bludgeonParagon

Axing an entire chunk of the small handful of personalities that even remain on the personality-based content creation website, in order to try and balance the cash flow, is the dumbest fucking blood-from-a-stone I've seen in a good while.

I know these decisions aren't made on vibes like the ones I operate on but I followed the new lineup of GB members with genuine, legitimate excitement at the new energy that was being brought in, and having a whole portion of that energy just uncermoniously axed like that is just plain rotten.

I guess I'll keep my sub for now but boy did I have a long and hard think about it this morning.

I would be the absolute last person to jump to the kind of conspiracy theories that people have been bandying about because most of them are so absurd and outlandish they read like absolute nonsense. My point is that Jeff's exit was the most unceremonious of the lot even by the standards of previous departures, with nary an announcement from the horse's mouth on the website. The fact that readers weren't able to suss out the probable motivation until Gerstmann's self-employment Patreon was brought up the day after his departure is the reason we got the unhinged reactions from people like OP. So I think compared to things like the breakup of GBE (who were very clear before their exit that they were Pretty Tired Of All This), the optics of this probably could have been managed better.

Otherwise, I think we're just agreeing past each other on the issue

I don't think the announcement needed an entire 12 hours worth of a countdown, but I was thoroughly entertained and assuaged by the announcement of permanent staffing as to the future of Giant Bomb. Gerstmann departing is a huge bummer (and so far it doesn't look like we're getting a clear explanation from him as to why) but independent of that, Grubb and Dan are basically the best options to pick up the slack for the void Gerstmann left behind (industry expertise and content creation). It was an extremely important announcement to make that clearly had a lot of work put into it and needed to make sure it got as many eyes on it as soon as possible.

I think the timing and ongoing lack of information prior to the Bombcast is still awkward as hell and part of me suspects that we might never learn the proper reason why Jeff left, but people projecting "disrespect" for Gerstmann need to seriously check their parasocial relationship with the personalities on this website.

The only thing I'd like to see from PvP Resident Evil is asymmetrical boss/miniboss versus humans 1v4 or some sort of invasion-style format where players basically play as the zombies.

There's plenty of ways to skin this cat that don't just involve ordinary shootman deathmatch

Sometimes for me double-clicking the post button triggers the error but then posts it afterwards anyway

It's kinda wack

I play videogames pretty religiously almost every day as part of my down-time but I've never found the need to go through the effort to take time off work to play through one. I find that I run the risk of losing interest a lot if I try and binge something - not out of boredom, but just out of habit.

Besides super short games like Call of Duty campaigns that amount to one sitting and a half, the only games I can think of that I actually marathon'd from start to finish would be Resident Evil 4 (Wiimote version, which sucked me in at a beach house during a post-high school graduation holiday), and Halo 4, which happened during a holiday of similar length - but neither of these I planned to explicitly take time off for, they were just games that I had happened upon during a holiday and was like "y'know what, sure".

The closest I probably would have gotten to actually planning time off would have probably been Mass Effect 3 since I would have been at a fever pitch to see the resolution of the trilogy at the time, but I don't think I was even employed that year. I liked taking a week off for E3s past, but that was just the vibe of a consumerist love of videogames always tied with a social gathering where all my videogame-lovin' buddies would lounge in one room, get hype for marketing and play related games simultaneously. Much less incentive without the social component.

Most recently, the final boss of Ori and the Will of the Wisps ends with a phase where the boss straight up deletes all the platforms and the player has to simultaneously attack the boss while leapfrogging off bullet hell projectiles raining from the sky to stay afloat in the air.

In hindsight it was a simple test of a basic, frequently-used ability picked up in the first hours of the game but it never occurred to me that the game built around the joy of its platforming would escalate by straight up removing the platforms - it took me up to 5-10 entire minutes of very dumb, continuous dying for me to realize and I yelled "holy shit are you serious" at my screen, out loud.

That game fucking rules.

The first one that actually came to my mind though, was a (kinda mild, in hindsight) moment in Halo 4 where the player turns the corner of a cave tunnel and sees a bunch of floating Forerunner structures out in the open space inside the weird bubble planet, so tall they disappear into clouds at the top of the skybox, and it's accompanied by a synthy vocal track backed by a swelling orchestra going completely apeshit.

I like the game but I consider it kinda mid overall, but I do remember just panning up to the sky and going "damn I'm kinda small huh", which is the right feeling to cultivate in a sci-fi series like Halo.

Remember Me is a super strong contender, it has a top tier aesthetic and some cool narrative devices mixed with some ho-hum combat, but I'd love to see Dontnod come back with a sequel with what they've learned from their storytelling experience so far. The Neo Paris setting is some really gorgeous cyberpunk design

More recently, I still had a ton of fun with Anthem and enjoy booting it up for a game or two every so often, which guarantees making me a social pariah. I find its core mechanics more satisfying and structurally different from the games it was constantly compared against. Personally, I can latch onto a satisfying loop more strongly than I do against on-paper discussions about content longevity etc.

I'm sure the gaming scene has plenty more to "cling" onto than a mediocre third person shooter stretched over a well-written script.

Cannata made a disappointingly silly generalisation about all videogames to hype up what was rightfully pointed out as what probably boils down to the flavour of the month. I agree that his problem wasn't "man compares new zombie game to the Holocaust", but his hyperbole was super reductive and deserved to be dunked on pretty hard.

I don't even think that he's wrong about having a conversation about games explicitly eschewing fun to convey a theme, but let's not pretend that this is somehow a novel, groundbreaking concept (to say nothing of how TLOU2 is probably still designed to be mechanically, if not narratively, satisfying).

Druckmann and Barlog should have just avoided putting themselves out like that and saved themselves the embarrassment