i’ve had a david harbour overdose for several years now. enough is enough. 

i don’t think American developers feel a threat to their lives when they include American-critical views in their FPS games, though. CoD has often been very critical and cynical of the military industrial complex (even when it’s ultimately valourizing it).

it’s because english is not the primary development language. you see the same thing in japanese and chinese games that were originally developed in their native tongue, and only pasted in english at the end. 

the amount of money being dumped into the marketing of the game, and the style of its marketing, suggests that it is being targeted squarely at western, mainstream gamers, though. otherwise it wouldn’t be available at launch in english.

you’re making a number of assumptions that need correcting:

it was so crucial that they better set up his mental health struggles, considering what he’s going to do could be generously characterized as having a psychotic break (or at the very least open to that interpretation). he’s clearly suffered from the trauma of his daughter’s murder for a very long time, and that kind…

and it’s important to note that BGG is just as susceptible as steam and metacritic, if not moreso, to review bombing and general mob behavior, due to working with a smaller pool of participants. one vote does go further on BGG for sure, and there’s no reason to think that Gloomhaven or some other game could presumably…

i think the merger will happen. everything that’s happening now are just politicians posturing. 

i was a big fan of the original Rainbow Six games, and Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl, which was more forgiving than OG Rainbow Six but not by much.

i am only basing my assumption based on their depiction in the cards, i am not “current” with pokemon. and i guess i assumed that ash was an outlier as a younger trainer, with most of the other trainers being older teenagers or straight up adults in their twenties/thirties—like team rocket. 

the show actually says she’s ten??? somehow i forgot this. i assumed that she and brock were adults. i guess i was mistaken.

i had no idea this was the case. i always assumed that ash’s friends were adults who were looking after him.

you’re assuming a lot. i was basing my judgement on the appearance of the cards. they look “coded” as adults to me, not children. i know nothing about the finer details of this franchise. 

a lot depends on the pacing and framing of each combat scenario. if the atmosphere is doing a lot of the work, and there’s an emphasis on slowness and tactics, a game with one hit/one shot kills can be very fun. if the combat is too fast paced though it could start to feel punishingly repetitive. but obviously this is…

if you focus on playing the game and not collecting the art it’s much less stressful on the wallet. it’s only a gatcha game if they ‘got ya’.

i get that you have to refer to the female characters as “young girls” for the sake of your argument’s creepy subtext—but these characters are clearly not children. i feel like you’re deliberately infantilizing adult female characters—which is of course it’s own problematic media trope.

there are many great combat games that involve killing/dying in a single hit. it’s not that the developers don’t know how to make this style challenging–it’s that they prefer padding out their games with combat that merely looks challenging but is actually just filler. 

starvation deaths on frontier lands, due to engineered and accidental famines aren’t necessarily violent.

you’re off by about a decade regarding ‘don’t mansplain’

russia is actually much more violent now than in the days of the soviet  union...