I know “worst” is an adjective that triggers a lot of content farms, but I still feel bad about these situations. Even the worst games, when they manage to be completed, are mountains of effort from the people involved; and as I understand it this was coming from one of IOI’s first publishing efforts.

This happened for me with Back 4 Blood.

Turtle Rock said “Okay, we’re done developing content. We’ll move on to new things now.” And people took that to mean it was a failed, dead, and worthless game. Whereas the active state where they left it was pretty solid, still runs, and I have a lot of fun with it. It just wasn’t built to be endlessly live-service.

I feel like, though it doesn’t come up much, we should conceptually separate “owning the game” from “having a physical edition”. Some games give you a disc, but barely offer ownership (remember CD keys?) while other games are only sold digitally, but are ultra-permissive with what you do with them.

I get the sense many indie companies would like to give people as much control as possible, but also can’t afford printing box sets.

King’s Quest VIII: Mask of Eternity. Even as a kid, I felt like it was a very strange gore-and-action focus shift for the King’s Quest series. Only as an adult did I hear the story of executive meddling that lead to the complete tone and gameplay shift.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2020/10/how-private-prisons-profit-from-forced-labor

It’s still kinda legal, just takes some extra steps and signatures, and a bribed judge - of which there are many.

That’s also setting aside people that are effectively slaves to low wages, unable to do anything but work with no chance for upward mobility.

While I do believe in this, a common point brought up about civil rights is everything that Malcolm X and the Black Panthers did around the same time. While peace wins hearts and minds, even just passive shows of force can dissuade hateful pushers of violence.

Even Gandhi didn’t just sit back; his operation broke laws in order to make a point.

The video game market is extremely hard to “corner”. It can happen for professional software like document processing, image editing, etc, but far too many startups are interested in making games, and there’s multiple digital stores to sell them. Minecraft and Factorio even sold off their own websites. Clair Obscur recently outsold a lot of big publisher efforts, and definitely didn’t need Game Pass’s visibility.

They can corner one particular audience like Call of Duty, but can only push so many expectations on them before those gamers consider other games. They tried it with Fallout, complete with subscription, and it was massively unpopular.

I still haven’t seen the “no other option” scenario as so many claim. You could say $80 price tags do that, but if all prices are going up, that doesn’t track so much.

They also discount games if you buy them while you have game pass. So there’s some encouragement to try a game, find you want to keep it, and pay for a permanent copy should it be removed from GP (or the player decides to stop the GP subscription).

Still, I’m done with them because they’re done with talented studios, and are active participants in the Palestinian genocide.

I mean, I enjoy PS+, it’s just a matter of whether you’re okay playing a bunch of games on a known rental basis for the price point.

I enjoyed playing Texas Chainsaw while it was on there. Now the game’s dead. To me, not much lost as I move on to other games (and I do buy games too)

One bit that’s nice about being a gooner game is, there’s enough outfit options you can just pick something “cute” and tasteful, and then just play the game. So while many people are ogling, people that are not as interested can just play the game.

EDIT: Adding onto this, though I consider myself a gooner I actually had the opposite reaction to Nier Automata, the game’s carbon copy. I didn’t quite like the bare-ass-thong look of 2B, and it felt like it was consistently distracting enough to make the game’s emotional moments feel silly. At the least, if I put SB’s “Eve” in a denim skirt, that’s my own choice.

I abandoned it.

I found some cool stuff. I even coincidentally solved a puzzle involving an ice box on my first go. But it was taking waaaaayyyy too long to find anything interesting, and I had multiple runs where it felt like there was no chance to build anything other than a straight path of rooms leading to a dead end, either from lack of doors, or lack of keys.

I actually like the dice roll of getting different encounters and adapting to what comes up; but only when the goal is generally to do well, eg dealing lots of damage or exploring new directions. But often there’s very particular objectives in BP and the UI doesn’t do a lot to help you track them.

I understand you; the point is it’s not just grammatical pedantry. Passive language is deliberately used to reduce feelings of culpability. “The suspect died in custody” is less blame pointing than “Police denied suspect treatment for injuries, leading to his death in custody”.

Even if people understand that the police would be the ones with the rubber bullets, there’s an emotional response behind “Police shot at reporter” that you don’t get from “reporter was hit by bullet”.

From what I have read, it is a simple fact that a nonzero number of people in LA have been protesting violently (or call it rioting). It’s even possible, but certainly not proven, these are Proud Boy agitators.

His comment may be based on the possibility they were not. It’s still a bit demoralizing when you and your thousand-strong hold back from violence, and your leaders still rebuke you for one person’s action.

For CA, this is that one car that caught fire in the intersection.

I’d really like to find video of the starting of the fire. Somebody made a claim that they saw a flashbang from ICE starting it by sparking some debris, which I’d like not to repeat too much until it’s verified.

One thing that might be misunderstood here is that California not paying taxes wouldn’t harm Trump. Trump’s goal, made clear from a sum of lots of behaviors, is the destruction of the United States. Defaulting on its debt, zeroing its GDP, destroying the livelihood of its inhabitants, and ultimately killing its war machine, so that they can’t fight Putin’s army. California’s lack of payment may just hasten that goal.

“Doing your taxes next cycle” just accounts for bonuses/corrections after reviewing taxes that had been paid through the year. It happens every paycheck.

Some people have very daringly chosen to withhold all taxes from each paycheck - there are legal reasons you might do this like “I plan to have a large tax write-off”, but without said reason, it’s very possible the IRS would come after you.

Would be great if the matchmaking world could set some criteria restrictions.

PlayStation controllers have a mic built in; make an expectation people will use it, and speak English. If people matchmake games, and then leave those games 45 seconds in, penalize them and prevent them from joining new ones.

I know those things are idealistic, but I also think with a very dedicated effort an online network could create that space.

I don’t even care about propagandist views. I’m just like “Hey devs, has your government stopped invading a sovereign country? No? Okay, no buy.”

The whole problem is, there are huge sects of people that refuse to stay out of each other’s way.

They wanted to invade Canada, Mexico, and Greenland. Then they realized first they needed to invade the blue states - the ones that believe in rule of law. The ones that have immigrants and get along with them.

It’s the same type of expansionists, and their loyal poor underlings, present in Russia and in Israel.

Yeah, I’ve been trying to learn this sentiment a bit more.

Thousands of us feel overwhelmed looking at and responding to violence. Others are super focused on their recovery work to help the world, and thus end up viewing the arrest of one of their (50) colleagues as a “disturbing inconvenience”.

The world isn’t one single needle that’s either getting worse or better.