ZombiePie

I can try pinging @dtoast to let people know about this issue.

Last I checked, @turboshawn was looking at the Premium Feeds and was making progress.

Pocket Casts has a whole process you need to do to reset RSS feeds, but it should now be working without issues. As a test, click the "RSS" link to the right of the feed you want. The URL of the page that pops up is the URL you want. If you use Overcast, if you pick the premium audio feed on the site and then copy the RSS on that version you can add it manually to the Overcast app. Another person on the Discord said "long-pressing the RSS icon" and going to Copy Link works for adding the premium feeds to the apps they use.

@topcyclist: I'm going to give you a quick chance to put more effort into the OP of this thread possibly with personal anecdotes and/or examples. Otherwise, simply having your thread start with "Give an example," and that's it, falls within our rules prohibiting forum spam which would result in this getting locked. You are expected to include original commentary with the threads you create.

Back in 2021, gaming investigative outfit People Make Games published an exhaustive deep look at Roblox and examined ways the game and its creators exploit child game developers while netting millions. Additionally, the game and its owner before and after the report faced frequent scrutiny about harboring sexual predators that committed actual acts of sexual abuse and assault. Following PMG's report, Roblox Studios published an outline to Axios about how it planned to improve its payout system and engage in safety practices that provided all players with basic protections from personal injury or danger.

Unfortunately, Roblox continues to face accusations that it has done little to dodge claims that it continues to take advantage of child labor and that their current payout system errs on exploitation. This week, Roblox Studio head Stefano Corazza finally issued a response on why they felt these criticisms are completely unfounded and their comments... are quite possibly the worst late-stage corporate apologism I have seen this year.It's a A LOT.

While being interviewed by Eurogamer, Corazza stated plainly:

"I don't know, you can say this for a lot of things, right?" Corazza said. "Like, you can say, 'Okay, we are exploiting, you know, child labour,' right? Or, you can say: we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even like an income. So, I can be like 15 years old, in Indonesia, living in a slum, and then now, with just a laptop, I can create something, make money and then sustain my life.

"I mean, our average game developer is in their 20s. But of course, there's people that are teenagers - and we have hired some teenagers that had millions of players on the platform.

"For them, you know, hearing from their experience, they didn't feel like they were exploited! They felt like, 'Oh my god, this was the biggest gift, all of a sudden I could create something, I had millions of users, I made so much money I could retire.' So I focus more on the amount of money that we distribute every year to creators, which is now getting close to like a billion dollars, which is phenomenal."

Also, Corazza repeated a defense that Roblox has made in the past that it provides younger audiences with an "educational value" that builds programming and personal finance skills that no other game outside of educational apps and programs provides. They also engage in a major informal logical fallacy by trying to dodge the issue of its treatment of minors on its platform by mentioning that most of its in-game content creators are in their twenties. That might be true, but the fact remains that minors are playing the game and Roblox is able to take advantage of their labor because they likely do not understand the context of the degree in which they are being exploited. Children and minors likely support Roblox's payout program because they don't know any better and their support of any program should not be cited as a sign that things are okay. Likewise, trying to reframe the discussion about child exploitation to that of Roblox's uplift potential in non-US or non-EU countries is downright disgusting. Major corporations have framed export processing zones or "free-trade zones" as places in which developing economies are uplifted by new factories or extraction facilities, often signed off by international institutions like the World Bank. However, after decades, we know that unless these zones are highly regulated and subject to third-party monitoring, no economic "uplifting" is bound to occur. It's safe to say that the same applies to Roblox and as PMG's initial report stated, if Roblox wasn't doing what it presently does on the internet, they would have been shut down years ago. But here's another quote from the interview that made my head explode:

"We have millions of creators in Roblox Studio. They learn Lua scripting," a programming language, "which is pretty close to Python - you can get a job in the tech industry in the future, and be like, 'Hey, I'm a programmer,' right?

"I think that we are really focusing on the learning - the curriculum, if you want - and really bringing people on and empowering them to be professionals."

For reference, buying 1,000 Robux costs the equivalent of around $12.50. When creators in Roblox attempt to cash out 1,000 Robux, it nets them approximately $3.50. Furthermore, the number of FREE educational programs on the internet that teach programming skills and languages like Lua or Java are too many to list. Part of me wants to admonish Eurogamer for having this guy say his piece without even the slightest bit of pushback, but I assume they're presenting his words as such because they are so damning as they stand. I mean... good God.

Goodness, how time flies by! This week marked the 30th anniversary of the initial release of Final Fantasy VI, a game still considered by many to represent a gold standard for the JRPG genre as well as one of the best titles on the SNES. For many, the game represented a gateway game for RPGs as well as an exposure to video games as artistic and storytelling pieces. For those of you outside of Japan, Ted Woolsey's translation work represented a new standard to aspire towards and the figureheads that worked on the original game, such as Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobuo Uematsu, we the first names in the industry you became attached to.

So, when did you first make an effort to play Final Fantasy VI? What are you earliest memories of it? There's no shame in saying the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster Collection are how you first had a stab at it, but I'm wondering if there are any of you that remember when the game released on the SNES as "Final Fantasy III" and had to be recalled because the first batch of carts had a glitch where the game would crash if you tried to perform Relm's Sketch ability?

And what are the moments from the game that still stick out to you? I know the Opera House scene is widely considered the game's best moment, but I still have a soft spot for Sabin and Edgar's Coin Toss cutscene. Last year I played through the game and penned on this site that I still consider Final Fantasy VI required reading for anyone with even a marginal interest in writing about games under an academic light, and I stand by that to this day.

