The 2009 Wolfenstein was way ahead of its time. It came in before the real open world craze took hold, and had a kind of pseudo-open design, where you had a consistent hub which connected off into various, linear missions.

Singularity is fucking tragic. It was the final release from Raven, before Activision repurposed the studio into a Call of Duty support team. It’s still a really good shooter, but got almost no publisher support, which I can’t help feel was a move by Activision to make it easier for them to shuffle Raven off to the…

And, it’s worse than it looks, because there is no animation canceling for the player. If you start an attack, you are locked in for the ride. It gets better, because if you start a combo, you are locked on the trajectory for that combo. Enemy moved out of the way? Tough, you’re still going in the same direction. Stop…

The “psychic,” is weird. Especially the way she’s presented. Her, “psychic power,” is that she can somehow hijack an implanted chip that goes with the headsets everyone’s wearing, but the game does not make that clear, and the entire thing is really vague.

It’s not even secondary market value. They’re chasing the value on cards from 20 years ago. Because you’re going to pull cards from 1999 out of a box of boosters printed in 2020, right.

Except, they’re not obligated to do anything. The whole, “you must defend your trademark,” thing is (kinda) a myth. You can lose your trademark because of dilution, but that is incredibly rare, and only occurs in situations where your trademark becomes the generic name for the product you’re marketing.

What that blog glazes over is just how incredibly hard it is to lose your trademark through dilution. That article was written with the express purpose of scaring you (as a small trademark holder), into thinking, “oh no, I must defend it or I’ll lose my rights,” but the truth is, dilution only occurs in cases where…

In theory, you’re really never supposed to see the cooldowns on bullet abilities. (This is somewhat less true with the Pyromancer, as it’s harder to get a stable loop, and you’re encouraged to consume your burn debuffs), but you proc a status effect on the target, and then get an armor mod which restores part of your…

My hot take remains that DA2 has the best writing of any Bioware game. The writing itself holds up remarkably well, and while it still suffers from the late-Bioware, “but we explained this plot-relevant element of world building in the codex,” it manages to avoid necessitating consuming all the previous ancillary…

Yeah, Devastators are a hard counter to the snipers. You might be able to slow them down with the Trickster’s bubble, enough to take them out. But, once I realized just how seriously the bullet shield wrecked snipers, it became a persistent part of my setup.

I’m going from memory here, but, ironically, it wasn’t laziness, it was that the devs sucked at predicting the future.

Willis’s dialog explicitly references, “the pee tape,” as I recall. Then again, it’s Willis.

There’s some subtly in there that’s easy to miss. I wouldn’t call it, “the best video game writing.” But, there’s more to it than the simple surface read.

There’s also a Ghost Recon: Breakpoint crossover event... because, what?

There was a guaranteed payout, even on bottom placement. So, even if they proceeded to get smeared into the dirt at the tournament, they were still getting a share of the prize pool.

Ironically, if you flip it around, the companies that deliberately set out to make game consoles have hilariously brutal attrition.

Note: Destiny is not a PvP game.

To expand on the MtG thing... WotC set up a website (Gatherer) indexing every card they’d published a couple decades ago. Sets from the 90s were added in order of publication, and new sets were added as they released. The very early sets were sorted alphabetically (this is an atypical sort order, as MtG usually sorts…

Yeah, in fairness, I don’t think Bungie wants their most dedicated players burning out. I think they’ve simply gotten far too aggressive in trying to push for constant engagement. This is (probably) the entire philosophy behind sunsetting (though it’s not the expressed position), because if your gear has a fixed…

Bungie has a real skill for abusing their playerbase. If you engage with the game very casually, it’s easy to miss some of this, but if you’re seriously committed to the game, Bungie has a habit of screwing you over, hard.