They have been. The problem is twofold; Airbuses are limited in the U.S., and airlines have increased the rates on those tickets because I guess a working airplane is now considered a premium.

There certainly was a “golden age of gaming,” where the cost for a studio to exist and make a game was pretty low and they were more willing to experiment. The thing people forget is that there was so, so, so much trash and shovelware made during that era as well. We remember the incredible game that innovated and drove the medium forward, and we forget the movie tie-ins and genre knockoffs.

These days, AAA has forgotten how to innovate, and nearly all of it is being driven by indie titles. This is because, once again, the cost to develop is now so low that literally anyone can do it. The amount of trash and shovelware we’re getting is almost ludicrous though, so it’s a lot harder to find the great titles that are overlooked, but extremely high quality has a remarkable way of cutting through the noise.

Currently, advocating violence against Nazis is considered not very cool. I’m indicating that maybe it should be. I’m trying to be respectful to the Beehaw hosts and not explain what I would like to do to people like Balaji, which would certainly violate some content policies.

America has a serious Nazi problem, and unless they’re willing to get real cool about the only ways to deal with Nazis, rich fucks like these are going to keep infecting institutions and making them more and more extreme. This dude is laying out a plan to ethnically cleanse San Francisco and not only is he allowed to walk its streets a free man, but he is allowed to organize other lunatics to follow him.

Dunno if it was like her specifically, but yeah she was in charge during that fiasco as well, and at the very least approved of it.

She had more of a hand in Magic the Gathering’s recent push to make as most product as possible, as well as the incredibly awful Magic 25th anniversary celebration idea of $1000 packs of proxies.

She sucked, and whoever comes next will be worse.

Look I love Dark Souls; it is an incredibly flawed game, and Demon’s Souls is even moreso. Dark Souls was so far ahead of it’s time that it still needed time to bake in the oven. Then with how claustrophobic DS2 and DS3’s worlds were by comparison, I don’t think FromSoft really surpassed Skyrim until Elden Ring.

Both games are some of the greatest of all time though, so a lot of it will just come to preference. I think a lotta Dark Souls players have been spoiled by the remaster though, the original release struggled hard under the weight of Miyazaki’s ambition.

People in the future will realize that Skyrim was made in a perfect sweet spot at Bethesda. It was made recently enough that the controls make sense and it feels good to play, but Skyrim was still so, so ahead of it’s time when it came to an open world RPG. Back then, Bethesda’s writers really had a knack for making incredibly interesting settings, and just seeing an entire digital world so wonderfully realized was considered ground-breaking.

A decade later, and the same model has become stale. The gameplay is still there, but the soul is not. Idk if most of those old writers have just left Bethesda or retired after so many years in the industry, but the magic has left the studio. I’m not even really looking forward to ES6 as much as I am the upcoming Avowed from Obsidian, because their games still have plenty of soul.

The Tennessee House is basically as MAGA as they come, so this isn’t surprising when you remember that they tried to expel two Black lawmakers from the house earlier last year on similar racist grounds. I’d hope that we could see some change this year, but I lived in Tennessee. I know those districts. A better bet is for anyone still sane to get out.

let’s not go crazy here, this story is from Utah. Utah is basically full of religious zealots and has absolutely not progressed socially in the last two decades outside of maybe Salt Lake City.

You gotta remember, there are two Americas. Rural America is closer to a fundamentalist country in the Middle East or Africa.

even anime honestly doesn’t typically get that big, I think the only one that maybe gets there is Dragonball? like, all of Dragonball. One Piece will probably end up there, but it just broached the 1000 mark recently.

Maybe someone here could refresh my memory. I could have sworn that during 2020 campaigning, Biden indicated he would be a one term president that would willingly let a younger Democrat run for 2024. I haven’t seen anyone really rake him through the coals over that, so maybe it was some misinformation that was spread to make him more attractive, but I feel like it was a really key reason I felt comfortable supporting him.

Is the only difference between a Con Panna and a Vienna Coffee the size of the cup?

It’s kinda insane how much people dismiss “System Shock.” It’s a serious bedrock of a title, so much of what we take as a given of games was really pioneered by LookingGlass. I think a big chunk of that was due to the gameplay not really holding up to modern times, but hopefully now that Nightdive’s remaster is out, more people can experience it and realize just how much of the game holds up.

Probably a close second is the original “Half-Life”, in terms of really cementing the story-based first person shooter, but I don’t think anyone is going to call Half-Life snubbed.

That’s the thing about stupidity, it has a lot of comorbidities.

I totally apologize, you’ve unlocked a memory. It’s so good in KOTOR that my brain doesn’t remember it’s a cRPG. I’m really hoping that if it gets a remake, it keeps all the guts of the original combat system, and doesn’t get simplified to a toggle between real time and pause.

oh shit this game looks awesome, thanks for the suggestion.

To me, it fell into the same trap basically every cRPG falls into; late game combat is a chore. Once the number of enemies and skills you have to juggle gets high enough, you can’t realistically use real-time on the harder fights, but you can run into so many enemies that turn-based takes forever.

I don’t even really mean that as a criticism of Larian, since nobody else ever managed to fix that issue either. It’s a big reason why the genre died off for so long.

I mean, Larian isn’t even a AAA studio. They’re still technically an independent studio, though with the success and polish of Divinity I think most would have considered them AA even before BG:3. Also you’d need a lot of evidence to convince me that any cRPG isn’t a product of antiquated design, there’s a reason the genre completely died off. From my experience playing it, even Larian couldn’t figure out how to make combat with 20+ enemies feel fun, a problem nearly every cRPG has had for years.

No, not even remotely. The biggest game of the year was an antiquated cRPG, followed by a bunch of sequels and remakes. The industry as a whole has been rocked with scandal after scandal, with the most recent being the large, widespread Christmas layoffs. Innovative gameplay is now something that completely eludes AAA studios, who only seem to know how to regurgitate trends popularized by better games.

2023 was another shite year for gaming, and rewarding it with brain-dead articles like this is why 2024 probably won’t be any better.