The greatest midnight launch I attended was GTAV for PS3 at GameStop. They hired a DJ and had it setup just outside the shop and they were spinning songs featured in GTA soundtracks across the series. There were tons of people queued up and the line wrapped around the store. Everyone just chatting about what they thought it would be like.
The one I remember most was while working for a games retailer. The Pokemon Game Boy games caused mayhem. Not enough product and so many angry parents.
A number of games over the years have had that. The only one I witnessed myself (and feel is was more the console release) was Halo. I attended a midnight launch and that was just crazy. I was also working for a retailer at the time of the original Modern Warfare launch which was pretty hectic. We had some people that had be queuing for nearly 7 hours.
Others have been the release of the Wii and the PlayStation 3 which I was also present for.
After the Xbox escapade, I vowed never to bother with those releases but just ended up working for a retailer where it was part of my job.
Throughout the early 2000s to early 2010s most AAA game releases had midnight launches. I remember going to the midnight launch of the first WoW expansion and the queue at my local EB Games at 11:30pm was wild. Never seen so many people in a shopping centre so late. Some of the best memories were hanging out with my family in the queue for the games and the real liminal space energy the otherwise empty shopping centre gave.
The only thing similar these days are people camping out for a new iPhone.
Zero Punctuation for me. He has a similar taste in games to what I like and a so so positive ZP review is usually a solid buy for me.
I guess the name is changing soon to fully ramblematic? There’s drama with the owner of the ZP IP right now and the folks who actually own the IP are 100% gonna fuck it up. Creator is starting fresh after a walking from a bad deal is how I understand the situation.
I’ll be honest, I just look at the steam store page for the game. If the initial impression from the images is good, and it’s a genre I want to play right now, I watch one or two of the videos and read a few top reviews. Then I just go for it. I don’t watch streams or anything. I am usually perusing indie games so it’s at most like $20 on the line, not the end of the world if I hate it, or if it needs a few years of patches to feel worth playing.
I’m usually putting on indie game reviewers on YouTube while I work for background noise. Have found many amazing games that way. I cannot recommend Retromation, Splattercat, Nilaus, and ImKibitz enough if you are into their game preferences. I also watch Olexa and Real Civil Engineer, but more for the laughs. They have good first looks though. Nilaus and ImKibitz are more automation and city-building games, Retromation and Olexa do a lot of rogue likes, and Splattercat is kinda a catch all.
For podcasts I highly recommend Into the Aether. They only bring games they like to the show and it’s a super chill and positive show that feels like chatting with friends who are really into vidya games. The episodes are quite long but great to listen to.
Generally, I wait for gameplay footage from official and unofficial sources before committing to buying a game. I have a number of accounts I follow on other social media platforms that keep me updated on new games I might be interested, but none of them are reviewers outside of a quick 30-second blurb on socials or their Steam Curator account.
If I’m leaning buy but still hesitant, I’ll generally pick it up and play for a bit to see if I’ll keep it.
I don’t find that my tastes align very closely with any reviewer, so I generally steer clear of them. If there’s any kind of massive community criticism, there’s bound to be plenty of people shouting about it online which makes it easy to take into consideration (whether to ignore it or not).
bin.pol.social
Aktywne