This is the problem with spending millions of dollars on games and focusing on profitability over actual quality or expression. Video games are fundamentally an art medium. You can choose to make some uninspired cash grabbing trash, and can even make a whole company built around that and make profit. But are you going to make a great game that way? Probably not.

You’d be better off with half a dozen people with passion and a comparatively minuscule budget. You might have to scale back from ultra realistic graphics and massive explorable areas with dozens of voice actors, but I don’t really think that makes games any better anyway. A little 2d rpg with really basic pixel graphics can put a big project to shame if it’s made with passion and emotion.

Given the responses in this thread, it seems that the same bias exists even in ostensibly leftist spaces. Yikes.

Y’all need to get out more.

Rip 'em apart! Make them into 6 different companies with single letter names and force two sets of two to share their letter to fuck with their marketing!

Dino Land for Genesis was a lot of fun!

Honestly I mostly just know because I have a big stack of old Game Pros and Nintendo Powers from the 90s and I only ever remember seeing Game Informer in Barnes and Noble once those became a thing.

But you may still be right! xD

2006 is a bit late in the game. Game magazines as a relevant medium peaked in the 90s. By 2006 you have a pretty robust internet, what’s the point? Yeah, sure, if you stick them in every single B&N they’ll sell, but Game Pro and Nintendo Power were institutions in the 90s. If you wanted to know about games, that was the way.

Bummer. Game Informer was the leading game magazine when Game Pro and Nintendo Power were around, though? I think not. Game Informer was third fiddle at best.

Ooohhh, that does look promising! Good to know there’s some kind of viable alternative!

That’s cool! I only really do thumb-ball mice, though, and I haven’t really seen alternatives to Logitech in the same form-factor. I imagine they might even have a patent on it.

Buuuut I’m betting I can do stuff like repair the couple of MX Ergos I have lying around if I need to if I get motivated about it. Or like, maybe there’s a way I can have replacement parts fabricated or use the shell of a Logitech mouse as the basis for something similar.

You hear that Logitech? Charge me a subscription fee and I will absolutely figure this out and distribute blueprints and repair guides to the whole ass internet. I appreciate your ergonomics, your unifying dongles, your precision mode, and all your hotkeys, but $90 is plenty for a mouse. Don’t get greedy or I will personally bite you in the ass.

I have used nothing but Logitech thumb-ball mice for the past 20 years. I love my MX Ergo.

If Logitech ever sells a mouse with a subscription, I don’t care how nice it is, I’ll have my own fucking PCB made and design my own QMK capable mouse before I’ll pay for it.

Just sell me the $90 mouse that lasts 5 years. I refuse to accept mouse feudalism.

I saw this on Ground.News this morning. None of the articles even listed the name of the bill, and all of them had zero criticism to offer. Not great.

Yeah it’s pretty clearly just getting people to manually train self-driving cars for a while now.

Yeah! How are we expected to compete with AI beauty? Break our fingers and glue six extra ones onto our hands?

That’s not unusual at all. What’s unusual is for a small publisher like 404 to demand an email address before letting you view their articles. Personally, it means I don’t read them.

Do we want free articles on the internet? Like we’ve had for the past 30 years until some publications decided in the last 5 years to start paywalling everything?

Yes. Yes I do want free articles on the internet. And once upon a time, publishers actually wanted my eyeballs on their free articles.

It could also just be propaganda. They’re pirates, not us!

Are you maybe a privateer?

Privateers tended to obey a sovereign government and do all the pirate things, but directed it against the enemies of the country they were under the flag of rather than just at whoever. Privateers would sometimes become pirates, though. Basically, they’d just keep doing the same job, but for themselves.

The distinction is largely one of who gets to make the rules and do the finger pointing.

Russia really has us fucking sideways.

I have a weird feeling that most of the shit going wrong in the US right now is going to turn out to be down to Russian interference.

Planescape: Torment is extremely replayable. I’ve been playing it every few years since I got a copy in I think like the early 2000s. It may be that this has something to do with having gotten to play it a little bit in the 90s but not having gotten to play the whole thing. There was a lot of anticipation there.

But I don’t think it’s just that. It’s incredibly responsive to choice, and it’s one of the first games I can recall with things like faction reputations and alignments. There’s a lot there to dig through, and even once you have, it’s always cool to wander around Sigil. It feels very alive.

The other one I end up replaying over and over is Shadowrun for SNES. That’s not so much infinitely repayable though as just a really great game that I’m happy to run through.

You know what they say: fives have lives, fours have chores, threes have fleas, twos have blues, and ones don’t get a rhyme because they’re garbage!