Season 4 of The Wire is brutal.

Jericho: A post apocalyptic show that isn’t just mohawk bejeweled raiders roaming around. It is a show very much of the GWB era, with offbrand Blackwater as major villains and heavy Dick Cheney vibes when it comes to the larger plot.

Kings: A sort of retelling of David versus Goliath except set in the modern day. If you liked the weird esoteric spiritual stuff on the Battlestar Galactica reboot, you’ll like this.

The Unit: A fictionalized adaptation of Delta Force missions, with at least early on heavy influence by the former Delta author of Inside Delta Force. Great early seasons. Later seasons become more Hollywood nonsense, you tolerance may vary, but season 1 and 2 have some gold.

The Wire: This was a huge show when it was on, but maybe zoomers don’t know about it. This is the crime show for people who hate everything about modern “procedural” crime shows. It is nuanced, thoughtful, and engaging.

Columbo: Speaking of crime shows and procedurals, Columbo is both and neither. Columbo is entertaining and keeps you invested with its unique approach to murder mysteries. It really doesn’t pretend to be a proper procedural, and you’re best off thinking of Detective Columbo as a supernatural embodiment of karma and guilt rather than an actual member of a police force.

Wikipedia isn’t the end all, but in this case I think it provides a working definition.

Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

There’s a danger in any game where it might be largely designed and marketed to be one thing, and then has lengthy mandatory sections where it becomes another.

Poorly made stealth sections are a prime example. Game designers want to change things up, but if the game isn’t made to do stealth, it can easily turn into an annoying mess. There are a few (not a ton, but a few) games where the mandatory stealth sections are well liked, but they were made to carefully take advantage of the game’s strengths and knew when to end.

Hold up, “enshitification” is just turning into a buzzword now.

Enshitification has from the beginning described a service or product which is first released one way, and then over time is made worse for the users in ways designed to squeeze more profit out of them.

Without some serious mental gymnastics, forced stealth sections tend to just be bad design choices. Not every bad thing is the same kind of bad thing.

So those anti-skub council creeps got to you too, huh?

That opinion is based on junk science that was promoted by anti-skub lobbiests. In the last 20 years no credible research has duplicated the findings that skub is (under normal conditions) hazardous in tall buildings.

Of books I’ve finished, The Da Vinci Code. It’s been a long time since I read it, so I can’t recall specifics but I do remember the moment to moments of the plot being contrived and stupid, and the writing to be bland and simplistic.

The only reason I read it was I was stuck somewhere without a book and I found a copy of The Da Vinci code that had fallen behind a shelf. I figured it was super popular so there must be something to it as I slogged through.

A: they’re betting most people will accept it, and they’re right.

Yes. Remember when Netflix put a stop to password sharing and the internet went aflame with people declaring that Netflix had shot itself in the foot? Netflix subscriber counts went up.

The average person will put up with so much more of this nonsense than techie people will.

Perhaps they are going for a tone of heroic escapism, or fantastical drama over gory and downbeat “realism”.

If you really just want to see heroes maiming people it’s been done. Invincible, The Boys (show and comic). Even back to the 90s there were comics like Stormwatch that centered on the premise of “realistic” consequences of super powers.

Personally, I think Star Citizen is shallow and pedantic.

Oh boy. Time for an 800 comment long flamewar about Star Citizen. I’m ready.

But he di’d bring a bomb

Mean at the Haunted Chocolatier…

Nick Rekieta, a minor YouTube e-celeb was gifted a Sonichu medallion and wore it. Currently his life is not going great.

I have an accessory item with a name on it, from the clothing of a person who was killed. I never met this person.

I found it while doing cleanup of the scene where they died. It had no investigative value, so was trash, but I didn’t feel right throwing it away. I kept it, in hopes of giving it to someone close to them, but life kept moving and I ended up with it.

Hi Nick.

Probably because it makes a ton of money. The opinions of people who post online represent a small fraction of people who play games.

I have made a conscious effort to reduce swearing, which has brought my swearing down to near zero, both online and in real life conversation.

I have found that it streamlines the ability to make a point. A lot of swearing is simply thrown in out of habit, and if you remove it, all you do is make your point more clear without losing anything of substance.

I think for many people swearing is a “filler word” in the same way that “umm” can be. I have also worked hard to reduce my other filler word use. My goal with both of these is better articulation.

The next effect is that swearing is normally viewed as an extreme use of language for an extreme situation, and when you don’t constantly swear the times that you do actually conveys how notable the situation is.

I’m legitimately having difficulty following the flow of this question. The formatting vacillates between question and statement, and I am sincerely having trouble fully discerning the connection between points.

I think this post comes from disappointment with Star Wars Outlaws, which by all reports largely follows the Ubisoft formula for open world games. For this, yes Ubisoft has struck upon a formula that is applied to seemingly all of their open world games, which is indeed overly predictable. For that, I do agree that the rote steps of a collectation heavy game where the player secures territory of the game in order to advance the story is overplayed.

Otherwise, I am stuck trying to tease out the rest of the post’s intention.

Recently the 2 “highly praised” Star Wars “open world” games

I don’t know what the other Star Wars game referred to is supposed to be. Is this referring to Jedi Survivor? That game did have a number of technical problems, but it wasn’t ever intended or marketed as an open world game. Putting even that aside, why are two Star Wars games used as the pillars of western AAA games? What is the point or critique here?