I mean, I am, yeah, more than a little bit; but I’m also talking about Kotaku, and Slashfilm, and a half dozen other sites (including Mssr. Walker’s original site, RPS), and just overall ‘internet culture’ in general.

Solid bit. Joking aside - I could really do with less of the ‘manufactured cynicism’ part of the structure. It manages to somehow feel both mean-spirited and manufactured at the same time, which isn’t typically the tone I’m looking for from my ‘enthusiast media’ coverage.

Comment that supports original poster’s comment against said misreading... but then fundamentally fails to grasp the actual purpose of their comment, focusing instead on a single line near the end that was really only for comparison purposes.

I think you’re right, but I’d draw a distinction between ‘games with horde mode’ and ‘Left4Dead-alikes’, the same way I’d draw a distinction between ‘third person melee action games’ and ‘Souls-likes’. I’d call ‘Fallen Order’ a Souls-like, for example; I wouldn’t say the same thing about ‘God of War’.

No worries; I only remembered because I played them more or less back to back - I came to Left4Dead fairly late, and then played Borderlands damn near at release (specifically out of a desire to find a ‘new’ co-op game after my co-op partners and I were starting to get a little bored of Left4Dead).

I don’t think you’re wrong at all; I just feel like there’s kind of still a place for that, I guess? A console that will ‘run’ the games, even if it doesn’t run them with all the graphical bells and whistles. (If it can’t do 4k, is anybody really surprised it can’t do this sort of thing?) To me, it’s very much like…

Anything like this is going to have a lot of games (or modes) you can point at and say ‘that’s where it really started’, for sure; your various horde modes and games- where you fought waves of enemies in a single location - were a definite precursor to the concept as well. That being said, the original Left4Dead…

Evolve I thought had cool art design, especially with that nice ‘lived-in universe’ feel, it had solid gunplay/controls, and it did a better job than most things in the category of making the characters/classes feel different... but I ultimately just found the actual gameplay structure kind of lacking. As in, the loop…

Yeah, I’ll take ‘a whole bunch of developers all trying to make knock-off Left4Dead’ over ‘a whole bunch of developers trying to make knock-off Destiny’ any day, regardless of the quality of said knock-offs. And I like Destiny - I just think it’s a lot harder to make a fun games-as-service game (or open world…

Same; I’d already added it to the list on my phone of ‘games to pick up at some point’. And now it’s been un-added. (Sidebar: Xbox store, be better about allowing listing for games more than just a few days out from release. Everything in this demofest should be available to wishlist, right now.)

Damn it; I liked that demo, too. That really sucks; I hope your friend can sort it out with them, somehow (and hopefully it won’t involve litigation).

I’ll second the fondness for Conectank, which is very much one of those ‘this really shouldn’t work, but somehow kind of does?’ games, and for Lake, which gives off great ‘just do your thing and chill’ vibes. (In a weird kind of way, it reminded me a lot of ‘Coffee Talk’, which I also quite enjoyed). Holding off on…

I don’t necessarily think studio acquisition is inherently gamer unfriendly - but if a primary driver of that acquisition is to deny a large portion of the player-base access to those games (in order to drive them toward a competing console/marketplace), I think it’s hard to call it ‘gamer friendly’, either.

Thanks for sharing this; I know there’s probably all sorts of NDAs on the terms of the agreements themselves, but I’ve always been curious about GamePass’s impact on developers. Enough of them (like Fatshark) have ‘re-upped’ that I assumed those experiences were probably pretty positive, but it’s still good to have…

I’d tend to agree (relatively low bar that it is)... but I wouldn’t necessarily suggest making that particular statement on any articles that have anything to do with the Bethesda/ZeniMax acquisition. (Full disclosure: I think exclusives are bad as a general rule, but I also view that move as pretty much Microsoft…

Which was always really useful! It just only seemed to be the case in like one out of every ten games I played (if that).

Yeah, that sort of viewpoint always feels a bit... apocalyptic, to me. I don’t imagine Microsoft will stop making consoles just because they’ve come up with a way to profit off of people who don’t own consoles. Even if their interest is primarily in selling a service, selling someone a console is still the best way to…

I always thought one of the least-used features of the last-gen consoles was the whole ‘have an early portion of the game playable whilst the rest downloads’ bit, so I’d love to see that notion migrate over to streaming. And, you know, implemented. Like it mostly wasn’t, last gen.

This is great news (assuming it, you know, turns out just as rosy as they’re promising); my co-op partners aren’t typically ‘early adopters’, and they’re both still on the Xbox One, while I’m on a Series X. I’ve already been pleased with the extent we can still play together on games that run on both consoles (ie, we…

That was a big one for me as well. The fact that both Back4Blood and Atomic Heart are coming to GamePass was also a nice surprise; I’ve had my eye on both of them for a while, but they were solidly in that ‘wait for a decent sale before purchase’ camp, so it’s nice I get to play them sooner rather than later (relative…