I agree. Dying is way, way less scary to me than a slow decline with dementia or a long, painful battle with cancer. No issues with death, I just hope it’s quick.

You should look it up. It’s a fantastic story with incredible art and design. Reasonably priced with a ton of content.

I feel like Nintendo gets a consolation slot with whatever the best game was in their closed ecosystem, but it’s not going to be competitive with the other candidates.

I also think they’ll give GOTY to an indie given what an unbelievable year it was for indie titles. Probably COE33, just based on the quality and production value they accomplished with a relatively small team and budget. But Silksong and Hades are also outstanding.

I read “when I try to buy some gems” as “stupid.”

I agree the most with that you called it a toy. It’s fun to play with.

In very limited cases, it can be a tool - but I’ve asked GPT5 to summarize complex policy documents that I know inside and out and it gets a huge amount wrong or just makes things up.

It’s getting shoehorned into business when it is nowhere even close to the functionality and accuracy it needs in that space.

And worst of all, it’s utterly destroying the web. Half of what I find in search results these days is AI slop with that baby’s-first-essay writing style and weasel words aplenty.

It has a few applications in small, targeted tasks, but on balance I think businesses are vastly overestimating its utility as a productivity tool.

The next two weeks are going to be deliciously salty.

Honestly, not a bad idea. Synthesizing and iterating, taking things out of context, combining elements you haven’t before - that’s how you get something interesting.

Ubi’s problem is that their gameplay loops are completely stale. There just isn’t enough new and different, the stories are trite, the dialogue is shit, and everything is boring and predictable.

I somewhat enjoyed the first Assassin’s Creed, but was a little bitter it wasn’t the Prince of Persia game they’d intended the engine for. I didn’t find “walking slowly to blend in with a crowd” to be as fun as the intense combat and tight platforming of Sands of Time. But I cannot for the life of me understand how the series blew up into a juggernaut of a dozen releases over two decades.

I’m actually playing The Lost Crown now and - not that I’m the first to observe this - but I feel like it’s the best thing Ubi has done since The Two Thrones twenty years ago. This is the kind of risk that Ubi should be taking. Modest games, smaller budgets, new genres. Diversify and let the creatives create. Let small projects succeed and give them a sequel. If small projects fail, it doesn’t break the bank. But for christ’s sake stop releasing the same three giant boring games over and over.

“No, no, hear me out. It’s exactly the same game. The same thing we make every single time. But this time, it’s in… Egypt.”

“Holy shit! What a maverick! Who is that guy? I like the way he thinks. Give him a corner office and the same budget we gave the Greece one!”

You’re completely right. It sounds from the article like they flailed around a lot trying to figure out what that could be before settling for “do what you know.”

A huge amount of time and energy wasted without a clear vision, and then they fell into the trap of trying to chase the success of other games.

I mean, the screen adaptations are all disasters in themselves, so there’s not a good track record there either.

Personally, I’d rather it just be left as a great animated show and to see companies stop trying to milk an IP where the show ended 17 years ago. We really don’t need cash-grab mobile games, fighting games, mediocre beat-em-up games, or either of the live-action adaptations.

That’s exactly where I also put down the controller, haha. All pantheons and platinum (and path of pain - which I think might be an achievement?) was enough. All bindings is just a little more masochism than I can handle!

It took me three tries before I really got into Hollow Knight, but when it clicked, it clicked. Kind of like Dark Souls. Started that one as well a couple times and petered out, but on the next playthrough, it became one of my favorite games.

Maybe Jim was just in a really good mood after all his hair spontaneously grew back. /s

Completely agree. The whole tone and setting changed. SC:BW went for gritty realism. Obviously, there’s a suspension of disbelief when you’ve got psionic aliens, but it felt like three scrappy factions barely surviving in the endless dark of space.

SC2 went full Warcraft. Ancient gods, portals to other worlds, all the same kitschy fantasy elements that are fine in the campy context of WC but really clashed with the established character of the SC universe. I get that they wanted to raise the stakes in the sequel, but I really disagreed with how they went about it.

And Kerrigan should have stayed evil. That’s my “Han shot first” of the franchise.

I’m glad to see others reassessing DS2 a bit. I understand the criticisms of the game but honestly I have more hours in that game than either I or III. Maybe just because it was the first I played, but I’ve always really liked it.

It’s the same damn 30% too.

If you wake up first, please shake me awake as well.

Somehow, it cantilevers the whole second floor.

And absolutely no memory. I keep seeing “I was better off four years ago.” Really? We were in the middle of a pandemic that was so badly mismanaged that we suffered a higher death rate than any other developed economy, and caused all the issues Biden has worked four years to untangle.

I strongly agree that all of these are under threat or direct attack in the U.S., if that’s your point. But these are some of the measures by which academics evaluate whether governments are “democratic” nonetheless. The U.S. in particular was much stronger on these measures twenty years ago than it is today.