Yeah, and that’s okay, as long as you’ve taught your players to be looking for that. If it’s the fifth game in the series and suddenly shifts to a couple of small, subtle interactibles and occasional pieces of important destructible environment, where those never existed prior, you better be using them all over, and from the start teaching players that they exist. It’s so important to teach players what the game expects of them. Going “what do I do!?” Is such a horrible experience every time, even in otherwise good games

Yeah this is literally what happened in 2008. Economic instability stopped banks from lending to would be individual home buyers, but corpos bought up everything they could eagerly with a 20% price cut.

This doesn’t make me super want to play 5, the only game in the main series I haven’t played, but it does make me appreciate the rest, sometimes in ways I’ve recognized, and others not so much. Halo was somewhat unique in the Halo 3 2007 era, where every game was shades of grey and brown, because enemies were still colorful, with distinct designs and silhouettes, and the game at least started in a lush jungle. While certainly waypoints made a difference, I want to say most interactive items were either brightly lit forerunner panels in blue, covenant panels in bright green, or human ones that were just a huge green button. Clearly that design was well thought out and done for good reason, even if it would be reasonable to consider them a little silly in their dramatic design. They stood out, even in halo 3s large setpiece battle areas

Someone talking about how a bunch of employees who weren’t invested, oh hey that’s me! Gamasutra has since gone belly up, but I found an archive of the interview with Frank O’Connor, halos franchise development director (at the time? Idk if that’s still the case). On this page specifically, we open with the quote “We hired people who hated halo” https://web.archive.org/web/20210116045012/https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/191234/making_halo_4_a_story_about_.php?page=3 I didn’t reread the full article, couldn’t say in 2025 whether it’s worth a full read, but that sentiment did stay with me all these years later as a strange choice

Yeah, for me personally, I’ve got one or two devices that see irregular use that are linux now, but my main rig is still windows and will continue to be so, since I have a number of friends on xbox that I can get more cross play for via gamepass But since I’m currently boycotting microsoft, and don’t know how much longer friends will stick with xbox given their general market decline, and given all the stability issues with win11 lately due to an increase of AI code usage, and all the everything… It might be a matter of time

Good to know! I’ve just been having regular encounters with high quality content from there, rather than being a regular reader, so I haven’t had any awareness of anything in the background. In a world full of “gaming journalists have no place in an era of AI” this is really heartening to hear

Honestly PC gamer has been pretty solid lately. Not sure why. Almost makes me nervous.

Damn, it’s the original founder? But, that guy actually gave a shit and I wanted him to succeed! The company got taken over by finance bros who just wanted to party, ipo, and walk away from a failing business they made, I assumed it would have been them, given the crypto

Hey man, don’t slam the doors.

To my understanding, for H4/5 one of the big drivers for why the games are quite different is that, following the split from bungie and breakoff to 343, naturally, a lot of new devs had to be brought on. That’s not terribly surprising, but additionally, during that hiring process, it was a goal to bring on devs who were not previously halo fans. Strange choice imo. The goal was to bring in fresh ideas and attract a wider audience (for one of the biggest franchises of the moment). The effect was a bunch of the employees didn’t have much investment in the franchise and often wanted to make changes that would alienate long time series fans.

While I agree with your general sentiment, I must say, a ton of that obtuseness was sanded away in World, imo, for the better. I would hope it continues to trend away

Ooh “Good Game, Bad Sequel” will ALWAYS make me think Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. It’s a GREAT game, but it’s not a banjo kazooie game.

Yeah that one was made into a real game in the molyjam, or whatever the game jam based on that twitter was. You play as the road, and the cars racing on it have ever shifting emotional states depending on how they’re doing. I’ll see if I can dig up a link

Yeah, I THINK the reason this was cut is because some of them are shot a little differently and actually have slightly different run times

Yeah, admittedly I did play the originals on release so nostalgia is certainly a factor for me. I did have the thought “maybe it’s a licensing issue?” Until I realized the tracks are still in the game, just only if you’re using classic visuals. I would have liked the ability to shift between classic/remastered visuals and audio separately (though I think with the remastered cutscenes at least, this wouldn’t have been an option)

May be worth noting that, for the licensed music, in the game it’s all instrumental versions, regardless of whether the track has lyrics or not. Searching for the tracks online will probably provide versions with lyrics where applicable.

