I kind of wish that Chris Roberts would just take the hint and STFU about release dates for SQ42/SC. There were so many broken promises that any trust that they will hit targets is gone.
I can at least say that, based purely off of what I’ve seen of their gameplay trailers, 2026 is a more realistic release date for Squadron 42 that any of the previous target dates were. The question isn’t if it’s going to be finished by then, it will be if they are going to release it in a playable state at that time.
2027-2028 for Star Citizen is completely unrealistic. The game is nowhere near finished enough to consider that a date that will stick, even if you get all the people working on SQ42 to move over to SC after it eventually releases, the extra manpower can’t make up for the huge hole they’ve dug themselves into. They still have a years-long backlog of content to produce and show no sign of slowing down on offering new pledges. When they catch up with releasing all of the ships that people have paid money for and 10 years later still have nothing to show for it, then we can talk about release dates - ones that give enough time for proper bug fixing, polish, and gameplay balance. 2 or 3 years from now ain’t it.
Could someone just make, like, Raunchy Mastercard and just process payments from everyone including all the porn and weird shit that the other mainstream companies don’t want? It seems like the payment processors being puritanical dipshits is a weakness that could be exploited by an enterprising competitor.
But then again, we’re talking about a natural monopoly that has been in place for decades at this point. I wouldn’t expect them to exactly play fair.
Anybody who has ever been unfortunate enough to have to apply for any of these healthcare or food stipend programs would know that it’s not as easy as the government makes it seem. In fact, the amount of bureaucracy, means testing, and highly restrictive income limitations means that most people don’t qualify period and people who do qualify have to spend an inordinate amount of time waiting to hear back from the government to know if they have been accepted or not, all the while hoping and praying they don’t get sick and can manage their money long enough to continue feeding themselves.
Case in point, my fiance is out of work right now and actively seeking work. She applied for both MediCAL and SNAP and was denied for MediCAL because she had earned too much already that year to qualify and the SNAP benefits totaled out to $20/month in food stamps, based on historical income, which is insufficient even for the most frugal of individuals to make work. This is for someone currently earning $0/month and being almost entirely supported by me.
After a certain point, it becomes a massive drain on your time and resources that could be spent looking for a job, so you stop bothering with the system altogether because who wants to spend hours doing paperwork and submitting claims just to get enough spare change to buy a bulk bag of rice to feed yourself a struggle meal?
I don’t want to hear shit about “handouts” from anybody. My fiance paid her taxes faithfully for years without ever having to rely on the program, so where are her benefits? She has undoubtedly paid more into the system than she will ever extract.
Cancelling a pre-loaded pride event because you’re scared of right wing nutcases being mean to your playerbase is the very definition of letting the terrorists win.
Palworld did more for the monster-collecting genre in one early access title than Pokémon has in the last decade of AAA titles.
Why does Nintendo deserve these patents when they aren’t going to produce anything meaningful with them and simply weaponize them to squash any real threatening competition?
Pokémon is the highest grossing franchise in the world, and 2nd place isn’t even close. I think they can give a little ground to an indie developer who makes games that people are actually interested in playing. The patent bullshit is ridiculous.
As much as I’m a fan of the project, I don’t think SC/SQ42 would scratch the same itch that somebody who just got done playing Starfield or Mass Effect would feel. Star Citizen is way more on the simulation side and light on RPG elements.
Hard to blame them for thinking that at the time. CD-based consoles had a very rough start in that era, but the PS1 was probably the first actual hardware success that used the CD exclusively as it’s medium. Nintendo had pushed cartridges to their absolute limit with the technology they had, so it was only a matter of time before someone ended up succeeding where others failed.
Night in the Woods is an okay story/adventure game, but man the soundtrack for that game is a real earworm. Years later now and some of the town jingles still pop into my head randomly. RIP to the composer who passed away way too young.
There were two heroes that were released as Xbox exclusive DLC back during the original release - Kit Fisto and Asajj Ventress. The mod added them into the PC version by reskinning Ki Adi Mundi and Ayla Secura respectively. The Aspyr release uses the reskinned versions from the mod rather than the official models from Pandemic/Lucasarts which they presumably had permission to use but chose not to despite the fact that the original models don’t have graphical errors and do have the correct fighting style/animations.