Very true. Though at the same time, you probably could have found that context you were looking for by typing a couple of those words into your favorite search engine or Wikipedia.
Grubb’s got an excellent morning news show that he’ll be back to doing this coming week if you wanted to poke your head in and check it out. They’ve also got a number of shows that are a good laugh, like Blight Club, where they take turns playing awful video games all the way to credits.
A boss several steps up the chain decided to make changes to how the site operates that were incompatible with what Giant Bomb is, namely that they wanted an advertiser-friendly, “brand-safe” image with less swearing and streaming. This led to a number of key people leaving, at which point, the name Giant Bomb isn’t really worth anything to anyone. It’s been covered in tons of gaming circles this week alongside the similar destruction of Polygon, so I didn’t think it needed to be stated yet again as I was summarizing bullet points from a live stream.
Which Jeff? Jeff, Jeff, or Jeff? Jeff and Jeff are now co-owners, and Jeff has his own solo thing, being a family man, which seems to be how he wants to live his life these days.
Kinda Funny did exactly that, and IGN still stands taller. But I think that just speaks to how many competitors can possibly follow that same model, because they’re driven by ad revenue and SEO.
For IGN, probably indefinitely. They do real journalism and real criticism over there, but their site is also a horrendous challenge to navigate due to ads, and there’s more Star Wars and Marvel on the front page than there are video games. Gamespot follows a similar model, and they’re still under Fandom, and that will probably work out…fine…ish…compared to trying to make Giant Bomb work under that banner.
And GamesBeat, and Aftermath, and NextLander. I think this is the only way game media survives. The corporate ownership doesn’t appear to work for anything other than the IGNs of the world.
It can be both. It was impressive when Oblivion had 7 different interlocking systems but none of them were particularly good, but these days, I think we expect at least one or two of them to be significantly better.
The problems with Starfield aren’t so much the bugs as they are fundamental, often dated, design issues. Here’s a sort of Let’s Play from a podcast I follow with one guy who loves trying to bend sandbox simulations to the point of breaking and a gal who writes comedy. Around the 10m mark, you can start to see where this sandbox should have accounted for this kind of play. If you can’t simultaneously do that while making a galaxy with 1000 planets, then you should probably scope down until you can. Starfield is not a terrible game, but Bethesda needs to evolve.
I wish we lived in a world close to that one, and maybe someday we’ll get there. Guilty Gear Strive’s source code just got leaked in its entirety, so complete that it can just be loaded as is into the Unreal editor, and a lot of people see this as a bad thing rather than the game ascending to immortality.
I once paid $140 (just pre-pandemic inflation) for a meal with two drinks at a fancy restaurant for a friend’s bachelor party. It was delicious. At the same time, I realized that no one meal, no matter how good, was worth that price. I don’t know what the threshold is for how much I’ll pay for a single video game, but $80 is more palatable to me when the game asking for it isn’t Mario Kart.
They’ve been putting out annual releases for a long time, and Call of Duty used to still have LAN. It doesn’t look like Madden ever had LAN, from a quick search of the old covers, which would list the features the game supported, but it was pretty common even in console games back then.
Yes, precisely. These days, when I consider buying a game, if it doesn’t have LAN, private servers, or direct connections, I treat the multiplayer as though it doesn’t exist, because one day it won’t.
I’m struggling with this too, about 1/3 of the way through the main quest. They tutorialize you on feints and defensive mechanics, but you can’t really punish aggression like you can in a fighting game, and the NPC never falls for my feints, basically ever. Getting through a melee fight feels like luck. The last one I got through was because I managed to impale him with three arrows before the sword fight actually started.