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Sixth Tone is not a “no name magazine”, it’s the English language publication of one of the largest online news publications in Shanghai.
Its a contender for best English language publication in China, and a good source of investigative (well, as much as you can get in the PRC now 财新 has been nutuered) journalism. It still gets to do more critical stories when they’re small scale and frame it as a problem government will find a way to solve.
People aren’t used to this as a concept, especially when there are so many terms and conditions screens (that have been shown in multiple jurisdictions courts to not be legally binding) they click through on a daily basis as well as many other “as a service” models that are reliable enough that people don’t realise what the pitfalls are (people playing for Netflix are fairly certain it won’t close next week, for instance), even the more technically minded expect sunset clauses - which would be a pretty good legal baseline to improve the situation.
Unless it’s infrastructure or something with a natural monopoly.
The main competition with steam is buying physical copies of things. If we want to support retailers selling physical copies of games and bricks and mortar shops, that’s a good thing.
Alas, I think the games industry is chosing to abandon them. And Steam has the ability to add games purchased outside of Steam to it for convenience. Unlike Epic it puts the user close to the top of priorities.
Minimetro and Cultist Simulator are my go to “comfy” games, but cultist simulator really does get you feeling like you’re chasing a mad eldritch horror when playing at times. It’s deliberately obtuse and odd, and then a revelation of the truth takes you over and you push on beyond your wildest expectations.
Slay the Spire and Hollowknight have both been mentioned enough in other posts in case anyone reading this is somehow unaware of either of them.
Faster than Light and Into the Breach are both excellent games. FtL is rng mitigation and crisis control par excellence. ItB is basically chess, and you play out the turns as best you can. It’s rewarding, but once you get good you need to ramp up the difficulty somewhat to keep it fun.
In the US the barrier to firing workers is much lower than in other countries. Even layoffs for purely arbitrary or personal reasons are easy and hard to challenge in courts. This is one of the reasons companies have little free capital and choose to lay off many workers as soon as the market looks to be turning. But it also has positive economic impacts as well. That said, EA are a bunch of greedy cunts, and I try never to buy anything new from them anymore (just buying used where they don’t get a cut, if they released any games worth owning).
To be fair to be fair, those people never complained about the historical accuracy with Pope sword fights, or Leonardo Divinci having technology that wouldn’t be produced until the 1800s, and I’m sure many more historical inaccuracies involving white folks.
Is kinda suss though that Ubisoft couldn’t do more black characters when in the Americas though, but can totally do it when it’s in Asia. 🙆🏾♂️
Been clean since Sun/Moon.
I was disappointed with X/Y and gave them one last chance to change course.
The disappointing dungeons of X/Y had been replaced by nothing by straight lines with occasional fancy camera angles. The utter disgrace that was Z Cave as a super (only) dungeon was more than anything Sun/Moon offered.
For a game series meant to be about exploring and discovering monsters to collect, they’ve really let the exploration/discovery side down. Holding my console upside down is cool and all that, but gimmicks to sell strategy guides are no subsidy for actual explorable environments to lead to dynamic, emergent gameplay experiences.
Really want to make my take on a monster capture world explorer. I think there’s a lot of space for a spiritual successor to Pokémon.
So when you said “break up Steam” you didn’t mean it in the usual, anti-monopoly sense where bits of a company are spun out into independent entities or sold off?
You meant let everything be done by enthusiasts and have it kinda interoperable?
I’m not against that, but I think there are bigger dragons of capitalism to slay first before we hope that splitting forums off of Steam doesn’t send them the way of the IMDB forums.
I’ll also add on that, for its many many flaws, the keighleys is pretty good about being aware of this kind of thing based on a few outlets that talked about how they were judges in the past and then suddenly never mentioned it again after an acquisition or the loss of a core editor.
Is that /s?
Because that last sentence really gives me pause for thought…
The last three weeks or so of Chinese video game reporting has basically been:
“They’ll never shortlist us for GotY. They’ll never choose a Chinese game for GotY. It’s all a Western ploy to denigrate and deny Chinese achievement because They are jealous that the first Chinese AAA game is so good.”
It’s been tiring.
Edit: just opened up my Chinese feeds, and I’m glad to report that the first one I found was criticising netizens for review bombing BG3 and defending the Larian speech, and giving it a more detailed translation.
I recall from the interview when the UK blocked it the creator said “you do nothing in it you don’t do it Black Ops. But only mine is terrorism, it’s purely political.” (paraphrased)
I’ll confess that I’ve not played either of them, so I don’t know how true that holds. But I do know that a lot of those console shooters are very political and the world seems fine with it when it’s a US avatar shooting up Arabs.
Only lines with voice work for me, even though there are plenty of great unvoiced lines across games. Sorted by game… I think this post certainly puts me of a generation.
“My emperor! I’ve failed youuuu!”
“Fox, get this guy off me!”
“You’re good, but I’m BETTER!”
“Never give up, trust your instincts!”
“IF THIS DOES NOT WORK!”
Honestly one of the most quoteable games ever made.
“Stay a while and listen.”
“My hotel’s as clean as an Elven arse!”
“Whaaaat?!”
“Tiax shall smite ye.”
“Heya, it’s me Imoen.”
“MASSACRE!”
“Not yet!”
“hyut hyut hyut”
“My fists never betray me!”
“Don’t stand behind me.”
“I’m gonna sleep well tonight!”
“The feeling… It’s… coming back!”
“Good vibrations!”
“Hello brother! […] I live on in this arm!”
“Laugh, and grow fat!”
“What was that just now?”
Love a good ham. We need more of them in video games.
“I’mma Luigi, number 1.”
“Falcon PUNCH!”
“You’re going the wrong way!”
“Retired!”
“You require more vespene gas!”
“All crews operational.” / “Battlecruiser operational.” ?
“En’taro Adun executor.”
“I do this for Auir, not you!”
“Your base in under attack.”
“So what shall it be? Will you join the Unity or will you die here? Join… DIE! Join… DIE!”
“Doctor required in inflator room.”
“[…] to the last place uncorrupted by Capitalism! SPACE!”
We acknowledge that the game is a work of fiction. Historical fiction, but fiction none-the-less.
If every fifth character is also black, I think there is a point that can be made about verisimilitude and taking liberties; but since we know he really existed and that there has been debate on what he did, having a work of fiction that portrays him as a samurai under Nobunga doesn’t seem unreasonable.
To compare, we know that Leonardo Di Vinci didn’t hand out guns to people or build functional flying machines - but we know he designed all sorts of stuff ahead of its time, so it kinda fits in a fictional story with him in.
But only one of those seems to draw huge amounts of complaints online… And it’s actually the less historically accurate one.
That’s a potentially interesting definition.
Dream Daddy, the daddy dating sim isn’t a woke game in this context because the conceit of it being an LGBT friendly town with a bunch of single gay dads makes it all make sense.
But a game set in 1300s Japan with a lesbian white protagonist would be woke because that seems incongruous?
I think, if I understand US law correctly, not a legal choice to publically traded companies.