I get where you’re coming from, but awards shows shouldn’t be participation trophies. The panels should give the awards for each category to the games they think were the best in that category.

And games aren’t made by a single person. If they decided that E33 shouldn’t win Best Music because it also won Best Art Direction, that’s unfair to the composers and musicians who worked on E33.

I have no issue with the Best Debut Indie and Best Indie being the same game.

If Silksong had been the voter’s best Indie, it couldn’t have won best debut because it wasn’t Team Cherry’s first game.

But if they’re going to give the best Indie award to E33, they kinda have to give it best debut. Otherwise they’d have to give one of the awards to a game that was not the best in the category.

Are you trying to say that any game that gets funding of any kind is automatically not worthy of winning?

I’m perfectly fine with people making money in exchange for an excellent product, and Expedition 33 is a fucking masterpiece.

if you haven’t played Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night you really, really should. It’s made by the creators behind the Castevania games and is REALLY good.

Batman: Arkham Asylum should count. Maybe not the later games as much, but definitely Asylum. It’s all about backtracking with new gear to unlock new areas and paths.

The Tomb Raider survivor trilogy scratches the itch a bit as well.

Do they have 5090s in them?

That’s not accurate. A tax write-off isn’t “taxes you don’t pay”. It’s “lost income that isn’t taxed”.

The US corporate income tax is nominally 21%. If a company writes off 100 of loss (or charitible donations, or expenses, or anything else), their earnings are reduced by 100 dollars, saving them 21 bucks. There’s no way to “profit” off of failure through write-offs.

They can’t sell them at a loss without a locked-down ecosystem. Sony learned that the hard way with the OtherOS support for the PS3 that lead to a ton of them being purchased to build cheap supercomputer ls and never spending a dime on games or software to cover the loss.

Lazlow, Dan Houser, and the rest of the old creative team at Rockstar are no longer with the company.

GTA6 is gonna sell like mad regardless, but unlike the last several Rockstar blockbusters I’m waiting to see if it’s good before giving them any money.

I actually also have a Razr+. My employer pays me a stipend to have a second phone so thay when I eventually leave I don’t have a bunch of contractors calling my personal number.

I just realized my Z-fold with controller case could make a truly excellent DS emulator.

Anyone know if there’s an emulator out there that supports folding phones in landscape mode as a DS, similar to the way YouTube will split the video and the controls when partway folded in landscape more?

And that last bit is wild because the one that doesn’t require Windows for PC gamers is the one owned by Microsoft.

Gaming on Linux is like gaming on Windows 20 years ago when you spent more time just trying to get the fucking game to run than actually playing the game.

I got an error trying to launch a BF2 expansion that told me to contact the nearest rendering developer.

The franchise basically created the microtransaction.

As much flak as Oblivion got for horse armor, the Sims did it first.

343 is remastering Halo 1 again?

Their console strategy is squarely aimed at Gamepass, which is a good deal for many gamers even with Steam. My ROG Ally has both Xbox and Steam games on it, and I probably do split time between them 50/50.

My series S shit the bed literally yesterday.

Something I’ve kinda come to accept about Gearbox is that Pitchford is an ass and sometimes they farm out products when they shouldn’t (ACM bring the biggest example), but most of the devs actually working on the games really do care about the product and want it to be good.

The multi-player maybe. But they’ve consistently delivered excellent single-player experiences with their flagship titles. GTA 3, VC, SA, IV, and V were all amazing. RDR1 was spectacular, and RDR2 may be the most impressive game I’ve ever played.

At this point, I trust Tockstar to deliver a good single-player game. I don’t really expect much in the way of the quality DLC we got with GTAIV and RDR, but I think the base game will easily be enough for me to justify a purchase.

I’m still gonna wait and see, of course. They’re not getting a pre-order out of me.

Let’s say you design a revolutionary widget of some kind, but don’t have the means to to produce it at scale. How do you get it to market? You parter with a larger company. For a share of the proceeds, you have them produce the item. Without a patent, when you go to the manufacturer and show them the design, they can just start making it themselves and tell you to beat sand.

Also, patents require competitive companies to alter a product design in order to sell it. If everyone could just copy the same product, there would be further incentive to monopolize the means of production to produce the single product at a larger scale, since the only differentiation between products would be the price. Patents allow competition through limited-term protection of their innovations.

Is the patent system abused by large companies? Absolutely. But removing patents won’t make them.good actors. It’ll just remove any limitations on their theft.

