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Yep. Not to say that people who struggle with games aren’t valid or there shouldn’t be accessibility options to cater to them, but when writing professionally about games, you should be a near-expert in how to play those kinds of games, at least at their baseline difficulty.
It’s fine to say “I don’t quite get this game, but I’m sure there are people who do and who enjoy it.” But that can’t be a “review.” When you’re a reviewer, you’re supposed to be an authority. If you admit to not being an authority, then you’re not quite qualified to review it.
It shouldn’t honestly matter, but knowing how many publishers tie aggregated review metrics to their developers’ wages/bonuses/raises (or even if anyone gets to keep their jobs at all), it’s crazy for a publication to have journalists who don’t actually know how to play games just reviewing them on vibes alone. It’s too easy to run the risk of not understanding a core part of the gameplay and just assume it’s the game that’s wrong instead of me (because I want to continue getting paid to review games). So I assign it a negative score because my lack of understanding made the game feel bad, and then a level designer somewhere loses their bonus because the aggregate score was half a point lower than the total stipulated in their contract.
Reminds me of the first time I booted up Elden Ring. The title screen started up and I heard some music, but it was so quiet. I turned up the volume and then a second later thought I almost blew out the speakers on my headset.
Context for anyone who has not heard the title music for Elden Ring.
I’d also make that complaint about adjustable difficulty, but to speak to the game progression, I have to agree.
Games should be teaching players what they’re getting into from the very beginning. The tutorial should be “When you do everything right, this is how easy the game is. When it’s not this easy, it means you’re doing something wrong”. That “wrong” thing could be messing up a mechanic, not upgrading your character enough, or you’re trying to go to a later area too early. It’s a teaching moment.
So many games today, at “Normal” difficulty, will throw players into combat encounters where they just basically kill everything in one hit. So players in the tutorial think “This is a bit too easy, I’m going to up the difficulty to Hard”, but then they don’t realize that everything gets harder when you exit the tutorial, and then over the course of the game the difficulty keeps outpacing your progression.
As far as the difficulty slider goes, I think it’s always better when harder modes just make you easier to kill, rather than enemies being more difficult to kill. There’s often a good balance that can be struck between the two, but too many games just opt for just making enemies tankier and tankier, which ends up turning the “difficulty” slider into a “time/resources waster” slider.
This is my peeve, over-tutorializing.
I know there are folks out there who are profoundly bad at games, and that’s who these things are made for. I’m reminded of that one gaming journalist who gave Cuphead a bad review because he couldn’t figure out how to double jump and never got out of the tutorial.
But just make it a quick selection when starting a new game. “I’m new here, show me guides” and “I’m an expert, skip tutorial content”. Or even just make the tutorials an optional object interaction in the game that you don’t have to touch if you’ve already figured it out.
But the best games are the ones that teach players how to play organically. Level 1-1 in Super Mario Bros is the common example. Setting the camera controls in the older Halo games was also a work of genius. Newer games are a bit too dense to be able to cover everything quite as quickly and organically as Mario, but you can still offer some similar diegetic hints and just add a little “Help” button for anyone who can’t figure it out on their own.
I thought Halo CE’s system of shields plus health was a neat innovation. Shields regenerate, health does not. Health is basically a buffer for survivability when shields go down, but you can survive combat at low health as long as you’re watching your shields.
The sound cues for shields low/down/regenerating provide a lot more feedback, too.
Hm? It seems to make sense to me.
They’re saying Cities Skylines could have filled a niche similar to the Civilization series, with a modest but devoted following. Cities Skylines 2 was set up to be a AAA game in scope, but neither the publisher nor the developer were willing to put the resources and work into making it happen.
Monument Valley 1, 2, and 3 (mobile games). An interesting set of puzzle games with good visuals. They only require single taps to work.
Also can get a mouse for the Steam Deck (or a PC if you have one). There are a lot of good games that you can likely use with a mouse if the hand/wrist motion doesn’t cause pain or discomfort for your thumb.
Nintendo raised the price of the Switch 1 and most of their accessory products in the US and Canada in May for Canada and August for the US.
This was following price increases for Nintendo Switch Online in Latin American countries which started in January. Nintendo has not raised prices of the subscription globally, but in their press releases about increased costs of hardware, they state that “price adjustments may be necessary in the future” for NSO, presumably after evaluating trends when the free trial period of GameChat ends for Switch 2 early adopters in March 2026.
And I know you said you don’t care about Sony, but just to share sources, Sony has already increased the price of their hardware in Japan in August 2024; Europe, Australia, and New Zealand in March; and the US in August of this year.
This was following earlier price increases in 2022 for Canada, Japan, Europe, Australia, and Mexico.
