Elder Scrolls games by and large suck out of the box. The prolific mod community is what makes them worth buying / playing. I’ve got a few hundred hours in Skyrim and I’ve never actually finished the main storyline. Don’t know how it ends, don’t care.

…which makes it so baffling. They could buy a lot of goodwill if they just made the store more consumer-focused, even if they earned less from it in the process. But no, they have to just commit whole hog to just being the worst.

Alternately, you’re playing an RPG, and you’ve reached an emotional climax. Mid-cutscene while a character is delivering a gut-wrenching dialog, an ad for Raid Shadow Legends fills your screen.

Hard no-thanks from me, but I could see this maybe being a viable option for folks who just can’t afford to buy games which, given the state of everything, might be a growing percentage of the population.

I am loving Hades 2, but I hope they don’t make Hades 3, or at least, not right away. Supergiant’s entire catalogue has been fantastic, and the diversity of genre and game style has been a great time to play through. It feels almost like a waste for them to make a third Hades when they could make something else as unique as Transistor or Pyre. Seeing the interesting worlds they concoct is a big part of the joy of playing their games.

unbugged 1.0 launch

Based on recent Steam reviews, it seems to actually be pretty buggy, and the Mixed review score doesn’t bode well for it anyway.

I wouldn’t have beaten the ‘true’ final boss without them. No way in hell.

Nine Sols did this perfectly. It’s another very hard metroidvania, but it has some options you can enable if you want to that adjust the difficulty in a variety of very tangible ways. I wish that was standard.

It really wouldn’t take much. Just some accessibility options to address some of the most punishing mechanics would do it. Would be great if mods solved this.

The high points of the game are very good. The low points ruin it, in my opinion. I get that frustration might be fun for some people, but I find it discouraging and I don’t feel like Silksong wants me to be successful. It feels like it wants me to feel frustrated and angry, and that’s not an experience I want to have. I doubt I’ll finish the game, which sucks, because I loved Hollow Knight, and I love the parts of Silksong that aren’t just making me mad.

Based on the username, I assume it’s either auto-translated (with obvious problems) or it’s a non-English keyboard and has problems with some characters as a result. Not throwing shade, just making an observation, for the record.

Maybe I’m in a minority here, but geez… I find it super hard to watch videos that have constant cuts during the speaking like this. I’d much rather just have the video be 5 minutes longer and include the natural pauses.

“Decent reviews”, but it’s a 71 on Metacritic. While in a normal world a 71/100 probably would be “decent”, I, and I think the majority of people, see a 71/100 and assume it’s a steaming pile, because of how absurdly skewed review scores are.

The US has the Fair Access to Banking Act trying to do similar things, but it’s been stagnant for 2 years.

This bill places restrictions on certain banks, credit unions, and payment card networks if they refuse to do business with a person who complies with the law. Restrictions include prohibiting the use of electronic funds transfer systems and lending programs, termination of an institution’s depository insurance, and specified civil penalties.

Banks and other specified financial institutions are allowed to deny financial services to a person only if the denial is justified by a documented failure of that person to meet quantitative, impartial, risk-based standards established in advance by the institution. This justification may not be based upon reputational risks to the institution. Banks may also deny services to a person who engaged in rude or harassing conduct toward an employee of the bank.

The bill establishes the right for a person to bring a civil action for a violation of this bill.

$8 billion lawsuit

They want Mr Zuckerberg and his co-defendants to reimburse the company for more than $US8 billion ($12.2 billion) in fines and other costs Meta paid following the controversy.

So… a $12.2 billion lawsuit, then?

I don’t know how much truth there is to it, but one compelling reason I’ve heard is that adult content has a considerably higher chargeback rate than other content, making the risk much higher for payment processors. This makes sense - I could absolutely see some horny person buying some adult content, getting off to it, then doing a chargeback in their moment of introspection.

Wow, there’s a series I haven’t thought about in like a decade. I recall really enjoying that game way back when, though.

It’s baffling that they decided to take the Marathon IP and do this with it. If this had been a single player game in the vein of the originals, it would have made sense - they’d capture the attention of people who played it in the 90s and wanted more of that. Who is this supposed to appeal to? I strongly doubt there’s much overlap between people who enjoyed those games in the 90s and people who want live service extraction shooters today.

The Borderlands franchise is really past its prime at this point, anyway. I’ve got absolutely no issue skipping this one. Might pick it up when it’s on sale for $10 in a few years. The franchise really peaked with BL2; it’s been down hill since.

It’s funny, really, because game elements like that could make for a really neat game if it was done intentionally, but when it’s AI artifacts, it’s awful.