Deep Dive Devin

That Stadia response might be one of the worst I've seen from a gaming industry representative...ever. It's far-and-away worse than the "pride and accomplishment" EA comment from the Battlefront 2 shitshow. Big "just call me a slur at this point" energy to the whole thing.

Most cumulative playtime overall is a potential, though. It kept the playerbase up for years before it started falling into disrepair. Fortnite is probably the only thing that has a chance of beating it, but it'll probably still need to keep going for a couple years.

Nah I feel like that would be the whole thing, not just the start. Entire story stylized like the "Worker and Parasite" bit from the Simpsons

Not really? He said the Division was mindless, but still fun. Maybe we'll never get a period as positive as the stretch between The Secret World and Rama (and TSW and Darkspore both had the death sentence undercurrent anyway), but it's not like Ross doesn't like games on the show nowadays.

I'm happy to hear Ross is planning to buckle down and go after the movie project. I've been thinking about what that thing's gonna be like for years.

Unskilled labor is a classist myth to justify poverty wages, just so we're all clear.

Played this recently, didn't do most of the extra stuff. Really enjoyed the core combat, exploration, and atmosphere. Brought across the Spanish-Catholic cultural influence well with some excellent art, music and environmental storytelling. Worldbuilding is very cryptic, limited to lavish and kind of confusing item descriptions, but with less Berserk and more Jesus than in Dark Souls. Ran into problems occasionally where my character couldn't dash or jump off of climbable walls. I was annoyed to discover you can warp between checkpoints, but only if you donate enough money to the church, and there are no overt signals to what the benefits of donation are. That would've helped the endgame search for health potions and items. I've also decided I just don't enjoy the "pick your shit up when you die or else here's more problems" mechanic in souls-style games. This one just caps your magic power more and more until you pay a toll to get it back, it feels pointless. Even in Dark Souls, it's just more busywork to get the souls back if you lose them. Still worth a recommendation just for the utter uniqueness and the incredible richness of the tone and world, it's like nothing I've played before. Backtracking is not nearly as big a problem if you just pay your communion dues and don't forget like I did.

To the first thing you asked? I have no idea, I've never watched Heroes. The second thing is a pretty resounding "no".

I'm not sure why it would, honestly.

I'm around.

Having been playing the game for the past several days, I can say the bot crisis in casual has died down quite a bit. I see two a day at most, and unless the server's full of them, they get votekicked pretty quickly. I hear one of the mid-July updates broke a lot of botting software, so this is a good start. I hope they can keep that momentum going.

We're not talking about perpetually hosting a dedicated master server or anything, we're talking about the bare minimum to play the game at all. Like, SRB2, the Sonic game built in a dead fork of the Doom engine, will always be playable in multiplayer, because you can run the server yourself even if the multiplayer master server (which, for perspective, has run for fifteen years on a non-profit fangame) were to be taken down completely. It doesn't cost anything for me to open my ports to play co-op with my friends. A few months back, darkflame released their own custom software to run private Lego Universe servers specifically because there were legal issues with trying to host a public one. That game is now officially rescued from being dead, whether or not anyone actually uses that software.

But the point isn't about whether the server will have a bunch of people on it, it's about being able to run it at all. Plenty of games will go unplayed whether a publisher kills them or not, but the focus is that publishers shouldn't be able to kill them regardless. You can't predict whether a game will stay popular, but you can choose whether to deny anyone the right to ever play it again, and that's a shitty thing to do which shouldn't be allowed, at least if they paid for any part of it.

I'm not sure that's fair. The internet as a collective needs to be more descriptive about what "game journalism" means. Sure, people have been memeing on the incompetence of games media for years now, but why they do that is much more important. Best I can tell, "lol games journalism" started in 2014 with gamergate. I'm not getting into the varied, often-contradictory claims of that movement, but it should be clear those claims aren't the same as the killing games problem. The shutdown craze has increased since 2014, but in my experience gamergate was more angry about individuals who represented social values they disagreed with, and the connection to "game journalism" was a story where one of them allegedly used underhanded tactics for good press. My skepticism of that story aside, it should be clear why the internet decided "game journalism" meant corrupt, sycophantic or incompetent actors. It's thinking in terms of individuals. I'm sure everyone here has seen someone talk about Kotaku like it's a person, not a site full of differing, sometimes-conflicting viewpoints. But games being killed is a systemic issue, an industry-wide practice that needs major legislative decisions to counteract, not started by individuals or even a specific company. The connection to journalism isn't just under-reporting, but what reports there are treat it with kid-gloves and fail to hold the publishers accountable for this decision. Games coverage has for a very very long time been in the pocket of publishers, and their tendency to play defense for them (even without actual sponsorships) hasn't wavered a bit since people started going "lol games journalism", because the problem goes further up than that, and I think saying "well game journalism has been bad a long time" kinda ignores this, because it's still treating it with the individualist mindset.

