It was a selling point of Mafia 3, a game that was unfortunately pretty dull otherwise

I wouldn’t call Riddick a success, it is the definition of a passion project that only continues to live because the star makes enough money elsewhere to underwrite it. Chronicles was a major flop

There was exactly one good movie in that franchise. Then they made Chronicles, which was basically a Muse album in movie form, then they made Riddick, which seemed like it wanted to understand what made Pitch Black good but couldn’t.

I’m really glad Zenimax did right by The New Order. It’s criminally slept-on

I tuned it out after the pretty dull first level and the grisly binary choice they gave you at the end, put the game down for a few years, but picked it up this year and was really surprised at how surprisingly nervy the plot was, and the self-awareness that came to undercut BJ’s stone-faced narration. It’s not an…

It’s gonna get more interesting if they pull the trigger on the “recruit Dixie communists” plotline they teased in the first trailer

One of the most tried and tested laws of consumer psychology is that people make decisions on the margins - you sell your steak knives for $90, you’ll get few customers. Sell that same set for 5 monthly payments of $20? Greater success, even if the price is actually higher. This is why non-profits don’t even advertise…

Like full stop, a principled stance against DLC is a principled stance against the survival of big-budget single player gaming. Hardcore gamers want higher graphical quality, bigger worlds, longer playtime, to make games worth their while, all of those things costing more money. You will be asked to pay more for those…

Prey and Dishonored 2 were definite financial failures, the former barely broke 250k units even after sooner-than-usual discounting.

It’s pretty simple. Games keep getting more expensive to make and the number of people playing them aren’t increasing in step - you look at Steam stats, for example, and most people buy a small handful of games a year, if that.

Problem being that anybody who’s not a nerdlinger is going to take one look at the pure-cheese art and say “pass” before buying Madden or whatever. LotR has drawing value as a name, it’s the only reason they’re dragging its corpse around.

The back half of the review makes it sound cool but I hate the “we own these book rights so let’s get out our milking gloves” Xtreme Teen Hobbit setting so much that an entire Act, however short, of pretense that I should care about some bolted-on mythology before I get to the real meat of the game is enough to make…

Amazon really should have sprung for a third season of Fortitude over this.

I tend to hate mustard / cream dressings, so in the past I’ve used /very small amounts/ of tomato paste as an emulsifier. Not as effective as mustard, of course, but in one sitting it gets the job done, and it complements sweeter ingredients. I like to dry fry a minced shallot and combine it with a very good virgin…

D2 was hard for me since I’m always and forever a Vinny D’onofrio fan and he’s just not well cast at all. Nobody’s well cast, except the Thief guy. Which I suppose is fair.

The games seem to always continue under the auspice of the previous ones being Low Chaos runs, which in D2's case means that Emily prevents Stilton from going mad and somehow that keeps Billie from being maimed.

He was also framed for regicide, which is not super good w/r/t one’s honor

Well if nothing else it’s good that it hits an irrational nerve... the game itself is an Irrational sort, in many ways.

I will say that while the sense of inevitable economic collapse is largely gone from Dishonored 2, the world still feels plenty sick. If Arkane’s immersive world building accomplished anything it was to really drive home the sense that the natural world of Dishonored is as fundamentally hostile to human life as human…

For what it’s worth, the Dickensian industrialization-era misery being on the margins is quite deliberate. It’s sort of akin to Game of Thrones in that way - you root for the characters against the existential threat of the wights but at no point does anyone articulate or acknowledge the deeply ingrained societal rot…