I run this account and its still is primarily an account meant to promote the user-created works on the site. In terms of promoting the staff-related stuff, you will have to reach out to them in terms of getting site announcements on non-Twitter/X social media platforms.

Call me basic, but I like Charizard and Blastoise as well as the legendary birds in generation one of Pokémon. Also, Bulbasaur is dumb. This is a discussion about the best and coolest Pokémon, not dumbest looking plant-dog-like things!

After months of speculation, Embracer Group has finally sold Gearbox Software at a price tag of $460 million and the buyer happens to be Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc.The rumors of Embracer selling Gearbox have persisted since the start of 2023 as the company's leadership continue to maintain plans for contraction as it struggles with mounting debt. Take-Two being the buyer of Gearbox shouldn't come as too much of a surprise considering they have published every single Borderlands game since the start of the series. However, the sale comes with a major catch. Take-Two's purchase is only netting them Gearbox Software, Gearbox Montreal, and Gearbox Studio Quebec and the IPs associated with those outfits which include, but are not limited to, Borderlands, Homeworld, Risk of Rain, Brothers in Arms, and Duke Nukem. Oh, and Take-Two have confirmed that Randy Pitchford will remain as the CEO of Gearbox.

It's important to note that unlike its third party competitors like EA or Ubisoft, Take-Two is structured as a gaming holding company and doesn't itself engage in internal development. They instead primarily rely on their two publishing labels, Rockstar Games and 2K to operate game studios that they own. They also have a "third division," Private Division, which operates to gain publishing rights to mid-budget titles and indie games, and a fourth division called T2 Mobile Games/Socialpoint which does mobile games. Ken Levine's Ghost Story is maybe the company's fifth division, but that delineation is not very clear. Gearbox will be tied to the 2K division, which was already tasked with maintaining the publishing for the Borderlands IP, and is best known for the NBA 2K games, but also manages Firaxis as well as Hangar 13.

Embracer is retaining Gearbox Publishing San Francisco and some of Gearbox's subsidiaries like Cryptic Studios, Lost Boys Interactive, and Captured Dimension. This means that the rights to Remnant, Neverwinter Online, Star Trek Online, and Hyper Light Breaker will remain with Embracer. Likewise, the television adaption of Borderlands will not be impacted by this deal and Take-Two has indicated that it will not be completed until the first quarter of Take-Two's 2025 fiscal year.

It is INCREDIBLY important to note that while $460 million is a large sum of money, Embracer paid $1.3 billion to buy all of Gearbox Interactive in 2021. Even if the company's main objective is to reduce its debt, that is a major loss and this sale coincides with Embracer selling Saber Interactive and a number of associated studios to Saber to the tune of ~$250 million and staffing layoffs at Edios-Montreal as well as Lost Boys Interactive. Embracer already missed its Q3 targets and these moves are likely not the end of its attempts s to reduce debt.

There's some important news related to Giant Bomb's Blight Club feature. During the Giant Beastcast reunion panel, which was unfortunately not recorded, Alex Navarro announced that he would be taking the title "GAMES MASTER OF BLIGHT CLUB" in light of Dan missing/skipping his turn a little while ago. Alex's first decree is for Dan to play the following two games sequentially the moment he completes Superman:

1. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
2. Drake of the 99 Dragons

Why did Alex pick these two games? Well, they remain two of the lowest rated games from his tenure as an editor and reviewer at GameSpot. For example, in his 3.7/10 review for Terminator 3 he stated:

The game is, at its heart, a first-person shooter, but it also contains a boatload of CG and taken-from-the-film cutscenes, as well as a fighting game-styled combat system. This all may sound well and good, but Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines feels like a rushed hack-job of a game, with just barely enough cohesive action to keep it from completely falling apart at the seams.

Despite the fact that four different development teams worked on various aspects of Terminator 3, the game, as a whole, still feels completely slapdash and thrown-together. None of its gameplay components come together in any kind of an interesting way to make the game the least bit entertaining to play, and the muddy visuals, mediocre audio, and largely absent plot just don't make Terminator 3 anything worth recommending in the slightest. The only remaining thing that could appeal to anyone is the significant amount of film footage and random behind-the-scenes featurettes contained on the disc, but nearly all of this can be found on the recently released Terminator 3 DVD, which also has this footage in significantly better quality and doesn't require you to play through this mess of a game to unlock it all. If you want Terminator 3, watch the movie and pretend this game doesn't exist. You'll be infinitely better off.

Fun fact, Terminator 3 comes from developer Black Ops Entertainment and runs on the same game engine as Fugitive Hunter: War on Terror. You know... the game where you get into a fist-fight with Osama bin Laden in the name of avenging the death of the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Nonetheless, the real doozy is Drake of the 99 Dragons which Alex maintains is "the worst game I have ever played," and his 1.6/10 review stands as a testament of that. In fact, the final paragraph of his review is absolutely scathing in its rejection of the game:

To simply call Drake bad would be a major understatement. Drake is simply an out-and-out failure in every single discernable category. Whatever style or pizzazz that Idol FX has tried to create for its comic book world is buried under a pile of cheap graphics, a lame story, awful audio, and an abysmal gameplay system that would still be painful to play even if it weren't as decisively broken as it is. There's nothing stylish or interesting about Drake, and, to be quite frank, any time spent playing this game is an absolute waste. If it isn't clear up to this point, let us sum it up with one simple statement: Don't play this game.

So, yeah, if Dan manages to survive this gauntlet then he is clearly made of tougher stuff than all of us combined.

Correct.

Piorot is and always will be David Suchet to me. There's no way you can change my mind. Don't even bother.