RIP Itagaki

If you’re enjoying ARK, that’s the game palworld was inspired by, they’re extremely similar. Personally I found that palworld was much more respectful of my time, whereas ARK wanted me to play it like a full time job if I wanted to have any dinosaurs.

The improved graphics look great for H2A, especially cutscenes, but it always bummed me out that it also changes the soundtrack. The original OST is just worlds better, with works from known artists (Incubus, Hoobastank, Breaking Benjamin), and the new music is just much more generic and mid.

I’ve been playing Tactics Ogre Reborn and just got to act 4 and… Man I really want to enjoy this game, but it’s difficult, and the board is rarely even in a way that’s frustrating. For example, casters are clearly stronger than martial units, but they need mp. Pretty typical. But, during combat your units can pick up cards that give buffs like increased mp generation or increased activation of automatic skills (which do things like generate mp, cause buffs/debuffs, one of them fully doubles healing done for the turn). I like the card system, somewhat, because it pressures you to move up as opposed to bottlenecking and defending set points whenever possible. But, once you’re a little way into the game, enemy casters come in with four cards, one of increased magic damage, one of increased auto skill proc, two of mp regeneration. Now your casters are weak as shit and need to run to the front lines to get the buffs necessary to cast high level spells more than once every few turns, while the enemy casters are goddamn artillery pieces that can attack from across the entire map. Your martials need to run through artillery fire and break through enemy tanks to target the back line (oops there are skills that tanks have that restrict movement so you have to kill them) and your casters can’t cast more than once every handful of turns, and can’t consistently benefit from the “your spells have longer range” auto skill, so in some fights you’re just beholden to rng of your enemy skills procing and cards you want/need showing up in places your casters can access without ending in a meat grinder.

It’s the kind of game I wish I had a friend who had beaten it a couple times to give me advice on. I’m open to looking up builds and strats online, but since it’s a remake of a game that was originally on SNES and then PSP, a lot of balance changes have occurred and sometimes you’ll find a forum post going on about how good xyz build is, only to later find someone else remarking “oh yeah that worked amazingly on the PSP version but it doesn’t work at all anymore”

I read the article. Bro, that dude started investing following the stock market crash of the great depression with an initial investment of ~$2500, equivalent to about $60k today. That’s not $10. That’s $60k which was then invested over 80 years starting at the lowest point in the history of the market and going into the postwar economic miracle of the US in WW2.

This is not a reasonable comparison, even a little. Average returns today are a tiny fraction of what this guy saw in his lifetime, and he was able to put down an amount that is nearly the median household income in the US today. If someone can put down a years wages into the stock market then they’re already financially stable. Nearly a third of Americans have less than $1k in savings. Not to mention, for most of the working class today, if you have $60k to throw around, it would be a better financial strategy to use that as a down payment on a house than put it into the market.

Let’s do the math. For baby boomers, I have average returns since 1970. An average of 10% a year. As a reminder, this is MARKEDLY LOWER (we’ll get there) than what your example saw in his lifetime. You’re right! Even investing $60 a month ($720 a year) over 40 years ($28,800 total) makes you a cool half a mil at that rate. HOWEVER. At today’s rates, an average return of 6.1% means you would need to invest almost 5x as much, $250 a month ($3000 a year) to reach the same amount in 40 years ($120,000 total). Meanwhile, your example lived through times where returns were, at times, on average, over 40% a year. On average. While that wasn’t the market state for his whole life, it WAS the state not long after he started investing. If you could get those numbers comsistently, it would take less than $1 a month over 25 years to make half a million dollars.

Absolutely incomparable.