ALLTheDinos

Great writeup! I'm in chapter 10 currently, but the game already feels like a top 5 lock for me at GOTY time. I joined this series for LAD, and Ichiban is absolutely my main draw. But I've also been surprised how much I care about Kiryu after being worried they were pushing Ichiban into costar status.

One thing I will say about this game is that it doesn't feel disrespectful of my time, in spite of the dozens of hours I've put into it. It might sound boring recapping what I do in a 2 hour block of the game (kinda wander around getting into random fights in search of photo locations), but the moment-to-moment is so engaging that I don't care. The relatively short timer for each day on Dondoko Island keeps me wanting to do one more thing there, and I usually don't care for that genre of game. Infinite Wealth is really much more than the sum of its parts.

Using the original intent of "gaming until it becomes A Problem for your sleep cycle", I nearly stayed up until midnight this past December playing Against the Storm. I can't remember anything beyond that, since I've got two small children that have irreversibly damaged my brain.

If Balatro were on my phone, I might never sleep.

@bigsocrates: For whatever it's worth, I disqualify winners and runner-ups from previous years from the list. Layoffs won the commenter's choice award last year and had its jersey raised to the rafters; I guess we could call it the Mario Lemieux of gaming news and unretire it for a second run? At any rate, I plan to post my list in progress in a few weeks, maybe sooner if something batshit like the Unity fiasco happens again.

To your other point, I think it's super representative of entertainment regulators to abhor the aesthetic of gambling but not real, substantive gambling. There's a total lack of curiosity to check the basic fact of whether you can actually put real money into the game after you've bought it. The game cannot possibly improve your poker skills beyond recognizing when you have a scoring hand and when you might be on the verge of having a great scoring hand (and even then...). This is the kind of braindead decisionmaking that gave the gaming community a kneejerk distrust of regulators of all kinds in the 90's.

I've been waffling on whether or not I should add this to my running Hottest Mess list, and I think I've decided on "yes". Not for me thinking it's a hotter mess than, say, Skull & Bones, but because this situation is incredibly stupid and deserves recognition.

Great writeup! I love reading about the early Final Fantasy games because IV is the first one I played. As someone who stays away from FF rankings (why yes I am an VIII freak, how did you know), I always felt V was surprisingly great and underrepresented. Comparing this to V makes me want to circle around to it, but also that endgame sounds like the least parent-friendly area ever.

@skuski: While I appreciate the work you did finding all of this, I don't think anyone's issue was that he might be compensated more than his peers. The issue is that he makes THIS much money to lead EA to a point where hundreds lose their jobs and exciting games are cancelled. If you want to interpret that as criticism of the job itself and the ludicrous market for its compensation, that matches my thoughts (and probably those of other posters).

I forget who reported this, but apparently at the price of the stock buyback that EA did recently, they could have kept everyone they laid off this week around for another 5 years. How are you supposed to interpret these layoffs besides c-suite looting of companies that exist to create products? The people at the top don't make shit, but the corporate world in 2024 only cares about quarterly reports and "the brand". Tanking EA just accelerates the rate at which they can loot the company and get their precious golden parachute.

Sorry to keep hammering this point but it's never been more clear that these layoffs only happen to artificially juice top-level numbers. Meanwhile, the people who make games suffer, the people who want to make games hit a hiring blockade, and we all get worse games as a result. All to justify some dipshit's bloated compensation.

The Insomniac layoffs have really put a fine point on this entire industry-wide saga. You really can do everything right, and it will not help you keep your job. The corporate greed and shareholder idiocy are going to fuck up this industry (more than they have already) while enhancing absolutely nothing.

If Elden Ring is essentially Dark Souls 4-6, is it too much to expect this to be Dark Souls 7 based on the time it took? The Ringed City was a beefy DLC for 3, and I feel like putting this on another map is going to make The Ringed City look like a trifle.

Regardless, I am very excited, enough so that I'm unwisely considering a new character. Talk me out of this please (don't talk me out of this).

Dino Crisis 2! Sorry, force of habit.

My real answer is F-Zero GX. That's probably the only first-party game I really loved on the Gamecube. I've had a bizarre hankering for that Lord of the Rings rpg that was an obvious ripoff of Final Fantasy X, but no one should work on anything related to that one.