Sony also increased the cost of PS+ in North America, Europe, and Japan back in 2023, more recently for Southeast Asia back in April, and there are rumors of another upcoming price increase to be announced at some point now that we’ve entered FY2026.
So all of this is just to illustrate that what Microsoft is doing isn’t really anything new—it’s just the latest development in a continuing industry-wide trend.
It was $15/mo before it’s first price hike, too.
And before that, a lot of people were taking advantage of the Xbox Live Gold conversion deal, where folks were getting access to GamePass Ultimate for $60/year.
I once spent $180 for 3 years of GamePass, and now that same amount only gets you 6 months.
I barely even buy 5 games a year, and often not at full price. And usually the games I want aren’t even on GamePass anyways.
$360/year is crazy. Only a good deal if you’re buying more than 6 full price games a year and plan to 100% beat them and never play again before they disappear from the catalog.
Not strange at all, it’s not as though it’s a particularly action-y game.
If someone wanted to play FF7 Remake/Rebirth on M&K, I might have a few more questions, but speaking as someone who still plays a lot of FPS games with controller, you’ll never hear me tell someone that their preferred style is wrong.
There are a few asset upscaler projects that might be worth looking into, but also be careful which version of the game you play, as not all mods support the same versions.
There is the PC 1998 port. Being from a time before controller support on PC was a thing, you’ll have to really try to weasel in controller support somehow if you want it. Some parts of the PlayStation release (glitches and spelling mistakes) are fixed, but it introduces many bugs of its own. Character models have mouths. Supports mods, but a lot of the go-tos may be pretty old and harder to find at this point, and you’ll really need a lot of QoL mods to make the experience workable.
There is the PC 2012 port, which is a (lightly) remastered version of the 1998 port. Character models still have mouths. Contains further localization changes from the 1998 port. It runs far better on modern systems than the 1998 port, adds some (not great not terrible) controller support, and some of the features from popular QOL mods that people used to add to the 1998 version are baked in. This is the version that is currently sold on Steam. Also supports mods.
Then there is the 2015 mobile/console port, which is further adapted from the 2012 PC port. Character models have mouths removed to be closer to the PS1 style. Introduces achievements, better native controller support (still far from perfect), and slightly better support for larger resolution displays. This is the version you can buy on the Xbox Store for PC. Basically no mod support because Xbox App games are very locked down, but it includes the “boost” (cheat) features that Square Enix has included in other Final Fantasy ports (toggles to speed up time, characters do max damage, no encounters) which some may hate the inclusion of, but do make it easier to just play the game for the story if you’re looking for zero grind.
I think it was underwhelming, to be honest. Hot takes below:
The praise for Clair Obscur was deserved, but I don’t think it deserved to win every category it did. I don’t think a lot of the categories themselves are even very well thought out, to be honest. E.g. “Best RPG” is such a trap because no one can even decide what merits inclusion in the category. And rather than factoring in something like how effectively a game incorporates RPG mechanics, of which Clair Obscur has relatively few, they just pick whatever the the best overall game is that happens to fit within that category.
The format of the show itself still needs work. They’re trying to make it the “Oscars of gaming” by locking in as much celebrity presence as they can. But you need actors to star in movies, you don’t need actors to star in games. Not enough focus is actually being put on the technical aspects of game development, because it’s boring and no one is interested, just like the technical aspects of making movies.
More people still watch it for the trailers than they do for the ceremony itself. I think trailers are fine, but if they want to be the “Oscars of gaming”, they should just do it like the Oscars themselves and keep all new trailers relegated to simple ad buys that play during a commercial break between segments.
A more transparent standard of decisionmaking would be nice. Movies take only 1-3 hours to watch, so there is a reasonable expectation that members of the Academy who make the decision on which nominees should win have actually seen them all (and even then they apparently don’t bother). There is no way that the folks who vote for these categories have actually played through every game nominated, so I’m curious about how they make their decisions.
I don’t know why the Muppets are there every year. It’s weird to go from Miss Piggy to the trailer for Divinity.
It’s also weird when presenters are there to mostly plug their own ongoing projects rather than to actually celebrate the people being recognized this year.
Most anticipated game is a joke category that GTA 6 will keep winning every year it is delayed.
Actually, every category where fans decide the results should just be thrown out, because it’s inherently not based on any degree of an unbiased, informed critical perspective. Case in point:
Gatcha games are huge in China (and elsewhere), and China has more people than anywhere else. So I can’t say I’m surprised. It’s just a popularity contest. The people that voted for Wuthering Waves likely never played the other games nominated, and they don’t care to. It’s also telling that such a massive chunk of trailer content was gatcha slop.