I don't think it's deep analysis that bothers me at all. I mean I'm sure a ton of people saw my rant about not needing games to be hard in another post, so yeah I don't really like what most people call hard games. Really, I just prefer difficulty to be moved to strategy or puzzles and less on reflexes and timing. So I should like deep games.
What bugs me is more of a phenomenon since a lot of games went from LAN and small server play to widely online. If there's cheese tactics among friends in a small group, you can agree to cut it out, work together to figure it out, etc. Online, you damn well better enjoy getting kicked in the crotch by the meta of the month until you follow the meta or it gets patched out.
Never been serious enough to get into iRacing but I've done some other sim racing games like Assetto Competizione and paid a bit of attention to iRacing. My opinion they thought through a lot of the issues other games have and tried to fix. DLC aside perhaps, it is NOT a cheap game to play.
It's a monthly sub that I think runs about $15 a month and doesn't include a ton of cars and tracks. Then the cars and tracks are pretty pricey. None of it comes off as predatory or rewarding no-lifes in that respect though. No lootboxes, no battle pass where you play 100 hours in a week and you unlock exclusive cars. You want something, you exchange money for it.
It's still really serious and a time and money sink, and that's why I've never taken the plunge.
The old thought process was if a game's sales could be saved in something like the first week or month it was worth it. Don't they usually just buy DRM spyware like Denuvo anyway? At least a lot do. So I say just drop it all a few months in and put the game up DRM free. Some do, there's a handful of things I've bought on Gog that they wait some time after the Steam release.
meta-gaming
I hate this trend. I was just talking about this a few days ago with one of the few gaming buddies I still have. Stuff I grew up on was so simplistic, Dooms and Quakes, early Halos and CoDs. There weren't stats, if there were loadouts it was fairly simplistic. There wasn't a lot to balance because there just wasn't a lot of variables. Now everything is infested with places you can min/max and if you aren't either testing it yourself for hours on end or cheating off someone else who does online, you are at a disadvantage.
The gameplay was simple too, that's actually what got me started on the topic. I was just trying to tell him that my old brain is just not interested in trying to learn all these advanced movement mechanics at the high speed and precision the people that grew up on that stuff do. It's funny too, because I've dragged some of these younger gamers into my type games and they are just as fish out of water without their sliding, double jumping, structure building, etc. as I am in their stuff.
There's a time I would have scrambled to say yes. Instead I think of esports now as what parents do to kids sports--suck all the fun and sportsmanship out of it for the sake of winning in the most crude ways possible.
Instead, I actually blame streamers and Youtubers, and I think that was always to blame. They are the new marketing, the "gamer journalism" to the young generation now. A lot of microtransactions are sold by these people. Do you think the kid watching when they run around and shit on the guy endlessly for not having some $40 fucking cosmetic items is going to do anything different than beg for money to buy it? Tons of tons of the videos I've seen is nothing more than a show off my purchase fest. Hell, I remember being shown some sort of custom room full of people in Fortnite literally doing nothing than walking around flexing cosmetics.
Once the companies realized just how much people will spend on extremely low effort stuff like player models, weapon skins, in-game currency of course that's where the effort went. Why is single player online only? Well, we can't have you cheating to steal our microtransaction dollars. Even if you're like me and couldn't give less of a shit about cosmetic items, look at Ubisoft and their tactic of adding grindiness to a game or skip it with some of your $.
I do think there's a lot of single player stuff though. You just have to look away from AAA studios. I just bought up a bunch of indie FPS games yesterday, I think I'm going to do little mini-reviews of them and "what are you playing" posts every couple weeks while I play them just to have some gaming chat on here.
In a perfect world I'd say it's fine for them to be able to. In a world where "mental health care" is a euphemism for putting them on drugs forever, mutilating, and indoctrinating them--I say hell no.
The couple normal guys I know with tons of tattoos are both from a background where they would benefit from standing out in such a way and also well off in their present lives in fields that the look is not likely to hurt their future prospects. They are really exceptions. The rest of the tattooed men I know have at some point been, if not still are, deadbeat drug addicts with jail time.
I do think this article gets a lot right. There's something weird about the desire for a lot of people. I've never understood it myself and I've never wanted a tattoo. Want to talk even more unhinged? Weird piercings. They are even more guaranteed to be fucked in the head.
They have all sorts of political issues, but you're in Australia so well you do too. I can't say I'm that much better off in America either. Everywhere has political issues. I'd say go for it. I've seen enough of your posts and you need a change of scenery.
I love the Stockholm area. The people really aren't that bad, I'm not extremely social and still met people there, and I've probably not spent more than a few weeks combined. Unless you're like the perfectly stereotypical loud Aussie that can't go ten seconds without calling someone a cunt, to the point that a Swede is embarrassed to be around you, then you will be fine.
I like Finland and the non-Copenhagen parts of Denmark better in the current political climate, but in your shoes if I had the opportunity to go to Stockholm I'd do it.
It feels so weird to have console prices go up mid cycle. Inflation I guess or they just can't handle the loss leader anymore? Actually I suspect they are just pricing what they think the market will pay. I mean other hardware has gotten cheaper. My CPU and GPU I got last year have fallen a good 30% and they are budget products not the high end. Xbox manufacturing can't drop too with no new tech? Whatever though. This gen pushed me back to PC anyway and I'm not swapping out my Xbox One X anytime soon console wise.
Game Pass on the other hand, I do have that. I'd converted a bunch of Black Friday XB Live time originally. Last year I finally had to add on, got a BF deal $95 for the year. If that's still a thing I do it. If I'm forced to $200 a year the value won't be there.
