Inside was better than Limbo for me, if that helps. Limbo was cool, but Inside had crazy atmospheric storytelling.

Night and day difference between game Bill and show Bill, too. Both characters are interesting explorations of attachment vs isolation in their own ways.

Oh, banana!

Agreed, I think it also hurts the games trying to even have a singular “villain” in the first place. Halo 1-3 had villainous figures, but I don’t think anyone was under the belief that just killing the 3 Prophets would solve the problem of the Covenant, or that killing the Gravemind would mean that the Flood would never be a problem again. The Halo series relies on having compelling factions with clear purpose and ideology to act as antagonists in a more general sense.

The Prometheans in 4 weren’t bad, but outside of the Didact, they had no real purpose or personality. They were just an obstacle. I was really looking forward to the premise of 5 with the concept of going rogue and tackling the underlying themes of fascism at the heart of the UNMC, but then it just rapidly pivoted to some other garbage with Cortana and the Guardians which led to nothing in the end anyways. And so I didn’t even bother to play Infinite.

Do you mean 343/Halo Studios or is 545 some sort of reference I’m missing?

You can!

Worth noting for anyone looking to play both N64 games is that OoT Gerudo stay stunned indefinitely (until the area is reloaded) but the Pirates in Majora’s Mask who are borrowed from the Gerudo guards only stay stunned for a short time before getting back up.

This incentizes use of the Stone Mask, which can be obtained from the invisible guard by giving him a red potion. If playing the N64 version, he is located outside of Ikana Graveyard, which is a place that you can get to at that point in the game but many might not have bothered exploring yet. In the 3DS version, they moved him directly into Pirates Fortress so he’s harder to miss, but it does require just a little bit of stealth to get to where he is first.

The people you’re messaging might, though.

I just think it stopped being a good deal the moment they implemented their first price increase. That signalled that they’re willing to do what every other subscription service does and raise prices as arbitrarily high as people are willing to pay, with the enticement being that once you’re in deep enough, you can’t unsub or you’re left with no games.

If you have copious time for gaming and are always on the hunt for sometbing new, is it still a better deal than buying every game at release? Sure, at least for now. But the patient gaming strat at least gives me a backlog of affordable titles too long to finish them all, and I can also return to it at any time without worrying about titles eventually disappearing from a subscription catalog.

I’m honestly surprised people still have it.

That’s exactly it, they have the ability to go about certain scenes in different ways.

I still only have the Astarion/Cazador example, because that’s the only origin character I played as, but one moment I remember as different between Astarion as party member versus Astarion as player is the conversation with his former lover Sebastian before confronting Cazador.

In my playthrough with Astarion as an NPC, he basically auto-piloted through most of that conversation. He remembered who Sebastian was, it was somewhat touching, and the player was able to ask Astarion questions for context.

In my playthrough as Astarion as the player, you can navigate that conversation in different ways, but there are also certain things that are no longer a given. You actually have to roll to remember who Sebastian is (which I flubbed) and that changes the course of the conversation away from the NPC “default” conversation.

Edit: I found some examples of that specific scene on YouTube, to compare the differences.

Astarion as a Party Member

Astarion as an Origin Character

but if you play as any of the characters you barely hear them, or so I’ve heard.(haven’t done it myself)

This is the case. There are a small set of instances where the character might get a one-off voice line, but in general you’re left mute, even during high impact story moments where the character would usually get a spotlight (e.g. Astarion confronting Cazador).

It’s just a bit of a shame because you’d think people would opt to play characters they like because they want to experience more of them while playing, but ironically you get less that way.

Agreed, I think it’s more that Jennifer English is out there putting in the work to get as many solid gigs as she can, BG3 being just one of several.

Stellar Blade is a 2024 game, so likely not GotY this year if it wasn’t even close last year.

I am seeing more and more of these “review bomb” takes lately, too. Dragon Age Veilguard getting review bombed because their game is too woke. Moon Studios saying they might have to close because trolls are review bombing their new game. Monster Hunter Wilds being review bombed on Steam because entitled PC gamers expect their games to be stable, I guess.

Too many people out there are deflecting legitimate criticism in favor of what are basically conspiracy theories—that there must be a concerted effort to specifically punish these developers in particular for the crime of releasing a misunderstood masterpiece. No one wants to accept the possibility that they just put out a bad game.

For anyone else trying to parse the title:

Sources from Build a Rocket Boy, developer of MindsEye, say the studio has begun layoffs amid a disastrous launch.

This might hurt every English teacher I ever had, but maybe title format should stop applying to article titles. Unnecessary capitalization hurts legibility.

Not that it would necessarily solve the wording issue, though, as I’m sure the data people for news publishers have some stats showing they get more engagement when the title is front loaded with more keywords, or something to that effect.

Yeah, the justice system in the US is pretty fucked up. Provably so, with plenty of data made publicly available to back it up.

Administrative detentions can be longer. On paper they can hold you about a month, but it can be longer than that with a judge’s signoff if they have proof of a crime.

This is typically where the police try to get you to confess to something and drag it out as long and uncomfortably as possible until you do, after which you either get to go free (though you end up on a list for a long time) or you may go to a “black jail”/黑監獄 which is a sort of under-the-table prison.

The terms of release can also sometimes require completion of a rehabilitation program, which is often the voluntary alternative to prison, or getting transferred to a short stay detention center for a few months to perform community service.

The previous user is a bit off base with the labor camps idea (not to say that the Xinjiang detention camps for Uyghurs aren’t widely known), but it is worth noting that China does utilize administrative detentions/行政拘留 for smaller offenses which are kept statistically separate from prison counts.

If Raiden needs a source, the law covering administrative detentions can be reviewed here:

https://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2021-01/23/content_5582030.htm

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People live around there, so harm is definitely being done to the air they breathe and the environment they live in.