Well, there’s also just more room for artistic interpretation going really far back in time. The issue that the “current timeline” series has is that it has to live up to the expectations people have from playing the games of who all the characters are as people, and to the ultimate end states we know they are all in…

I mean, this is basically the plot of Horizon Zero Dawn, and is the tact taken by most story lines that want to present a post-technology view of society. Removed from context, most of the things modern people do would be seem as utterly ridiculous to medieval minds as the things they did.

I used to play games on at least “normal+1" difficulty when I was in grad school or younger. But as I’ve gotten older, the compounding impacts of old age naturally slowing reflexes and just not having time for obtaining mastery in something that is supposed to be a fun diversion from actual work has made it so I no…

You also can cancel out of attacks by hitting block in the middle of the attack, something they don’t really explain anywhere, but which is extremely useful when you’re surrounded.

Yeah, it’s kind of the natural conclusion of Microsoft’s choice to use commodity PC hardware in the original Xbox and run a Windows derivative in it. It just took them a lot more generations to pull off than I think most hoped.

I mean, for first party exclusives, I don’t really know what kind of “wheeling and dealing” would be going on WRT the set of platforms to support.

From a practical standpoint, I’m fine as long as they don’t realize separate One and Series X versions of a given game. Saying there might be some games that are Series X only is just like how modern PC games still have “minimum hardware requirements” that creep up each release cycle. So long as a game that _can_ play…

It always boggled my mind that BMW used the M6 as the basis for their GT3 car. Like, why would you chose your largest (since the 8 wasn’t around at the time) coupe to go racing with?

Alternative take:

For fun, because I have too much time, here are the ones I’ve gotten done so far:

Yeah, it’s definitely possible to sometimes write a semi-competent Haiku with the options provided, but I agree with his general assessment that it’s more a simple-poem-generator than truly capturing the classical definition of Haiku. It’s way too possible to create something completely divorced from the literal, and…

This is something I think a lot of people just fundamentally do not understand when comparing “why don’t we just do car thing [or insert any other state-regulated mandate] like place X.”

Yeah, that one. The first one is from 2009, and has a yellow background on the box art.

It’s great, but you need to make sure you find a copy of the 2nd blu-ray release, not the first one. The first one had really, really bad upscaling issues, to the point of making some scenes completely unwatchable due to scaling artifacts.

The problem with Champloo is it came out during that awkward transition between…

Ah yeah sorry, I was counting the Boshin war as part of the restoration (since Ishin’s literal translation is “Like a Dragon: Restoration!”) but you’re right, that is technically pre Restoration itself.

Judging by the Shinsengumi jackets on the background characters and that Kiryu has a revolver in one hand, I imagine the setting is during the Meiji Restoration. So more “What if Yakuza, but Kenshin.”

One small copy-edit comment:

It wasn’t bad, just hard if you weren’t good at a particular type of optimization problem. In most games, hacking is basically just “enough points in trait? good to go.” At most, they maybe throw in some Mastermind in there where your stats give you more tries. Deus Ex’s was closer to playing Pipe Mania while the game…

Dude, lying to your partner about your marital status is absolutely abuse. You’ve knowingly removed them of their agency and ability to provide informed consent. Not all abuse is physical.

He neither resigned nor was fired. He’s taking a leave of absence (I.E. unpaid leave). With the game so close to release, his position cannot go unfilled for an extended period of leave. As such, he’s losing his specific title as creative director for the game because it is presumably going to someone else not on…