I dislike people normalizing hate speech through this kind of space, but I largely agree. If people want to follow a curator that will make sure they aren’t emotionally blindsided by a female protagonist showing affection towards another woman, for example, that’s a choice they can make. We wouldn’t want the chuds to get their feelings hurt, afterall.

But in all seriousness, that’s kind of their choice. Obviously, any comments that suggest violence against people who make/play/are represented in that kind of game needs to get shut down immediately, but you’re allowed to not like LGBTQ+ representation. It’s not illegal to clutch your pearls at the sight of non-heteronormative sexuality. It’s just reprehensible.

I occasionally go through the lists posted by chud curators for small indie titles that would have escaped my notice. I don’t have time to scrutinize every title on Steam, but these guys seemingly have infinite time to ensure every unheard of title with a case of LGBTQ+ representation gets criticism from them. Ironically, they’re fantastic for finding small, progressive passion projects I would have otherwise missed.

The only way to get around this would be to verify your age, which Discord says can be accomplished in one of two ways. The first is to “submit a form of identification” to Discord vendors (i.e. scan your physical ID), or to use “facial age estimation.” Discord says that the latter process happens fully on-device, as “video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device.” For ID scans, Discord says that documents “are deleted quickly.”

Between the features that are limiting being almost entirely things I don’t want anyway (random friend invites are literally just fucking scams and ads to begin with), and the entire process being completed on-device… What is this, some slow news day? Everyone is losing their minds about this being some insane overstep like Discord is asking for a blood sample, or even a photo of your driver’s license.

Don’t get me wrong, fuck this age verification nonsense, but it’s pretty clear this is some very specific government regulatory appeasement where Discord is attempting to avoid culpability for holding data at basically every joint possible. They already have the useful, farmable data, like geolocation, age/gender demographics and interests. They don’t want our government ID. They only want a “yes” or “no” from their app.

Must be a slow news day. Everyone’s blowing this up in headlines for cheap clicks.

Pretty confident “Look Outside” is an RPG maker game. I cannot recommend it enough. It is an immaculately written game, and oozes passion and personality.

The first purchasable version of Minecraft I remember didn’t even have a working health bar.

Notch sold the game to Microsoft long before it was ever a complete game. Why program something when you can sell players on an idea and then sell that idea to Microsoft?

Same.

The writing wastes a LOT of time. Yes, I get it, that’s the vibe they want to set, but the vibe was set like 5 minutes ago, and all you’ve done since is print synonyms for “drunk asshole.”

It’s also paraded as pro-communist media, and it really isn’t at all. People are so capitalist-brained, that any game which places communism and capitalism on equal footing, pointing out the faults in both and mocking them relentlessly, is somehow “pro-communist.” In particular, the games plot-relevant example of a die-hard communist is not someone to aspire to. Neither are the capitalists or fascists, but that’s kind of the point: it’s hard to say it supports any political viewpoint when it shits on everyone fairly equally.

Honestly, I wanted and expected a lot more out of it. Particularly in the ending.

Though it was absolutely worth the playthrough. It’s a fantastic game, just not this pinnacle of writing the way the internet plays it off to be.

Let’s be straight: as amazing as Baldur’s Gate 3 is today, Act 3 launched half baked and half broken. My first playthrough experience was horrible, largely thanks to broken flags and missing content from the Upper City, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have comparable experiences with early versions of Original Sin 2. Hell, they rewrote basically the entire final act of that game with the definitive edition, and I’m under the impression Original Sin 1 had a similiar situation, though I didn’t play it enough between the original and the definitive edition to experience it.

Now, part of all this is because Larian opts to make decisions to cut content and reduce scope rather than abuse their staff or delay a project. In Baldur’s Gate specificslly, I won’t say I am perfectly happy with the outcome, but they are a good studio that practices reasonable employee ethics, and ultimately puts in the work to get there with the product as well. I’d have no issue buying Divinity day one or even pre-ordering, but I do not expect a perfectly complete and polished experience on release.

You can’t just expect people to actively interpret media. We have entire school systems designed to avoid educating them with those skills.

Boys, my little rhythm gamer heart has quite possibly never been as blessed as it is this week. Rhythm Doctor, unbeatable, now Bits and Bops?

We just need Tango Gameworks to officially announce that their studio is up and running working on Hi-Fi Rush 2, and my cup will have completely run over.

Played the entire thing start to finish last night. The new content is incredible, as expected.

Come for the quirky, one-button rhythm game. Stay for the character driven story about the weight of the expectations we place on ourselves and each other, and the way that effects our mental health, physical health, relationships, and worldview.

There are people who exist between “I build, format and otherwise manage my own gaming rig,” and “I don’t need a PC for games.”

