And then it goes into a sewer.

I blame the Tylenol.

You’re not getting your deposit back if those creative juices soak in.

Foundation was so strange because it felt like the writers split into two isolated groups.

The team that was trying and failing to “reimagine” the original story, and the team the totally abandoned the original story and was doing their own thing with the clone emperors story.

Unlike other examples where the show felt like an existing story twisted into the framework of an unrelated franchise, Foundation felt like the clone emperors story came out of the talented writers getting frustrated by the quality of the adaption.

I noticed you haven’t mentioned the actual quality of the content. Is it a responsibility to give money to a medium simply because it takes payment instead of using ad revenue?

The competition for what’s in those magazines is with independent online reviewers.

The idea of ranking games on a numerical scale is inherently flawed. I suspect many publications still use it as a way to make nice with game publishers. Text that’s lukewarm can slap a 9/10 score on and a lot of people just jump over the review to the “objective” score.

I feel it’s important

Genuinely, why?

Not all YouTubers are quality. This is obvious. What I am saying is that I’ve found a mere handful who are quality and for my tastes they have replaced the entire legacy professional gaming journalistic media. Other people I’m sure can find similar YouTubers who cater to their tastes and opinions.

That might be exactly part of why gaming journalism is irrelevant.

If the “news” about an upcoming game is just repeating developer hype, then it’s just useless noise. At that point the only thing that matters are reviews, and independent YouTubers are beating the professionals in quality and trustworthiness.

So what’s left? Actual dry industry news? I suppose some small amount of people care, but not enough to support the amount of gaming journalists out there.

click- and rage-bait headlines on Facebook over quality journalism

Gaming journalism has been overrun with that.

What I, and I think many people, want are trustworthy, knowledgable reviews.

I can’t trust any of the major publications. I trust a small handful of YouTubers who are giving me more of what I want than the entire professional industry.

Back in the late 90s-early 2000s the PCGamer magazine was actually worthwhile. It had reviewers who specialized in different genres and if read enough you could get a feel for their writing style and critical voice. The fact it was a monthly publication meant they weren’t racing to get a review out in the first 24 hours.

Nowadays it all seems like publications race to put reviews out online for relevance, and the reviewers often seem to have a disdain for video games and even if they don’t they aren’t genre experts.

I don’t like fighting games. My review of a fighting game would be trash. Yet major publications just pump out reviews by whoever.

Individual youtubers at least can develop a recognizable critical voice and stick more to genres they know and enjoy.

The entire industry was flooded with mouthpieces for developer statements, and opinion piece hottakes. How many of those people does an industry really need? (Or more importantly: How many of those people can it financially support?)

As for reviews, they are for the most part similarly worthless and hard to trust. There’s about five YouTubers who I actually trust the opinions of, and I haven’t felt left out at all with that as the extent of my gaming journalism intake.

I can’t be certain, but I suspect a lot of gamers are completely burnt out on the professional gaming journalism industry.

I don’t consider anything I watch a guilty pleasure, since I’m pretty open about watching B and bad movies.

I enjoy movies where a director has made a surprisingly successful cult movie and on the back of that got creative freedom and a big budget from a studio, which they then used to create something beautiful and terrifying. My exemplar movie for this is Southland Tales, which I absolutely love on all possible levels.

I really like movies that commit to a sharp genre turn. The Guest (2014) is a great example.

Lastly, spaghetti westerns. This seems like a maybe more mainstream choice, but had a conversation in real life not too long ago with somebody who had no interest in any kind of western and didn’t know about the distinction between classic and spaghetti. When I was articulating the difference I was able to boil it down to classic westerns being nostalgia and romanticization of the American west, while spaghetti westerns were made by people with no nostalgia for it. It creates a subgenre which is grittier and more morally grey than the John Wayne era movies. My favorite is Once Upon A Time In The West, though I’d recommend people work up to that by watching other genre movies first.

I think the original trilogy (plus Reach and ODST) work because while there’s a ton of lore, the really convoluted stuff is kind of at the background to the moment to moment feel of the game. The most forward facing content is a pastiche of other easily digestible scifi that’s all mixed together in a fun, interesting way. You’ve got conventional humans who feel like a straight expansion of the colonial marines from Aliens up against a diverse and interesting array of aliens. The Covenant are a refinement from Pathways Into Darkness and then the Marathon games. You’ve got the flood as a space zombie change of pace.

It all mixes together well and the more detailed lore can be built on top of it. There are many intentional gaps and hooks which can suggest things without having to be addressed explicitly, leaving room for some mystery.

After those games, the series kind of imploded under the weight of its own lore since the developers/writers chose to bring all of those mysterious elements to the forefront. It gave less interesting enemies to fight, and less motivation to care. I doubt many people have moments from those games burned into their memories the same way moments from the original trilogy are.

The MCC Halo had a graphical remaster on the original engine, that’s why you could swap between original and remaster visuals on the fly. The upcoming project is a remake on a new engine with changes to gameplay and design.

In videos he has mentioned both reducing the damage from the sniper rifles so they aren’t one-hit kills, and allowing jackels to use carbines which will replace some sniper jackels.

Yes, it was in the CE PC multiplayer. And, to refer back to the post:

It adds new weapons to the CE campaign

What’s your favorite movie that uses lots of practical effects?

The Thing has to be up there if the criteria is just an overall great movie heavy on practical effects.

Do you have a favorite practical effect of all time?

The “digital” wireframe view of the city from Snake’s glider in ‘Escape From New York’.

It was accomplished with miniature buildings which is rad.

Repeat from the other thread:

I beat The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

It was alright. A third person shooter where you are theoretically giving tactical orders to two NPC followers. In reality, good or interesting tactics go out the window in favor of just spamming special abilities as much as possible in a chaotic mess of fights. The story was decent and gets interesting near the end, although for my money after the big reveal it feels like it drags out a bit longer than it needs to. For $3 I got my value.

Something that is popular (or sells well) despite having no apparent appeal to anyone the commenter can think of.

I don’t enjoy Bloodborne. I think I can figure out why there is a lot of hype for it.