brian_

After finishing the game, I'm surprised that this thing got enough high scored reviews to make an 80 on Metacritic. Outside of being one of the prettiest games ever made, it seems like every directorial choice was made to go against the grain of anything that might make it popular with a more mainstream audience. I enjoyed it, but the notion pre-release that this sequel might be the breakout, mainstream hit Microsoft wanted seems funny in retrospect.

EDIT: As a side note, all the "this is barely a video game" and "this would be better as a movie" takes are infuriating. Of the plethora of valid criticisms to be thrown at this game, and there's plenty, that stuff is just nonsense. Video games can be so many things. There are so many games out there that are both more and less "do-y" or interactive or whatever you want to say a video game needs to be a video game. If you don't like that stuff, that's fine, but don't limit the space. I don't think there is any world where this would have been better as a movie. I don't think there's any world where a major movie studio would even give this thing the time of day, let alone the budget to pull off a high fidelity, slow paced, trot through dreamy landscapes and claustrophobic nightmares.

I've always thought of the games industry relative to the consoles. What generation they're on, where and when games release in relation, the platform holders and their line ups. This generation has been the one to move me away from that. I feel no particular affinity for the consoles themselves. I'm thinking about games much more as things separate from whatever platform they're on. The $70 price point has pushed me out of caring about the newest, biggest releases. I'm playing much more of my backlog of old games. I've bought a computer with a graphics card in it for the first time in my life and playing more games on PC than ever before.

It's hard to tell if this is any indication of a floundering of these consoles, or if I'm just getting old. PS5s seem to be selling well enough. Xbox seems a bit murkier. But also, I'm just kind of not interested in whether the machines are successful anymore. I think I just tend to think of them as storefronts now. Like a Walmart or something. When I buy something there, I'm thinking about the thing I buy, not the Walmart.

Judging by the number of collectables I have left to get, it seems I'm about halfway through the game and it's completely unsurprising that reviews are all over the place for this thing. It is absolutely just more of that first game. I understand that slow walking through highly directed, linear hazy nightmare-scapes to do the occasional highly directed, deliberately slow combat sequence or repetitive puzzle isn't going to be popular with most people, but I enjoyed it the first time around and still find it enjoyable here.

I'm also just as conflicted on its portrayal of metal health as I was the first time around. I'm glad the game decided to drop the rot mechanic, something the game deliberately lies about in order to make the player feel a paranoia associated with psychosis. I still don't know how to feel about the mixing of Norse myth with the character's psychosis so that the player never really knows what's happening. That kind of "putting the player in the character's shoes" could be helpful in getting some sort of better understanding, I'm just not the person to evaluate whether this is actually a good way of going about it as someone who doesn't live with it. At the very least, I'm glad the series has attempted to portray psychosis as something other than the nebulous evil that infects villains and makes horror monsters because that shit drives me f-ing nuts.

"We here at Xbox are proud to announce Ninja Theory's next game... Hi-Fi Rush 2!"

Great article. I just want to push a little bit on this part.

It should never feel like that it is the consumers responsibility to protect the jobs of workers at a large company. That's the employer's job. I think people tend to conflate this with the want to support independent creators, who do not have the protections of a management team, making millions of dollars from their work, in place. They're responsible for bringing in the money by delivering successful products that people want to buy and running a successful business that people feel good about supporting. I realize that if we lived in a world where management did take proper responsibility, this stuff would happen far less frequently, and we wouldn't need to have this conversation in the first place, but continuing to feel like the onus is on the consumer to keep people employed isn't going to push them to do so either.

I've been thinking about Microsoft's lineup from their 2014 E3 press conference a lot lately. Where they showcased:

Fable Legends, which was cancelled

Scalebound, which was cancelled

Phantom Dust, which was cancelled

Project Spark, which they gave up on about a year in

Crackdown 3, which was delayed for years and was not very good

The Master Chef Collection, which was a disaster at launch

and Sunset Overdrive, which was maybe their most successful game they showed that year but didn't exactly set the world on fire.

Sure, this was all about six or seven months after the Xbox One launched, where they had to do a shit ton of course correction, but it didn't seem like Microsoft had their shit together then, and now a decade later, it seems like once again, they don't have their shit together. And maybe they never did? I don't know.

@bigsocrates: I wasn't referring to the use of the term "blockbuster". I meant the more general notion of tossing people away to boost your portfolio.

"Those whose roles will be impacted will be notified today, and we ask that you please treat your departing colleagues with respect and compassion."

"These changes are grounded in prioritizing high-impact titles and further investing in Bethesda’s portfolio of blockbuster games"

Two directly conflicting statements.

I scrolled through the whole bundle today. I haven't checked any of these out yet, but with about a day left for sale, here's a list of games that I thought looked interesting enough to give a download.

interwine

Repurpose

Loco Motive

What Remains

Lucah: Born of a Dream

Our Cinderella

Underhero

Spare Parts

Lonely People Potion Shop

BOSSGAME: The Final Boss is My Heart

Nadine in: Diamond in the Grave

after a while

Rituals in the Dark

Kandria

Arctico

Cycle Chaser H-5

Pixross

Hill Agency: Puritydecay