I had a friend of a friend that did this back a handful of years before Covid. Crazy college party and drank himself to death basically. I think he was 20 or 21. I'm sure it happens, but I can't imagine lingering heart problems from vaccines helping the case any.
I've read the Man in the High Castle but that's it. It's been a while since though. I like the beginning but I think it overly complicates itself later. Still, good book.
Will be looking at this though, I'm open to putting others on the reading list. It's an interesting topic.
That's just old Reddit run-ins with Souls fanbois from years ago coming back. There at least was a certain (likely small) subset of them that define difficulty as if-and-only-if reflex timing. I tried to get them to play The Witness and look up nothing but never any takers.
Yeah I can't imagine my cousin spending much time on a puzzle before running to Youtube. I guess he's a zoomer if they haven't made up a new group yet. He's a teenager. He's way smart enough to figure it out but lacks the patience to try. I've had to talk him out of cheating some too. I'll cheat, it can be fun, but it can be the last 15 minutes you ever play of a game too.
Everyone knows they didn't lose anything, it's just the criminals punishing the other criminals with hand slaps to make it look like they are doing something.
With as much stuff is constantly getting lost, how is it never some loan balances that end up lost or a night of ACH transactions. They know how to keep data secure and just choose to throw their hands up with stupidity when they delete evidence.
So true. I've had the souls players that want to spit in my face apparently go on about how puzzles, numbers based RPG, stealth, etc. are not difficult because you can just look up a walk-through and follow it. That's a choice made to let someone else do the brain work for them.
I haven't played any non turn-based FF game so I'll preface with this thought being not specific to this game. I've never understood why people get mad about easy options in single player games. I'm not saying every game should be required to have them or anything I couldn't care less if a game comes out with one difficulty. Just it doesn't bother me if there's a choice. Is everyone really measuring themselves up to others with success at a video game? Really?
I'm way more bothered by difficulty choices that don't work in a fun way. Those type things stick out to me more in games with guns, but that's more what I play. Uncharted with insta-headshot bots that take multiple clips to kill. Call of Duty World at War laser precision rain of grenades when the enemy shouldn't even know you are there, etc. I can't think of much in hand-to-hand combat games, even though I suck at those, they usually tend to be more fair.
Haven't seen either of them. No Netflix. It's not full of woke? Doesn't look like it but I assume all new movies are right now.
I tend to watch a lot of movies in the summer so maybe I'll put them on the list.
It's true. I let my Prime go about 18 months ago after they fought me tooth and nail over refunding a fraudulent purchase that they admitted was fraudulent. It was the last straw.
Almost bought something there a couple months ago. The cart/checkout kept offering "Prime shipping" without really making it clear that it was signing you back up for Prime. You have to be really careful to pay attention to what you were selecting.
Probably also bitching about how they can't afford the cost of living and they need more government handouts.
I'd be willing to bet I've not spent $5,000 on video games in my entire life combined. I've spent $0 on "collectible" avatars.
I think whatever they call standards are about as consistent as what you'd get from a toddler. Fitting I guess, most have the reasoning ability of a toddler.
Twitter does belong to Musk and his investors, meaning they are within their rights to act with their property as they see fit. But Musk has often adopted the moral high ground of untrammeled free speech in his justification for buying the platform. In this context, applying new prohibitions on certain terms could be seen as contradictory to this claim.
Not taking away old prohibitions on certain terms could be seen as contradictory too. Take your pick then. We can allow nigger, faggot, tranny, etc., right? Free speech, right? I don't want to be called cis any more than they want to be called fags.
I'm pretty sure I'd get charged with desertion, or whatever happens when you punch a drill instructor in the face. There's a certain point I get where all consequence goes out the window. It's nearly impossible to get me there, but marching in a face diaper while going on about racism would probably do it.
Canada can have Detroit, and if we're going to keep Chicago we're going to need several aggressive bombing campaigns.
I have no idea what the worst is anymore I've heard so much bad about every big developer.
But to just add to your rant I'll complain about Koei Tecmo. Yesterday I decided I would try Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. I still have the Xbox Game Pass and it was on there. So, I download the PC version. Crashes first load. I finally get in game, start tweaking the settings. End up settling for a 1080p/60 target. A little low but it's a new game and I don't care to hear loud fans. My system isn't that amazing anyway. So all configured it's maybe taxing the system at 70% most of the time. Except there's these damn stutters. Every 30 seconds (roughly) it seems like. Crashes again in game. Then again trying to load it back up. It's not my PC, I've got loads of other games that are fine. So I give up, delete it, and download on my Xbox. Works fine on there. Now I'm at the point I get to decide if I want to "git gud" enough to kill the first boss and keep going or just find something else.
So yeah, a bad PC version even though I should be the easy player to please, I will just turn settings down and play rather than jack off to benchmarking videos. Should have known when a game had an option for pronouns it wouldn't work that well.
I kept trying to think up the best way to make a longer answer, but it would have been a wall of text. So, in short, I think you're right that games are actually part of it. I quit multiplayer games around when that chart started going wrong because the fun factor was just gone and it was skins, loot boxes, battle passes, etc. now. The fun release for kids these ages in video games is not there in the same way it was for me at those ages, and good luck getting a teenager to try some old game like I play. Games are just another form of consumption now. Think about a kid that age, consoom Youtube, consoom social media, consoom in video games. How many of them is this their entire life?
My point is as long as the mode I'm playing is what I want from the game, I don't really care if they go so far to make an option to skip to the end credits and pop all the achievements. Do I think it's stupid? Sure. Does it ruin the game for me? Not really. What ruins games for me is having bad gameplay or not being fun, not what other people do or don't do in it.