I mean also it just seems like a case of normalization. You start out with slow meaningless MTX then you move it more and more. Hell its a bit odd since I’m glad there was some outrage over the MTX in this game but as you said its most likely due to the increase to $70 usd which is a slap in the face to deal with MTX in a fucking single player game but Capcom is one of the shittiest companies when it comes to dumb/pointless MTX.

Monster Hunter, Devil may cry, Dead Rising, and Resident Evil all have this kind of shit with very little peeps about it. So you basically hit the nail on the head on this on why there was such a big outrage this time around. Also I’m really surprised fucking Street Fighter doesn’t, the literal poster child of pointless/odd additions which in a funny way has actually only gotten better in the digital age. I’m not a big fighting game fan but season passes have sort of solved having so many fucking editions of a single game. Like holy shit there were 5 fucking versions of Street Fighter 2 in a span of 3 years. 3 versions of SF3 in 3 years.

Edit: marked by bold, I was tired when writing this comment and seems I just forgot to finish my full thought before posting.

Vr is very price prohibitive and Oculus/Facebook sell headsets at a loss to make their marketshare. Its not great but if you want to “try vr” especially something you hear will make you physically sick to use and you might not even like. Its just logical to spend the least amount of money on it for a “proper headset”. Like if you value your privacy that is fine and completely understandable but lets be honest here, most people don’t. Especially with the popularization of social media and smart phones like we can even apply the same logic with your argument with phones like why would you buy a device that has so many cameras and microphones and wave it around your home and toilet. Hell I think the phone is actually worse since most people bring them everywhere while a headset is a bit more constrained on where you can take it.

I mean not really. Again the index is a great headset but look at how long people actually use their headsets for. Is it better to throw your money into a pit that is $400 or $1000. VR is a weird since you either love it or hate it. Most people are going to hate it and many people aren’t really into the idea of reselling their stuff. This isn’t to say facebook good or some nonsense like that but from a prospective customer’s standpoint why spend so much money on something you might not even like. You don’t have to drill any holes in your walls to put up base stations while inside out tracking isn’t great it gets the job done and again its far more convenient. I like the option to have base stations but again realistically putting in so much work for something you might only spend a week or month on is not a great investment of your money or time. If you like VR, I would highly suggest getting a better headset than a quest or oculus headset but a newcomer I will 100% suggest a quest over anything else especially a used model to save them extra cash.

Are we going to ignore that VR adoption is basically held up by Oculus/facebook. I hate facebook and their support for their titles on the VR space are dreadful for instance it is unacceptable what they did with Echo Arena but you can literally look at the steam hardware survey and see that Oculus/facebook makeup nearly 70% (67.4% to be more accurate) of VR headsets in the market today for PCVR. Who the fuck is funding many VR game devs right now? I can tell you it ain’t many publishers and the biggest one right now is Facebook as much as I hate to say it. Facebook absolutely is a crutch VR needs to survive in this market but we gamers should make use of them for as long as possible then ditch them whenever its convenient for us.

Hell the PSVR2 looking very juicy if that has great PCVR support and it doesn’t require any ps5 nonsense to work but PSVR2 is a perfect example of how VR is not in a great place and a big part of it is price related. Like VR nuts (like I) would gladly pay higher tier prices for a good headset but to some average joe, they see a headset that costs as much as a fucking console that only works with a limited number of games. Hell the thing can even make you sick trying to use it. Most people aren’t going to pay 1000+ dollars to try VR to see if they “like it”, hell they aren’t even paying $550.

Again I’m not here to advocate for Facebook but I will sure as hell make use of their investments in VR because they are sort of throwing that money in a fire pit with how the market is. Facebook plans on trying to fill that fire pit with so much money it becomes a bridge that is profitable and it might be in the future but right now if you want someone to try VR, a oculus headset is probably the best bang for your buck headset especially if you buy it used since realistically most people are going to play with it for a month then be done with it and try to hock the thing.

Footage of a police shooting that occurred during November has came out. A cop detained a suspect who they believed to have a supressed gun, they cuff and search him finding no gun and put him in back of a police car. So the deputy was walking past the car when an acorn struck the car. He shouts “shots fired” and basically unloads on the car with the unarmed suspect while screaming he is hit. The other cops on the call also start unloading on the car and thankfully the person in the car was not hurt. So from the onset its a humorous story about a cop overreacting to a stimuli and we are only laughing because noone was killed in it (well I guess some people would still be laughing if it was deadly but probably less). The cop apparently was a vet, so this seems to be a case of PTSD and its not great that an officer was able to make it that far along while such a mundane stimuli was able to set them off possibly getting someone killed. Hopefully the officer in question gets the help they need but its clear they shouldn’t be in that position at all if that is how they will react.

I agree with most of that however The King in Yellow was made when he was around 5 years old. People sort of put it into the Lovecraft universe because of the themes but nope has 0 connection at least in its inception. The whole Lovecraft universe is sort of a hog podge of other’s authors work as well who sort of expanded and formalized parts of it. Its honestly very cool what a group of authors can do when IPs and such aren’t hoarded in a huge vault being left untouched until its economically advantageous to use.

Yeah it does make it a bit hard to listen to those audiobooks in the car…

I mean if they have read some of his stories, it should be pretty obvious he was pretty fucking racist. The cat thing is a fun meme but if anyone has read at least call of Cthulhu the work most people know about its pretty on the nose. Every human antagonist is either black or a foreigner and he is pretty blatant about it. Hell don’t get me started on Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (or The White Ape), that one is just so funny with how bloody racist it is because the conclusion is so absurd, you can’t take it serious.

