Yeah, I was never bored, but it is a deterrent to keep up with the sport when each game goes 3 hours and there are over 150 of them in a season. Cutting off all that extra time is only a good thing.

That I’ve played

• StarVaders
• Avowed
• Split Fiction
• Blue Prince
• Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves
• Knights in Tight Spaces
• Rift of the NecroDancer
• Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping
• Keep Driving

That I’m currently playing

• Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

That I want to get around to but have no idea if I’ll find the time

• Eternal Strands
• Door Kickers 2: Task Force North
• Civilization VII
• Commandos: Origins
• Bionic Bay
• Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon
• Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo
• Cyber Knights: Flashpoint
• The Alters
• Ruffy and the Riverside
• Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream
• Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound
• Mafia: The Old Country

That I want to get around to and haven’t released yet

• Borderlands 4
• The Outer Worlds 2
• Mina the Hollower
• Dispatch
• Mouse: P.I. for Hire
• Constance

From what I understand all professional sports are having difficulties gaining traction with the Gen Z demographic

And they’re all doing the same nonsense with making it annoying to watch. I’m not asserting that I’m definitely right or anything. I haven’t done anything resembling actual analysis of the trend. Intuitively though, given my own experiences with the prospect of following a sport I enjoy or not, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just the leagues offering poor value to a demographic that hasn’t been locked in to the sport yet.

A one more heist story where it was clear it was never going to be just one more heist, and the band dissolved itself over a lack of real leadership. As opposed to the trope, where it’s one more heist that goes wrong. I take it back; I do have a critique of the story. Act 4, on the island, was a detour from anything that had anything to do with the main plot. Other than that though, I thought it was fantastic.

Playing it now, while it does have its comedic moments, it feels like a huge misrepresentation to call it Monty Python-esque.

New games are not exclusively pushing high end graphics. In fact, they’re dwarfed by those that are not. My favorite game from last year was The Rise of the Golden Idol. It’s mostly still images and takes up less than 3 GB. Balatro was a game of the year nominee from last year, and it’s only a handful of MBs. Blue Prince is hardly a looker, but it will likely be on a lot of game of the year lists this year. There’s so much out there.

One of those ways that people have choices is with multiple competing soccer leagues, is there not? That may explain in and of itself why it does better. Of course, that’s a chicken and egg thing with how much the market can sustain, but there’s no one to keep MLB or the NFL in check. The NFL, I understand, does have a similar generational problem, but that could also be attributed to CTE findings.

That’s interesting, because it’s no more boring than it was 20 years ago. It is, however, like most sports, tied up in bullshit exclusivity contracts. From my perspective, all of sports has a problem with gambling advertising and with making it annoying to just watch the sport in the first place. If a certain game isn’t exclusive to Apple TV or Amazon, then you still have to deal with your local team’s games getting blacked out for 90 minutes after it aired live if you bought the league’s streaming package for $150 per year.

Maybe baseball isn’t boring, and their business model is teaching people like me to stop watching. I watch fighting games instead now.

The games today are not mostly shit. There’s so much great stuff that comes out every year that it’s difficult to keep up with it all. It’s just not usually the stuff that gets the most marketing. As a bonus, the best games of the year rarely ask for that $70 price point. What are you looking for?

For my criticisms of that game, which mostly match that video, the story isn’t one of them. I’d call it one of the best the medium has to offer.

I’d definitely have a higher opinion of FTL if it didn’t feel like the entire game ended up just being about the final boss. Knights of the Old Republic is also one that I felt that, if you knew the twist ahead of time, lost a lot of its impact.

1. Skullgirls - Simply the best fighting game ever made. There’s so much depth in a comparatively small roster that I could basically never get bored or see every viable strategy in it.
2. Baldur’s Gate 3 - Tried and true RPG mechanics combined with the best version yet of Larian’s engine that encourages free form problem solving. And on top of that, they managed best in class presentation in NPC dialogue and had some of the best writing in the genre. This will be a tough act to follow, especially since I don’t think their last two Original Sin RPG systems were anywhere near as good as D&D 5e.
3. Elden Ring - It’s been a great couple of years for two of my favorite games of all time to come out within a year and a half of each other, but this is another one of those games where there’s just so much to see and so many ways to solve the problem in front of you. Pattern recognition for where to find your next reward is up to you; your next goal is up to you; how you conquer the bad guy in front of you is up to you.

All three of these games just respect your intelligence and are composed of systems deep enough to give you countless ways to solve their challenges.

I’m having a great time with Borderlands 3 right now. They did so much to improve the feel of those games with that one. Standards are incredibly high if that’s trash.

If we had private dedicated servers and the ability to play without anti-cheat, Linux support would be a non-issue. But because we don’t have that, anti-cheat is seen as a necessity, and we don’t have Linux support.

Every game has cheaters. If we could run our own servers, we could decide who we play with.

No, they arrived at the conclusion, for good reason, that the addressable console market isn’t growing using the old methods. So rather than hold on to exclusives with the myth that exclusives are going to drive adoption for Xbox, they’ll just port their games everywhere and make Game Pass available when possible, and Sony likely came to a similar conclusion. Even though they’re doing way better than Xbox, they also seemingly came to the conclusion that the ceiling is much higher without console exclusivity.

Very untrue, but okay.

That hardly makes it generic though.

If they’re not growing their platform beyond what the market was 15-20 years ago, is it lunacy?

It did take off for a time, and now it looks like it’s an early access game that hasn’t had an update in 19 months. And I can tell you that if they don’t let me host the server myself and play via LAN, they’re not solving any problems for me over Battlefield.