Outer Wilds is on sale. Great game if you like space, puzzles or platforming!

If anything, media made for a malleable audience with low critical-thinking skills should be held to a higher standard, not lower. I still remember how much I loved The Hobbit as a child. Even at the age kids don’t remember stuff, you still set the groundwork for the rest of their lives. The argument insults kids and betrays the speaker’s low opinion of them.

It’s a shame discourse is still stuck where it was when SWSH came out. I hope the fandom can move forward some day and accept that a billion-dollar franchise isn’t immune from critique.

Fair enough. There’s always the two-hour grace period for refunds. The first “real” level after the tutorial eases you in pretty well, so if the gameplay doesn’t click there I’d take it as a sign. It’s a unique game that punishes hard for mistakes, so it won’t click with everybody.

There’s a story/cinematic difficulty, but I haven’t tested it out. The standard difficulty is a challenge, but in my experience it felt fair. I’ve never played a Soulslike so I don’t have a point of comparison on that front lol.

Prey (2017), killer immersive sim. Reminiscent of System Shock 2 mainly.

If you enjoy the combat, Sifu takes that/the Arkham Batman style to a new level. Definitely has a crazy high kill count, but the story is all about revenge so there’s not too much ludonarrative dissonance.

There was so much other controversy with that game that I didn’t even hear about the AI. Gross.

Manny Bothans and Dustin Echoes, the two pillars of Star Wars and Halo lore

It’s not just about dopamine/cope either. Knowing that people saw the state of the world they lived in, and came together to make good art anyway, is good for the soul. It reminds us that there is still good in the world worth fighting for.

It’s easy to forget that when algorithms show us the worst and stupidest of humanity every day for peak engagement.

People say Breen is sympathetic? That’s more of a hot take to me lol. He’s actively helping them destroy the human race (suppression field/other war crimes).

And I like the boat/car sections, I just love HL1 and how it mixes gunfights and platforming challenges. The only part of 2 that hit that high for me was the underside of the bridge, which is an inspired sequence in an already brilliant game. They both deserve the praise they get and will go down as some of the best games of all time.

I suppose my hottest take is that I refuse to believe in anything HL3, even if they announce it, until it’s actually released. I thought for sure that Alyx meant it was around the corner and it’s been five years… at this point I think it will never happen (I’d love to be wrong though).

That makes sense to me. I think 1 vs 2 comes down to personal preference, they both excel in different ways. I prefer the focused gameplay loop of 1, but I can imagine how groundbreaking the NPCs and the physics of the boat and car sections were back in the day. My main gripe with BM’s weapon balancing is limiting machine gun grenades to three, but I understand that ten was overkill and fed into my “I’ll save five in case I really need them” hoarder mentality lol.

Wild that you got banned for saying that given TF2 pioneered the practice.

What, like Blue Shift > Opposing Force or HL1 > HL2? Or lore-related stuff?

I suppose it looks fun, but I always preferred games that didn’t lock you into official servers like DRG and TF2. Hopefully this isn’t too much of a derail from the question being asked :).

How they treated professional Melee and especially Project M was the moment I realized Nintendo was just another out-of-touch company. So many indie devs would kill for fans that passionate, let alone a modding scene that robust. Nintendo threw it all away.

Edit: and that ignores the graveyard of fan games Nintendo has killed. AM2R, Pokémon Uranium…

I loved watching the Star Wars behind-the-scenes with Ben Burtt.

Love me some Cave Story!

Very true. Sadly game dev is a risky endeavor at the best of times. Steam/other storefronts are very noisy environments for devs with little spare change for marketing. On the flipside, digital distribution and storefronts mean that it’s way more feasible to self-publish than it was twenty or thirty years ago. At least, as far as I’m aware. I know there were standouts like Cave Story in the early days.

Some YouTube videos came out that launched both into wider discussion. Both never had proper sequels or successors, so they stand as unique experiences even twenty years later. I don’t say this to diss modern Bethesda, but that they are both distinct enough from Oblivion and Skyrim to have staying power in their niches.

Daggerfall Unity makes that game playable and smooth on modern hardware, and Morrowind modding projects like Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel (just released an Anvil expansion!) bring in new and old fans alike. OpenMW does for Morrowind what Unity does for Daggerfall, although stock GOTY Morrowind still runs fine IIIRC.

AAA may be all but dead, (so far gone that even E3 died) but indies have been in a perpetual golden age since Shovel Knight and Undertale came out. And if boomer shooters and Morrowind/Daggerfall can have a modern renaissance, it can happen to other games/genres too.

If Trump gets those tariffs the American people will turn on conservatives when it spikes prices. Inflation killed Harris, it can do the same to Trump. If anything, the fastest way for MAGA to die is for them to fight over power and squander four years with infighting and suicidal policy calls. Factor in razor-thin house/senate margins and even a competent admin would have trouble, let alone Elon and Trump.

My hope is that Vance suffers the same fate Hillary did when he tries to hold Trump’s coalition together.