You are referring to Doom 2016 actually. While that turn out decent, one of their key arguments was due to it being online focused. We all know Doom 2016 had rather generic multiplayer.

With that said, it feels silly not to have issues when publishers refuse to send out review keys. Its a huge red flag for a game, this doesn’t mean it will be bad but its a trend we shouldn’t be happy about. Its only done to help preserve preorder numbers.

That is funny but not as bad.

Can’t say too much but god I hate this so much. Used to work a call center and someone had a username that was all 1,l,I s and there was no way to easily identify between those 3 characters. For someone to verify who they were they needed to tell us their username and some other info. So I had to waste nearly 30 fucking minutes dealing with this stupid shit before we could proceed forward and we couldn’t just DC the person.

No personal person (except maybe freelancers) were ever going to buy Adobe for its list price, it was always about getting businesses to buy it, its the exact same scheme that there is for Winzip. Also you are acting like it was some act of kindness when really if it was that case, they would have kept perpetual licenses around with their subscription plan but they did away with it since they knew they can rake in way more money with the scheme. The plan for Photoshop was around $600, their subscription plan is $22 per month. in 2.2 years, you have paid basically the same amount but one you actually keep the product in the other you have to continue to rent it. Apparently the " Creative Suite Master Version" was $3000, today creative suite runs for $60 per month, so that would be around 4.2 years to pay it off. I doubt most people are using every single new feature they add. Hell some companies avoid updating to make sure everything is compatible with their current workload. So having perceptual licenses just make sense in these kind of cases.

once we have gotten past the ethical quandaries and doing it the right way. It would be cool to just synthesize voices for npcs and PC from a list of “character types” and maybe add accents for the main PC. So all games can have voiced audio (could be cool if it can also work in a retroactive way, like play a classic CRPG but have fully voiced characters would be pretty neat), which can be a mixed bag in modern day since realistically there is a budget and voice acting can take a ton of money if done right. So it means we as gamer if we can mod in new quests, we can use such system to truly expand thee game. Like I love real VA performances so I can see this as a “stopgap” so you can get the main questline done and many of the “good” side quests done but you can use this AI trained voice for the more smaller tasks that may not get as much love or as I said use it for modding.

In some ways I agree, people love to tear each other down but one of their examples is around “Genshin Impact players”, Like cool you can enjoy those games but god damn them getting popular is fucking scary to me as a gamer since it means Gatcha gaming is coming to the west and I’m sorry to all you Genshin impact player but those mechanics are some of the most cancerous things in modern gaming. The huge gambling aspects, paying for power, just the constant daily grinds, etc. The same is said for sports titles and other things. So people use it as a “Har har I feel I’m better than you” but I think there is a fear of such monetization catching on. We as gamers should be fighting against these things because we are becoming nothing but a god damn piggy bank for these large gaming corporations, who are trying to make us gamblers. Its honestly the reason why I try to stick with the PC market and indie games since the biggest problem area is the AAA scene since they are trying to extract the most amount of wealth. I want a developer to succeed and I think there is a fair place for monetization in the gaming scene but right now a ton of devs (realistically publishers) don’t respect players and their money.

I mean even from a core concept, melee with big animations just seems like an odd way to go for that style of game as you point out with multiple enemies. Also its brain dead simple unless they have changed it where you just go left, right, left, right. So difficulty setting basically just goes down to how tanky is this enemy (which is a pretty common way to artificially inflate a game’s difficulty).

He was certainly above that. Hell his story “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” also known as “White Ape”. Is literally a book about the “one drop rule” to the point its actually funny because of how absurd it comes off as. Its so insanely racist, it fucking becomes funny based on the character’s reaction. Its not a great short story but basically he find out his great great great great grandmother was a “white ape” (which is not human per say but lets read between the lines since the white apes come from the congo region), his response to this news was pouring gasoline on himself and burning himself alive. Like yes its fiction but the fact he made a fucking short story where the focal point is discovering that you are mixed race and learning that is so mind breaking, death was the only logical option is god damn hilarious.

Focus 2

meshify 2

Pop Air

Enthoo Pro 2

Evolv Shift 2 Air

Eclipse p400

Like these aren’t the “boring cases” you are referring to but they are black boxes with at least decent airflow since those boring HP,Dell, and other big system integrator use are pretty horrid for cpus/gpus gamers actually use. That was just from a cursory look of 2 case manufacturers .

You know ignoring your comment that the war has been going on for 3 years. Its only been a year and halfish maybe closing into 2 years. Its laughable that a country like Ukraine whom’s military budget before this was several fractions of Russia’s is able to hold them back in open fucking warfare. I know you are gonna say whatabout Vietnam or “War on Terror” but those were insurgencies (ignoring the ethics of the US being in those wars since really we shouldn’t have been) the US and Nato trying to capture territory typically goes smoothly as we seen in the Gulf War and Desert Storm basically being called the 100 hour land war

While yes that is the level headed answer but gamers aren’t level headed. People associate people with their game choices with the decisions of the developers/publishers all the time. We see this with people who do Gacha, COD, Etc. Where people’s hatred is for these people for supporting said things. The “true gamers” see most mobile gamers as gamblers and children because of the industry/monetization around it.

Sure there is a ton of elitism in gaming but are we going to ignore mobile games are the birthplace of the shit monetization we see in modern AAA gaming. There is a reason why sports games and mobile games were the only gaming related things Konami wanted to do for the longest time (now they are just cashing in on lazy ports). Low expenses, high turnout! Like there are a likely a ton of great games on mobile phones but we can’t ignore the market is filled with glorified slot machines. Many mobile gamers have been pushing for this unfortunately.