Cycling collisions, while harmful, are orders of magnitude less harmful than collisions involving cars, especially SUVs.

When you hear about a life-threatening or life-ending traffic injury, you can assume it wasn’t two people walking, or two people biking, or one biking and one walking, etc. You can always assume a car was involved.

Same for me. I enjoy the Hitman games, but they have a bit more guidance towards suggesting possibilities for you.

I’d almost like it if I could investigate just as a master hacker that can skip the breaking in portion to try checking XYZ company’s records while sitting at the crime scene, instead of going down a 2 hour rabbit hole at risk of being caught to realize “Oh, that was the victim’s ID, not the killer’s, so nothing I’m investigating has anything to do with the case.”

I don’t think there’s that many big-budget releases you can invest in if you care about Denuvo. Even the Ace Attorney games, re-releases of old DS visual novels, have been getting Denuvo’d.

I agree when it comes to taste-specific stuff. I’m playing Steamworld Heist 2 and have Tactical Breach Wizards in my wishlist, so indie tactics games have been satisfying me - they’re certainly good and interesting, as you say.

But, those aren’t games I’d recommend to everyone. It does mean not much water cooler discussion since no one is playing the “same” games in most social circles. It used to be, a big release like Halo came out and everyone was talking about it, playing it, and discovering things together.

The point is that it’s not just them paying the price, though. With continuous years of NO publishers putting out anything interesting, we’re at a point where people are just less interested in anything that’s coming out.

It’s a carrot and stick problem to some degree. They know now we hate microtransaction-laden live service games, but it’s harder to define what players would enjoy. Keep in mind, there’s many cases of simply letting the developers cook that haven’t worked out either.

Right - they don’t even make a game a decade anymore, and even Deadlock is in a genre many people aren’t interested in.

Massive are the ones that made Star Wars Outlaws - so it seems the world disagrees with you.

I wasn’t so interested in Outlaws, but I’ve sometimes thought the criticism was slightly overblown. It looks a lot better than some other Ubi games.

100% is itself a bit of a misleading target.

I think I remember Just Cause 2 had it so the top achievement in the game was only for 70% completion because they knew they had such a ridiculously huge map.

Breath of the Wild aims the same way - they like having you come across a bunch of Korok seeds while traveling, but not scouring the land with a magnifying glass looking for them.

The stupidest instance in recent memory was an LGBT-positive video saying “It’s okay to be queer!” but in the captions, inserting another one of those fucking dinky-ass asterisks into the word “queer”.

Okay, so is it NOT okay to be queer? Should we censor “boy” and “girl” next? Or maybe stop with the silly asterisks and blame the medium that actually tries with the bans.

I am curious if the games community has anything positive to say about major publishers at this point.

It’s fun to laugh at one failure, and it’s nice we still get occasional great indie hits. But when most major publishers fail to turn out anything of interest, and even Sony is kind of reaching vanishing expectations amid remasters of remasters, it becomes hard to even suggest what to buy an unknowledgeable kid for Christmas.

The most fragile thing to me is their funding stream, which may even serve as a source of enshittification demands, implemented as subtly as possible.

Not in any way forgiving cars, but for my own cycling I at least try to avoid those unsafe intersections where possible. I’m still uneasy about taking the bridges into downtown more than I need to.

Ideally, Sony would handle the legal hurdles needed to allow PSN in multiple countries. But I imagine, as the publishers have invested tons of money into producing those singleplayer games, part of what they want in return is investment into the “PlayStation ecosystem”. Much like how Microsoft doesn’t care if people play their games on an Xbox, they just want an account.

Basically, I don’t think Sony is really in the business of putting down huge financial risks just to get the $60 entry tag of the rare singleplayer game they put out. Those games are meant to get you buying other Sony content as well.

I think there’s better patterns RPGs can use for them.

A lot of games now just put them wandering the world, and touching/attacking them prompts combat. Then, the game needs to invent various motivations for you to actually want to attack the enemy.

In a lot of games, they’re just genuinely in the way through tight corridors to a destination. A better approach can be to associate some kind of minor quest reward to directly pursuing the enemies.

But, then you get the problem that a lot of RPGs just have no interesting decisions to make in combat. And, participating in combat can lead to a slow wearing down of the party’s mana points, or the game’s equivalent. In many games, you only want to use the basic cure spell and auto-attack because you’ll survive fewer fights without mana rationing. It becomes counter-intuitive and less fun.

Some games resolve this well. Cosmic Star Heroine for instance, a short indie JRPG, heals you after every fight, and each combat is uniquely scripted in for pacing much like Chrono Triggwr.

If the original comic someone found is correct, now that word has been censored and re-edited in…

I’ll admit, I’ve kept no interest in the game or its sequel because the concept just sounds depressing. Similar to Dark Souls’ plot; “Life sucks, you accomplish nothing more than survival, and innocent people die anyway.”

“But I must!”
“Fine, well…at least take this whip. Oh, and learn the spell Hydro Storm, if you can.”

I totally get disinterest, but I get rubbed the wrong way when people “want games to fail”. I want the world to have more games that are good - and yes, occasionally those would come from publishers we traditionally grumble about.

I had no interest in Concord, but I’m not making video content laughing at its failure. I think that practice is a bit weird sometimes, and even victimizes some of the game devs that didn’t do anything wrong. I would guess at least 80% of Concord’a devs did their job well - just based around a bad concept.

I think I’ve gotten more than a little tired of the “guy walks in on girl bathing” trope in anime.

Like, somehow this is a world where no one knocks, and the first thing girls do in an unfamiliar environment is get a bath.

It’s one of those series that has expanded so far, with favoritism towards its characters, that they even decided to drop the name “Yakuza” in favor of the Japanese title, since so much of it has little to do with being a Yakuza anymore. Honestly, I can’t remember any game in which you’ve done actual Yakuza-like actions such as shaking down businesses, running loan shark scams, or executing hits. When you do end up making money, it’s through perfectly legitimate businesses whose biggest problem is “thugs keep attacking us!”