If you’d told me this six years ago when I thought Valve could do no wrong, I might have been excited. But now, this might as well be a wet fart. (And I should know, because I fart a lot.)

William JACKEDson Harper

The stance I’d take is that Final Fantasy XV, Resident Evil 7, Yakuza 0, Persona 5, NieR:Automata, and Nioh* collectively revived the West’s faith in the Japanese games industry in late 2016/early 2017. Individually, none of them is super-influential,** but their collective importance is undeniable.

This is a fair take. I’d say BI’s influence is has more to do with video game discourse than the medium itself. It solidified a kind of meta-discourse about games’ legacies divorced from their actual merits as games, and I don’t think games writing has ever recovered from that.

BioShock Infinite is an interesting choice not because it was actually influential to the medium in any way, but because it was (IMO negatively) massively influential to video game discourse. In the months following its release, Infinite was rarely discussed on its own merits, but rather in terms of its importance and…

This is a pretty good assessment, I think. Planet Coaster rewarded extreme patience; you could build pretty much anything you wanted if you were willing to wrestle with the game’s tools to place objects pixel-perfectly. But for the rest of us scrubs, trying to do simple things like building a bridge or aligning the…

I have no idea whether or not I’ll like this game, even from the description of the gameplay, but at least it’ll be interesting.

I get why Weinstein wants to rehabilitate his image. What I don’t get is why so many people are willing to help him.

This Nancy fucks.

Branching off one of your points: I think what makes “everything is morally grey” so tiresome is that that’s not how the real world works. In reality, there are often shades of grey, but sometimes some things are obviously good, and some things are obviously bad. Constantly inundating players with moral tradeoffs just…

Just dropping to say that if y’all haven’t played Manifold Garden, then you definitely should. Just look at this:

Wait, wasn’t Chidi shown to have a girlfriend while he was alive? (Who broke up with him for his indecisiveness, if I recall correctly.) Did Chidi just admit that he was never in love with said girlfriend, or is this a continuity error?

If there’s any term that signals “I’m a colossal fucking dillhole” more than “sapiosexual,” I’ve yet to hear it.

Yeah, this review was kinda baffling to me. I don’t really understand negatively comparing Penn to McHale, because McHale was always the weakest part of the ensemble, and I don’t think he actually succeeded at making Jeff a likable jackass until the back half of the first season (and that came mostly from the plots…

Good news! Heaven’s Vault actually is coming to Switch, probably next year:

I’m disappointed at the lack of jokes about the Laurel Canyon sound. It’s like I don’t even know you anymore, A.V. Club commentariat.

They lowered the PC specs to be a lot more reasonable a couple of weeks before release. I’m guessing an exec at 505 got on Remedy’s case and told them to be more realistic.

Yeah, it does seem like a good Switch game. Since there’s a bunch of dragging and dropping, a touchscreen interface would work pretty well. It’s probably really clunky to play entirely with a controller; I wouldn’t recommend getting it on PS4.

I finished Heaven’s Vault about an hour ago, and I have to say: it’s probably the best game I’ve played that I wouldn’t recommend. For those of you not in the know, it’s an adventure-’em-up where instead of solving traditional puzzles, the challenge comes from trying to decipher an ancient language.

The segments where you have to puzzle out whether people are telling the truth based on their facial expressions have received some critique, in large part because the fidelity on animation differs markedly between the face and the rest of the body.