Agreed, I think it also hurts the games trying to even have a singular “villain” in the first place. Halo 1-3 had villainous figures, but I don’t think anyone was under the belief that just killing the 3 Prophets would solve the problem of the Covenant, or that killing the Gravemind would mean that the Flood would never be a problem again. The Halo series relies on having compelling factions with clear purpose and ideology to act as antagonists in a more general sense.

The Prometheans in 4 weren’t bad, but outside of the Didact, they had no real purpose or personality. They were just an obstacle. I was really looking forward to the premise of 5 with the concept of going rogue and tackling the underlying themes of fascism at the heart of the UNMC, but then it just rapidly pivoted to some other garbage with Cortana and the Guardians which led to nothing in the end anyways. And so I didn’t even bother to play Infinite.

Do you mean 343/Halo Studios or is 545 some sort of reference I’m missing?

You can!

Worth noting for anyone looking to play both N64 games is that OoT Gerudo stay stunned indefinitely (until the area is reloaded) but the Pirates in Majora’s Mask who are borrowed from the Gerudo guards only stay stunned for a short time before getting back up.

This incentizes use of the Stone Mask, which can be obtained from the invisible guard by giving him a red potion. If playing the N64 version, he is located outside of Ikana Graveyard, which is a place that you can get to at that point in the game but many might not have bothered exploring yet. In the 3DS version, they moved him directly into Pirates Fortress so he’s harder to miss, but it does require just a little bit of stealth to get to where he is first.

Am I crazy or are the shades of blue in the key of that graph completely different from the shades of blue in the graph itself?

I just think it stopped being a good deal the moment they implemented their first price increase. That signalled that they’re willing to do what every other subscription service does and raise prices as arbitrarily high as people are willing to pay, with the enticement being that once you’re in deep enough, you can’t unsub or you’re left with no games.

If you have copious time for gaming and are always on the hunt for sometbing new, is it still a better deal than buying every game at release? Sure, at least for now. But the patient gaming strat at least gives me a backlog of affordable titles too long to finish them all, and I can also return to it at any time without worrying about titles eventually disappearing from a subscription catalog.

I’m honestly surprised people still have it.

May constitute a war crime? Israel is a war crime.

That’s exactly it, they have the ability to go about certain scenes in different ways.

I still only have the Astarion/Cazador example, because that’s the only origin character I played as, but one moment I remember as different between Astarion as party member versus Astarion as player is the conversation with his former lover Sebastian before confronting Cazador.

In my playthrough with Astarion as an NPC, he basically auto-piloted through most of that conversation. He remembered who Sebastian was, it was somewhat touching, and the player was able to ask Astarion questions for context.

In my playthrough as Astarion as the player, you can navigate that conversation in different ways, but there are also certain things that are no longer a given. You actually have to roll to remember who Sebastian is (which I flubbed) and that changes the course of the conversation away from the NPC “default” conversation.

Edit: I found some examples of that specific scene on YouTube, to compare the differences.

Astarion as a Party Member

Astarion as an Origin Character

but if you play as any of the characters you barely hear them, or so I’ve heard.(haven’t done it myself)

This is the case. There are a small set of instances where the character might get a one-off voice line, but in general you’re left mute, even during high impact story moments where the character would usually get a spotlight (e.g. Astarion confronting Cazador).

It’s just a bit of a shame because you’d think people would opt to play characters they like because they want to experience more of them while playing, but ironically you get less that way.

Agreed, I think it’s more that Jennifer English is out there putting in the work to get as many solid gigs as she can, BG3 being just one of several.

Chopsticks, unironically. Better than having salt all over your hands.

“We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying”

All these months later and fuckhead still thinks tariffs are a tax on other countries.

Stellar Blade is a 2024 game, so likely not GotY this year if it wasn’t even close last year.

I am seeing more and more of these “review bomb” takes lately, too. Dragon Age Veilguard getting review bombed because their game is too woke. Moon Studios saying they might have to close because trolls are review bombing their new game. Monster Hunter Wilds being review bombed on Steam because entitled PC gamers expect their games to be stable, I guess.

Too many people out there are deflecting legitimate criticism in favor of what are basically conspiracy theories—that there must be a concerted effort to specifically punish these developers in particular for the crime of releasing a misunderstood masterpiece. No one wants to accept the possibility that they just put out a bad game.

For anyone else trying to parse the title:

Sources from Build a Rocket Boy, developer of MindsEye, say the studio has begun layoffs amid a disastrous launch.

This might hurt every English teacher I ever had, but maybe title format should stop applying to article titles. Unnecessary capitalization hurts legibility.

Not that it would necessarily solve the wording issue, though, as I’m sure the data people for news publishers have some stats showing they get more engagement when the title is front loaded with more keywords, or something to that effect.

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I think that might be a misreading, they have no humanity in deed, not in essence. They weren’t born subhuman, they are choosing to be.

I’m not going to give the genociders the benefit of the doubt, at least.

Part of the confusion is that there was a different Prey game being worked on a couple years earlier that actually was connected to Prey 2006, but that project was canceled and the studio working on it closed.

Given the quick turnaround between Prey 2 being canceled and Prey 2017 launching, I have to assume that Bethesda just took a separate project that Arkane was working on and slapped the “Prey” name on it to try to save face and show that the IP was still alive and well after the sequel was canceled.

I’ve had it go both ways too, with a couple of times where an enemy was able to throw a projectile at me from another room because there was a tiny hole in the ceiling or a high wall that the projectile could path through.

More than that, however, were instances where the game told me I could hit something just fine, only for it to not work as my projectiles/spells smack into some obstruction that was apparently not factored into the hit calculation.

I remember during the initial console reveal, basically the only thing they had to say was that the sticks are larger and smoother (in motion, not the caps themselves).

I don’t know if they mentioned much else later, but they were very tacit about their durability/longevity. I don’t have much hope that things will be better, at any rate. I still bought a Switch 2, because I know it will still bring me joy to play, but as much as I enjoyed the comfort of playing with a Joycon in each hand, I’ve learned from the original Switch to avoid using the Joycons where possible and opt for a separate controller when playing docked (I’m just using the Pro Controllers I have left over from my original Switch).