ALLTheDinos

The "and Friends" moniker is incredibly bizarre. At least it'll help me remember which companies are still owned by king dumbass Lars Wingefors.

As you said, I wish any sort of change to Embracer was beneficial to the people who've suffered under it, but this sure doesn't seem like it. Really tough to laugh at the stupidity of it all when so many careers and lives have been negatively affected.

Great writeup! I appreciate your orb notation!

This game is so elegantly designed. I probably said this in my GOTY list last year, but it always gives you precisely what you need and no more to solve a given puzzle. Really nails what a lot of other puzzle games lack in a lot of respects.

Big Fish Theory was my 2017 Album of the Year, and it feels like that has only held up better with time. His track on Gorillaz' Humanz made me seek him out, and I immediately fell in love with his lyrical craftsmanship. You noted most of what I love about the album already, but Vince is also goddamn hilarious anytime he wants to be. Pretty much the only minus for me is the misogyny, which while par for the course in the genre is still disappointing (yikes at the Chris Brown defense in "Love Can Be").

@cikame: If I counted every time stupid right-wing shitheads got offended by something they made up, my Notes app would be nothing but those entries.

@bigsocrates: Admittedly, I don't expect most of these to hang. I jot them down into a Notes app as I become aware of stuff, and I intend to re-examine them each time I update this list. A few of them are hints of bigger issues (like DD2 and Tekken 8 both revealing micropurchases after reviews are in) that might blossom into true hot messes in the fall. The further we get from the news, the less likely I am to remember it existed, and I never know what gets a pop on these things.

For clarification: the Xbox multiplatform candidate is not about them going multiplatform (which seems like a solid business decision but idk), so much as it is about them completely fumbling their messaging during two weeks of rampant speculation. Rolling the "news" out on a podcast that didn't answer anything, not even the names of the first 4 games, was a bizarre way to address it. I think it speaks to a larger issue at Xbox of them simply not knowing what to do with the console.

Overwatch 2 has been added to my rolling list, thanks for the recommendations!

@regularassmilk: Christ, the AV Club Kinjapocalypse is probably my biggest forums-related heartbreak of all time. The comments were so key to my enjoyment of that site, particularly for the Simpsons Classic reviews, and one day they were basically gone forever. I guess I wouldn't have started posting here if that never happened (lurker since 2010), so there's one silver lining?

This whole thing is a colossally poor decision made by a thin-skinned loser who seems only capable of making poor decisions and failing upwards. I feel bad for everyone impacted and anyone who was still enjoying Kotaku's content.

I always saw Alex's role in this series as the Mads from Mystery Science Theater 3000. Give him an invention exchange budget and a TV's Frank to pick through his dvd collection in the background!

Drake of the 99 Dragons is absolutely brutal. Make sure Grubb and Minotti have copies of the tie-in comic to read every time Dan dies in the game, unless that planned tie-in comic was never made.

@efesell: Monster Hunter World, which is sitting at Very Positive (88%), has exactly 200 items listed in its DLC section on Steam. LAD: Infinite Wealth locked off NG+ in DLC and is 91% positive. Truly feels like some people have nothing better to do than to write reviews for games they don't intend to keep because they have Denuvo or microtransactions. This is not a defense of either of those things, people can do whatever they want with Steam reviews, but they do look like petulant idiots.

As for the framerate: is it really that important to a game's performance? I was under the impression that it was a piece of the puzzle, but a 60 fps game will not automatically run better than a 30 fps game. If my understanding is correct (or partially correct), then it sort of feels like drawing a hard line on framerate has become shorthand for advance complaints about how a game might perform. I had no performance issues with Starfield, a recent game locked at 30 fps, and I'm sure I've played other games that felt buttery smooth that didn't even kiss 60 fps. I just kind of ignore reports about framerates these days because the information ends up meaning nothing to me, barring something about the game dipping to single digits.

I bounced off the first game, but I'm going to buy this one. I think it was the vocation spotlight videos that really drew me into the hype, and reading several reviews (including Austin Walker's on Remap) have confirmed that I'm in the right mindset now to enjoy DD2. Helps that I'm getting close to the end of LAD: Infinite Wealth and open to another long-term playthrough of a game.

@sparky_buzzsaw: My interpretation of the question is something that really bowled you over with a game (though it can be not a game too). Probably more on the technical side of things like the op and subsequent answers have noted, but it seems open to interpretation.

I have a pretty low bar for being impressed, so I'll go with something from this year. The load times for Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth have been nearly nonexistent for me on a Series X. I spend more time looking at the RGG logo before the main menu than I do waiting for the game to load. Yakuza: Like A Dragon, which I also played on a Series X, took much longer to load. Someone at RGG really focused on optimization, and I greatly appreciate it.