He brought it up because of the rhetoric in the article, not specific to anything about the game itself. I mean, purging online aspects of a game with no way to recover them is still wrong, even if it doesn't render the entire product unplayable. Maybe instead, just burn the last ten pages or so of every copy of Dracula if you want a comparison. The popularity doesn't really matter, as well. If someone -- anyone -- wants to, the art they're trying to access should be...y'know, accessible. The only limitation to accessing art should be the physical limitation of stuff that hasn't already been preserved digitally. It could be friggin' Empress Theresa and it would still be wrong to permanently damage or remove every copy in existence.

I would agree if not for the fact that this came right after they directly responded to the twitter campaign saying they were going to make some more substantive changes. Obviously current-era Valve is a disappointing company, but I think it remains to be seen whether they were outright lying.

Well, that #savetf2 thing did get it a pretty good bugfix patch just a couple days ago, actually. The fact that Valve's updates prior to this have been kind of bad and the servers being overrun with bots and cheaters hasn't changed, but hey, maybe it's the start to something better. Honestly, all I want at this point is for them to release the last comic. How the fuck does this company keep teasing people with final-act cliffhangers?

So I've heard. I haven't personally checked back with the manga since several months before I wrote that. All I've really gleamed is that Luffy finally got his super saiyan form. I'm honestly fucked either way, since I feel like I've probably forgotten most of Wano (frankly, I've forgotten most of Whole Cake too) and will probably start from the beginning of the arc whenever I get back to the series. Oh, and on an unrelated note, Berserk is coming back, in case anyone here hadn't heard yet. Lead by Miura's close friend and established mangaka Kouji Mori, along with the rest of the assist team from Miura's manga studio, they're going to try and close out Elfhelm (with TWO chapters coming on the 24th) and then base the final arc on Miura's unfinished plans. I honestly couldn't be happier, because even if this conclusion ends up sucking (which, I'm optimistic, I think it'll be "okay" at worst), Miura's work stands on its own and I don't think it will be brought down by a poor attempt at an ending any more than it was by not having one at all.

Well you actually didn't say that, but it was the thing you're not doing that I had a problem with, so it doesn't really matter if you care or not.

Well you can kind of see how you gave the impression that "what you like to do" included the scam that is NFTs, until you said you didn't even know much about them. I'm not shitting on you just for making 3D models. If that's all it is, I'm sorry for jumping to conclusions.

Thankfully Ross is not economically braindead (and I suspect having his assets previously stolen for NFT shit does not make him more sympathetic to the idea), so no, I don't think advertising your crypto scam will be very lucrative here.

I admit it's been a good half a decade since I started up the game, but I know starting with Water Hazard there have been map edits in these videos. I'm pretty sure *some* of the alleys in Ravenholm include such edits.

Siofra River in Elden Ring really managed to "wow" me, it was the point I realized both A. how insanely much content they crammed into the game, and B. how far it was willing to depart from Dark Souls thematically. A lot of people hate the Meat Circus from Psychonauts for its difficulty, but I think the music and theme of the level being a big gross weird circus made out of nightmares is the perfect final level setting for such a unique game. I honestly felt kind of disappointed that Psychonauts 2's climax didn't manage to hit the same high. Fatherland Follies only really gets surreal or crazy for a few seconds. Sonic 06 fucking sucks, but the final part of Kingdom Valley would actually be genuinely breathtaking in a good game. I guess ChaosX's Remaster Project does okay?

The intro both surprised me with a hilarious non-sequitur, and reminded me that I haven't had a pop-tart in like ten years. I wonder if they were actually good or if that was just my broken high-school brain reacting to the sugar.