hermes

Hi,

Just to inform that the latest episode ("829: Fantasian" according to the youtube archive) seems to be missing from the site and feeds. If I go to latest, it takes me to episode 812 (Oct/2023).

Also, the carousel and grid features only shows up to january...

I wouldn't get ahead of it myself...

Games are auctioned to be adapted every week, movies are put in preproduction regularly, with directors, writers and stars being planned all the time. Remember Metal Gear? Remember Borderlands? Bioshock? God of War? Kane & Lynch?... I could do this all day...

Until there is a trailer and a release date, I wouldn't trust any of those news above the level of "rumored".

No. Even when the ending is bad, and a solution relatively easy to implement (looking at you, Fallout 3), a game with a broken ending is often the result of more broken decisions along the way, as such, any effort to change it after the fact is being disingenuous with the released game and the audience.

The Katamari series... All of it. In a delightful yet somehow demented way.

Also, Patrick has become sort of a cohost to Decoding TV with David Chen, a podcast/youtube channel that does in-depth coverage of streaming based TV shows (stuff like Loki, Ashoka and Black Mirror). It used to have different guests for different shows, but Patrick was recently "promoted" to fixed fixture...

Austin has been a third chair in Nextlander show "Never been a better podcast" several times, with Abby, Bakalar and Dan.

I am voting for 0.

This year is pretty stacked, and the only times they talked about Starfield in the weeks following its release was with derision.

I often find that a negative/mediocre review is more useful than a glowing one.

A review that says "this product is awesome 10/10" says as little to me as "this product is worst than cholera 1/10". On the Internet is seems like every opinion has to be great or awful, with barely anything in between. However, a review that sits in the middle and actually tells me why something is not the best thing since sliced bread is more useful. If the qualms the reviewer has with something align with mine, it would affect negatively the purchase; if they don't, at least I will be informed of the issues, even those that are not relevant to me.

Just wanted to mention the Dark and Darker mess as a possible contender.

For those unfamiliar:

To summarize: A group of people left Nexon (a south korean game publisher/development house) to create their own studio and do "things properly". They created a game called Dark and Darker, a roguelike dungeon crawler, which exploded online during their beta... which caused their former employers to pay closer attention to this rogue project, and it seems like the new game has some assets and code stolen and thinly disguised from the project they were previously working for on Nexon.

Not to side with the big corporation (for once), but it seems like they might have a pretty good case here, especially because when served, they proceeded to destroy (not delete, destroy) all stolen assets which, while not proving their guilt, certainly didn't help to prove their innocence. There are also screenshots of their discord talking about some unsavory practices. The game has been delisted from steam while the legal case is in dispute, but they continue to support it via torrent.

The Unity mess has the stench of very poorly thought out business decision being confronted with reality. I don't want to presume, but I wouldn't be surprised if the time between conception and communication of this plan can be counted on hours.

The fact they have to backpedal or double down with every concern raised, makes me think they didn't take much feedback before going forward... What happens with demos? What happens with game pass? What happens with games online? Who gets the numbers? How do we validate them? What happens if some malicious person decides to bump up the numbers to make us pay more?

@bigsocrates Specially if one of the small companies is Microsoft and they are trying to stick the bill for everything in the Gamepass Store.

I often am against the idea of Hottest Mess getting too real, because I think it sours the taste of good fun we try to have at laughing at people getting too big for their own britches, and nobody wins when passionate people lose their jobs and storied companies get shut down (in the past, I was against the nomination of Telltale and Activision layoffs), but damn it, if The Embracer Group crumbling like a house of cards is not the biggest, hottest mess I have witness in the last few years, I don't know what is. Not in the beating a dead horse kind of mess, more in the watching a train accident kind of mess...

That is all I have to say. I will still feel more comfortable laughing at the implosion of Twitter after being bought by a certifiable manchild or the ESA struggling to justify their own existence, than people being cut off of their livelihood by executives so out of touch that still think NFTs are the future, but I can see that mess is an apt descriptor for those news...