I don't think that they do. They still had the money. It's now been donated, and Jirard is distancing himself from the charity and not running them attached to IndieLand anymore; the trust is gone, so it would have been difficult to get people to donate anyway. The only smoking gun I could see they had against him was the money still in the account (at the time). The accusations about the golf tournaments had no numbers attached to them, only that "there must be more money there", and it felt very unfounded and as though Jobst just needed another video out for his baked in sponsor slot. From what I can see, Jirard did exactly what he should have to make amends, and now that a bunch of people have all been encouraged en masse to lodge complaints to the IRS, the rest of the truth will come out of that inevitable audit, because I sure didn't feel like I got it from Jobst's follow-up videos. His and OrdinaryGamers are two channels I'm certainly not interested in watching again. If you're going to do something resembling investigative journalism, then act like it; don't preamble your video telling me how I should feel about something before you've presented your facts.
By that I meant from the perspective that the initial allegations still felt like it could all just be a misunderstanding. Now that it has been donated, it seems to be more a matter of who at Open Hand was actually in the know (since it is possible that Jirard geniunely was being misled himself), and why the money wasn’t being donated. The golf tournament stuff definitely feels much more circumstantial since it is based on extrapolation. Overall it does seem like the IRS getting involved is going be the only way definitive evidence of what was actually going on will come out.
I'm reading between the lines of what Jirard said in his recorded calls and his response video when I say this, but I got the sense he and his family wanted that dollar value to be significantly higher so that they could have more control over what it gets spent on. People are more willing to do what you want them to do when you give them $1M than if you give them $1000. Still not a great reason to hold on to it if so, but hardly fraud.
Jirard’s words were unambiguous over the years, though. It was always “we’re working with…” or “we’ve donated to…” and not “we’re looking at these charities”. I don’t know what the rationale for hanging on to that money was, whether it was for the right reasons or not. What I do know is that people were lied to. It doesn’t matter if he intended to or not. It’s not a good spot to be in, and I can’t imagine it gets much better from here. The whole thing felt very much like w crypto scam, except the money was still available, but there was a whole lot of “trust me, bro” and misrepresentation of what was happening behind the scenes.
How many years of research do you need in order to pick the charity or university you want to fund? How many times do you repeat the lies (with numbers!) without even knowing what your own charity is doing? I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a different reason they hung on to the money, because this doesn’t pass the sniff test. Where there’s smoke there’s fire.
Karl’s drama/exposé videos have always had this kind of antagonistic energy to them. It usually doesn’t bother me since the subjects, like Billy Mitchell, have brought the absurdity on themselves. Carrying that same energy into serious claims of fraud feels like a poor decision even if it’s the style of video you’re used to making. I don’t think the money would have been donated without these videos so I’m glad they were made, but the presentation was not as effective as it could’ve been.
Agreed with the tone of the videos being off and I don’t like both creators.
On the other hand, there is definitely some weird accounting going on at the charity. They are supposed to report all expenses which they didn’t. They also didn’t provide any banking statement that show the money were there all the time. If the fund is misused and then repaid later, they were still misused.
Also, as I understand it, $600,000 is not all the money. Already last year’s tax filings showed more capital than that. The charity also has some money deducted for “costs” that is not broken down, and although I’m an outsider it doesn’t seem very cool because the charity hadn’t actually been doing anything so I can’t imagine donors feeling like costs of that size are warranted.
He didn’t even manage to donate all the money they claimed to have on their tax filings from over a year ago. There is another entire indie land after that at least.
So no. He hasn’t even donated all the money. His “apology” was also pretty much a non apology. “Sorry if you felt mislead”.
Elden Ring and Stardew Valley ate a decent chunk of 2023 for me. And are both amazing games in their own right. Totally different, though.
I didn’t play anything really bad this past year, but I did bounce off Crosscode pretty hard after expecting to love it given I’m a sucker for early JRPGs and the 8 and 16 bit eras in general. It’s a well made game, just overlong and featuring some tedious and frustrating mechanics.
Street Fighter 6 - Really really good fighting game, definitely a recommend if you want to play one.
Baldurs Gate 3 - It is BG3, what more needs to be said?
Octopath Traveler 2 - It is more of the first, but more refined and better at tying the characters together.
Dead Space Remake - If you like the original, you should really play this, it is incredible.
