Phasing out the optical drive from laptops was just about inevitable regardless of what Apple did. It saved a lot on battery life, not just form factor. I might see digital distribution of music, not video games, as a bigger driver for removing the disc drive, too.

Yeah, exactly why it feels gross to signal boost it.

I don’t think we need to amplify one of the worst opinion columns written in a hot minute. This reminds me of that guy who wanted to shame every adult who uses a backpack, as some kind of fashion faux pas. Both of these people can get bent. Games are fun. Backpacks are practical.

That was the first thing I took away from it, too. I like alcohol. It’s also objectively a worse activity for a healthy adult than playing ping pong.

I always thought it was legacy support for FAT file systems. If one was so inclined, you could break a large file down into chunks yourself using a compression tool.

Steam doesn’t advertise a game’s DRM status. DRM-free Steam game lists are maintained on wikis by users testing them. Most of the time they’re not DRM-free, but sometimes the developer is motivated to release them that way.

Kingdom Come is an Embracer joint; a subsidiary of Plaion. They’re definitely not independent. Baldur’s Gate 3 was self published but with a sizable investment from Tencent to fund its $100M budget. Valve is independent, but I don’t think anyone would say Half-Life 3 is their most anticipated indie game.

I’d argue boiling a thing down to “slop” is a lazy way to avoid saying why they didn’t like it.

People tend to use it to mean, “thing I don’t like” far too often these days.

That’s funny, because I would describe Breath of the Wild as the antithesis of the open world design, popularized by Ubisoft, that was most ubiquitous when BotW came out. You climb a tower and decide what’s interesting by seeing it from the top of the tower, not because climbing the tower labeled it as a checklist item on your map. In fact, if you do all of the shrines visible from the top of the towers, you’ve only done about half of them, and late in the game, after stumbling across a few shrines by happenstance, you realize from the negative space on the map that anything you couldn’t see from the top of the tower would tend to have a puzzle to solve that would reveal it.

There’s a whole wide world of AAA video games out there aside from those you mentioned. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II was fantastic just last year; Metaphor: ReFantazio the year before that; Baldur’s Gate 3 the year before that; Elden Ring the year before that. Plenty more still might be significantly smaller, but it would be difficult to count something like The Alters as indie; or Invincible VS or Screamer or Mouse: P.I. for Hire.

I’m currently only hosting Jellyfin (movies and TV) and Komga (books and comics) on a LAN, but I already bought a domain, and I’ll be exposing them via reverse proxy within the next few weeks; maybe even this weekend if everything goes well. After that, Nextcloud is a must for sharing large files, as Google Drive’s limits are coming up on me fast, and I’ll start test driving Fluxer as a replacement for Discord.

The zombies and monsters don’t fit the fantasy of being a thief. I didn’t try to fight them off, but mostly I just ran from them. It didn’t feel like I was sneaking around them or that it was something the game encouraged me to do when I encountered them, unlike with the human NPCs.

Getting lost is part of the point with the labyrinth levels.

If mine was the intended experience, it’s the part I would call dated, and avoiding that feeling is probably why we have so much white/yellow paint and so many objective markers. I’m inclined to believe, based on the presence of the in-game maps, that they expected me to find my way around by landmarks that weren’t as visually distinctive as they wanted them to be if they were unrestrained by development time or technology.

Movies are mostly settled science at this point, right? From the invention of the camera, there were decades of experimenting with what could be done on film, and eventually we arrived at feature length and a toolbox of techniques to use within it. Now and then some other innovation comes along and blows people away, but it’s not every year. Most of the time, it’s adhering mostly to a formula and tweaking it, or just telling a different story in the same constraints. Likewise, I don’t think games will ever advance as fast as they did in most of our lifetimes, but we’ll still get new stuff here and there.

As far as “AAA” goes, the AAA of Thief 1’s day is barely bigger than most indie teams today. Shareholders or not, you can’t experiment with $100M (or as high as a few billion if you’re making Grand Theft Auto VI) like you can with $1M or even $10M. As much as the author puts Thief on a pedestal, I bounced off of it for not strictly adhering to stealth, like when it takes a detour into the undead and other monsters; and for the constraints of its own technology at the time, like geometry being so simple and textures being so reused that I found the levels tedious to navigate by way of lacking identifiable landmarks. Thief 1 loaded the entire level at once because there was no asset streaming. Thief 2014 had load-bearing walls demoed in the video because they couldn’t keep up the fidelity they targeted without dynamically unloading one part of the level and loading another from a hard drive.

Anyway, Project Shadowglass looks awesome. Hopefully there are no zombies.

The fascinating thing to be reminded of by seeing this video so many years later is that this cycle will repeat over and over again. “Thing I liked years ago is better than thing people like today,” says essayist. Some of it was, but it came at a cost, so we then valued other things in response to those costs/flaws.

I knew what it was before we had this conversation.

Oh, you’ve never seen the throwaway bonus missions on a game SKU before? Truthfully, no one knows but Rockstar how substantive that extra stuff is. But my gut and past experience tells me that if it was actually worth seeing, they wouldn’t have padded out the list with a bunch of variations on guns and cars, of which there will be many even in the base game, because it’s Grand Theft Auto. The missions that we know about, which you have to read on one or two select pages but they’re not present on others, is some kind of mission around collecting cars for some fence; I’m not losing sleep over not having that and keeping an extra $20 in my pocket.

Yeah, deluxe versions of stuff like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Borderlands.

Or, alternatively, it’s $80, but they’ll let you plus it up with some bullshit that doesn’t matter for $20.

It’s worth what someone is willing to pay. I have paid north of $100 USD for new video games before. For what’s different between those two versions of GTA6, I probably would have been just fine on the $80 version and felt it was worth the money, as the $20 more expensive version doesn’t seem to offer much of value to me, but that’s if it came out on PC in the same calendar year. By December, all of the cultural zeitgeist around the game will be discussed to death on end-of-year gaming podcasts, and by the time it comes to PC, it will be long past spoiler discussions and that cultural moment. So by then, I don’t know what I’ll be willing to pay, but it will be far less than $80.