Politicians seem very good at misunderstanding things when it suits them.

I still find Civil War Generals 2 to be a really fun and challenging game. The visuals are still perfectly readable and charming.

Isn’t is supposed to be is.

[US] Any suspect that says “Am I free to go?” during an interview where they haven’t been Mirandized, and then if they are free to go leaves immediately.

Or if they are not free to go and Mirandized “I demand a lawyer.” and “I am asserting my right to silence.” and nothing else. Playing cute games in an “interview” so you can get off some zingers at the cops is at best not going to make your situation worse. Very likely though, the longer you talk, the worse it will get. Therefore any technique that is giving up your right to silence and council is sub-optimal.

This footage doesn’t catch the public eye as often because it isn’t spicy. It’s just boring. You want to be boring because the cops who booked you are not the right people to be spinning your side of the story to.

I’d recommend reading the original Thrawn trilogy. It is set in the original expanded universe continuity, which is no longer part of the Disney canon- but you can still read and enjoy this old version.

In it, Luke is aware he doesn’t have the knowledge of the old masters and is searching for it. Jedi knowledge was treated as more obscure and lost in the old books. In the wider galaxy, there are varying perceptions of Luke given that most people simply know he went into the Death Star II in handcuffs and left with Vader and the Emperor dead. Most people don’t know the details so fill them in with myth.

As for alien races, the movies laid out brief moments which the EU often ran with. There are tons of books that expanded what races are like. Going back to the Thrawn books, the admiral explicitly learns about alien cultures to better understand and destroy them.

Airsoft has grown massively. While it is more of a whole day event, it fills that same niche but better in many ways.

Most lazertag places I remember seeing were inside or connected to arcades, and those really aren’t a thing for kids these days either so it makes sense the lazertag places aren’t as widespread as they used to be. If you’re specifically going to travel to just do lazertag, you’ll probably just travel to do airsoft or paintball.

I love Battletech, but I understand why it isn’t for everyone. The crunch of of detailing armor hits and internal effects, and keeping track of heat sinks is all the kind of thing that appeals to a specific kind of numbers nerd.

Yes Alpha Strike exists, but it’s relatively new and I think it exists as this weird thing that by stripping out the details takes away the appeal for the loyal crunchy brained people.

Further, the miniatures are really neat, but 28mm (or 32mm, whatever is happening with 40k scale creep these days) scale really allows people to paint and customize characters which is appealing to more people than relatively less characterful mech sculpts.

For video games, Full Spectrum Warrior.

It’s got a unique third person-ish view where the player swaps between different fire teams or special units, and orders them. It looks like a third person shooter but is just a real time ground level tactical game. It’s demanding but fun. It’s the kind of game that Brothers In Arms, old school Ghost Recon, or Doorkickers players would love. I don’t know why nobody really remembers it or why somebody hasn’t made a spiritual successor.

Similar to the 1997 point-n-click Blade Runner game. The rights to all the aspects of that movie were such a mess that the developers decided not to use any footage or audio from the game because they honestly couldn’t figure out who owned what, and made it follow a new main character which was an obvious “Not-Deckard” who was chasing replicants in a similar but ever so changed variation on the plot of the movie.

My claim to a brush with celebrity is that I used to know Michael Rooker, who played the guy who got pretzeled.

That’s why I called it “16ish”. It is probably taking some liberties to improve the graphics that wouldn’t have been available in the 90s, but it is trying get those nostalgia neurons firing. Point is, the aesthetic is intentionally not photo realistic, so missing out on Arnold’s face isn’t the biggest problem in the world.

The headline seems a bit overly snarky and dismissive of a small studio dealing with the kind of licensing problems that just come with big properties and image rights to expensive actors. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in a game.

It sounds like without the image rights, there won’t be any closeup cutscenes of Arnold’s face, but given that the game play is a 16ish bit throwback aesthetic, it actually doesn’t seem as distracting as it sounds.

I mean, this looks fine to me:

Maybe they aren’t allowed to do an accurate Arnie voice impression, but if all the character audio is crunched up to feel more retro, that might not be a problem either.

I really enjoyed it as an XCOM combat-ish game that felt like there was work done to make it feel like it belongs in the Gears Of War universe. It’s not infinitely replayable because the campaign has mandatory side-missions that are generated from a limited template and begin to feel stale once you’ve seen all the templates, and by the endgame you have so many special abilities unlocked in your squad that it kind of drifts away from any semblance of feeling like combat tactics and into a puzzle game about min-maxing abilities to combo chain them together (this opinion might read a little oddly but if you’ve played enough turnbased tactical games you notice many game riding this line, with some going extreme one way or the other). It is worth a sale price though if you need a turn based combat fix.

I posit that ratings in a franchise like Star Wars are a downstream reflection of previous material. Part of Andor’s low ratings I think are a reflection on the other shows that came out and weren’t good. It creates an environment where so many viewers check out. I’d say that Disney reducing the amount of Star Wars shows it puts out and giving the shows to properly talented creators to make unique high quality projects should be the takeaway.

I really hope the executive takeaway is “let individual creators have unique takes and expand Star Wars” and not “All Star Wars should now be dark and depressing and grim.”

The expectation that it was an open world modern style Fallout game does seem to be a theme among people who didn’t like it. That wasn’t helped by pre-release marketing that emphasized it came from the studio that made New Vegas (despite the writers and game leads all being different).

I went in to the game without expectations and found the structure of the game closer to a classic BioWare RPG. Rather than a single huge open world it was a series of curated hubs to travel between. At those hubs there was space to explore but it was more limited and curated than a full open world. The more curated approach meant that the game could be designed with certain builds in mind since players would interact with certain areas coming from known directions, allowing alternate routes or quest solutions for different builds to be placed.

Accepting it as a hub based RPG that leaned into a specialized build made the game click for me.

Setting aside prices, I’ve seen an unexpected amount of sourness directed at the first game. While the first game wasn’t a greatest of all time RPG and had flaws, I found it overall enjoyable enough and it was clearly a project with some passion that I didn’t regret sinking time into it.

I expect similar of the sequel, with hopefully improvements based on feedback from the first game. I plan to have fun with the game, and it is a bit tiring to see things like the pricing prompting people to badmouth the game itself when they are separate things.

Am I going to pay $80? No. No I’m not. This is a single player RPG though. There’s no FOMO of getting left behind on the multiplayer unlocks or the lore of a new season. It’s a singleplayer game. Put it on the wishlist and buy it on a sale. Simple as.