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Cake day: Jun 30, 2023

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User name checks out, I really enjoy your writing. Do you keep a blog?

Games, as much as anything else, is a hobby and are something that people have to have a passion for to stay up with it. Just like the hobby of your coworker, who hits up the car show circuit every summer weekend, can cite every part number for the general Lee dodge charger out of the Dodge parts catalog, might be intimidating to someone who isn’t a car person. Our hobby has time and financial commitments that gatekeep others out too. We love it anyway.

Chasing an authentic or definitive experience, is like going for tops at a car show. A goal worth striving for but not required to enjoy the hobby.

Just like we can talk about how Donkey Kong, or Super Mario Bros. or Doom impacted gaming forever. So could your car guy about thunderbirds, corvettes, or some other third thing.

Equally sad is cars today, like games, are engineered to make as much money as possible and not for repair or longevity. Meanwhile the classics will always have a community dedicated to preserving them even as the stock of parts grow thin and less accessible.

In 30 years no one is going to be able to drive a car from the near future even if they wanted to as they get reduced to required apps to start and LTE connectivity for the on board computer functionality, the same way Fortnite won’t exist even though Super Mario Bros still plays fine on OG hardware


The 80s had some great games. Donkey Kong. Pac-Man. Galaga and Galaxian. Super Mario Bros 1,2,3. Zelda 1 & 2. Contra, Castlevania, Megaman

But the 90s had Mario World and Mario Kart. Super Metroid. Link to the Past. Donkey Kong Country. Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time. Crash and Spyro. Sonic. Medal of Honor. Goldeneye. Half - Life.

I’d probably take the 90s slightly over the 80s. Heck even the 00s have Half-Life 2, the GTA series, the good Call of Duty’s and Halos. And the 2010s had RDR2 and GTAV.

2020s haven’t had any super great games yet though.


Call of Duty: United Offensive on PC. I just recently came back after a decade of not playing (and over 20 years after release) and the community is still there just smaller and the game is still just as fun


Seriously, I don’t find that upgrades to battery life are a net upgrade to usability if the size and weight of the phone becomes too large


A boycott would work, I just think most Nintendo fans are empty in their threats and will still buy the switch 2 just like all those MW2 players did back then.



I’ve been playing more of my old retail games that don’t require any launcher or drm beyond requiring the disc. It’s nice.

I’m not exactly sure if “xfire on steroids” bloat of steam actually adds anything anymore these days. Steam is nice because my library is already there. Even the friends list has mostly been supplanted by discord now.

I use the epic launcher for 1 thing, to launch Fortnite to play with my son. I don’t want more steam features, I’d rather acknowledge its existence less. Start selling games without DRM that only use the launcher to update and it’s better than steam. That’s the 1 feature it needs.


Firmware is dumped almost immediately as well, not a big deal to update a switch offline.



The price is too high. They are going to sell skins and characters. The game is going to be fluffed with open world sections instead of actual content. I probably won’t enjoy it.

My kids will though


I mean who really cares for pub matches? If you are worried about competitiveness then play pugs. Team stacking and pub stomping isn’t competitive


Well if you had community servers instead of brain dead match making this wouldn’t be a problem for PC players


My 7yo is the heaviest user of our PS5 but he pretty much only plays Fortnite on it and plays everything else on his switch.

I think the convenience of switch and mobile games are something that todays kids have that we really didn’t have and that’s why Netflix is saying this.


I agree with the author’s assessment that Uncharted and the Last of Us use the right tool at the moment for their stories.

I don’t get the criticism about Call of Duty and Halo following Half-Life’s success of limited cutscenes and scripted events to tell their stories. In fact as soon as the article started these were the exact games I thought of to rebut his point. They are the best story based FPS games of their generation and they don’t need an open world that’s believable in absence of its own protagonist.

Far Cry/The Division/Ghost Recon are all Open World shooters with a believable world. They have terrible (IMO, feel free to disagree) stories though.

I thought his analysis was interesting just not sure what the point was and if it was what I thought it was that Half-Life negatively influenced stories in games then I disagree.


Yeah this is pretty bad for families who want to load a game to each child’s switch without having to buy multiple copies for each child


Upscaling an old game on fixed hardware that can’t output at high resolutions is good.

Upscaling a new game as part of the graphics pipeline instead of optimizing it is terrible and shouldn’t be accepted by gamers that have to spend $1000+ on a GPU


That quote is just horribly disturbing to me. He’s basically letting the mask drop that their endgame isn’t to make great games, it’s to make you hopelessly addicted to screen time that you obsessively play and spend


All time favorite game is so hard to narrow down. I’d traditionally always say Mario 3 and I stand behind that but there are so many great games that stand beside it. Donkey Kong Country, Half Life, San Andreas, red dead redemption 1 and 2.

