Thursday Next

Fair.

100% this. The problem with MCU being so much a part of the zeitgeist is that it is canon for most people. Even if the GOTG Game characters were closer to the comics and therefore more "authentic", I wouldn't even know.

Not to mention that art like that would never get made if you did go in with a "plan" for it. Going to a Hollywood studio and saying "I want to make a film that says Americans are brainless creatures that seek only to consume everything and that American corporates behind consumer temples like malls (and movie theatres) are part of the problem." probably isn't going to make much headway. Ethan's comment reminded me that one of the reasons I stopped watching South Park was that while it claimed that everything was a valid target for criticism, what it seemed to be most against was caring enough to change the status quo. You can absolutely make apolitical games (Tetris, sports games, etc), but I think what you have to sacrifice to do so is a story. As soon as you have narrative, you have to have motivations, which means you need to have some sort of characters with desires, and at that point you are doomed to insert politics. Is your protagonist on the side of the law catching wrong doers, or a rebel fighting against an oppressive regime? If so, congrats, you have introduced authoritarian/libertarian politics into your game.

Like the ones who say "Why does "The Last of Us 2" a zombie game, need to crowbar in a load of "politics"? Why can't it just be completely non-political like Romero's Dawn of the Dead?" and then go back to mindlessly consuming media at face value, taking nothing from it.

Nah, those "boycott the SJW game" tossers always cave. There is 0 point in appeasing them.

I know you know, but... Corporations are absolutely not rational, that's definitely one of those "greatest trick the devil ever pulled" things. If publishers were rational, they would stop doing the "Our game set in [the Cold War/post climate apocalypse/corporate dystopia] is completely apolitical." mental gymnastics.

It's going to take a big film to make me stump up the £20 to watch it on Disney+ premiere thingy rather than just wait for it to go on standard "But I already paid you DIsney+". But I think it is definitely worth it for families. The cost of taking yourself, partner and two kids to the cinema to watch the latest Marvel film would dwarf $30, plus you'll miss half of it because you are taking kids to the loo, or otherwise being distracted by parenting your children, or being distracted by other people not parenting their kids.

Episode 1 of Loki was brilliant.

Hopefully we'll see a sort of "natural selection" where studios that don't crunch continue to thrive and those that do are punished at the tills. Sadly, I don't think most consumers know/care about crunch and so it will only happen as a result of actual humans burning out and shipping broken products (as happened with CP2077), which is not ideal.

Who plays games for enjoyment?!?

Because I want to unlock all the things.

I'm in Age of Calamity Korok Hell. I hated that in BOTW there were so many stupid things to collect. 100s of korok nuts, temples, etc. all completely unlabelled. AoC has doubled down on this with 175 Korok seeds to collect, across all the campaign levels, many of which have time limits. Worst of all while chests (from what I can tell there is no overall reward for opening all the chests) are marked on the map (with an ability upgrade), the koroks are not. So I have to have a guide open because no fucking way am I tiptoeing through these levels trying to find that one bombable wall where a korok is hiding. I was already sort of done with the game, but now (like BOTW) I am beginning to actively dislike it.

Glad you were able to stay safe.

I think with all of these sorts of games, in an ideal world, I would love a "post-game" sort of thing where you can hoover up quests, collectibles, etc. and just sort of enjoy that you saved the world/galaxy/whatever. But I get that that is resource intensive and only like 10% of players even finish games so I see why it doesn't get done.

Fairy nuff. I have a personal axe to grind on this as I had the ending spoiled by having to deal with the Advertising Standards complaints before I got a chance to play through the final game myself. People complaining that there "were only three endings" when there are actually in excess of 6million end-state combinations.

I think people put too much emphasis on the last mission/cutscene as "the ending". The whole game is the ending of the trilogy. All of the companion story arcs are wrapped up nicely, the individual races have their arcs resolved, the galactic story comes together, and all of this is based on the millions of decision combinations one can make along the way. The only bit I see people complain about is the "final choice", and if the final choice had been replaced by some hidden sum of your previous choices, people would have just complained that they didn't know that having Edi and Joker hook up was going to trigger the Synergy ending, or being a renegade would trigger the Destroy ending or whatever and why can't they just pick the "ending" that they want.

Personally, or because you want it to be a commercial success? I'm happy to swerve BOTW2 since I didn't love the first one. I don't think it'll have a commercial impact as the two platforms don't really compete with each other directly.

I've deliberately not watched it since I want the new Zoids to be a surprise for me. I cannot wait for this to launch.

Or streamed a la Stadia.

I feel the opposite. AoC has sated whatever desire I had to play musou for a considerable time.

Pun intentional?

Yeah, it's a monster. I'm sure its resurgence and my working on it is entirely coincidental.

Not sure if that is aimed at the situation or me, but either way. *shrug* Them's the breaks.

That hasn't happened to me yet!