My partner is a perfect example. She has my old PC shell, with some $500 of GPU, internal memory, and accessories, hooked up to the TV. She uses it daily, almost exclusively for Steam games and streaming services that she finds more comfortable to navigate with a keyboard and mouse. A smaller, quieter, streamlined, “this more or less will do the things you want to do straight out of the box” product would have saved both her (and I, because that thing has had some troubleshooting) a lot of headache, while looking far more presentable to boot.

Maybe she’s the odd one out and the target audience is more niche than my bias’ recognize, but I guess we’ll see for sure when this thing releases.

Turning into? Sony has been worse than Nintendo or Disney for years. They’re the OG “we’re going to silently brick your machine to protect our digital assets.”

At least Nintendo had the decency to put in their EULA that they’re going to fuck you for trying to pirate content on their proprietary hardware. Sony just bricked your personal PC because fuck you and then lied about it.

I’m going to spoiler it and talk about it, because I am genuinely interested in other people’s opinion/experiences on this.

Just finished Chapter 3 of 8. It has some very classic Telltale foibles. Sometimes the script seems to assume you made a decisions that you didn’t make and it makes the dialogue feel awkward. Other times, the sarcastic tone in a written dialogue choice isn’t clear when you select the option and the resulting scene isn’t at all what you thought you were suggesting. I suspect by the time I am done, I’ll have the general sense of “oh, my decisions didn’t ACTUALLY matter,” as is Telltale tradition, but I’m not far enough to judge in that space yet

Despite these fairly common for Telltale problems, it’s an incredibly witty and entertaining piece of entertainment, and perhaps one of better “no, seriously, there’s a game in here” Telltale products. The “dispatch” mechanic is, imo, a fun management game, and they tie it into the narrative in ways that feel clever. Everyone is at each others throats because of a story beat? People are actively sabotaging each other on the job and it’s making your job as their dispatcher harder. As a comedy and near-film, the writing is laugh-out-loud funny, the voice acting and character animation is top notch, and there’s an interesting story and world holding it all together. I’m sure people will argue that it’s a better movie than it is a game, and, as much as I enjoy the corporate dispatcher half of the game, I am sure many will agree, as the dialogue writing is truly the stand-out element of the game.

It’s very good. Not perfect, but very good, and compared to the older Telltale games, a real home-run.

I can’t wait to see the exemption for “part time workers” and suddenly everyone making less than a triple digit salary has exactly 32 hours a week, or whatever is legally permissible to pass as “part time work” in your country.

You’ve provided a fantastic common-sense solution designed off the simple premise that no one needs 12x of a living wage, and I can’t agree enough, but I know the capitalists would fuck it up at every stage possible, while simultaneously arguing that they’re justified in doing so because the method of economy that they worships has given them moral purchase to look down on the poors.

The ceo makes $96.5 million a year.

This should be severely punishable by the law. It causes more societal harm than many crimes with serious penalties.

But this doesn’t confirm my bias’.

Metal Hellsinger was one of the more inspired experiences I’ve played in the past several years. Really sad to see a studio making genuinely quality games have to shutter.

Seconded for Dark Cloud 2 specifically. Game is incredibly good.

You know, fundamentally, I don’t hate Gamepass as a concept. “Netflix, but for videogames” is an idea I can get behind, as it widens the audience for something I love by lowering the bar of entry. There are plenty of people out there that benefit from being able to play a few games here and there without needing to commit hundreds of hours to $100 purchases.

But Netflix has overstepped with price hikes and ads, and I’ve cancelled my service with them. That Microsoft thinks it can charge some ~$40CAD a month is pure hubris. I hope they learn quickly that, at that price point, the enthusiast market will happily cancel and just buy their games outright, and the casual market will decide it’s an expense they don’t need.

Because if they’re shuttered, the company/people that make the company have the opportunity to go somewhere else and do something better. I’ve disliked everything they’ve produced since they were purchased by EA, so I’ve come to think the publisher holds them back.

I mean the last Bioware game I played and enjoyed start to finish was Dragon Age: Origins, so… /shrug.

I accept that ME2 was a good game, but I couldn’t get into it. It felt too much like a shooter, too little like an RPG for me. And don’t get me started on DA2. “ANOTHER WAVE!” and character customization being kneecapped, or completely removed in the case of your party members, left me quitting it after some 3-4 hours.

Inquisition was okay, but I still lost interest after some 6-8 hours. It wasn’t “bad,” but it was still an okay game wearing a good games skin.

Bioware losing the creative freedom to explore characters outside of the mainstream that the saudi’s are going to permit them to write/create is a real problem. As a marker of political freedom of expression and as a stance against the fucking fascists that are rapidly encroaching on people’s rights, this is a huge step in the wrong direction. But I won’t mourn any specific games. Honestly, I hope they get axed, so they are given the opportunity to go indie and/or get picked up by a better producer/studio.

