Went with a laptop a few years ago just because I was moving often enough that a desktop was unwieldy. Pretty happy with them, and I’ve upgraded where I could (RAM and hard drives mostly.)

Sure, the best approach will always be a mixture of traditional katana skills and more “underhanded” tools like smoke bombs and firecrackers, but the game never punishes you for living out your own personal version of Seven Samurai.

We’re talking a theoretical though, that a competitor is even interested in doing what Mixer did and can offer more money than Twitch would. Why would Spotify try to just repeat what Microsoft failed to do? Spotify doesn’t have more money than Microsoft, and that money didn’t help them buy their way into a competitive…

Which of those contexts are you in need of being able to portray in Overwatch?

And it’s not always racist.

There’s not really a whole lot of usage out of those other contexts, while it’s use purely as a way to threaten racially motivated violence is a pretty common one.

Seriously. Weird people acting like they’re losing a part of their culture over not being able to spray paint nooses. “There are non-racist killings via hanging, you know!” is a weird hill to die on.

I don’t get the “there are hangings that aren’t racist” defense. It’s it being used as a reference to racially motivated lynchings by players that makes it problematic. Removing it is a pretty low cost way to deny racists (and ironic jackasses) a symbol they can use.

Honestly, it makes far more sense to censor handguns because those have taken far more black lives than nooses ever did.

If Microsoft couldn’t do it it seems shortsighted to jump ship hoping Spotify can somehow pull it off through sheer money dropping ability.

Doesn’t seem very likely, personally.

The cart really only has value because of the box it’s in. After it’s taken out it doesn’t really matter what they do to it. It’s not a particularly rare cart in itself.

Well good thing there’s nothing particularly pressing about our current cultural situation that might need addressing, I guess.

I feel like a lot of games abuse the player by denying them agency in the horrible things they often inflict on the characters you’ve come to care about. A game that just makes me feel miserable about the consequences of events I had no choice in isn’t necessarily one I want to play.

I feel like this is the sort of detail that makes reviews like Kotaku’s worth more to me than the aggregate score any day. Like Naughty Dog can make an incredibly high-polished game, that due to the things that the Kotaku review talked about, I don’t want to play.

Balking at the idea of games being political is inherently problematic, especially with the incredibly obvious bias these sorts have on what counts as “political.”

I feel like that 95 doesn’t really tell me anything though. I learned more from the Kotaku review than that 95 will ever say.

I find no score reviews like Kotaku’s more useful lately. Like Kotaku’s review of TLOU2 was more useful as an indication of whether I thought I’d like the game than the 95% aggregate score it’s got on Metacritic.

Even if they weren’t review bombing a game that isn’t out yet, you’d still have lopsided scores probably. Seems like practically everything on the PSN store has between a 4-5 star rating. Occasionally you get a really shitty game with less but with user scores there’s not a lot of meaningful variance between 4-5…

Who did Kotaku cancel, exactly? The literal staff of the website in question walked on their own volition, as a group. Kotaku reporting on it didn’t make it happen.