It is pretty weak. But it’s all they have. There’s not a lot else the CDC and Fauci could say or do to engender trust. Once people lose trust, not a lot can be said to fix that.

I always loved his scene in The Dark Knight. It’s a great, tense scene to begin with and he just has such presence. He sells the moment, being this walking black convict caricature for 30 seconds before defying expectations and showing humanity isn’t as monstrous as the Joker thinks.
It’s basically a cameo, but it’s…

After eight years, multiple delays, and 800,000 cumulative lifetimes’ worth of reported crunch, Cyberpunk 2077 is out in the wild.

Deadnaming is just such a needless, needless dick move.

I’ve thought before that we should adopt “née” for deadnaming, like we would with surname changes following marriage.

Given CD Projekt Red only had mandatory crunch for two to three months, it seems like the obvious solution would have been to force its workers to work mandated overtime for longer—say six or eight months—to really eliminate those bugs and optimize the game.

Well, “sneaky hack” being “something XBox players have been doing for timegated launches for a decade.”

It makes sense given the rhyme letter. (Which, as a Canadian, it took me like 5 minutes to get, as I tried to connect “me” with “zed”.)

I think that’s the issue with some service games: the money is in the DLC and add-ons. Destiny 2 makes money by being free-to-play, hooking you, and getting you to buy paid story DLC and cosmetics. But because the game is “free” you don’t think about paying that bit extra for a new character or a boost, until you’ve…

You cannot license a property like Cyberpunk (one teeming with social and political commentary through the works of William Gibson and others) and expect to get away with “Our game says nothing of value”.

“Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it’s a simple adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe”

Undecided.

Summer Blockbusters might have something to say. But many don’t have much to say beyond “seriously... don’t piss off John Wick.”

I just really, really, really hate the idea that things have to be the GOAT or be trash. The people going into Metacritic and rating a game they played for 40 hours straight a 1 out of 5 because of _____. 

You don’t have to expect it to say something. But it could say something. That it doesn’t is simply something to mention. That it bothers you that Riley noted this says more about how defensive you are about this than anything.

You can’t dismiss the criticism of Cyberpunk because it’s just a big dumb AAA title and then dismiss how another big dumb AAA title (Last of Us) at least tried to be about something.

And The Dark Knight came out the same year as Iron Man. That doesn’t mean Iron Man was a shit movie and a failure because it was a shallow escapist genre film rather than a grand operatic look at madness, chaos & order, hero worship, the power of symbols, and human nature.

Sure. But not all cyberpunk tries to say the same thing, and some cyberpunk media is deeper than others.
Just belonging to the genre doesn’t automatically confer or require depth.

Expecting every video game to be The Last of Us is like expecting every superhero movie to be The Dark Knight.

What a curious position.