Do you remember what E3 presentations used to be? Go back to 2006 and watch one straight through. Or even 2016. Lots of slides about how great the presenter’s company was, live demos that didn’t work; for about 2 hours that felt like 4, with far fewer games shown in the same amount of time as today. That’s not to say this is objectively better, or that it’s always good, but it’s how we arrived here. Compared to 20 years ago, I also have so many different ways to cut advertisements out of my life entirely that this and the Game Awards are basically the only times I seek them out. And it’s not just Geoff’s show; take a look at the Steam “showcase of showcases” page, and you’ll see all of the other little events tied around this time of year, too, often with demos available for us to play.

One of this year’s best-rated games is a 2D game that looks like it was made for the Game Boy Color, and last year’s Call of Duty got a 65 on OpenCritic. Perhaps critics like Remake and Rebirth for the ways they subverted the idea of remaking a classic while still integrating a classic combat system into a modern one, as that’s what their words would seem to indicate. The reality is that what you might consider a masterpiece is going to be grating for someone else, and that’s going to bring down its average review score.

Yes, Rebirth required a hardware upgrade to play, which is going to lose a lot of players compared to the install base of the PS4 in 2020. There are also the folks waiting for the trilogy to finish before picking up either the entire set or the one in the middle they hadn’t played yet. And anecdotally, though I haven’t seen this stat tracked yet, if you make me wait over a year for exclusivity to run out before you port it to my platform, I’m not playing it the first day it’s available; they trained me to wait already, so I may as well wait for a deep sale. I still haven’t purchased or played Rebirth, but I plan to during this upcoming summer sale, and I’m replaying Remake now ahead of that.

Review scores are just someone’s opinion, and they’re only “inflated” when it’s not an opinion you share.

Their sales recovered once they left PlayStation, so now that there’s a simultaneous launch, the smart money is on it doing phenomenally well.

This looks awesome. A Bloodsport/kumite plotline should have been made into a video game a long time ago, and we’ve got RGG making a Virtua Fighter game.

“This mission seems like it’s going to be a cakewalk, so just go by yourself with three R2 units. It’ll be fine.”

RAM prices came down a bit in mid-April, as I said, when one of those deals fell through because it wasn’t actually set in stone, and one of those major AI companies was less cash rich than everyone thought. That doesn’t mean it’s back to where we started, but they came down from their peak, at least for a time, and have somewhat stabilized since then. We’re also seeing data centers meet opposition, not just legally but logistically, and folks are trying to read the tea leaves there for prices, too.

No, because some of the supply constraints we thought were locked in contracts were actually just handshake agreements that fell through, so that frees up supply and sends prices back down a bit. There’s also the part where this came for RAM first, but then SSDs were hit on a lag because a lot of the same tech is used, and then HDDs were hit on a lag because SSDs were scarce. HDDs don’t really factor into these devices, but there are ripple effects that can make predicting long-term costs difficult.

Then you forget that everything that got worse was also replaced by something better.

Around this same time would have been the old flash cartoon, “The Decline of Video Gaming”, which accurately predicted the trend of all genres taking on RPG elements, perhaps even more than they thought possible. I’m not quite sure where this pessimism came from, as we were hot on the heels of all of the mega hits that came out in the late 90s, and everyone was quite aware of imminent releases of the early 2000s at this time, like Super Smash Bros. Melee, Final Fantasy X, and Metroid Prime.

You’ll probably want to keep 20% of your drive free for performance reasons, honestly. So if you need anything else on there, make it small.

I think I’ll be quite busy in September, but basically everything listed as releasing in September is a miss for me. I’ll be busy with the dozens of other games that came out this year, for sure.

Even Terminator 2 changed the time travel rules established in the first movie, but at least it felt like its ideas were still original. And I didn’t even mind Terminator 3.

I played the 2018 one and not Ragnarok, and that might be true, but what an awful way to introduce people to this game during a showcase, lol.

They understand, but they also understand that when they need to make something new, and the old classic already had a complete story, their best chance to make money is off of something familiar. So not Tom Bombadil, but that’s how we ended up with Solo: A Star Wars Story and every Terminator after 2.

I was disappointed in Uncharted 4 for a few reasons, but it’s got other components to its gameplay loop besides shooting, and some of them are better than the shooting too. I’d expect this new God of War game to have some light puzzles and decisions around gear, but they couldn’t have baked more of that into the opening 20 minutes? Kingdom Come: Deliverance II just last year is very story-heavy, but they’re gracefully integrating introductions to mechanics (“tutorial” has connotations that don’t really apply here) all the way through the first 5 hours of the game while setting up the story. Even the introduction to your own character allows you to make decisions around how to spec out his character sheet.

That was a pretty brutal 20 minutes. If the game was coming out on a platform I own, even if I was excited for how the combat works, that was barely interactive, and I wouldn’t be looking forward to sitting through that again. In The Legend of Zelda, you hold up for about a second and a man immediately gives you a sword; I couldn’t help but think of that during all that story setup.

Not that stable. This game went through a form of development hell long enough that they had to lay off some folks to survive long enough to finish it.

This game is very good, but boy is it stressful. I can’t play for long sessions before I end up needing a break.

Yeah, any earlier than that and I’m hunting down scanline filters for RetroArch to dial in the look. Having a proper CRT and old consoles is too much for me, but CRT scanlines very much affect the look of those old games.