sweep

I think the boss design is generally pretty good, although I did find both the Stormveil Castle bosses to be a little frustrating - however I think that's largely to do with the way the game funnels players straight into that location with the grace arrows pointing them straight there, when actually it's going to be much more beneficial for players to explore all the surrounding catacombs and open world areas before they ever get to that castle.

I will say that I think in other souls games there's usually more of a gimmick to the first few bosses, either they have a specific weakness like fire, or you can parry them during specific attacks. The two stormveil castle bosses don't have any such exploits, they are both just tanks with wide sweeping attacks. Having said that it's still pretty early in the life cycle of the game and there's so much to explore, it could be that they have a weakness that nobody has figured out yet.

Not in recent years (for obvious reasons), but the Switch is basically my airplane console. I live on the opposite side of the planet to my family so several times a year I'm catching a 20+ hour flight each way to go see them, and that's where I think the switch really shines.

I'd use it in handheld if my partner wants to play PS5 or watch a netflix show I don't care about, so I can sit on the couch with her still. I wouldn't play anything with a strong narrative though, it was mostly fooling around in animal crossing or picross.

I'm extremely excited. I don't preorder games, because fuck that, but I love the Less Is More style of open world exploration where things seem to be happening seamlessly in the world around you without needing to be prompted by map markers and ingame cutscenes. You stumble across things naturally, and you have the constant sensation that there's more mysteries to uncover around every corner.

Compared to the "climb a tall tower to uncover a bunch of collectibles and side quests on the map" style of gameplay (no thank you) it's extremely refreshing, and I wish more designers would have the confidence to trust their players to find things organically.

Y'know what, anything which is just mindlessly killing stuff as a poorly-written alpha wide-boy. I used to love the Gears Of War games but I can't play them anymore, they're just mind-numbing.

For some people the restrictions/lockdowns caused by the pandemic are more meaningful to their lives than the potential physical illness - considering a lot of countries are moving away from restrictions and lockdowns (despite Omicron running rampant and every medical professional advising against it) it's easy to see why for a lot of people the end of lockdown == the end of the pandemic.

I think there's also plenty of people who have suffered extreme trauma and are acting as though the worst is over as a form of denial. Can't fault people for that. It's not been easy.

Man With Same Personality For 30 Years Causes Outrage By Being Himself, News At 11

As the generation that grew up with consoles, you'd have thought that millennial parents would be the most lax about letting their kids play video games. Ironically the inverse more-often seems true, with enthusiasts having the most rigorous rules around gaming + online time. Which makes sense really; We know. We know how insidious loot boxes are. We know how game design is structured to perpetuate addiction. We've talked about it on forums, in discord channels, on podcasts. We understand the negative mental effects of hanging out in twitch chat all day because we've been there. Done that. Got a wardrobe full of stupid t-shirts.

I don't have children (unless you count the small demon that I walk outdoors twice a day and enjoys chicken far too often) but I was watching some clips of Limmy, the comedian-turned-streamer, in which he discusses Fortnite and his son's addiction to the game. Limmy has a 10 year old child, and in his signature heavy Scottish accent he describes how the game makes his son rage, makes him angry and upset and gets him worked up, to the extent that Limmy says he considers it irresponsible parenting for him to allow his child to continue playing that game. Here's the clip, featuring the angry child, for anyone interested:

It's titled "Fortnite is poison" but I feel this mindset could apply to any number of these addictive multiplayer games. I grew up playing Age Of Empires 2 and Call Of Duty United Offensive online, until I graduated into World Of Warcraft, and while part of me thinks "kids get invested in games in a way that the older generation don't understand because they can't relate to a child's lack of agency or social mobility which games grant them" and "parents will always be concerned when an outside influence is provoking a reaction from their child which they consider extreme" the other part of me knows that this generation of games is far more manipulative and socially insidious.

I've been using this site for 10+ years and I know a lot of you have too, and as many of my friends and colleagues are now parents I'm going to assume you've all collectively accumulated a bunch of kids as well. Do you have concerns around letting the youths play videogames? Have you put rules in place? I feel like my own access was unlimited and unfiltered - my parents were happy that I wasn't outside causing trouble and the scene was relatively tame with limited online options - there was only so much harm that could be done. These days I feel like games are built like casinos and social media has given children (and adults, honestly) unrealistic expectations when it comes to their own abilities, in a way that propagates disappointment, addiction, and bullying. I'm going to assume that if you're reading this you're among the more informed parents when it comes to video games, so I'm interested to know how your parenting styles have adapted to the current generation, if at all.

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I think a while back Jeff pointed out that this sort of dismissal of people's issues isn't helpful - I think it was around the time Cyberpunk launched. If a game works for you flawlessly then that's great, but people should be able to talk about their technical problems without being dismissed, made to feel that they're isolated cases, or that those issues have no bearing on their user experience.

I've had plenty of issues both with Halo Infinite and with the game pass/xbox app. In case you still feel like being dismissive I'll provide links to the threads full of people who have shared this crummy experience. In the first two hours of playing Halo infinite I had to deal with:

- The mouse not being locked to the game window. I run a dual monitor setup, as do plenty of PC owners, and having the mouse drift from my primary monitor to my secondary monitor whenever I try to turn around is less than ideal. Halo Infinite only has the option to go borderless fullscreen (why?!?). When I googled this issue the response from Microsoft support was recommending people disable secondary monitors, which seems frankly insane. I also saw a lot of posts from people with G-Sync monitors who are having issues as a result of not being able to go fullscreen with this game.

- The audio in the game being buggy as hell. For some reason spoken voices all appear faint/muffled, as though being spoken from a great distance. This seems to be related to the way Halo Infinite deals with surround/stereo? Whenever I load up the game there seems to be a 50/50 chance that the audio will randomly work properly or not - inconsistent bugs are the fucking worst. Very frustrating loading the game, getting to a cutscene, then having to restart because I can't hear what anyone is saying.

- The xbox app failing to launch the game. I absolutely hate the xbox app. It's clunky and slow, the party system is a mess, the app is constantly giving me redundant notifications (like telling me my credit card is out of date when it clearly isn't), randomly giving me store prices in incorrect currencies, and with some games such as Halo Infinite completely failing to launch the game. Instead when I clicked "Play" it opened a random microsoft store page (I've linked an article directing people to the convoluted fix for this). Weirdly it wasn't even the first time launching the game, it just decided to stop working after a few plays. I had to reset the game data and redownload a patch from the xbox app settings to get this to work. Awesome.

- Straight up crashing. Halo Infinite hard crashed on me twice in the space of an hour. No error message, no freezing ingame, just flashed out of existence. One second I'm going up an elevator, the next i'm staring at my desktop.

I don't want to be totally negative because the game plays beautifully once you've managed to get past the myriad technical issues. The grapplehook is amazing - having jumped around with it in the multiplayer for the last few weeks I was able to seamlessly start flicking around corners and it pairs so nicely with the open world that it's honestly hard for me to believe that this wasn't always a feature of every Halo game. It's just a shame that the incredibly cool gameplay is tripped up by technical garbage.

Tortollan world quests in Battle For Azeroth. Eurgh.