As is now traditional (these features have been going for three years now!), these games are selected at random from the hundreds of emails I’ve received after appealing for suggestions. Unless I say otherwise, I’ve not played the games, and as such can’t vouch for them, not least because most have yet to be released.

You got Deck Builder, so that’s like, one in ten. Good job embarrassing yourself.

And no insult to you, either, but I beg to differ. Its a copy of a game mechanic that has been around on the table for years. Its a good game, but not nearly the best. I can list dozens off the top of my head, even in the last ten years.

Maybe I didn’t get Slay the Spire, but I found it repetitive - and not in the good, rogue-like way. Nothing carries over to the next playthrough and I got tired of playing the same levels over and over.

A lot of the complexity in a shipped game arises from the middle layer of game code .. think game flow, loading strategies, a number of other in the weeds decisions you make in pipeline development when building a game on an engine. If you want to think of L4D2 as a “patch” I think you almost can, on a technical…

Huh, i visit PC Gamer every day and i’d have guessed they had quite a few women working there. But according to their staff page out of 25 people only 4 are women (16%). That is quite low. None of them appear to be in senior positions either.

Agreed. I recognize that as a straight man, maybe I am a bit ignorant to certain issues but I do try to educate myself whenever I have the opportunity. I do know that it’s important to have queer (and other) representation, but writing the main character as a straight teenager without the option to pursue a gay…

I wouldn’t say that Roberta’s name carries anywhere near the renown as the examples I listed. Unless you were a really big fan of Sierra’s adventure games in the 80's and 90's, you’ve likely never heard of Roberta Williams or the IP she helped create. If we’re talking about famous adventure game developers, Tim…

Im gonig to point out that IGN’s summer of gaming panel was the lead hosts of their PS and Xbox podcasts, Daemon who is one of the most tenured people at the company from the consumer facing side and executive producer. and the reviews director.  They picked by position, its been at least a decade since Chobot worked…

When Ryuji asked the question, I fully expected my options to be limited exclusively to the women in the room, as that would reflect the original Persona 5’s extremely limited view of romance.

I haven’t played any of the Persona games, but I feel like “the main character isn’t gay” isn’t the same thing as homophobia. Like, I know it’s a role-playing game and he’s the main player character of the game and so ostensibly the role that you are getting to play, but just because you can make a lot of other…

The reality is that there simply aren’t any women in the games industry whose names carry the same recognition as the men’s. There’s no female equivalent to Hideo Kojima or Warren Spector or Cliffy B or John Carmack or Phil Spencer or Todd Howard or Peter Molyneux or Sid Meier or Tim Sweeney or Will Wright or Gabe…

Agreed. GamerGate was/is a statistically tiny group of whiny assholes, lead by an even smaller group of rage baiting opportunists, that were given way too much air from places like Kotaku and Polygon for the sake of driving traffic. Outside of the industry, the entire thing is completely unknown. Hell, most consumers…

I think it’s funny how nowadays it’s all swept under the rug that GamerGate members were overall pretty left-leaning for at least the first six months of its existence, and still left-centrist for a while after that as alt-right trolls flocked to it (ironically, to defend it from Kotaku’s “gamers are dead” hit piece)…

But that’s just another form of prejudice as well, I mean how many white men vs other races are applying for these positions? how many women vs male? what are their credentials, schooling , experience level? Who’s doing the meta data on this? that will tell you what’s actually happening and what direction to take.

Identity politics: the clamoring of affluent, upper-middle class types for greater access to board rooms, positions, privileges, etc., on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, etc. That is what the author’s reference to “representation” means in this context.

100% endorse. Remedy doesn’t feel like they should exist, and the fact that they do and keep getting to make weirder and braver stuff makes me endlessly happy.

Having the movie suits isn’t product placement. Sony owns the rights to those movie suits. It’s just a fun bonus.

Bodega Cat has a kitty in a Spidey mask, everyone’s going to love that.

You don’t need to use quotes. It is by far the ugliest Main Story suit in all three games. Some of the optional suits don’t do it of me but it was the only cutscene that made me literally recoil at how godamn UGLY one of the characters was.