I think if I was trapped on a desert island, I’d be fine with any of these as my only game


My kids don’t play it, but the whole model is so exploitative to both the “game makers” (the ones who make the various experiences) and the players.

Basically every second of every game you are being bombarded with a prompt for a microtransaction that lets you skip to the end, or buy a pet, or buy ways to grief the other players.

It’s then marketed by YouTube’s who acquire $1000s worth of in game currency and spend it on every single thing in the game. I don’t see how any of those things are fun but it makes me sad that these are the kind of games the next generation have as there foundational games.

Anyone who thinks gaming isn’t shit now and was better 20 years ago is kidding themselves. And thanks to Roblox and Fortnite it’s only getting worse


Oh I was referring to FH but yeah that makes sense for Split Fiction


Why do you need an account of any kind to play a single player game?


Glad to find out we aren’t the only fools that push to prod at 5pm on a Friday. Big companies like Sony do too!


I don’t understand people who think Half-Life aged badly. On a Rail and Interloper aren’t the greatest chapters in a video game but no game is perfect.

I do need to try Black Mesa and see how it improves on those chapters.



I have no idea about the game and whether it actually contains gambling content or is just being auto flagged due to the title but this kind of crap is why I hate big tech and is why I hope we eventually have a future where decentralized services rule over big tech.


I don’t think we are going to convince each other, I am glad that you find value in being able to sell skins that you don’t want on the marketplace for credit. That is why the system was designed, not for it to be abused by others for gambling.

I more-so have problems with how the system is rife for abuse, and I think that it should be up for debate whether valve should have to do anything about it.

I actually don’t think they should have too, I think more responsibility should be on the individual and responsibility on the parents for minors.

I do think that we should expect easier parental controls with more granular settings to be able to allow parents to protect their kids from risky trades rather than basically just enable or disable the entire social features.


You can’t convert steam credits to cash directly, that’s true. But if you put all the necessary systems in place to be a casino, but then just rely on 3rd parties to launder the credits to cash/crypto, I don’t consider that an real distinction even if it is a legal loophole. It’s just the same as a pachinko parlor.

I guess that makes it more on the level of Dave and Busters or Chuck E. Cheese, except nobody is really serious about exchanging prize tickets from those places to cash/crypto like they are on steam. I suspect if they had a black market like skin gambling in CS:GO does though, there would be a similar push back as there is vs Valve in this scenario.

I do agree with your point about TCGs, they get by on the fact that commons technically allow you to play the game but they are similarly exploitative.


Yes eBay and Amazon is responsible for not vetting sellers and buyers on their platforms and why the experience is so terrible for honest sellers.

The other examples aren’t applicable because Ferrari, wüsthof, or local taxpayers don’t make money off of vehicular manslaughter, murder, or war crimes.


You acquire items of arbitrary values for real life money by random chance and call the other guy stupid or dishonest for considering it gambling?


Lootboxes are literally gambling and redeeming them even look like slots.

Allowing the selling/trading of skins allows for a black market to emerge to convert them to currency. Valve created the conditions for this exploitive system to emerge and does nothing to stop it. You can debate whether valve has a duty to stop it but they are forever a black eye on gaming in my eyes. Just because they sell cheap games twice a year doesn’t white wash them


I don’t know if I’ve seen split opinions on Naughty Dog Crash games. It’s pretty much always been praised. Post Naughty Dog is a different story as well.

I think I like the author’s point of comparing the nostalgia most gamers feel for series like Crash Bandicoot compared to the nostalgia that modern day viral games will bring Zoomers and Gen Alpha but I also can’t help but be deeply offended by it.


Whether there is something wrong with doing that is a matter of ethics and personal values…

Regardless of those, it’s profoundly stupid to taunt Nintendo with confessions of piracy and threats to commit more


A live service game failing isn’t newsworthy. It’s newsworthy when one isn’t completely terrible


After 6 months VC money demands they move on into live service and other ways to screw their audiences


I buy Nintendo games but I don’t believe they have should have any right to block me from running their software that I’ve dumped myself on any device I see fit. How does that make me entitled when I purchased their software?


Glad I hacked my switch before Nintendo all went to shit. I am done buying Nintendo products. (To be fair I will never have time to get through my back log anyway)


Or in this case die a hero and then someone pays to desecrate your corpse and reanimate you


I don’t recommend it, but going bass-to-mouth was a very popular and hyped feature addition for SEGA Bass Fishing. I’m surprised this is the first you are hearing of it



I feel sorry for the goobers who bought this game before the mod was released. Sad thing is that activision could do this themselves but then they couldn’t gouge gen Zers with micro transactions so they won’t