inspectorfowler

YT Premium is a relative gamechanger.

We keep our family plan with it because my wife teaches elementary school music and frequently uses videos of ballets, orchestra performances, folk music performances, etc. She can’t afford to have a weird or questionable ad pop up before or during a video (not to mention it just seems cheap and weird to show ads to kids).

We pay $15 for that and for both of us (and my parents) to have ad-free YT and also get YT Music (which isn’t great but rarely doesn’t have the music I want) I’m fine with that.

If I could only keep one game series it would be Uakuza and the stories are a big part of it. The “main” story can always be summarized in a way that says “mediocre dramatic movie” but when you add in the side material, characters like yakuza who wear diapers, the incredibly overwrought emotions of the characters, etc., it gets out of hand really fast in a delightful way.

It’s different for each pet and it takes a long time. In almost 21 years of marriage we’ve lost three dogs. With one we grieved right away and felt a little better. When the next one died, we had acquired a young dog and her very joyous attitude sort of accidentally covered our grief about the older one until one day we had a moment and both broke down sobbing in the living room. That let us know we needed to talk about it more and deal with it.

Dan Ryckert got me onto meditation which has helped a ton with anxiety but it has also helped me to be able to sit in really bad emotions and live with them rather than try to suppress them. Overall I think it has helped me through some pretty sad stuff in a more productive way in terms of emotional health.

Weird to think a guy who thought egg shells were egg whites would produce such a positive change in my emotional health but here we are.

I think it’s too late to save the game but Battlefield 2042 is starting to make some actual changes the fans have requested. It’s heartening to see but I won’t go back (on console, anyway) until they stop PC to console crossplay and just leave it at PC to PC or console to console. I have friends on other consoles but I am not going to open myself to that kind of savagery just to play with them.

It really depends. There are only a few games I will come back to over and over. The Yakuza series is one of them, and some of the others are included in subscription services. Basically once I've beat a game I almost never go back (I can't help loving the world of the Yakuza games enough to repeat them).

I know I'm an outlier in the enthusiast communities - I couldn't care less about vintage games or any of that stuff. I love it when Gerstmann gets wrapped up in his retro stuff but I would never play those games. I fully support it but I play games to get immersed in a world I can't get to in real life so as the storytelling, graphical fidelity, and other elements of games continue to improve I'm just drawn forward. That means that owning a game doesn't mean a whole lot to me.

Subbing to a service is pretty well in line with that mindset.

Conversely, it's why the PS service doesn't do it for me because Jim Ryan came out and said they aren't doing the first party stuff on that premium tier - at least not day and date. Therefore it doesn't help with my weird need to move forward.

Edit - shorter way to say it is that I view each game as an experience, not an item to keep, so I don't mind going forward with new experiences and leaving the old ones behind.

I was wary of the initial pivot because it was hard to see the gaming content as some of the more culturally broad stuff was coming out.

As they’ve started to reinforce the gaming content, though, I have enjoyed a lot of the energy of things like Jan and Jess QLs.

My only real wish would be a return to the chemistry of being in person together but I realize that will never happen. Ain’t really nobody doing that anymore and I get why.

I had unsubbed but when Bakalar said the gaming and staffing were changing late last summer or early fall I trusted him and it’s been fine. It will never be like it was in late 2011/early 2012 when I hopped on board but that is how things work. If the site never attracts new staff and this new content, all it does is retain a slowly dwindling core of fans and it dies.

@turtlefish: At least one guy has sued. I have no idea how the suit went.

I agree with a lot of sentiments here. I think Chris Roberts 100% believes he will deliver the game to end all sci-fi games. I also think that with him at the helm it won’t happen.

They’ve burned through a budget that is probably only eclipsed by Halo Infinite (if wikipedia is accurate, anyway) and have little to show for it.

I think there are probably people there who are extremely frustrated by administrative decisions that hamper development of the game and wish they could get a finished product out.

If not Star Citizen, other games are starting to get close to this. I don’t like the combat in Elite much but their world has gone from boring with nothing to do all the way to totally alive with full VR support. But then they added on-foot combat which I have found to range from obtuse to buggy while remaining frustrating.

The dream will stay alive and I hope the budget *they* have managed to vacuum up will inspire a dev/publisher team to make this dream happen someday.

The game was first announced I guess in 2012. I missed the early Kickstarter but in 2013 as an anniversary present my wife bought me a $150 package which was a lot for us back then. However, the promises of this game were something I’d always wanted - an actual universe you can inhabit with no barriers between on-foot, in-ship, and even on-land vehicles.

It has promised amazing stuff and some of the things it *has* delivered on are wild - no loading to a different “physical” space when you get in and out of ships and stations. If you’re in a space station, and your buddy comes up and flies inverted next to a big window, you see each other in real time. This creates the possibility for amazing ship boardings, or hostile invasions of the (still not in the game to my knowledge) mining and production facilities. However, it also creates unbelievable headaches for the devs when they have to create a single unified physics system for ship-to-ship combat that also covers stopping at the juice bar across from the yoga studio and getting a smoothie (this is a real thing).

I was so excited that I bought in even more by working some OT and I am about $500 in. Please save your applause for the end, ha.

Now with 10 years of development, $435 million raised, and no end in sight in any capacity, it’s a pipe dream. And yes, the alpha is “playable” but it’s one glitchy, bugged-out star system with extremely limited commerce. That “juice bar” is fine but your character will frequently drop the juice and it will fall out of the game world or it will get stuck in your hand, etc.

If you’re looking for a laugh and somebody who is extremely patient with this situation, I really recommend GlitchedInOrbit’s YouTube channel. If you watch the below clip, realize that this isn’t just getting “stuck in the subway and hit by a train”, it’s that for every “respawn” she has to wake up at a med facility and WALK HER ASS BACK TO WHEREVER SHE WAS and at some point they keep saying they’ll institute item loss where your stuff just drops there.

I’ve learned my lesson on this. With a very nice PC I can barely get playable framerates at 1440p on a 30 series card with 32GB RAM on a game that started development in 2012, so I have zero hope that the single or multiplayer versions of this will ever be finished.

I am writing this over Starlink so I have a vested interest in SpaceX launches. I am not real pleased with how Starlink is cluttering up low earth orbit but we live in a world where I live half a mile from very high speed fiber and this is still the only way for me to get anything over 40-50 Mbps right now.

I have never played Madden football, but if you think about it, this guy probably got as many game consoles out the door as Miyamoto. I know plenty of people who started with “just Madden” and then “Madden and Call of Duty” and now they play all kinds of stuff. Even if football isn’t your thing, if you play games this guy contributed to your hobby an awful lot.