I don’t suppose you’ve played Metaphor: ReFantazio? Because that’s a fantasy setting with extremely obvious 21st century political satire. Anyway, I’m not trying to mock you for not expecting it or anything, but I’ve found political themes in fantasy to be very common and often the most compelling part.

Really? Fantasy settings have been political since forever, and Game of Thrones wasn’t that long ago. I’m rewatching the extended editions of Lord of the Rings now, and while I can’t remember the books’ stances, the movie for sure has things to say about industrialization and environmental impacts when they cut to Saruman.

It’s a sleeper hit for sure, but I’d highly recommend Escape from Ever After to anyone looking for a good Paper Mario game like those first two. 6 months and 7 new releases into this year, that’s still the best game of 2026 for me so far.

There are still four things left you can find in arcades but not (common) consumer hardware. Gambling for kids…

I’ve got some bad news for you.

Yeah, arcades as we knew them kind of died, but they still exist. They’re more focused at kids than they used to be, and often times they involve adaptations of cell phone games like Angry Birds or almost-simulator-rides like Fast and Furious that cost $8 per play.

Part of why arcades died was because it was so obviously a better deal to play the home version than the arcade version. Fighting games were money-making machines, because nothing was more lucrative than your friend getting pissed off that you beat him, driving him to put another quarter in the machine. But if you’re really tired of feeling like there’s always a cash shop or some DLC around the corner, just buy games on a lag of a few years, kind of like what you just did. And indie games are great too. If you’re enjoying Marvel 3, for my money, I’d say Skullgirls is by far the better game, and you can frequently get the game + season pass (4 additional characters) for about $12USD during a big sale.

If you haven’t played a AAA game in over 14 years, then you might be surprised to find out that it happens all the time. Marvel 3 did upset its fans with its business model though. They put out “Ultimate” Marvel vs. Capcom 3 a year later, for like $40, and it pissed a lot of people off. So the cash shop wasn’t in the game, but it still had that sour taste for a lot of folks. The reality is that making a fighting game is not going to result in the best version of that game on the first try, meaning that they need to do more work on it after the point of sale, meaning they need to raise more money to justify that work. It used to be buying separate versions of the same game (Super, Turbo, Championship Edition, etc.), and now it’s buying DLC characters in the same version of the game. That $0.25 arcade machine had a high chance of being far more expensive than what you paid for the home version, and that’s why they did it; arcades were a plenty nefarious business model in their own right.

From what I can tell from Kitboga videos, all retail gift cards are a lucrative way to launder proceeds from scams. Valve was probably just more tired of dealing with it.

4x18TB in RAID5. I went with 18s because it was the best value for $/TB when I bought them, which was just before prices spiked. That gives me almost exactly 50TB of usable space after formatted capacity and space lost to RAID. If I bought drives today for the same price as what I paid earlier this year, that 50TB shrinks to 35TB. I’ve only got DVD and Blu Ray rips on it; Jellyfin counts 120 movies (105 of which are Blu Ray, 15 DVD) and 1166 episodes of TV (10 series on Blu Ray, but number of episodes per show varies wildly). This is the full fat rips with MakeMKV, all special features, no video compression via Handbrake or anything; almost exactly 11TB used. So I’ve got a lot of room for expansion, and I plan on also using this NAS for other things that will probably be a rounding error compared to my Jellyfin library.

The full quote is:

Hey Tom [of The Verge], I can confirm this [last minute decision thing] is not true. We just limited the knowledge of this news to a very small internal group. Intention was to share this news first with our players and everyone watching showcase.

A lot has changed since Asha came into role 107 days ago. We are moving fast and it’s frankly pretty energizing inside the hallways here. I was made aware of these exclusives roughly a month in advance. Hope that helps!

It was my paraphrase, which I made somewhat facetiously. I don’t think a lot of replies here know what paraphrasing is.

Some additional developments not captured by this article: Jeff Grubb says a source tells him there is a finished PS5 version of this game sitting on a drive somewhere that will now go unused. And second, an Xbox…sorry, XBOX exec said that (paraphrasing), “No, this decision wasn’t made last minute. We decided this over a month ago but just wanted to keep it secret so it would be a fun surprise for gamers.” So they definitely made this decision last minute.

Gotcha, thanks for taking the time to humor me. I never would have guessed.

Maybe you said so in some lingo that’s foreign to me, but what upsets that reputation? What kinds of configurations do they not like, and why is it not set and forget? Sorry for asking for a dissertation, but I never had any idea e-mail could be more complicated than set and forget.

What is your reputation in this context? And what does losing it cost you?

Would you care to give some additional context here? I haven’t had the itch to host my own e-mail, but what kinds of misfortune do you encounter when you’re not in the good graces of Google of Microsoft? And what could land you in that situation?

To each their own. I said elsewhere that video game ads like these are about all the ads I ever see in a given year, and it’s how I’ll know I’m interested in a thing that a summary might not capture. Plus, my favorite games outlet will do an MST3K style talkover, and that’s fun too.

Yeah, the bright side of the past couple months is that companies have seemingly finally realized that live service is a losing bet.

A lot of us here are disillusioned with Nintendo, but there are still so many third party games that are supposedly coming in 2026 that don’t have release dates yet that this could be worth watching. Or perhaps you play Fantasy Critic and want to know if those new Luigi’s Mansion or Xenoblade Chronicles rumors are true.

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.