Nintendo does not have a monopoly on fun video games without “aggressive enshitification”, which I’m guessing you mean microtransactions and battle passes. I’m drowning in a deluge of great stuff to play, and none of it is Nintendo lately.

I saw so many people in another instance relating this to shaming people for avocado toast rather than these games exploiting gambling addiction.

Personally, I’m at the point of “fuck walled garden ecosystems”, not to mention all the legal work they’re doing to ruin video games.

Cancelled or shut down? If you wanted a cancelled game to come out, 99 times out of 100, it was your imagination making it into a great game, and they cancelled it because it wasn’t coming together.

For games that were shut down, for me, it was Robocraft. It was only shut down recently, but the version of the game that I loved from about 2017-ish was basically replaced a year later with a version of the game that I was not a fan of, and it stayed that way until the game’s and studio’s closure. I had to get burned by Robocraft in order to come to some realizations about the rot at the core of live service games, and it informed a lot of where I spend my time and money now.

I watched two Jobst videos, and the second one didn’t sit right with me, so it’s no surprise he played fast and loose with facts that might see him lose a court case.

As for what I’ve been playing, I just beat Borderlands 2 the other day, and now I’m working my way through the DLC before I move on to the Pre-Sequel and 3. It’s mostly a huge improvement over the first game, but they definitely unflattened the progression compared to the first game, which is something a lot of RPGs and adjacent games do. It’s never been my preference, and it comes with its own design problems, like how the game refused to give me some decent guns toward the end of the game and then suddenly gave me guns that trivialized the next part of the game.

I’m still in the middle of Kingdom Come: Deliverance as well, but I’ve only inched forward in it since the last of these posts.

And I’m always playing fighting games like Skullgirls, so that’s the free space on my Bingo card.

I doubt it. Maybe Grand Theft Auto and Mario Kart can get away with charging more, but a lot of games asking $70 aren’t finding many customers willing to pay that price right now.

I don’t think the people gaming on smart phones are the same demographic that would compete with the Switch 2 or a handheld PC. It’s not a lot of data, but take a look at how poorly Apple’s initiative for AAA games on iPhone has been going. There are more problems with that market than just library. The PC market has been slowly and steadily growing for decades while the console market has shrunk.

There’s a lot here, and yes, the total addressable market for the Steam Deck is currently less than either Switch will sell in a single quarter, but the video game market is a very different thing now than it was in early 2017. The Switch was the only game in town; now it’s not. Live service games make up a significant amount of what the average consumer wants, and those customers largely play on PC for all sorts of reasons. The Switch 2 is no longer priced cheaply enough that it’s an easy purchase for your child to play with, abuse, and possibly break. The console market in general is in the most visible decline it’s ever been in, also for all sorts of reasons, and those handhelds from Sony and, at least, Microsoft are likely to just be handheld PCs as well.

Development on blockbuster system sellers has slowed way down, which comes hand in hand with there just not being as many of them, which makes buying yet another walled garden ecosystem less appealing. This walled garden has Pokemon and Mario Kart, so Nintendo’s not about to go bankrupt, but if we smash cut to 8 years from now and the Switch 2 sold more units than the Switch 1, I’d have to ask how on earth that happened, because it’s looking like just about an impossible outcome from where we stand now.

Also, there’s this quote:

But, although Microsoft has now been making Xbox consoles for over 20 years, it has consistently struggled to use that experience to make PC gaming more seamless, despite repeated attempts

Look, I’m no Microsoft fanboy. Windows 10 was an abomination that got me to switch to Linux, and Windows 11 is somehow even worse. The combination of Teams and Windows 11 has made my experience at work significantly worse than in years prior. However, credit where credit is due: Microsoft standardized controller inputs and glyphs in PC games about 20 years ago and created an incentive for it to be the same game that was made on consoles. It married more complex PC gaming designs with intuitive console gaming designs, and we no longer got bespoke “PC versions” and “console versions” of the same title that were actually dramatically different games. PC gaming today is better because of efforts taken from Microsoft, and that’s to say nothing of what other software solutions like DirectX have done before that.

Still, the reason a Microsoft handheld might succeed is because it does what the Steam Deck does without the limitations of incompatibility with kernel level anti cheat or bleeding edge software features like ray tracing (EDIT: also, Game Pass, the thing Microsoft is surely going to hammer home most). Personally, I don’t see a path for a Sony handheld to compete.

I believe it has a direct lineage from a game based on The Hulk called Ultimate Destruction, and you can feel that. You’re super jumping, gliding, and sort of like Venom, consuming people to pose as them. There are missions with a stealth element, but other times you’re throwing tanks at helicopters. Holding the run button will have you effortlessly doing cartwheels off the tops of cars and wall running straight up skyscrapers.

I haven’t played the PC version, but I expect it’s the same as the console version: Prototype (from Activision in 2009; there’s another game listed with the same title). The story is utter garbage, but everything about the moment to moment gameplay is great, and it definitely checks the boxes you’re looking for. I never played the sequel, because it re-used the same map, and that’s a lot like playing a Mario game with all of the same levels as the one before it, but this first game rules.

If you have access to something that can play Xbox 360 games, I’d also highly recommend the first Crackdown.

I hear very good things about Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed, and there’s a new one coming.

I’m definitely keeping an eye on Selaco, but I’ll wait until it leaves early access.

I’ve been playing another lap through the old Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and just got my party kitted out with +1/+2 weapons and better armor, so this ought to be the point where the rest of the game gets way easier.

I’m coming up on the end of the base game of Borderlands 2, as I try to make my way through the series before the fourth game launches this fall. There’s a lot of Borderlands 2 DLC to get through after this, but it’s scratching an itch that the FPS genre hasn’t really been doing for me with new releases in years.

And I’ve also been making my way through the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance (this one on GOG). It’s sort of flip flopping on how important the simulation aspects of the game are to its whole deal. I too found them frustrating, but I know from Red Dead Redemption II that, when done right, they’re there to make you make choices that that character would make in that setting. However, sometimes the game hops over them in the interest of time, and other times it makes you go through them to the point of tedium. It’s still early going in the grand scheme of things, and the political intrigue has surely grabbed me if nothing else.

With a name like Perfect Dark, what are your expectations for the new one? The demo they showed was vague enough that it could be just about anything, and I get the sense that it won’t launch with split screen multiplayer or even a deathmatch mode, because no one does those anymore.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.