It was technically always licenses for every video game ever commercialised. It’s just that a publisher has no practical way to control what happens to someone’s floppy/optical disc/cartridge/whatever physical media.

Has it ever been something else? Nobody using “woke” seriously has ever been able to define it.

Yeah, pretty much. The best Sims game doesn’t exist, it’s a Frankenstein monster that would take bits of the 4 games.

I love the idea of 3 with the open city and NPC progression, but wow this game’s an unstable glitchy mess. It’s not even close to be playable without many unofficial fixes, and even then, it runs like shit.

The only things I’d take from 4 would be maybe moods (nice to have, I guess) and the more organic body models, with more seemless morphs. 4’s gameplay is boring as hell, nothing interesting ever happens. And they got rid of create-a-style which is a huge creativity downgrade.

It had a few graphical upgrades through the huge content updates it got year after year.

Now there is more biome diversity, more decorative flora, better underground environments, more creature types…

If anything, they tried so much to populate it that sometimes I feel it’s lacking some truly desolate environments. “Empty” planets are uncommon, and even those are mostly cluttered with weird stuff and “anomalous” living things.

I’ve not played Forbidden West, but I’ve played all of Zero Dawn. I’ll just say, as much as I like the game (I do, quite a bit), it’s bad at being open-world.

Most narrow paths are only related to quests, and if you try exploring them before you need to go there the game punishes you by making it a chore to go and to leave for no gain. Also, the terrible message “you’re out of bound, turn back now or we reset to your last save” is one of the worst failure at world design ever. It pops up constantly if you’re just trying to explore.

And yes, I tried playing HUD-free for a bit (I had a great experience doing that on Breath of the Wild). As you said it’s almost impossible, the environment, while looking good, is way too messy to spot the small details you’re supposed to… Unless you turn on the magic compass and GPS.

In other games, paths and important items are highlighted with lighting and clear and functional visual cues. Beside the infamous yellow paint, HZD does almost none of that efficiently.

[De Beers] stating that the economics of lab-grown diamonds for jewelry were not sustainable.

“That’s cheating, we can’t throttle the market of these shiny rocks! The indistinguishable ones you need are still those we’re killing people for!”

I hope one day you can make a perfect gemstone for the cost of a burger, so people just stop caring about them at all.

Even if it’s self-imposed, that still sounds like a terrible idea to me.

Hoopa : “Just gonna drop a bunch of those legendary idiots for shits and giggles. Catch, trainer!”

I don’t know what kind of funny or what style of review you’re looking for, but there’s Matt McMuscles, who does “What Happened” and “The worst fighting game”.

What happened is not technically always about bad games, but about troubled development in general. Most of them do end up rather disastrous or at least disappointing and are known for it though.

The worst fighting game, however, exclusively reviews bad games, since, well, he’s looking for the worst one.

Single joycon is barely usable, but the Wiimote was terrible for sideways holding.

Its shape was clearly never intended for it, and the d-pad was absolutely awful, one of the worst I’ve used.

The d-pad worked as buttons (which was how most games used it, in vertical mode), but for movement it was very stiff and almost impossible to get diagonals. For a console that featured virtual console heavily and needed a lot of classic controls, that was very bad design.

Until they give a “better” reason, I am going to assume the one they hinted at is true, and Microsoft just decided that it was worthless because it wasn’t “Mikami’s studio” anymore. Honestly, I already suspected it.

In which case, fuck them. These games were not made by one person, a studio is bigger than its director. And the rest of them didn’t get even one chance to prove themselves.

Truly shows how little they value the people who make their games.

Well, I don’t think they’re putting up a very good show right now.

Sorry, dude, what you said must have been very interesting, but at some point I just stopped reading to optimize a watermelon workflow instead. Weird.

Okay, I’m all for good, complete education, but blaming people not understanding media on “too much STEM” is a bit ridiculous.

Foamstars was a new IP, so they didn’t count on brand name to carry this one.

Unless they thought “Square Enix” would be enough to hype it, and yeah, for a game that far away from their usual, that would be completely disconnected from reality.

Paraphrasing : those expectations are not too high, they’re the direct result of the games’ budget.

Yeah, okay, let’s admit that for a second. It’s not like they have no control over the scale and budget of their own games. Seems to me this still counts as unrealistic expectations…

The most baffling part of it is how it looks like zero attempt was made to attribute credibility to sources.

Using Reddit as a source was bad enough (of course, they paid for it, so now they must feel like they need to use this crap). But one of the examples in the article is just parroting stuff from The Onion.

Edit : I’ve since learned that the Onion article was probably seen as “trustworthy” by the AI because it was linked on a fracking company’s website (as an obvious joke, in a blog article).

If all it takes for a source to be validated is one link with no regard for context, I think the point stands.

Embargoes do get a bit of backlash sometimes, but not nearly enough.

When I am aware they are a huge red flag for me in any case.

No way they can enforce that. I hope nobody is going to intimidated by this.

That “Atari” was already Infogrames buying itself a new name in the early 00s. It had already changed hands a number of times since 70s/80s Atari, and had basically nothing to do with it anymore.