One of the last Web 1.0 bastions in gaming. Really hate to see this, especially when Discord is around the peak of its popularity right now. Here's hoping a more future-proof alternative than that arises.

Much of this isn't unique to PC gaming. And if there ever was a dark age for PC hardware, we've recently crawled out of it, thankfully.

What bugs me the most right now (and doesn't quite get addressed in this article) is low performance standards. Everyone's pushing 4K and ray tracing, which makes it hard out here for us framerate nerds. It's starting to feel like every major release that comes out is Crysis, something for my hardware to grow into. Only with blurry anti-aliasing/supersampling techniques now.

One new, big positive I'm not seeing talked about much is a growing variety of Japanese publishers are taking PC seriously now, and that hasn't happened in over thirty years. I'm including Sony in this, even with their recent missteps in the space, and Square Enix's recently announced restructuring suggests simultaneous PC releases in the future for their games. That will inject some competition in PC gaming, although be aware that Japan has its own share of publishers that release broken ports.

Xbox buys talent, mismanages it in search of impossible scale, and cuts it loose - be that the 20-year experts of Fable, or the battle-scarred makers of Dishonored, or the invigorating new generation behind Hi-Fi Rush.

Talking up the demerits of capitalism in the massive gaming industry has been more common as of late (perhaps especially so on Lemmy), and I do think there is nuance in that conversation.

There's no reasonable nuance here. Microsoft clearly wants insane return on investment from their studios, and I don't see how that leaves room for the art of video game design.

I didn't see that coming, and it's a welcome development. If it warps the general PC hardware market enough that devs start optimizing for a standard platform, it'll result in less buggy products at launch. And maybe orienting development towards a relatively underpowered platform will make it easier for those of us ~~dumb enough to~~ that like to spend more on a desktop to hit those 60 FPS targets.

Ugh, that pull quote.

Even in our press guides, we were not to say anything about Alex’s sexuality, period, at all.

Considering the response to the first game and its prequel, I don't know who the hell SQEX Europe thought their audience was.

The wild thing about last summer was it revealing how remarkably stable their unpaid labor pool is. Take away their tools, mock them in the national press and on the site, and the worst most of them will do is participate in a perfunctory protest. They weren't willing to go to war or even organize in a meaningful manner.

It makes me think of how nationalism has sent millions to their deaths. Who needs money? People will put themselves through hell just to protect an identity.

"We know, stop writing us."

Grave of the Fireflies, a Ghibli film. Stopped it a couple times. Ended up finishing it eventually, wish I never had.

Casual xenophobia/racism. Much like the whole MSG thing here.

Well, a bunch more talent just hit the job market with The Escapist melting down, too.

I encourage anyone that hasn't yet to try any subscription-based journalism for a month just to see how different the writing is when it's not beholden to advertising and SEO.

I don't like 3D platforming. I haven't liked it since it really kicked off in 1996. Even all these years later with Super Mario Odyssey, I feel like I'm constantly fiddling with the camera, and something in my brain struggles with judging distances in 3D space at times. I used to love platforming. Yoshi's Island is one of my all-time favorite games.

If I were in a bubble, I'd say the camera and the floaty controls that are in a lot of these games need an overhaul, but Mario's as popular as ever. Between that and Mario games still being at the top of metascores, it's probably only me and five other people grumpy about it.

Well, they wouldn't, because not all of the nine thought the game was perfect. A 100 on Metacritic only means the game placed in the top score for a given publication (4 out of 4 stars in WaPo's case, for example).

In games criticism, a top score doesn't always mean a perfect game. It can mean the game met or surpassed the current benchmark in its genre, or it simply was good enough to be in a top tier.