asylumrunner

Why post this? What was gained? Was there a moment where you looked at this draft and went "oh yeah this isn't very dumb to post"

I dunno, if it was on a guest's GOTY list, is a parody title, and has gotten a decent amount of mainstream news coverage, feels like it should go here.

If we have pages for Barkley Shut Up And Jam Gaiden and Dong Dong Never Die, this doesn't feel too different

@mikewhy: Ah! My reading comprehension is in the toilet today. In that case, I don't think skipping around is necessarily super conducive to this series, I might just say to just go ahead and play Judgement and 7. It's like (pardon the choice of series but it's the only multiple-installment series I can think of that works as a comparison point) watching Harry Potter 1, then 4, then watching the Fantastic Beast movies.

I think if you're going to skip one of them, skip Kiwami 1. It's the exact same mechanics as 0, with half of the playable characters, a kind of bunk plot, and some middling side stories marred by the fact that they're from an era before the series knew what it wanted to do with tone.

Otherwise, numerical order, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Sprinkle Judgement in whenever you want (I would recommend between 4 and 5). The clumsiest game you're going to hit mechanically at this point is 3: 4 and 5 manage to spice things up pretty well with the old engine, and Kiwami 2 is running on the same engine as Judgement and 6, so that's nice and fluid and modern.

If the people who get the short end of the stick here are billionaire Wall Street hedge fund managers, having been memed into insolvency by a bunch of self-proclaimed idiots on Reddit, then as far as I'm concerned, enjoy destitution, nerds, shoulda got a real job.

I am by no means an expert (nor a lawyer), but the stock market generally always struck me as a sort of rich person perpetual motion machine, an economic device that does literally nothing productive where, if you have enough capital to start off with, enough knowledge in extremely baroque market trends (or enough additional money to hire someone with that knowledge), or alternatively just barely enough odds at a lucky win to convince regular people they have a shot, then it just churns away turning money into more money without actualy doing anything. Except, oh, every ten years or so it explodes and launches everyone else into a recession.

It's dumb, that's a lot of words to say the stock market is stupid, and I'm kind of okay with it being obliterated by 1000 monkeys with 1000 typewriters pooling together their power into the kind of market force normally reserved for blandly-named corporate firms.

Been playing it a lot this weekend, started over from scratch mostly just because I knew I'd want to play all of 1 and 2 again, and honestly I don't mind the chance to do all of the opportunities again.

Absolutely no opinion on 3 yet, put 10 hours into the game and I literally just moved on from the Hitman 1 content. By that metric Hitman 3 is the greatest video game of all time

Wonderful write-up!

I actually have another backlog that I end up thinking of a lot with my game backlog, and that's the extremely imposing number of books I've been meaning to read. I have three bookcases packed to the gills with books (which have become all the more omnipresent since moving into a studio apartment), but like my game backlog, my book backlog is more than just a sterile list of the things I want to play or read that I haven't yet.

For one thing, the mere act of accumulating a backlog is sort of a memory aide for me. Not all of us have the encyclopedic memory of the world of games as a Tim Rogers, or the colossal collection of a Jeff Gerstmann, and for me, my backlog partially exists just to remind me that certain games exist and came out, and that they're worth remembering as I look back on the hobby. This is a big chunk of the reason I still like to hold on to physical media, both books and games, is that once I clear something from my backlog, there's a physical reminder of it to hold on to that can help me recall it just by pulling a title off a shelf. Either way, with so many games coming out and so much, I dunno, life, it can be nice just to remember what games happened.

On the other hand, a backlog is also fundamentally aspirational. For most people, especially people who haven't been playing games since the Atari, a backlog is unconquerable. Good games come out all the time, and any time spent looking back and knocking out the classics is time for new games to slip onto your list, and time spent chasing the new hotness is time that That Old Classic Which I've Not Gotten Around To Yet is left to languish. But, thanks to personal brain worms and the slow creeping corruption of the American capitalist Puritanical work ethic, I like to measure all of my time, including my leisure time, in "productivity", and transforming the hobby of games into a checklist does help me to feel that arbitrary sense of "productivity". But, ultimately, it really exists as a way to justify to myself to carve out a bit of time to play games and enjoy myself. Something about "oh, I should clear this thing from my backlog" carries more weight in my mind than "oh I should play this game", and it serves as a motivation to actually sit down and play a game instead of doomscroll or do work or just do nothing.

Seconding the opening of Prey, which is, in my opinion, the best opening hour of any video game ever made.

In Yakuza 0, when you realize Tachibana is the man with the bat tattoo, and that Makoto is the owner of the Empty Lot, that was a huge "oh my gooooooooood" moment for me.

I don't know if it counts as a twist, but for me the moment early in NieR Automata where you come across all the machines just straight up bonin' had a very twist-like effect on me where all of my expectations of the game went directly into the trash and I just stared there going "uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh okay where do we go from here"

Missed the live podcast today, time to take a big swig of coffee and check this thread all about one of my favorite Giant Bomb personalities Ben Pack.

Gonna miss you on the Bombcast, looking forward to seeing whatever your next endeavor will be!

Just finished listening to the podcast, looking forward to not hearing from you much at all and hoping you're comfortable out of the public spotlight!

@archer88: Tim deserves an emmy for the sheer number of times he puts that toenail clip in that video