Computerchairgeneral

It’s almost impressive how companies can think up the worst ways to experience games when they want to show something off at these events.

This console generation is ending already? Like, logically I know it’s been six years, but it still feels short for a console generation. Curious to see if the handheld rumors pan out and what confusing name they give it.

Doing things and not spiraling is about all we can do at this point. I suppose it depends on the things you care about or want to prioritize The massive cuts to government spending Trump has talked about are inevitably going to impact services like Social Security and Medicare so mutual aid resources are going to be important for a lot of people:

Mutual Aid Hub-Resources Food Not Bombs FAQ

If you’re concerned about what will happen in places like Gaza and Ukraine there are charities that are helping those affected by those conflicts:

Charity Navigator Gaza UNITED24-Offical Ukranian Fundraising Platform

Finally, if you are not in a position to donate money then there are ongoing election efforts that need volunteers. At this point that’s mostly ballot curing, helping voters sort out issues with their absentee or mail in ballot. Some of these ongoing elections are incredibly tight and making sure those ballots are accepted could make a difference, especially in low profile races:

Mobilize.us Ballot Curing

Clicked for a game announcement. Got a political manifesto about art and culture. Not disappointed. Definitely interested to see how this develops.

It looks cool and I like some of the little callbacks to the original PlayStation, but I imagine the price for this is going to be ridiculous and that’s before the scalpers inevitably get their hands on them.

Well, my expectations for this game were already on the floor. Guess it’s time to put them in the basement. I mean I want a good sequel to Bloodlines, but that’s looking less and less likely.

Amazing game. One of the few shooters I can think of that really drove the “War is Hell” message home. Shame it got delisted over an expired music license.

I had genuinely forgotten about the sequel until I saw this. Started wondering how I had missed that and then I remembered it was a straight to streaming cash grab. Time to go back to being blissfully ignorant.

Yeah, really hoping this is just a misstep from the marketing team. It’s such a whiplash inducing shift in tone from all the previous marketing and trailers that they’ve released. If not then they certainly picked an interesting game to fully shift the tone from dark fantasy to…whatever Veilguard is aiming for.

Fable having this realistic art style still feels weird to me, but at least it seems like they’re matching the tone of the other games.

Yeah, the art style definitely feels like a holdover from the live-service days. I could see them having to work with whatever assets were left after that version of the game was scrapped and just having to make it work.

Not sure how I feel about the art style. Varric and Harding look decent, but it felt like the longer the trailer went on the more the characters turned into something out of a stylized hero shooter. Honestly, the whole trailer felt more suited to a hero shooter than a single player RPG. Hopefully the gameplay looks better, but this was a very odd way to formally reintroduce your game after ten years of scattered trailers and announcements.

No? Xbox might not be in the greatest place right now, but it’s a far cry from where Sega was when they discontinued the Dreamcast. Yeah, Microsoft stepped on a lot of rakes with the Xbox One, but it wasn’t a Saturn-style disaster and Microsoft is still doing well enough to buy out a major game publisher.

It’s an impressive battle plan. I’m always a little pessimistic when it comes to these things, but at least this effort is casting a wide net. If even one of them succeeds that could impact the entire industry. Hopefully some government body, somewhere chooses to take this seriously.

Hopefully this showcase is successful enough to become a tradition. It would be nice to have an indie-focused showcase that doesn’t have to juggle their time between the games, advertisements, and sponsors.

No ads? No awkward celebrity cameos? No sponsors? Just video games? At a video game event? Ridiculous.

More seriously, there are a lot of good studios on that list and I’m excited to see what they have to announce.

Feels like forever since I heard Ken Levine ramble on about narrative LEGOs and game design. It’s an interesting concept and hopefully the game lives up to expectations. I’m still cautious that it might all end up being pre-release hype, but he certainly seems passionate about the idea and I’m certainly curious to see what narrative LEGOs actually looks like in execution.

From what I understand, fast travel isn’t locked behind microtransactions, despite some claims I’ve seen. You can buy an item that you can place that lets you teleport back to that point, kind of like fast traveling to a map marker. These items are available in game along with fixed fast travel points between major cities. So the reviewers would have had access to fast travel they just wouldn’t have been able to use real money buy them whenever they needed them.

The microtransactions are bad enough, but the fact that none of these were present in the build given to reviewers just makes it worse. I mean people would still be complaining about them, but I don’t think the backlash would be as bad if Capcom had made it clear from the start that the game was going to be riddled with microtransactions.

Genuinely excited to see Alpha Protocol available for sale again after all this time. Was not expecting to see it on the front page of GOG. It is such an interesting game, even if it isn’t, strictly speaking, a good game.