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Companies can make a lot of money + pay shareholders without ever declaring profits. Look at Amazon for a case of weird accounting.
More generally, I also disagree with this idea because the incentives to become an employer would be decreased and ultimately it’s the business owners who are taking risks.
In one important way they are consumer friendly in terms of keeping physical media alive. I doubt PS6 will have a disc drive and M$ have already confirmed any new consoles from them won’t.
Even these proposed “game key” carts can presumably be traded or sold so it isn’t like a single use key for the online store.
I saw a 256GB one on Amazon UK for £22. Might pick it up now in case there are shortages or the price skyrockets. That plus the system memory would be 512GB of storage and I tend to buy physical games too.
Edit: The one I was looking at wasn’t even the Express version. Lots of people are gong to get stung by this.
Edit 2: there are some micro SD cards marked Extreme but these are not compatible with switch 2 despite the name being similar to the Express ones.
Dungeon Keeper 2 is good in its own way but definitely lost some of its original magic.
There was an indie series called Overlord (I think, can’t quite recall) which tried to be a Cities: Skyline type homage to Dungeon Keeper. I played it many years ago and it did scratch the same itch so you might be interested.
I think the power curve of the 2nd one really hits when you started off with your character in the first game killing rats in a basement.
As an aside I started Seige Of Dragonspear reecently because it was really cheap on Android and I was stuck on a long bus journey. I think it’s actually pretty decent and potentially would be a good starting point if BG1 was too slow. So far the writing has been similar to the other two games albeit not quite on par. There is no tutorial on the mechanics or anything like that though.
Edit: One thing about BG1 is that it can be absolutely fucking brutal in an old school way. I was in Chapter 5 in the eponymous Baldurs Gate and a sidequest triggered where an NPC told me they had poisoned my entire party and I needed to follow them to an alleyway to get the cure. I assumed this was a ruse and my party was going to get mugged/jumped in the alley.
Fast-forward to 4 hours of gameplay later, 2 weeks of in-game time. I was on Chapter 7 on my way to confront Saverok and my entire party keeled over and died. Turned out they actually had been poisoned and none of my stacked saves went far enough back to go and complete the sidequest to avoid the poisoning. So I was totally soft-locked with no way to complete the game by conventional means.
This post made me install Vampire Survivors on my phone and it felt like an old flash game I used to play on miniclip during IT classes in school. Some of the assets are completely stolen from OG Castlevania too (I’m sure this has been pointed out before).
Anyway, like 45 mins passed and I have no idea where the time went. I can see this game being good for public transport, waiting rooms, etc.
I really don’t like tactics style gameplay which only a couple of exceptions. Traditional RealTime with Pause is much more appealing to me after playing so much of the old Baldurs Gate games. This is partially why I could never get into the Divinity: OS games and why I’ve been avoiding BG3. I usually just want to instagib scrubs instead of entering a series of elaborate menus.
Their Luna product seems to be different to Steam. It’s a streaming platform like Playstation Now or the Google Stadia one that got shut down.
The other games that they’ve got on there primarily seem to be DRM-free GOG codes, mixed with some for the Epic store. Maybe they meant they were taking on Steam by boosting their competitors?
Watching the review from Gmanlives I was struck by how much the game looked like PoE from a first person perspective. Including the mechanics. Like he was complaining about the objects in the world not reacting and stealing not being a mechanic but that’s exactly how it works in PoE (and Baldurs Gate). Also the spells look like they have moved over 1:1.
I picked up Andromeda for my Series S recently because it was on sale for ~£3 or so. Never played it during its rough launch. I did play a little of the original ME games when I was hanging out with friends back in the day but not a super fan. Although I’ve spent a lot of time on Bioware’s old Infinity Engine games.
I think that game might be underrated. This could just be a patient gamer moment but the writing is pretty good and I’m finding the initial sidequests to be immersive and compelling. Moment to moment gameplay is smooth too, with combat being a lot better than how I remembered the others to be. Interesting playing it when it was pretty much the beginning of the end for Bioware.
One big issue is that military service is mandatory for men only so they feel they are being disadvantaged doing it while their women counterparts are getting degrees and established in the job market. That part seems like it could be solved by making it compulsary for both sexes like Israel does - assuming they want to keep up military service. I don’t see how they can stop given their neighbours.
I’m getting one on launch. Love my OG switch and got many cherished hours of gaming out of it.