MindBullet

I've become increasingly convinced that the only viable path forward is for everyone involved with the site to go their separate ways. Everyone who has left so far has proven they have a loyal following that will support them through Patreon or Twitch subs or the like. I think Jess straight up doubled her Patrons after getting axed. Hell, most of the staff currently have successful platforms elsewhere. The audience and the connections made through GB won't go away, even if the name does.

The brand is getting more and more toxic with each passing month. The negativity attached to the smiling bomb logo is only growing. Get out now. Hand the forums over to the bots. Let the wiki become a billboard for ads. Just let this long death spiral come to an end and give everyone closure.

Remember all the reassurance about Fandom being a cool new employer that was excited to work with and understand the team?

At this point just let the site drift off into the horizon and have GB become a loose affiliation of streamers that collab sometimes. For real, if you're going to dump so much of your editorial staff like that what other option is there?

For me, the Hellena Taylor thing was more about how readily the internet turned on certain people based on presumed morality. I really hope memories of the actions taken against people like Kamiya and Hale, how determined the morality test on Taylor was even at the height of love for her, and how quickly and violently those same actions turned in the span of hours is not lost. Taylor sucks, but all that situation did for me was confirm once again how much the internet can become a reactive hive mind.

Babylon's Fall does deserve at least some love, if only because it was so bad and it came in the middle of Square Enix seemingly going out of it's way to piss people off. Didn't it come out right after SE sold off a bunch of their Western studios? I imagine seeing this thing get pumped up while a game like Avengers get shat on by SE management would leave certain people sore. Even after release, they seemed determined to pretend it was going to be a big deal. There was a $100 or whatever special edition! They even shoved 2B's 2B's in there! I know they've been putting her in everything, but still.

Pokemon kind of pisses me off because it proves that monopolies work. Yeah, those new games were beyond busted. What are you gonna do about it? You can't get Pokemon anywhere else. What, you gonna go play Temtem? Yeah, right. Players figured out how bad Scarlet and Violet were almost immediately, but they still sold like hotcakes. Every time someone talked about it, it was always "yeah, it's busted but...". Why would they ever change the way they do things when all we ever do is prove that they don't have to?

Overwatch 2 is only interesting in how determined the backlash was, but I still feel a lot of that is connected to Activision/Blizzard rather than the Overwatch team. They did royally fuck up the messaging, though. I haven't played it, but it seems like aside from players hating the monetization that thing is fairly beloved.

The merger could be 2023's hottest mess at this rate. It seemed like a sure thing this year, but it feels more and more shakey as time goes on. If anything, I think Sony's weird bad faith temper tantrums (that seem to be working???) are driving the nomination for this this year.

Musous are games where you hit Square 2 times then Triangle to do a combo, then you hit Square 3 times then Triangle 2 times to do another combo, and then you hit Square 1 time and Triangle 3 times to do another combo and then you hit Circle to do a Special Attack and watch the KO counter tick up.

In Vampire Survivors the whole point is to put yourself in a position where you don't have to hit any buttons but the numbers still go up.

So... NO

88 hours. Saw an ending, didn't bother doing the optional bosses. Haven't been back since.

Feels like this is kind of a bad demo. Forspoken feels like it's had everything go wrong for it from day 1. This demo was a chance to try and turn things around, but it feels like all they've done is seal their fate.

There's no way players are going to give this game a fair shake, right? The ad campaign has been cringe inducing at best, and the demo feels and looks terrible. The HDR is busted, the tutorial doesn't actually explain anything, and the chatty protag comes while people are still pushing back against Forbidden West and Ragnarok's talkative characters. I almost feel like they shouldn't have bothered.

I'd like to pull the ol "put it on just to take it off" move with the Ni no Kuni: Cross Worlds mobile game that released this year.

Mobile gacha games are a whole can of worms, I know, but this thing went above and beyond and is a great encapsulation of shit involving NFTs in gaming this year.

Netmarble used the cutesy Ghibli-inspired aesthetic and nostalgia for an established IP to push out a Crypto farming app. Players found out when Netmarble announced they were introducing MARBLEX, their crypto currency.

They then nerfed their gacha rates, put out in-game events that required a crypto wallet to participate, sold endgame PvP gear for said crypto, and when the game got overrun by crypto farming bots they charged players real money to skip the massive login queues that had formed. The real kicker is that basically all of this only applies to the Global version of the game, as Asian territories had actual regulation on NFTs in games.

I was pretty interested in the new crew. There was a lot of reason to be excited, and I was more than ready to give the site a chance to really make a push and rebound. There's been some signs of life, with the coverage of Keigh3, the big carny-ass stream on Twitch, Jess' Hot Takeouts... But I've mostly tuned out. I'd go on a whole screed about what went wrong for me, but I honestly stopped paying attention a while ago and we've been through that song and dance enough already.

I still visit the forums out of pure habit, but they feel out of place more than ever before with the increased focus on Discord. I imagine it's just a matter of time before this place is gone from my life completely.

I feel like I'm turning a corner on the Mario voice now. Maybe this was just a bad selection of lines, but this trailer is where I finally went "Ah...".

Aside from looking nice, this trailer has me feeling like it's going for the absolute lowest hanging fruit and "look, it's that thing from the games!" gags. Which is fine, I guess. It definitely seems like a kid's movie.

@propagandapanda: The only example I can think of is Star Fox 2.

Star Fox 2 was canceled in mid-1995, when it was about 95% complete. Nintendo still wanted the game finished after cancellation, so took it through full localization and QA testing. Cuthbert said there may have been no official announcement of cancellation, and there was confusion about the game's status in the media. The August issue of Game Pro printed that it had been delayed to 1996, while Electronic Gaming Monthly wrote that had been canceled in their September issue. Nintendo Power wrote in their September issue that "rumors of the demise of Star Fox 2 have been greatly exaggerated", with a release most likely coming in the first half of 1996.

Wikipedia

There have been other games that were cancelled despite being finished, but I think they mostly were given a proper announcement. The only interesting case I ran into was NBA Elite 11 being cancelled so late into development that copies of it managed to get put on shelves and bought by consumers post-cancellation.