Remnant 2 - Great game, a good refinement of the first remnant, and fantastic in co-op.
Last Epoch - I really like the leveling systems(Character and also Skills). Not perfect, but fun and chaotic.
Crab Champions - Crab goes BRRR. Not many games I go out of my way to 100% but this games feels incredible to play.
Spiderman & Miles Morales - Finally pick up on the cheap, if you enjoy the Batman Arkham formula, these two are fantastic. Miles Morales definitely feels like a large DLC though.
Driftwood - Longboarding Sloth, super chilled out and relaxing. Just enjoy carving down the hills on sticks of butter.
Lumines - The best game on the PSP, and still love it(picked up for cheap with Tetris, but prefer Lumines)
The not so good.
Ghost Runner 2 - I want to like this more, I loved the first game, but the wide open levels and bike traversal just don’t feel good or fun.
Diablo 4 - Play Last Epoch instead, D4 feels boring and bland and uninspired after finishing the story.
Blasphemous - Didnt click with me, the combat felt good and the movement was good, but never stuck with it, will probably try again at some point.
Hyper Light Drifter - I have tried a few times, and I keep bouncing off it.
Ori and the Blind Forest - I also want to like this game, but bounced off it again.
While Street Fighter 6 is my Favourite game of the the year, Baldurs Gate 3 is definitely the GOTY. I would strongly recommend any game from the favourites list. I haven’t played any really bad games this year, Diablo 4 is probably the worst I have played, do not recommend it. Unlike the other games which I would be tempted to suggest under certain circumstances.
On Ori and the Blind Forest - if you generally enjoy platformers, I would encourage you to give the sequel a shot, Ori and the Will of the Wisps. I played BF years ago and like you, I bounced off it. Then a couple of years back I tried WotW and loved it.
I subsequently went back and retried BF, and I realized that every issue I had with the gameplay had been fixed in the sequel.
The story of the first game only factors into the second game in minor ways, so you’ll be fine if you skip it.
I will give it a try, pretty sure it is in the steam library, but probably be a couple months til I get round to it now (Granblue is being an absolute blast).
The only game that was kinda a bummer was Tears of the kingdom. The sky world was just copy/pastes with nothing but some robots. I wanted the hot bird people up there or something.
The underground was dead and had a few POIs but was basically just those same annoying ninjas from the first game who disguise themselves as civilians. I liked the story and characters in botw2 better. The map was largely unchanged from the first game. Some of the missions were better. Gannon actually getting a plot was cool. The enemies were better this go around. The gmod bits were cool, but caused the game to run like shit. The game also ran at like, 22 fps the entire time anyways. The shrines were as meh as the first game, which were already so dull I’d look up guides just to get more hearts/stamina.
…it should have been a $25 DLC instead of a $70 game.
It was a solid 4.5/10 for me, mostly just on the amount of rehashed stuff for a $70 game, which should have blown my balls off for waiting six years and $70 later. I hope the next Zelda game is more like Twilight Princess.
I was going to contest, but I actually emulated the game and didn’t have the framerate issues. Everything else held up for me though. In terms of the civiskyzation, it has been thousands of years. They all dead. I don’t disagree with the underground being empty, but it is an unknown underground. It made sense for the POI’s to mostly match up with the overworld elements.
I think these are fair lore reasons when it’s like this because of the hardware the game runs on. Maybe there could have been more underground but it affected the performance.
Disagree on the DLC though. It was a pretty fully fledged game. I also agree that it shouldn’t have been $70, though lol.
I think had they released it on PC, it would have been a bit better, since the vehicles could be built larger and have a further despawn distance without big frame drop penalties. (And frame drops in certain environments). I’m glad for the enemy variation and liked the bosses better in totk. But next game, I hope the gameplay is wildly different and they take some risks with the story. I’d love to see parts where you play as Zelda or something.
A butelki bezzwrotne ma na pewno Staropramen, tylko jest niedobry. xD Można też natknąć się na budwar z Budziejowic, sprzedawany obecnie jako Budweiser Budvar w marketach, on też zawsze był bezzwrotny. Bezzwrotna jest też Holba i niektóre Litovele, ale zabij bo nie pamiętam które.
Na pewno Bernard, Zlatý Bažant, Primator (wszystkie rodzaje), Kozel itp. mają butelki zwrotne.
