My wife rarely plays games but loves Animal Crossing, and her grad school classes and internship have scaled back to the point where she has lots of free time on her hands suddenly. So she’s made very similar progress to you, which is both admirable and a little frustrating as I just can’t keep up with her. Nintendo,…

I’ll never understand the love for Friends, but I guess you just had to be there (I was a little young for it, but some of my friends at the time loved it). The Office is a mediocre show that was fine at the time, but I’ll really never understand why it became the most popular show of our decade when there are so many…

I mean, aren’t Subway and other similar strip mall food establishments also franchises? I’m sure they have some small level of autonomy, but from what I understand there’s still strong oversight from the corporate level in terms of operations.

I was just turning on my Xbox anyway, so I dug around. The header on the store advertising the BC sale is gone, so it must have ended. But now I haven’t been able to find a simple list of BC games to buy like I used to, I can only find them by searching. It’s incredibly strange and frustrating. They do have a list onli…

Plenty of people prefer to play FPS on consoles, which is totally fine and valid no matter what snobs say. Plus I have a great gaming PC and I still prefer to play with controller sitting on the couch for basically every game but Civ, it’s infinitely more comfortable and relaxing. I spend all day on a mouse and…

A solid portion (or maybe even a majority, hard to say) of players will be experiencing this game on their TV, where they won’t be 18-24" away from the screen but instead sitting across the room. It’s a ridiculous issue and insane that it keeps coming up in AAA games, especially since it’s been an issue for this…

Xbox Game Pass is an amazing deal for anyone on the fence, even those who game on PC rather than Xbox. The selection is fantastic on both platforms, ranging from Xbox exclusives (Forza Horizon is my personal fav) to AAA greats (Yakuza 0! Monster Hunter! FFXV! KH3!) to indies (so many all-time greats!) to classic games…

I’ve also been trying to plan ahead for the least busy time and store to restock in the next week or so. I had thought early morning would be best too, but maybe middle of the day would be better...

I’ve had the same thought this week. I was in middle school during 9/11 and my memory has a distinct before / after boundary for that event, even though I was far from NYC and not directly affected. This is already feeling similar and possibly bigger, considering how drawn out this may become and the impacts it could…

Good point, also true here in the US! They’re reducing hours in order to do more intensive cleaning each night. You know Gamestop’s not going to wipe off every copy of Call of Duty that’s been casually picked up every day.

“Buh-buh-but how will I stumble over mountains of abandoned Funko Pops while trying to find a game to overpay for, and then have the most meaningful conversation of my day when what should be a 30sec transaction becomes a 4min transaction from an employee who clearly doesn’t want to be there?”

Sorry, didn’t mean to be insensitive at all. I’m just a cis man reacting to those smoky bedroom eyes.

Spotify reminded me this morning of their incredibly video game soundtrack selection, so I’ve been listening to the Final Fantasy Distant World albums, Hollow Knight, and other gems while working.

Hot damn...I feel this image in my ovaries and I’m a man. *fans self like a southern belle*

Aside from the basic infrastructure to work from home, game design is a highly collaborative creative field, and that collaboration is much harder (though not impossible) to generate with everyone working in separate locations. And not everyone has a decent workspace at home, especially in cities like Tokyo where…

When I first saw that email from Amazon I was a little disappointed, but the more I think about it the more I don’t mind the delay. Beyond the fact that it’s just a video game release in the midst of a global emergency, this is also a game that a) retells a game I’ve played over and over for the past twenty years, so…

As many have said, raw performance isn’t that useful for direct comparisons. The easiest example is the PS3, which was way ahead of the 360 on a pure hardware level but was famously terrible to work with, leading to substandard ports for the majority of the generation compared to the “weaker” console. Similarly, the…

I’m lucky in that 95% of my work happens on a computer and my company already had a pretty strong WFH policy if you weren’t feeling well or just felt like it. But even still, it’s been hard to focus on mundane work tasks with everything going on in the world. I’m trying to distract myself more productively instead of…

I mean, I can’t say definitively, but I do know that Square Enix is also a Japanese company...

That middle ground is called the Switch Pro Controller, and it’s lovely.