Gundato

@dizzyhippos: Well, there is "insane" and "just about every single story about him involves sexually assaulting someone and exposing himself to the general public". Which has worked out well for him but may not be the kind of highlight you want in the news about your new acquisition.

But yeah. If TK really likes him then I can see it. Which is kind of what pushed me away from AEW. I love the wrestling and liked most of the stories but it was very clear they were the same carnie bullshit. But even then I can't see AEW hiring him in the next few months (when is that dark side airing?)

@dizzyhippos: Ah. So probably just drama and the hopes to negotiate a better contract

And I doubt Ric is going AEW. He hates Arn with a passion and even though AEW's response toward abusers hasn't been the best (and mostly highlights how low the bar is for wrestling...), Tony et al know that The Plane Ride From Hell dark side is imminent and is unlikely to pull any punches on Ric's (at best) sexually assaulting ass and will hopefully portray that more as "And then Ric Flair assaulted a flight attendant and everyone laughed" rather than "Ha ha, and then crazy old Ric tried to convince some pretty stewardess to ride space mountain".

So.... Adam Cole (that's Britt Baker's Boyfriend!) apparently no longer works with WWE.

Unclear if he got shitcanned or he just left. I can't imagine a case where WWE would fire him since he is the kind of talent even investors understand is valuable but...

@antime: Yes, there are the execs and the senior staff getting women drunk in The Cosby Suite

There is also the recruiters at a job fair/conference making "jokes" about penetrating a cybersecurity expert and wanting to know where her boyfriend is. Or apparently the multiple people who think it is okay to enter a breastfeeding room to stare at women until they get shouted out. Or the guys who obsess over their coworkers and write them incredibly creepy letters that are so distinctive and frequent that other women can identify the person immediately because they had to deal with the same stalking. This is behavior that permeated multiple companies and likely isn't unheard of at others based on some responses we are hearing on twitter et al. Before this kicked off people were starting to remember all the microaggressions and shit that drove women out of Insomniac for decades.

Unions shift the power from management to the workers and are generally good. But when the workers have the same toxic culture, it doesn't fix anything. Maybe you are a frigging board member getting pressured into sex by other board members because your boyfriend died a few weeks ago. Maybe you are someone who needs your union to stand up for you who is experiencing the same abuse from those reps too.

And a lot of that is because one of the major contributing reasons that this is so pervasive in the gaming industry is the same reason it is so pervasive in "techbro" culture in general: These are late stage "start up" companies where the management is very much a meritocracy based solely on shipped products and technical ability. You shipped an awesome product so now you are a manger because you know how to ship great products. But you never learned how to be a manager and you think the key is to just replicate what you know works and that leads to "locker room" talk and not understanding why diversity and inclusive workplaces matter. Clearly you know better than all those out of touch suits so they should shut the fuck up if you need to let off some steam by showing your coworkers the creepy binder full of pictures you have of the lead actress of your game. And that tends to snowball and make others think that is how they need to manage their workers and so forth.

And that gets back to the point: it isn't just the managers who are toxic. It is the culture of the industry. So if you shift the power from the managers to the workers... you aren't changing the culture that has the power.

I still think the games industry desperately needs broad unions that encompass everything from golden goose lead developers down to the poor bastard who needs to recreate what is corrupting endgame saves during hour one of a bethesda RPG. I don't think unionizing will have much, if any, bearing on the pervasive misogyny in the industry.

Not sure how obscure or interesting mine would be, but probably one of these three

Star Crusader which was a space flight sim in the vein of wing commander with branching paths, really bad CGI cutscenes, an expansion pack that you mailed the guy a check to download off an FTP server, and a stealth/scanning system that never made a single bit of sense. I still have that expansion on a disk somewhere.

Tachyon: The Fringe which was ALSO a space flight sim in the vein of wing commander (although it probably mapped closer to Freelancer) and ALSO had a branching narrative and traded out the expansion pack and nonsense for Bruce Campbell saying "That's a... big gun". Also the trick was to activate "slide" while boosting to go at max speed because it tried to model real-ish space physics. I remember playing this through probably dozens of times and the branching defense mission being something I could only ever do if it was the first thing I did on a saturday morning because it was so bullshit.

And lastly, Necrovision which was a weird probably bad FPS set in World War 1 where you end up fighting vaguely steampunk/magitech vampires for some reason. This was probably a very bad game but it lives rent-free in my head and I think of it at random ass times. Have yet to install the gog version I bought but someday

And honorable mention to Hidden and Dangerous 2 but I think that was actually a REALLY successful and popular game.

Finished Dark Souls 2 and I continue my love/hate relationship with that game. It is amazing for what it tried and what it became (*cough* Sekiro *cough*) but holy crap is it just mean in ways From hadn't been since Demon Souls

So, as a palette cleanser, I decided to play A Plague Tale: Innocence because of course I did. I am sure there is other stuff going on in my life but this is the first time in decades that a video game has given me nightmares. The lighting and rat tech is so good that I have woken up multiple times over the past week or two thinking the walls are moving.

And narratively, I love it. The intro is very reminiscent of Yakuza 3 in that I am sure some people will hate it but I loved how much time the game went in to making me give a shit about Amicia and Hugo and it pays dividends later. As the game goes on you start to find out more that makes you question what is REALLY going on but... it doesn't matter because Hugo is your little brother and you need to protect him.

Mechanically... yeah, this is definitely an adventure game and it is full of bullshit to the point I had to bing the solution to a few of the puzzles. But mostly it flows

@monkeyking1969: With the vita form factor I can just take it out of my bag, play a bit, and toss it back in when I reach my stop or whatever. With a laptop I need to take out the laptop, balance that on my knees or a tray, pair the controller, and then play

The clamshell form factor has a LOT of issues in terms of balance. If you think the steam link is chonky then that is chonky AND unbalanced. Usually pretty top heavy and uncomfrotable.

But yeah, there is nothing stopping gdp or aya from getting the same hardware. And that is a good thing. Because this isn't a closed garden. This is to make people more comfortable with the idea of just playing with a gaming form factor laptop on the go. Which benefits Valve (and MS) a lot.

I admit I am pretty keen on this (more or less convinced myself to get a windows handheld in early 2021 and was just figuring out what model) but if folk have ANY interest in this they should probably just make a reservation before it opens up tomorrow

5 dollars but fully refundable (as steam credit) to get into the queue and you are going to have plenty of opportunities to see influencers, random folk, and probably even GB do coverage on the device before your window opens up. It looks bad? Just get your 5 bucks back. It looks good? Congrats, you can get it q1/q2 rather than q4 or from a scalper bot.

@frytup: For what its worth, I have a two or three gen old apu on my living room PC. Mostly that is a streaming box but I have found I can generally play two or three year old games at 1080p at medium-high settings. If amd-dlss is "good enough" then getting "reasonable" visuals on modern TVs seem reasonable and I suspect it will be comparable to console vs PC before this generation... but swapping them.

That being said: I would assume the idea would be more to stream from a beefy PC at that point... but also there is no need for a dedicated streaming hardware for that because basically everything can run the steam streaming app these days.