I kind of want Larian to start making a bunch of promotional videos mimicking Valve’s “Meet the…” series from Team Fortress 2, but for the origin characters.
I kind of never cared for the Overwatch hero videos, they were too serious. The TF2 videos were always absurd and hilarious. (Massively disappointed to this day that Adult Swim never picked up the TF2 show for a full series.)
While the game is very serious, there’s a lot of funny stuff in it (and I don’t just mean Karlach dancing at hilariously inappropriate times). I think Larian has the humorous abilities to pull this kind of thing off, and it will continue to highlight how important the characters and character development are to this game.
EDIT: Yes, this is also so we can get some modern, high-quality video of the absurd shit Minsc got up to before BG3. BG and BG2 callbacks, yeah!
I remember buying War For Cybertron for the PS3 off of a 9/10 review on IGN. This was back when I could only afford to get one or two games a year so it’s mediocrity stung so bad. Was one of my first experiences with buyer’s remorse.
Other than being in existence longer than pretty much any other game review platform, ign still isn’t that great, or accurate. Reviews have been meh for the last decade or more.
I still have most of my old next Gen issues, with the demo CD roms. I think I have the entire run of PC Accel, which unfortunately was just way too ahead of it’s time. Look up the story if your can find it, it was pulling in more and more subscribers every month but the publisher scrapped it because basically, it was subversive, it was 18+, it was viciously critical of games and the industry when warranted but also gave the best praise to those that earned it. It was the non-douche precursor to Maxim(if you can believe such a thing exists).
It’s a sad story, after they got shuttered, the lead editor and several others put most of their own money on the line to try and restart the company publish new issues, but this was long before the Internet had any social immediacy. Subscribers mostly didn’t hear about them trying to restart, there was no real forum or community where people could keep up on the topic and join the cause. I found out like 4 months after they tried to restart and was devastated, I had no idea and would have resubscribed in a heart beat.
It’s also really shady how the publisher discontinued it. I had already subscribed for the next two years and I think they canceled it with like a year and a few months left and so then I just started to get PC gamer, not even a refund.
I’m not going to pretend that I read many of the zombie outlets.
But understand that games media (and most other news media) has been getting gutted for closer to 20 years than not. The only reason so many outlets are even SLIGHTLY good is because of people like John Davison working their ass off to fight for every single inch.
So maybe, just maybe, we could avoid “Whatever, they suck so fuck 'em” levels of posts? Focus more on what got games media to this state rather than self-righteous apathy.
Takes it all back because A. There was no review bombing, people who left mixed reviews had reasonable and valid complaints, and B. He reversed course as soon as people started pointing out how he was protesting quite a lot about exactly nobody calling him a Nazi.
I think the OW team was already pretty good in that regard, and Jeff Kaplan tried to “protect” them, even if that didn’t always result in the best decisions for the game.
I’m currently playing UFO 50, which is a game by Derek Yu and friends. The games are “fake” 1980s NES games. You pick a random game out of the list of 50 and there’s little to no instructions on how to play any of the games.
You just press start and see where it takes you, just like classic games.
It also has a whole fake narrative tied to it. The collection is 50 games released by the company “UFO Soft,” a fake game company. Each game has little blurbs on its history. Some games have multiple entries to their series, some are one off. Others are “spiritual successors” to others. It’s a whole little universe in the game. And even though not every game so far has been for me, they are all at the least creative and interesting. And some games I absolutely adore and want to play through to the end asap. I’ve only just touched the 25th game and have ~ 15 hours. And I know some will take me a long time. There are also secrets to find outside of the 50 games. The menu has a terminal and you can find hidden codes that give God modes to games, and some provide hidden lore of the universe this game company exists in
When Xcloud eventually (promises, promises, Phil) gets purchased games access, there’ll be no need for the console anymore. Hell, PC gamers could (in theory, anyway) play GTA VI by buying the Xbox version and playing it on Xcloud (again, if purchased games comes to it, it’s been promised for years).
I have no interest in my gaming experience being at the mercy of network latency. It’s bad enough for online games, but there’s no getting around that other than physically going to the same location as everyone else you are playing with. Big no for single player games. If cloud gaming does replace locally computed gaming, it will be another case of enshitification.
I have a buddy with a catering gig who works on film sets all over, an RV trailer with kitchen and a tv and Xbox in the back that we’d fire up in between meal times. No wifi when you’re filming a snowboarding video in the mountains …if they force that into every game then him and people like him will just stop buying new games altogether.
kotaku.com
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