Fire Emblem Engage. Only the third FE I’ve tried, I go back and forth on whether this series is for me. At this point, this one might be my favorite out of the ones I’ve played. The cast is really weird overall but I still quite like a few of them. I also like the character advancement and Engage systems. It’s fun to tinker with my party. The battles also seem to have less of the nonsense and more of the kind of strategy I like than in the others.

Classic. Gorgeous soundtrack, too. I remember as a kid (pre-Internet) actually calling up the store because I couldn’t figure out how to save the game 😂

I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed the main story in Starfield. I normally don’t care at all about it in Beth games. Unfortunately, I was too disappointed by all the missed potential to keep up with it after that (which is just weird to type out, I think I went 200 hours in Skyrim before I decided to actually go through the story). The awful framerates I was getting really didn’t help, either.

Oh, and Starfield’s Neon is gonna look real bad side-by-side with Cyberpunk 2077. Oof.

Improved ray tracing is key. We’re at a point where hardware improvements aren’t for selling games to end users, they’re for cutting costs for developers. Project managers don’t want to spend time and resources handcrafting lighting anymore.

We saw it before where making SSDs baseline didn’t necessarily always lead to a change in world design but certainly led to cuts in asset streaming optimization. Same with framerates.

The domestic market can be, and even that depends on your perspective. For example, China doesn’t have the insane Disney copyright regime the West has that artificially suppresses competition.

Competing in the domestic Chinese market is another conversation entirely, as right now, for video games, China has to come to us. The remnants of insular, planned economy only get you so far when you’re trying to build soft power and expand into foreign markets.

Mario & Luigi games are still JRPGs, which is a genre that’s more of a vibe than something easily defined. Here it’s a little easier because the series traces back to a major JRPG developer in the 1990s.

Even Expedition 33, another one with timed gameplay, is frequently getting lumped into the category (though that might change in coming years). That’s why I prefer the term Japanese-style role-playing games, as the genre is increasingly seeing game dev outside of Japan.

depends how much chinese influence you want in the gaming market.

There’s no stopping that train now, Tencent or no.

Traditional devs need to be ready to compete, and breaking up monopolies makes for a market more prepared to do so.

I just think it’s ironic that it came to mirror the books in that you can enjoy absolutely top-notch storytelling for a while and then can’t enjoy the ending.

Worth it just to get your socks blown off by the opening theme, if nothing else.

It’s not the best Civ has ever been, but RomanHoliday’s AI rework seemed to mostly resolve the biggest problem I had with it, which was the AI falling apart by the Renaissance.

Everyone seems to be more interested in the latest techbro feud so I wanted to highlight what he said about Unknown Worlds staff not being given specifics on what their compensation will be. The statement was quite nebulous on that.

Gods, I hate this culture. Make concrete, public promises to your staff to follow through on your acquisition deal? Nah, can’t have that. Open yourself up to liability by throwing the former execs under the bus, in detail? No problem!

It’s really interesting that one of the reasons Diablo 3 was a step down was the increase in handcrafted story elements that kept interrupting the procgen flow. Some games just do really well with it.

Fire Emblem Engage, having more fun with it than I thought I would. After Three Houses, I’d kinda written off Fire Emblem as not for me but only a couple hours in I’m already having fun messing around with character builds.

That’s the thing, for the big publishers, the end user (consumer) is only part of the puzzle. Investors and business partners (such as licensees) are more important, and have been for years. They bring in the wealth.

End users are neither organized nor informed enough to have a seat at the table. The masses will gravitate towards their big properties and marketing will be shaped to that effect. Acquire said big properties if you don’t have them, and make sure all the potential investors know you did.

This reminds me to get on Shogun, I’ve been meaning to start it.

And oof, it hurts me in my soul to see The Night Of that high up. I’ve rarely been so disappointed in a show.

DS9 would probably make the list if it were reviewed today. It’s the most like prestige TV out of old Trek (at least the later seasons).

Not even just bad, some-of-the-worst-Trek-ever-made bad is sprinkled in there. Season 2 is dire.

David Wise’s twitter would have been wild 😂

Damn, you must have a beefy rig. Even setting aside the weird texture issues, FPS was all over the place for me. Knew it was a hard pass pretty quick.

Still amazed how well Wilds sold after that dumpster fire of a demo.

I’d also recommend they open up the co-op more, but common sense multiplayer seems a bridge too far 🙄

They still have plenty of source material. They aren’t even halfway through the game yet.