Tripadvisor has incredible boomer energy. Every time you find yourself reading a forum thread there it's like a time capsule to the dial up era.

Peak PR performance

It should be impossible for dream sequences in games to be even more tedious than the ones in movies. And yet.

ICE is what happens when little boys grow up only playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and don't balance it out with silly little games like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing. Not a drop of whimsy to be found in these broken men.

People love to rag on the Mercator projection, but when did you last see a Mercator projection world map? They basically haven't existed for decades! Unfairly scapegoated projection imo

Dante thought there were only seven circles of hell but that's because he never had to use Ubisoft Connect

Who doesn't have an oven with a fan setting? Is this some new dreaded American thing?

All news is local

Finally someone has cracked it

Merry Christmas! 🎄 If you’re visiting family today, remember to turn off motion smoothing on their TV 👍

Counterpoint: yes you can

i stand by this statement every year

Step 1: reconsider your choices to this point

Step 1: reconsider your choices to this point

I really struggle to grasp what Meta actually did with that $77bn of metaverse money. Like they didn't *literally* set it on fire, where did it all go?

Such a horror to use a slightly aging device with a micro USB port. All that fiddling about, feeling like something is about to snap off at any moment. How did we live like this?

Spotify Wrapped has been a malign influence on the world in so many ways but the worst is definitely establishing the practice of doing "end of year" lists in early December.

No surprise that the person arguing the "who needs revenue anyway?" side of this debate is an academic whose job doesn't depend on the commercial success of the industry.

You don't know how many copies I think Cyberpunk has sold

Huh! I've played this game entirely in the period between the busted Windows update and the hotfix being released and was kind of baffled by the performance which seemed a lot worse than you'd expect and almost totally insenstive to tuning the graphics settings.

Listen up games people

It's annoying how long it takes to make TV these days but the complete collapse in quality of The Bear is a very strong argument for taking your time.

To me this mostly signals Unity and Epic bothh further deprioritising their game engines to the point that they barely see each other as competitors anymore.

"No funny stuff" remains undefeated

Unfortunately the concept of 'ZIRP' has now fully escaped containment as is being used to explain literally anything that's changed since the 2010s

It might turn out to be a cool device but for the avoidance of doubt it is not going to be a pillar of anything and no serious analyst thinks otherwise

I regret to announce that the Americans are at it again

Just realised why Hades II's combat is so much more satisfying than every other game around at the moment: no parry mechanic

Excellent use here of the journalistic "amid" to imply a link between any two events that happen at roughly the same time

Wake up, babe. New heresy's just dropped.

Even as a fairly seasoned grand strategy hand it's hard not agree with a lot of this. People keep saying that Paradox tutorials are good now. This is a lie. They are terrible.

Solution to climate change: abolish all physical objects

For reasons that seemed to make sense at the time I wrote a thesis about this and the answer is: yes

This is true. Usually cutting jobs is hard to sell to investors because it looks like a sign of failure. "We don't need these jobs because of AI" is a way of covering your ass while sounding forward-looking.

What is the actual principle people are trying to defend here? "Oh it's just traditional ML not AI, that's fine" What are you talking about?

I presume they weren't *trying* to simulate a hallucinogenic experience here but that's sure as hell what they got

I have some sympathy for the "whiny babies" argument (some of these people really are whiny babies) but really this is a pretty weird way of looking at things. You can't just berate the audience into paying more.

Including some of my thoughts on the Xbox thoughts on the Xbox profitability story. While "profit margins" for business units are sort of fake, this story does underscore how the games business will always struggle to deliver to kinds of profits that Microsoft is used to.

Is the games industry profitable? Yes, and has been throughout the entire recent layoff wave. But profit margins did slide dramatically post-covid as costs shot up but revenue didn't keep pace. Margins have recovered since then, mostly thanks to reduced personnel costs.

The American mind cannot comprehend a nice train

Would be interesting the trace the relationship between the Japanese tourism boom and the emergence of a bunch of Western-made games set in Japan

Today in Americans Forgetting the Rest of the World Exists. Can't believe that a structural shift that has happened in every other Western democracy would also happen in America. Guess it must be due to some highly specific domestic factors.

Ubisoft now takes 5 years to make an Assassin's Creed game when they used to churn out one a year. Covid didn't help but it's clearly pretty marginal to the bigger picture here.

This guy is to me the prime example of Twitter being dangerous for your brain. He's been frog-boiled from normie centrism into fascism without even noticing.

Teleportation is murder

Having a familiarity with the Ikea product range really ruins your enjoyment of Airbnbs

I've never seen Scarface which is weird because I like mob movies. But it increasingly feels like my biggest generation-specific hole might be never having seen any Studio Ghibli film (which five years ago I'd heard of).

*guy firing up Astro Bot* Great, another brutal tale of betrayal and vengeance

Yes, finding good non-mainstream games is hard and that's a problem. But it's a problem that exists just as much for other media as it does for games, and if you're not at least aware that serious games *exist* then sorry you're just incredibly incurious.