@av_gamer: Jess was absolutely not constantly complaining about Aloy. Go back and listen to the Bombcasts where they talk about this game. Everyone on the staff who played this game criticized it for this exact same reason. Yeah, Jess talked about this particular criticism more than everyone else, but Jeff agreed with her. And none of her criticism was directed at Aloy as a character. It was all framed as the game's designers not trusting the audience.
The Last of US is the Hamilton of video games. Anyone can look at it and see that it's well made. But goddamn, the amount of ridiculous praise it gets from critics and fans alike is just so off-putting that I can't care about it.
Every generation believes that the young people are wrong and have bad taste in things. It's easy to just look at stuff and be like, "Stuff was better when I was a kid." A bunch of adults talking about how stupid kids' movies are isn't particularly interesting or useful: the audience of a kids' movie isn't reading reviews for that movie, and they're seeing the movie anyways because their parents are taking them. It is with these caveats that I see this:
Minions are so fucking stupid. Children deserve and are capable of understanding better movies than these.
One of the single most annoying things about game announcements is when people make fun of the name of a thing before they even know what that thing is. It's so obnoxious and pointless. All video game names, removed from context, sound dumb. And you know what? It doesn't matter. At all. I remember when the Wii came out and people talked about how dumb the name was. You know what didn't matter at all in the long run? How dumb the name "Wii" sounds. Everyone does this at some point, and it's just so tiresome.
how do you make travelling in space (known for being pretty empty) interesting?
As far as I can tell, you have two options here: you make it non-scientific and fantastical, or you have really interesting characters. It's the difference between an asteroid belt in Star Wars and the asteroid belt in The Expanse. I'm not a game designer, but it feels like the latter is much easier to do in a book or a television show that has transitions between settings and scenes than in an open-world game where the player might do the same actions over and over and over again.
@dudelongcouch: I enjoy most of Tam's stuff, but he is an utterly unreliable narrator when it comes to Elden Ring. I say this as someone who has 58 hours in Elden Ring and is going to play more today. Criticizing another game for having opaque systems in the same breath that you praise Elden Ring's systems is hilarious.
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