I haven’t, and I really should. Like, REALLY should. I was college roommates with and took part in the wedding of someone high enough at Gearbox that I can’t say their role without doxxing myself, and we’ve stayed really close.

Yes. The out of left field had more to do with what was expected going in. We all expected silly D&D and fart jokes. We didn’t expect a legitimately touching examination of grief and denial to bring depth to a silly character.

BL2 was great. Some of its DLC was even better. Assault on Dragon Keep is one of the best looter shooters ever made. The gameplay was a blast. The jokes were funny…And out of left field it broke your fucking heart by secretly being about a young, traumatized girl’s grief.

I have trouble finding time to game these days. Easy modes let me experience the games more quickly. It’s not always the “best” way to experience a game, but I don’t have more than 1 or 2 hours a week on average to play games these days.

American here:

I’d appreciate help from the rest of the world.

Please embargo us. We need our economy to be in ruins next November, with Trump and his goons as the culprits. Heck - if you can fuck our economy by January, we may even be able to primary some current Republicans so thet Trump is fucked by the midterms no matter which party wins.

That’s so close it should’ve just announced the day it released and blown all our minds.

That tiger in SoM is so awful.

The alchemy system is really unique.

It’s also a very long campaign with several points that feel like they’re coming up on the ending, only for a lot more game and story to come afterward.

I never finished the 1st one because I found the complete lack of connection between the stories frustrating. I get that they wanted you to be able to play with any combination of the 8 characters, but the story suffered heavily.

It was just 8 separate games played at once with the same mechanics, and the lack of any real overarching story meant the narative scope of everything felt small.

And I don’t give cash to anonymous people online. I only use cash in-person for immediate services or products.

If it was used as an actual currency instead of an investment vehicle for speculators, that would help.

It also has zero protection from scams and fraud.

Americans can’t sign it, but the law would absolutely benefit American gamers.

If they have to do the legwork to leave the games in a playable state or pass it to the community, American gamers will be able to participate.

I am a scuba instructor and professional underwater photographer. I’m also obese.

Scuba is not a sport that makes one fit - especially as you get better at it and improve buoyancy skills to the point you aren’t even having to swim most of the time. When I dive, I’m essentially just existing underwater, not even supporting my own body weight.

You want to hear about a game to play?

Clair Obscur. Made from former Ubisoft team members in what sounds like a healthy development culture and it’s a godamnned masterpiece at every level. Visuals, art direction, story, characters, mechanics, music - it’s all stellar.

Buying studios wasn’t stupid.

Doing it and putting all their products on a subscription service is.

They know they’ve destroyed the planet, so why bother planning for a future they’ve already prevented.

And you can turn off some of the survival elements that some people find annoying. For instance, having to spend half your time early on hunting a specific type of fish for freshwater.

Windows was wildly popular prior to Doom. Doom for Windows 95 was a showcase for DirectX, not Windows.

Doom was on more systems than Windows 95, yes, but that’s a little misleading. First off, it was released several years before Window’s 95. Secondly, people upgraded computers less often back then, and Windows 95 wasn’t packaged with most systems and wasn’t distributed online. You had to actively decide to go to a store and buy it.

Third, the vast majority of Doom copies were the shareware version of the first campaign. It was tiny and free. People would bring their floppy to a friend’s house, or they’d post it on a bbs for download.

The port to Windows 95 was a technical showcase of the advantages of using DirectX. It showed that Windows had integrated features that could be used to enhance games with minimal development cost, and that games could be run without having to exit Windows to DOS, which was a huge hassle required for most games at the time.

Yeah, but they were also still making new standalone gaming boxes with a dedicated OS, and they didn’t have the Xbox division take the lead on game mode.

Linux and Mac gaming also weren’t a threat, and the solution to a bloated Windows installation was more horsepower, which was relatively cheap.

Now the market is completely changed. The Xbox Series S and X have had their lunch eaten by Playstion and Switch. Linux gaming is exploding because of the Steam Deck, while more-powerful Windows handhelds are performing worse with worse batteries than the Deck because of Windows bloat.

Mid-range GPUs cost more than an entire high-end gaming rig from 5 years ago, so high-end gaming PCs are rarer than ever.

Microsoft has to do something. And what they’ve chosen, for now, is to partner with Asus to launch a true Xbox-branded competitor to the Deck. To do that, they have to actually be competitive. There’s 2 keys to that. One is Gamepass, and the other is moving Windows out of the way of the game experience.