I’m looking forward to ‘The Ascent’, ‘Hades’, and ‘King’s Bounty II’ (all of which, I believe, are coming to GamePass); there are a handful of others in there I’m interested in - like Humankind, LiS: True Colors, and your own Scarlet Nexus - but they’re more in the ‘wait for reviews and probably a sale’ category,…

It’s definitely a great game, for sure (though I think I may be the only person who loved Limbo and completely bounced off of Inside).

I somehow missed the Banjo: Kazooie train entirely (despite being an N64 kid), so that one never made it onto my radar, but I’m always happy to applaud a game which lets you get creative.

Yeah, there’s absolutely something to be said for something that’s familiar and comfortable - I wouldn’t still be playing Destiny eight years on if that wasn’t the case. But I also fundamentally enjoy playing Destiny; after any given bit of Destiny, whether or not I get ‘better’ loot is just a bonus cherry on top of…

Fair point, for sure. Where GamePass is concerned, I definitely get a lot of utility out of ‘playing stuff I didn’t even know existed/stuff I never would have played otherwise’, but ‘stuff I know I would have bought eventually even if it didn’t come to GamePass’ is definitely a large chunk of how I justify the…

Regarding the ‘colors/numbers go higher system going a bit stale’: I definitely agree, and it doesn’t help that it seems to be absolutely everywhere these days.

Same. Granted, this probably isn’t something Microsoft wants to hear, but there are several publishers whose games come to GamePass so often that I’ll usually hold off even if their games are on sale, out of hopes that they’ll arrive on GamePass sooner rather than later. (I’ll usually give it a year or so; I figure if…

Definitely high on my list of ‘upcoming stuff coming to GamePass’ as well. I’m not a huge fan of the genre at large, but I’ve got enough faith in Supergiant at this point to be excited about pretty much anything they do. (All the glowing reviews don’t hurt, either, though it was definitely one of those things that…

Not exactly a killer list, though I am glad to see Iron Harvest arrive on PC; I’m 99% my PC couldn’t handle it, but it makes me hopeful the eventual Xbox port will hit console GamePass as well. (‘Eventual’ being a key word, there: that port is climbing up the ranks of ‘promised Xbox port that may or may not ever…

Plus, at this point, it’s not as though ‘media will be self-censored in order to still be able to sell in the Chinese market’ is purely a Chinese-founded/owned issue, anyway; witness Disney’s ongoing balancing act of ‘we totally have gay characters in our movies*!

Honestly, my big takeaway from this article is ‘oh yeah, the Cycle; that looked interesting when I saw a preview of it a couple years ago’. If you’d asked me prior to reading this, I probably would have guessed it had come out on PC by now, had an entirely underwhelming response, and more or less disappeared from…

Exactly. Granted, we don’t know exactly how/when those deals are made - I’d tend to assume that was a ‘Warner Brothers’ decision, rather than a ‘Turtle Rock’ decision, especially given that we’ve seen a fair number of WB games show up on GamePass before - but still: if you don’t want the narrative around the launch of…

See, I honestly get the appeal of it - I’d rather just buy a new console every five years like clockwork and not have to worry about how far I am from the ‘next’ console generation, or how fast my machine was going to go obsolete. I mean, we know they’ve got an expiration date on them, for all intents and purposes; I…

I took your meaning; AVClub’s kind of built that ‘knee-jerk dismissive’ thing into their brand, tonally - at least in the Newswire stuff. It’s not that it’s never funny, either - sometimes it is, very much so - but when that’s the only tone they ever take, it can feel like having a conversation with a teenager who’s…

For sure - though as someone who considers ‘you don’t have to spend an hour in the settings menu every time you first run a game’ one of the benefits of console gaming, that one’s less of an issue for me. I tend to like the binary of ‘it will run or it won’t, and if it won’t, you can’t buy it’. It’s kind of an implied…

Hell, it’s even notable when online-only games like Destiny roll out an expansion which doesn’t stutter the servers for a few days - and that’s for a game that’s been a going concern for four years now (eight, if you include the first game).

Yeah, even with something like this - that I’ll probably always play with friends (in other words, I’d have to be online anyway) - this sort of thing is always super-frustrating. Combine that with ‘coming to GamePass’, and you’ve got the exact same situation on Xbox/PC that contributed to Outriders’ issues - a whole…

Yeah, I was definitely playing (solo) on whatever the baseline difficulty is; I’m usually the ‘canary in the coal mine’ for my co-op partners, in that I get sent in to try new things and see if all three of us should play them together, and nothing about Killing Floor really stood out to me as something I should…

Yeah, it’s definitely one of those interesting things that, at the time, I was sure was going to pop up in other games: that in a few years, every game would have its own version of ‘The Director’. Instead, like you said, games where the entire point was semi-randomization/procedural generation became more or less…

Oooh, Against the Storm looks nifty; so does Void Eclipse! Onto the wishlist they go!