Having no official ties to China is the point, since the CEO of TikTok lied where user data is stored, and who had access to it.

It feels like an era just closed. Not even just a case of, “nobody can replace him,” but, like, nobody could even pretend to, because he defined just that much.

They tried that in the Xbox 360/PS3 days, but fundamentally missed the point: eventually, you run out of people with a strong, creative vision, and then the machine can’t be fed with limitless money, and shuts down.

Skipping Chadley? How can anyone feel anything but sheer, unadulterated joy at the prospect of more Chadley?

At the very least, FFVIII feels like most mature of the games: almost every character in the game fails badly at something, injustices go un-addressed, and the people in the game are basically all adults who either didn’t quite grow up right, or are plagued with regrets they may never come to terms with.

I kind of get leaving Kotone out, since she changes the tone of the story, but her links seemed better written to me, which makes her exclusion feel...weird. 

That’s not so odd: the side characters tend to have weaker writing (many of the SEES team are replaced by ‘literally who’ as links, which was fixed in later titles,) the stats tend to require less aggressive planning, and the “monster of the week” style that goes on until the big twist really causes the game to drag…

Not really ‘crush,’ but Kokonoe’s mixture of sass, bitterness, and midriff goes far.

Using American copyright law won’t help much, since Pocket Pair and Nintendo are both in Japan. 

“In a new press release from audio electronics company Altec Lansing, it was revealed that GameShark is returning, sort of via an artificial intelligence-powered successor called ‘AI Shark’ You don’t care about that.”

I want to see a story actually end: no sequel bait, no spin-offs of a spin-off, just an actual end to whatever their narrative is supposed to be. If Disney won’t do that, than I just don’t care. 

Does it manage to go far enough to become actually funny, or is it just too bitter/uncreative? 

In fairness, Todd admitted that the game just wasn’t fun one year before release, so the only real confusion they had was assuming that their stop-gap measures to improve the game (like making fuel useless,) were enough of an improvement to ship with, and not something that would ruin the game when combined with…

What I’ve been playing the most? Darktide. I can’t seem to stop playing it, and I don’t really know why.

Cyberpunk always had a solid gameplay loop, at least: do things to get experience and money, use that experience and money to get more ways around levels to feed the power fantasy, and then finish the story missions when you feel like it, concluding the game.

Honestly, the problem is kind of the inverse: they CAN make the planets more interesting to explore, but their entire design philosophy prevents them from making exploration worthwhile.

I don’t think anyone thought Cid “yell at my not-wife about tea” Highwind was cool.

Skyrim has the better world design (because it actually has design in the first place,) and is, honestly, prettier even without mods. So, it feels cozier.

You can’t even change backgrounds in Newgame+, one of their big features, so even Bethesda itself didn’t think backgrounds mattered all that much after the ending...

Now that it’s been brought up, yeah, Street Fighter 6 WAS kind of snubbed: a game that managed to make fighting games more accessible to the public in a solid way kinda deserves at least a nod.