I wonder how much they’re paying Rockstar to delay The Only New Release of that generation; which will doubtless be available on PS5/XSX anyway.

There was still back and forth between PlayStation and Xbox. For the PS3, Sony went bonkers on architecture, and as a result Xbox won a lot of players. With the Xbox One, they made stupid plays on TV access and always-online, and Sony succeeded against their foot-shooting. Then, with the Series S|X, Xbox still lost but won back some consumers by introducing service-based game rental, which Sony followed suit on later.

The two have bettered each other by serving as competition to capitalize on the other’s anti-consumer actions, and by at least competing on pricing and ideas. Imagine if people called out the Xbox One’s always online, but PlayStation didn’t exist.

“lol, too bad gamers”

Here’s a question. For ages back, the console market had three contenders. Who do you think would compete in the trifecta between Nintendo and Sony?

Normally, PC markets stay aside from that conversation, but it might be Valve and the Steam Deck. I’m just not sure if Valve is the type to be interested in running big promotions at Wal-Mart by Mountain Dew displays.

Do we have a term for people who violate the Geneva Conventions in times of peace? Some new “twelfth circle of hell” type of moniker.

There’s a sardonic chuckle from me every time I pass an SUV stopped at a red light in the bike lane…while carrying more groceries in my saddle bags than all of its combined cargo.

If you want something a bit closer to Starfox, rather than an all-range flight arena, try Rogue Flight. It definitely evokes the power fantasy feeling, living up the classic arcade trope of “one ship being readied on a mission to save humanity”. There’s some very big-name voice actor work in it, as well.

Another good game for the “power fantasy” trope, though it’s a bit more outside the target, is Ace Combat 7. Or, perhaps any games in the series, but this one is pretty accessible. The combat is close to what you’d get in X-Wing/Tie-Fighter, but with fighter planes. It breaks from realism a little bit where needed to make the stunts fun. And, the story very much orients around the silent player character being “scary tough” in a fight, to the point enemy fighters are retreating just from seeing your wing markings.

Estelle, from Trails in the Sky.

She’s introduced as a bit of a cocky moron who constantly has to be wrangled by her more mature brother. But, there’s a slow development of competency where she starts to become decently sufficient at all the things her brother is good at, while he meanwhile lays bare some heavy emotional flaws - many of which Estelle excels at processing (call it a feminine trope, but it works).

Of note, all the rest of the Trails series have had male leads, and their pace of character development ground to a complete halt.

That still sounds like a mild inconvenience for the ultra rich, and a life-ruining disaster for low wage workers.

I wish it was easier to predict when the AI bubble is going to pop. There’s likely lots of money to be made shorting them, but it’s not something small investors can do easily - and there’s a real possibility some thousands of investors instead pull harder on the copiumand just lie to themselves for the next decade that “it’s almost there bro, we just need another lake for cooling our doubled power output”

I think it’s perhaps more necessary than you might think.

We have a lot of entries appearing in Steam, yes, but a huge percentage of them are investor-driven, research-founded money farms. They intelligently gather players, and they successfully evade boycotting measures, but they don’t make people happy. And, the studios that went into them used to make such games but have been bought out and squeezed out by private equity.

If somebody really wants to play an online shooter, they’ll still play COD even if they hate it, IF it’s the only good option. The more new options appear, the less valuable those entrenched games get and the more likely they collapse entirely.

We’re kind of complacent with having people like Valve around making Steam, but we kind of need more people in that space for people to turn to as every major console gets enshittified. Even Gabe Newell won’t live forever.

I realize when you search Steam there’s a lot of successful iterations of the classic Fire Emblem formula. Makes me wonder if any teams have done the same for HOMM3. I remember there was the fanmade expansion for it, it seems viable to invent a story/system from scratch.

EDIT: I should read other comments before commenting.

Brain Implosion Energy
10,000 grams of pure caffeine
Because you can’t overthink if your heart stops.

I think this is the goal of most true “adventurer” tropes. The moniker is genericized and relates to someone who gets in a lot of fights now, but its original meaning is someone that I picture is eager to explore new lands, with nary a luxury to them, relying on the kindness of people he meets, and exchanging useful tricks and information he’s come across.

I imagine they were the school bullies, but also convinced themselves they were the repressed minority being “bullied” by the rest of the school.

I really hope we can reach a point where we don’t give this guy headlines.

“Trump declares that anybody that’s EVER made fun of him is currently being targeted by every international police force which he has command over, and also that the sky is purple” is a statement totally disconnected from reality. We DO NOT NEED an “Um, actually!” to disprove him.

Yes, but you qualified that with “from those privileged enough”. Greta was never politically powerful by herself.

Besides, you also said your response is to roll your eyes; to ignore her, at absolute worst. I have done that too. I’ve gotten mail from dozens of charities about being SO CLOSE to fixing some problem like homelessness or bee colony collapse, and scoffed at their constant efforts for my attention. But I don’t HATE them. I don’t enlist efforts to burn down those charities. I don’t take time out of my day to try to prescribe harm to them.

You HAVE to have some truly despicable damaged core to do such a thing.

I really really REALLY want to hear ONE sentient answer to this question. I cannot understand it. I can’t even understand the ROUTE your logic would take.

Yes, there are influencers out celebrating their own actions a bit too much for promotional purposes. The worst I’ll ever feel for them is rolling my eyes and not caring about them.

I want to believe I could be convinced otherwise, but I almost feel like regardless of what circumstances you were built up around or how you learned about a person like her, there has to be something fundamentally wrong with you to have hatred for someone showing concern for the world’s path of self destruction, and putting themselves at risk for everyone’s sake to try to resolve it.

That is a conclusion made in hindsight, the easiest place to make predictions. Not every studio has the same forms of public popularity and good will they can bank on.

Also, selling millions of copies is not an indicator of a studio’s upper bounds. Publishers - even indie-oriented ones - need the lightning in bottle releases to pay for games that didn’t do well. We can’t do an experiment where KC:D2 releases on two planet Earths, one with a DRM-free release and one with DRM, and say for certain that the second wouldn’t let them additionally fund another studio’s pet project.

Basically, given how many failed releases happen that we never hear about, it can be misrepresentative to point to some good games and say “See? Studios are able to pay their mortgage.” Denuvo is able to sell to studios, costing those studios money, in part by showing raw data (that we might not ever see) explaining how it promotes early sales.

My general guess: The delay is tied to Denuvo. Smart devs will launch with Denuvo so that pudding-headed pirates (my label for a certain small demographic among pirates) drooling over marketing will see the trailers, try to pirate, fail, be told by crackers to wait like 2-3 weeks for them to unlock it; but instead become impatient and buy the game full price.

But the time period to capture pudding heads is not constant, and is not perfectly predictable before release. So, the developer may not want to commit to a certain release schedule where they will release on GOG, dropping Denuvo at that same time. They might even want to reserve the possibility the game will go years without dropping DRM, if it’s somehow staying constantly popular, and constantly desired by pirates, and/or they can see that the hacking communities have failed to unlock it.

I’m currently in the process of converting over; have a dual boot and will probably leave it that way for the next year.

It is NOT, by any measure, that Linux is annoyance free and perfectly designed. It’s that Windows has been building up its annoyances in competition, so that going penguin takes a considerable measure of bloat off.

We’re at a point where some games are just performing better through Proton than running right on Windows.