Best game i played this year was Alan Wake 2, though I can imagine it’s probably not for everyone. The Marvelesque “homework” you’re recommended to do before playing to catch all the references and understand the interconnected lore might seem daunting, but the world and narrative Remedy has built continues to impress me. A lot has been said already about how Remedy has been pushing innovation and mixed media, but I’ll also add how impressed I am with the level of writing in general. Not only is the narrative mind bending, but all the characters are compelling and distinctive and all the different styles employed are nailed perfectly and mesh surprisingly well, from the Noir-caricature Alex Casey monologues to the goofy Koskela brothers TV ads.
The worst game I played this year was Ghost of Tsushima. Okay hear me out. The game is beautiful, well optimised and the combat is solid and satisfying. The game is just roughly twice as long as it should be considering what it is. The story is only okay at best, but suffers from a consistently dour and overly serious tone which really starts to drag as time goes on. The only bit of comic relief is Kenji, and he is barely around. On top of this the quest design is 90% “talk to person, move to area, kill the enemies there, go back and talk again”. Main story missions overly rely on walk-and-talk and/or ride-horse-and-talk. There are a handful of missions with more to it than that and those are good, but there just isn’t enough variation to sustain interest over the playtime (especially if you’re attempting to do everything and thus have to chase down the Ubisoft level open world stuff). After about 10h playtime I was loving the game, but by the third act I was thoroughly worn out and bored.
Unfortunately I had to drop Alan Wake after the prologue. The game is probably great, but I think my PC has finally hit a AAA game it just cannot handle. Perhaps I’ll give it another shot once I upgrade.
I absolutely get your criticisms with Ghost of Tsushima. While I personally loved the game when I played it, I do recall commenting that it had the same gameplay loop as I criticize Skyrim for i.e. go here, kill things, repeat, but for me the core combat mechanics were good enough that I didn’t mind. A shame that you weren’t able to enjoy them to the same extent, but very fair critique
Sometimes we just don’t like certain genres. I’ve tried dozens of times to get into rogue likes and I cannot get into them. I enjoyed hades decently enough, and I could get to the boss. But the gameplay loop always gets repetitive for me. It’s weird!
I don’t think it’ll grow on you as you play it more. It’s one of those games where you can kind of immediately tell whether you’ll like it or not.
I also think it’s pretty repetitive (not even different interiors for each moon) but I’ve been finding a lot of fun with the goofiness of it all. Playing with friends, laughing at each other’s demises, and screwing around with the funny gadgets you can buy is where all the fun is for me.
Yeah I meant more like, each moon doesn’t have its own unique interior. So you see a lot of the same corridors (especially if you’re bad like me and can’t afford to visit the later moons).
I have owned this game for ages, I think I bought it shortly after its release, but despite having a clear memory of playing it, it was so long ago that Steam doesn’t even tell me when I last launched it.
You should! The beginning may be a bit slow, but before long you’ll be building sweet bases or exploring the underground or doing whatever you like, really. It also has a ridiculous amount of content with even more to come next year, apparently. Also, no hunger/thirst mechanics! Like yourself, I don’t like 'em. Terraria has HP and MP, that’s it.
I bought Terraria a few months ago while I was buying some other games on sale and it’s legit all I’ve been playing. I absolutely love this game for the depth of he crafting system and the cosmic horror themed bosses and setting. Really just the whole thing is so well crafted.
I also hate horror games (other than silent hill 2), but Lethal Company was so much more enjoyable for me when I was playing as an operator for my team. You might want to try staying in the ship and giving the most concise and precise calls to your radio operator friend that’s inside. It is less scary, even if there are some monsters roaming outside at times (but they are pretty easy to dodge)
As others said, it’s not for everyone. The gameplay loop is and will remain repetitive.
For what it’s worth, I hate horror but I generally just get surprised, not scared in this game. To me it’s a game where you go in with the mindset that you’ll likely die in some horrible way, but it’ll make for a funny scene or story afterwards.
I’d actually recommend watching clips of people. Not big name YouTubers, just the random 5-60s clips people upload and figuring out if those sort of events would be things you’d laugh at or enjoy being part of yourself.
You don’t have to like games just because they are popular. It’s clearly not for you and that’s really all there is to it, and that is ok. Go try something else that actually piques your interest.
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