I don’t know why, but I freaking love simple/arcade golf games. Surprised Golf wasn’t available already, but I’ll definitely be playing!

I think BioShock just got grandfathered in through its System Shock lineage.

Except for all the small studios also struggling or going out of business because getting investment right now is really, really hard.

The megacorp closures and redundancies are far from the entire story, they’re just the headline grabbers.

Are you thinking of Spy Hunter?

Wow - Take Two shuttering this studio AND Roll7 (OlliOlli, Rollerdrome) just a month after they announced they’re buying Gearbox for almost half a billion. Absolutely catastrophic mismanagement. What a shitshow.

As mentioned in the article, these are all union VAs and their new agreement explicitly protects them from AI being used without their permission.

If it turns out they really did use AI to rework some of the voice lines, there could be a major lawsuit coming…

I still remember the first time I saw the demo video where they flip a window around and write a note on the back of it. Blew my mind.

Starfield

As a dev who has worked on mobile games:

1. The stores have a serious problem with discovery which makes it unreasonably difficult to find the good original games in the sea of shovelware, but the good stuff IS out there.

2. People say they hate free-to-play and that they’d happily pay once for access like a normal game, but the stats say otherwise. Almost no one pays for premium mobile games, and that’s why no one bothers making them.

3. People who use ‘mobile game’ as an insult are usually wilfully ignorant about the platform and just have an axe to grind.

I think you mean ‘after the GameCube’.

And even then, the GC only sat as a middle-ground between the original Xbox and the PS2. Nintendo hasn’t explicitly tried to make a graphical powerhouse since the N64.

There’s no such thing as a zero-effort port

Yeah I wouldn’t use EA Sports as the yardstick here as they keep them coming long after everyone else has given up on a platform. FIFA 14 came out on the PS2 in 2013; the same year the PS4 launched.

I wouldn’t call this a cash in at all - in fact, it’s now easily the best way to play Q2, with impactful (but optional) visual improvements, revamped AI, new accessibility options, both of the original expansion packs, the entire N64-exclusive campaign now available on all platforms for the first time, AND an entirely new campaign created specifically for this remaster.

There are a lot of low-effort ports out there (looking at you, Rockstar), but this ain’t one of them.

The kicker for me is always when I reach the point of: ‘oh wait, I’m not instantly great at this new thing?! UGGGGHHHHHH… ok I give up’