Kotaku has lost a lot of the writers who would do more “real journalism.” I don’t mean that to demean blogging or the writers here now, just that Jason, Heather, Cecelia, Gita, and others would often post stories with sources that did deep dives into a topic. Journalism, not blogging.

Wish I had taken your advice before I clicked this article...

Playing the Tony Hawk Demo has reminded me just how much I love games that are mostly disinterested in punishing failure, and instead find other ways to push the player to improve, so this looks right up my alley. The art is very cool, too, the hugging screenshot has Ghost of Tsushima meets Bambi vibes.

I’m not using Microsoft as a “moral debate point.” I’m just saying that Notch was in the news due to Microsoft distancing themselves from him. And there’s a difference to me between having trash associated with a company and actively using a quote from a trash person to promote a game, long after they’ve been outed as…

Yes. At the same time that Microsoft is doing everything it can to minimize associations between Minecraft and Notch, Factorio has three slots to feature quotes from critics/people in the industry on the biggest storefront on PC and it gave one of those slots to Notch. To me, that makes a statement about the…

First off, John K is a revolting piece of shit. Fuck him.

Steam Store is back up, so in case anyone is doubtful that someone on the Factorio team would feature a quote from a dev who is currently mired in toxic controversy, they did:

Anybody know why they would include a quote from Notch on the Steam store page? I’ve been wanting to check this out for a while but have sworn off Early Access, so when I got the Steam ad saying that it was in full release I clicked through and saw that, among the 3 quotes that Steam features about a game on its store…

I did, thanks for the reco! Moving it up my backlog, sounds perfect for whenever I finish Ghosts of Tsushima.

Right, but Orwell would have approved of the original 1984 ad. /s

Epic sucks. Apple sucks worse (or at least has sucked for longer/has a larger footprint of suck). But at least the overlords who own G/O media are fine, dec-

There are countless ways to shit on a garbage human like Ben Shapiro without resorting to potentially anti-Semitic tropes.

You need to diversify ya Popsicles.

Yeah, I think viewing parties/online movie clubs are a decent solve in the Covid interim, but hopefully long term you’re right that theaters will persist, even if more streamlined. You’re probably right in how the shift will work. I just have some social anxiety and move theaters are (hopefully not “were”) a perfect…

The Alto Collection is free this week, too, apparently. Don’t know much about that one but it looks chill and the reviews of the iOS versions are pretty good (for whatever that’s worth).

Yeah, I have a few small issues with the EGS (mostly dumb and petty shit like wishing they had achievements so my lizard brain can get serotonin bumps) but the histrionics around it were completely laughable. Suddenly Valve and Activision/Blizzard were some kind of noble bastions of storefront purity, it truly was…

I understand the challenge of this for studios and the fact that there’s not a great answer here no matter what. I really do. But if the future of movies is paying twice the cost of a theater experience to sit on my couch and watch that movie on my own screen, that’s really depressing. I get that everything needs to…

“Worse than nothing” is literally the lowest of bars. If the limited evidence we have suggests that they may be worse than cloth masks, shouldn’t people be safe and use cloth masks until we have better evidence? I get annoyed at poor science coverage in the media, too, but I don’t think it’s helping anything to…

He looks like normcore Dr. Disrespect. Not a great look...

According to Metacritic (I never played it), the game sounds pretty much “fine” too. I guess absence does make hearts grow fonder.