The last Bioware game I genuinely enjoyed was Dragon Age: Origins, which was the last thing (mostly) developed before the EA buy-up. I’m sure it’s scary for the employees, but I suspect this is good for Bioware in the long term.

and the Switch port was (apparently) never fixed…

What’s the supposed issues on the Switch port? I only owned the game on Switch, and I didn’t have any issues playing through it.

I’m already playing Hades 2 and FF Tactics comes out tomorrow.

So that, I guess, then probably nothing. /shrug.

Steam sales lose their luster when they’re so frequent.

An absolute masterpiece of a game. What starts off as a “cute rhythm game” very rapidly evolves into some of the most immaculate gameplay design and in-game storytelling I have ever seen. I “joke” often than the final boss is the tears in your eyes, but it’s a lot less of a joke than you would imagine.

If you like rhythm games, emotional storys and ludonarrative harmony, I cannot recommend this game enough.

The cost of food and shelter driving people homeless and hungry is evil. The cost of Nintendo products causing people to play fewer Nintendo games is rude and unfortunate.

I’m just pissed off at all this misdirected frustration. We should be lobbying governments to manage grocery and real estate megacorps, and instead we’re creating YouTube videos about Nintendo being evil because the price of an individual game went up $20. The gap between unfettered corporate greed of UHC causing suffering on scales previously only seen in wars against Nintendo getting an extra $20 here and there if you want to keep up with their products isn’t even a fucking comparison.

And I’m tired of pretending a completely unwelcome and tone deaf price increase is “evil.” I hate paying more for videogames as much as the next gamer, but the cost of living has increased by 50% in basically every metric. Rent, food, power, gas, restaurants, movie theatres, snacks, alcohol… Literally everything I spend money on has gone up between 25-50%. Nintendo is the first asshole in the video game industry cocky enough to up their prices by the same amout, and suddenly, “The Switch 2 is EVIL.” Really?

Listen, I am not a fan. $10 for a tech demo that should be packaged in is insane. But pull your head back and look at the wider picture instead of coming in here with these terminally online takes. If you can’t distinguish between “evil,” (like health insurance corporations condemning millions to chronic pain and, in extremes, death) and “shit I wish wasn’t so expensive” (like a singular brand of videogames) then maybe it’s worth figuring out where the nearest patch of grass is.

I teach 7s and up, so the absolute youngest I deal with is 11. I will absolutely check it out. Thank you for both creating and sharing this.

Oh lord this looks incredible. What’s the age rating/target audience for this? I’m a teacher who works to try and bring quality and engaging games into the classroom, and at a glance it feels like a perfect junior high entry into gaming.

Adding to this one. Incredible game.

Bugsnax. Substantially better game than I anticipated.

God, Mouthwashing was a masterpiece.

I also really, really enjoyed Arctic Eggs, but it’s so absurd that I can barely recommend it to people.

I appreciate Critical Reflex in ways I hadn’t quite put together until reading this article.

I’m famously a World hater, so yes, absolutely. Until Icebourne released, I was extremely disappointed with World, even for a pre-G Rank release.

Though, all of the titles since Generations have had the problem of being released with a portion of the planned content missing. I was more forgiving of it before, though I am having a hard time pinpointing why.

Compared to World and Rise? It’s just not very good. It’s by far the fewest hours I’ve put into a Monster Hunter game since… Well, literally ever.

I still have the CD in a box somewhere. It was loaned to me by a friend and I never gave it back. Hilariously, I still see that friend, so that might make for a fun conversation.

I do want to state that the flight model has NOTHING on Elite. But otherwise, it is in a lot of ways a game which I wish Elite was a lot closer to.

Friends and I downloaded it, prompted by this post. There’s a little bit of awkwardness and animation jank, but man, does the game get the core concept right.

Space is not flat, the ship feels like a near arcane contraption, rail guns should feel like they’ll punch a hole in a small planet, and grappling hooks always feel good. These guys know what I’m looking for. The only thing I could genuinely ask for is a more true to physics flight model, but ultimately, I’ll be too busy taking down fighters using a rocket launcher while gravity-booted to the nose of my ship to care too much.

“Everyone who is critical of me is woke.”

I hate that you get downvoted for pointing out the reality of the situation.

Relative to the price of everything else, $80 for a AAA videogame is actually reasonable. The problem is that rent has gone up drastically, food has gone up drastically, and our wages have stagnated. Getting pissed off at Gearbox for charging $80 for Borderlands 4, and then paying $15 for a burger and fries without an equal reaction just doesn’t seem sensible to me.

Everything is awful, and videogame devs aren’t the ones stealing all our buying power.