Ben_H

Or family stories about their grandpa's expertise at Pacman and Pong, and how enjoyment of video games has been passed down in their family for generations culminating in them becoming an expert in playing games using methods learned playing games with their parents as a child. Also neatly staged photographs of the game in question being played on their TV in their perfectly clean living space.

Don't forget IGN, who already dominate SEO when it comes to guide-like articles, walkthroughs, and searches. They're always either at the top or near the top for any guide-related search result. Kotaku is not going to be able to compete with IGN alone, not to mention all of the other competition in this space.

This whole move seems incredibly misguided. The whole game guide business is already severely oversaturated (not to mention that for every legit guide website like IGN or RPGSite there's like 10 that are blatantly plagiarizing them all and SEOing their way above legitimate sites). G/O seem to be trying to get in on a gold rush long after all the other miners are already either settled in or in some cases leaving because of how awful that market is to compete in. If they wanted to do this, they should have done it years ago. It's an extremely stupid thing to do just from a business perspective. From a journalism point of view, it's really sad. We need more reliable news outlets reporting on things, not fewer.

I just bought Monster Hunter Rise and it also has a bajillion optional pieces of DLC, nearly all of them cosmetic. The only one I've noticed so far that has raised my eyebrow is that you have to buy tokens to edit for your character's physical appearance after you created them (the game includes at least one or two when you buy it though so it isn't as bad). That was kind of bizarre but also you can just create new characters if you want (not to mention that many of the armour sets completely hide your character anyway).

This type of thing has been in Capcom games for years now and isn't new. I'm not sure why people are surprised by it. Even the various versions of Street Fighter IV were crammed full of costumes and other DLC. If you don't like it, don't buy Capcom games. Simple as that. I've owned and played hundreds of hours of various different Capcom games and never once felt the need to buy any of this stuff. It's there if you want it but it's not like the games are designed to funnel you into getting any of it.

On the FPS thing, I think it heavily depends on the game and isn't something you can take some hard line stance on. On some games, playing at 30 FPS can feel like the video game equivalent of wading through molasses. On others, the game running at 30 FPS isn't actually noticeable at all. If the developers specifically account for the fact their game runs at 30 when tuning how the characters move and act, it can be indistinguishable from a game running at 60. A game intended and tuned to run at 60 running at 30 though can be quite unpleasant. It's always a case-by-case thing.

I'll get this game eventually. Vinny's stream over at Nextlander made me want the game but 95 Canadian dollars is a bit too much of an ask for a game I'm not sure about so I'll wait for a sale. The game looks really fun though.

I'm pretty sure the magnifying glass is new. I don't remember seeing it before. The other day when it first magnified something for me it was a surprise. I would have noticed it before now given I've done hundreds of these things and have right click opened the images in new tabs to zoom in on them.

The 00's were a really solid time for Canadian indie pop and indie rock music. I already know this album fairly well. It has the early 00's western Canadian indie rock sound along with dry humour and sarcasm endemic to the Prairies to mix (see "One Great City!"). It definitely makes me nostalgic to listen to some songs off it since there were at least a couple of them on the radio here when I was a kid (Canadian content regulations required that a certain percentage of music on the radio be made by Canadians, so here in western Canada we had a lot of indie rock bands from the region show up on the radio a lot).

Favourite songs: "One Great City!", "Plea From a Cat Named Virtute", "Psalm for The Elks Lodge Last Call" (the first two of these are on a few of my playlists already)

The extreme flexibility of Baldur's Gate 3 is probably the most recent one for me. It's the kind of game where no matter how hard you try to break something in the game, they somehow have not only accounted for it but often have bespoke results when you do the weird thing. For most games, when you try to do something that goes against what the game wants you to do, the game will gently refuse to do what you want and guide you back to what they intend. Not BG3. It will instead let you do what you want but then force you to deal with the consequences, good or bad. That's really cool. Think of it as if when Vinny would play open world games and would try to break the game constantly, but only this time the game just rolled with whatever he did instead of trying to prevent him from doing things.

Without getting into spoilers, an example was when I was struggling with a boss I realized if I snuck one of my high strength characters into a very specific position and used a pushing shot (a special ranged attack that launches enemies flying back several meters), I could simply launch the boss off a cliff and avoid the entire fight. I didn't think it would work and assumed the game would launch into a cutscene the second I interacted with the boss in any way, since that's what most games would do because they want you to do the boss fight. But nope, I did the pushing shot, the boss went comically flying off a cliff, the game gave me a quest update dialog without blinking, and I continued on my merry way.

At one time the criticism made sense since Kick was both targeting kids and had gambling/slots categories as major categories while Twitch banned that kind of thing. Now, of course, Twitch has a lot of these same categories along with other categories that encourage potentially dangerous financial behaviour like the new-ish daytrading category (I'm not kidding about this one. Last year they kept featuring this stock bro on the front page and now there's a whole category of streams like it. They all couch everything they say with "this is not financial advice" but we all know what the gig is). Add on all the gambling ads and the two platforms are starting to become indistinguishable.

edit: Huh, it appears they already got rid of the stocks/day trading category. When I saw it (I think it was last week or two weeks ago) my first thought was "that seems like it shouldn't be allowed" and I guess I was right. From a liability perspective, that entire category was extremely dangerous.

There are currently over 100k people watching slots, casino, poker, and other things like that on Twitch though. Oh and there's also a dedicated crypto category, so make of that what you will.

I like a mix. A game like Yakuza 0 is the perfect example. The main storyline is extremely serious and tense, but there's enough lighthearted or fun stuff in the game to stop it from being too unpleasant. Persona games also fit this mould. As does Life is Strange, another game that's probably one of my favourites.

Games that are straight up miserable like The Last of Us I have no interest in. I don't need that in my life. I already have enough of my own stuff to deal with. I tried playing the first one and bounced off it hard about two-thirds of the way through. Some people seem to revel in that kind of thing though (see the millions of people who love true crime podcasts which are something I have absolutely no stomach for) so to each their own.

JRPGs and RPGs in general. I'm fairly certain Skyrim has a bunch of these too but I don't have exact dialogue lines for it.

An example I thought of is in the first planet of Outer Worlds there's a town filled with raiders you can go to and clear out. In the town I found a random woman who said she was happy where she was and didn't need my help with anything. Then a couple hours later I found a person who wanted me to save her, so I confirmed to them that she was alive and was happy where she was. I'm not sure if it counts because after you inform the person you already found the woman, they ask you to go back and convince her to come home so technically the quest isn't already completed but is partly completed.