. But fuck me I’m NOT going to grind the coliseum for hours just to buy random weapons that I don’t need but are arbitrarily required for the 100% completion.

I’ve also learned not to rush it. I frequently replay games that I like, so if I miss an achievement, that’s fine. Maybe in five years I’ll pick the game up again and grab the random achievement I missed the first time around. There’s no need to sweat it, no need to read guides before/while playing the game and potentially spoiling me some major story events, and no need to immediately replay the game just to reach that random achievement.

That being said, the game I had the most fun with was CrossCode. Movement is fluid, combat is snappy, story and characters are fun and puzzles are actually challenging. It’s the most charming experience I’ve ever had playing a game, and it’s why it immediately jumped straight into my top favourite games ever. There is technically a “completionist list” within the game with some abdurd and missable requests, but it’s not required to 100% the game and it’s basically just a pile of challenges that you can tackle on if you feel like it. If you don’t, you can just play the story, do the side quests and collect all the treasures, which is a lot of fun. The platinum only requires you to beat the story iirc, so you don’t even need to do any of that; I did it because I liked the game and wanted to do it. Twice! I bought the game on PC and console and 100% it both times.

Most other games that I enjoy completing are platformers/collect-a-thons, such as Spyro, Crash (except Crash 1, never managed to finish it, but had tons of fun nevertheless), Ori, Celeste, PS1 Oddworld games, etc… and metroidvanias, if they are not overly long (basically every one I’ve played except for Hollow Knight).

The longest run I had was Final Fantasy XIII. I liked the game so much that I kept going back to it over the years, slowly chipping at the side content and grinding my way to max level. I got the platinum almost ten years after starting my save file, and I wouldn’t have enjoyed it nearly as much if I attempted to rush it all in one sitting.

The CEO constantly starves the D&D team. They don’t have the budget they need to make a good product.

Respectfully, I disagree. I’ve seen much better 3rd party content from smaller creators who charge less than WotC and offer much better value. As much as I’m sorry for those who were laid off, the problem with the DnD team is not their meagre numbers, but their lack of care for the brand.

The DnD team (which consisted of both writers and playtesters) had ten years of consistent player feedback on 5e, and one and a half year of OneDnD playtest, and only did the bare minimum. You don’t need hundreds of people to write a rules update. Heck, it took me (only me, a single person with no collaborators or playtesters) a week to write a replacement for the 5e fighter, and I recon I did a fairly decent job. There were Monk revisions floating around that were miles better than the abomination that they attempted to push in UA6. Heck, I also wrote my Monk revision during that time, and it took me about two/three days at most. During the playtest, Crawford claimed that the Warlock’s Pact of the Chain was never meant to be as “spicy” as Pact of the Blade or Pact of the Tome, which is bullshit (it was clearly presented as an equal option to the other two); instead of rebalancing Chain and Talisman, they just folded the Pact Boons into the Invocation system and called it a day (again, lazy game design). I did that for my homebrew Warlock in about… half a week of brainstorming?

I could go on, but the point is, I would expect those who are paid to create content for the game and do it for a living to do better than what I can do for free in my spare time.