Torn here. Similar behavior has done a lot of harm in other industries, and US antitrust enforcement in modern times is near non existent.

Despite my fondness for the first game, I still haven’t played the second, and I admit the seasons thing doesn’t exactly help. I dislike locked content like that. And frankly, a lot of the stuff the devs did in the first one decreased rather than increased my enjoyment (like the endless attempts to crack down on…

I’ll be honest, quite apart from Blizzard’s behavior lately, I just don’t see how this could turn out well - as a reminder here, Blizzard let the D3 team mess with D2 for years. It’s not exactly in a good condition anymore, even if they just did a straight port of how it is now it’d have serious problems.

I am occasionally impressed that Activision Blizzard has managed to go so low. Then I’m reminded that people buy what they produce pretty much no matter what due to childhood experiences, even if they’re currently comically evil.

Yeah, this more makes me uncomfortably aware of how time seems to slip through the fingers than anything else.

Got to admit, the James Bond tones really hit me there too. Apart from that though, I will comment that I feel like they missed some potential here, given the protagonist could’ve been a sympathetic villain, if not for the whole everyone else forgetting everything thing. As it is, it almost gives me shades of Mother…

Honestly as far as pricing at least, what I’m waiting for is a resumption of the tariff exception for GPUs et al. Ending it was one of Trump’s last attacks on the country before exiting office, and it should’ve been restored by now (really, the whole trade war was rank nonsense that worse than failed to work, but…

I’m not going to cite one from my childhood - since frankly, I don’t really have a good grasp off the top of my head of when things came out. That said, one year easily stands out for adulthood.

‘starting’? I’d peg that to around the time of the Blizzard North fiasco. Don’t get me wrong, some of the games they’ve come out with since have been good (or at least become good in the case of D3), but Blizzard’s peak as a dev was a long, long time ago (well, so far anyways, I guess I shouldn’t be a total pessimist).

What I’m getting from this is that top 100 billboards used to be less useless. Also we’ve had a disturbing number of truly awful presidents in a very short time.

Frankly, I’m not really interested in their opinions, but I would suggest stores adopting solutions that discourage this kind of thing. It’d at least cut down on it, if they could only sell one.

Serious question, who would purchase this?

The stats page wouldn’t load long before this. I finally got around to playing it in the runup to BL3, and it was busted consistently back then. I don’t think that’s new, so much as them just cutting it rather than fixing it.

Your point here on Steam sales is spot on - I did a AAA apples to apples Steam sale price comparison back after Fallout 4 came out compared to after Skyrim did, and the price increase was absolutely grotesque.

As disgusting as I find artificial scarcity (one of the reasons this is much worse than console exclusivity, which can actually make sense), one of the big things that really jump out to me about this is the nature of the market here itself. This isn’t so much a competition for consumers, as for publishers. Prices…

Huh. I think Double XP actually has a point for once.

It depends on whether we’re talking games that you’re kind of expected to replay. E.G. Borderlands, Diablo, MMOs, etc. If so, obviously those. If not... I’ve replayed Xenogears repeatedly, Suikoden II, Star Ocean 2, and SMRPG a few times. Ditto with Ocarina of Time.

I’d been trying to figure out what the last thing they released I cared about was, and I think this was it. Yeah though, pity about the IP, we’ve waited on a new Suikoden for a long, long time (even with the recent spiritual successor in development). They’re honestly almost like patent trolls.

This is one of the weeks where one of the previous comics of the week is enormously better than the latest one (on Penny Arcade specifically).

I was under the impression indications were he wasn’t going to be changing them in the short term - admittedly this is from vague recollection though.