Castle Magus

While Polygon is still fubar, Giant Bomb is actually back. I think? It's hard to keep up with this shit sometimes. In any case, the above video is already out of date, at least as far as Giant Bomb is concerned.

But yeah, I agree with Woolie. If these two chuckleheads here end up being the "best" of "gaming news," then "gaming news" is beyond fucked. Not that I would stop watching/listening to them.

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Here's what I say to the news of all of those Sony GaaS/"live service" games being canceled:


And yeah, the point Pat and Woolie made that these Sony wannabe "forever games" all would have been directly competing not just with the already established powerhouses from other companies but also with each other was a great point. Who the fuck has time to play seventeen different never-ending, time-devouring games at once? I don't have the time, interest, or inclination to play even one of those pieces of shit, but that's just me. And, fuck, I say to hell forever with even the "successful" ones, too, like Fortnite or whatever. In my not at all humble opinion, Fortnite was one of the worst things to happen to the modern video game industry as a whole, up there with shit like Denuvo and NFT games and such (and not just because it also let Epic fund the creation of Epically Gangrenous Shitpuddle).

Another name for the Modern Triple-A Video Game Industry™ easily could be "Sunk Cost Fallacy: The Industry."

The sooner all this shit finally crashes, explodes, and burns to the ground, the better. At this point, it's just gliding along, wobbling, stuttering, barely above tree level, belching smoke, engines on fire, parts falling off, and money spewing like a ruptured sewer pipe out of the cargo hold to be forever lost to the four winds.

You know how TERF means "trans-exclusionary radical feminist," right? I'm starting to feel like there needs to be a term/acronym that means something along the lines of "asexual/aromantic-exclusionary (radical?) ...um... LGBT-supporters... ...?" Needs some work, but that would be the gist of it. This is assuming, of course, that there isn't already a term/acronym like that and I'm simply not aware of it. And, with that said, this certainly isn't a new phenomenon or anything.

Take this Polygon article about the most recent Ghostbusters movie, for example. Basically, the article seems to take the stance of "They must kiss/confess love/fuck/whatever, or it just doesn't count at all." Fuck off with that shit. Look, if they made another new Ghostbusters movie involving these characters, and they made Phoebe openly gay, I would be totally fine with that (and if other Ghostbusters "fans" have a problem with that, they can fuck off, too), but at the same time, don't go shitting all over things that don't exactly match up with how you wish they were. "Not every queer romance needs to be clearly spelled out on screen, but..." has very strong "I'm not a racist, but..."/"I'm not a homophobe, but..." energy.

Also... Phoebe Spengler is "so, so queer-coded" because of... her hair and the way she dresses? Uh, so, was Egon Spengler "so, so queer-coded," too, then? Because Mckenna Grace in these new movies was explicitly and intentionally made up to look almost exactly like how Harold Ramis looked in the original movies. I mean, sure, it could be both of those things, but it's way more the latter than the former in intention, though. And I don't recall anyone trying to claim that Phoebe was "so, so queer-coded" in Afterlife (especially considering the chemistry she had with Podcast [a male character] in that movie).

And, lastly, "in case you're lucky enough to have not watched the newest new Ghostbusters movies" (emphasis mine). Implying that anyone who has watched them is "unlucky"? Fuck off with that shit, too. The new Ghostbusters movies (i.e. Afterlife and Frozen Empire, anyway[1]) are fine. Admittedly, I didn't like Frozen Empire nearly as much as I did Afterlife, myself, but it's not "a frankly bad movie" either, and I don't feel "unlucky" to have seen it.

(I don't feel comfortable putting the "homophobia" tag on this because it doesn't really fit, and I don't have an "acephobia"/"aphobia" tag yet [nor do I feel like putting one just on this one post], but if I ever, sadly, find a reason to make another post in the future that would need a tag like that, I'll add it and backtag this one with it as well.)

[1] - I thought the 2016 movie (Ghostbusters: Answer the Call or whatever the fuck they're calling it now) was okay, too (despite the intensely shitty trailers for it), but that's neither here nor there, as that movie has nothing to do with the newer ones, which were actual, passing-the-torch sequels of the originals, rather than a failed attempt at a reboot.

Full headline, because Jesus fucking Christ: "A follow-up to the legendary Disco Elysium might have been ready to play within the next year⁠—ZA/UM's devs loved it, management canceled it and laid off the team: 'For a while it seemed like miracles were possible, and with them redemption'"

Disco Elysium was a flash in the pan, after which the high lord muckety-mucks at ZA/UM decided to use said pan for the sole purpose of taking a massive, steaming, diarrhetic shit in it, ruining the pan entirely, for everyone, forever.

Anyway, nothing really new is being said here, there's just a lot more detail in it. Just further confirmation that the muckety-mucks at what's left of ZA/UM are vile, disgusting shitbags.

Also, it highlights the fact that those "People Make Games" documentary makers apparently don't actually have the slightest goddamn clue what the fuck they're doing.

Follow up to that previous clip from last week.

I'm absolutely one hundred percent all in with Woolie on this one.

Woolie: "The takeaways have pretty much just been, as the week has gone by, that like 'Yeah, dude, you're nuts and clearly you overthink or you think too highly of what news actually is.' And I think, in reflection on that, I think what it is is that I definitely hesitate to call myself 'the news' because of what I think 'news' should be."

That these two complete chucklefucks are being considered as "the news" (or, at the very least, "video game news," which clearly has a much lower bar than "the news" [though, granted, not by all that much, these days]) simply by virtue of the demonstrable fact that most other "legit" "video game news" sources are outright horseshit is genuinely kind of depressing.

I don't watch these guys for "video game news." I'm fine with the talk about Pat's baby or Woolie's childhood in Grenada or Woolie visiting a Buc-ee's or whatever. Any actual "video game news" I get from them is just a coincidence.

So, because the Fallout TV show made the games super popular again, all of a sudden, apparently every video game website on the planet seems to have decided to drop everything else and run a bunch of those banal, asinine, aggravating "How to jooter the jeeter at <Place> to get <Thing> as part of <Quest> in Fallout 4" articles, which have been the latest glut of such articles to clog up my Google News app.

It sucks.

Yes, I know I've already complained about this before. That hasn't magically stopped it from sucking, sadly.

Full headline, because Dreamwidth's subject field length is still inadequate: "PSA: If you are unhappy with a game due to predatory microtransactions and DLCs, stop complaining and stop playing them"

I agree with this in part, but not fully. I already don't buy/play games like that[1]. However, I'm sure as shit not going to stop complaining about such things. The guy is absolutely right, though, in that complaining about this stuff does not accomplish a single goddamn thing at all (beyond providing a [dwindling] sense of catharsis).

It's like I have said many times in the past, myself. As much as I hate the modern video game industry for all the dumbshit it spews on a constant basis these days, I hate modern video game buyers/players at least as much, because if they weren't down there, with their gaping maws perfectly lined up with the sewer outflow pipe, the modern video game industry would not be up there, diarrhetically spewing all that dumbshit into the toilet for all these morons to blithely suck down. "Vote with your wallet" never works, and the people who say it know it never works, because far too many fucking idiots far too often "vote with their wallet" explicitly against their own best interests.[2]

To restate: Shit producers thrive on shit consumers. Shit consumers (often militantly) support shit producers. Circle of life.

On the one hand, telling people to "stop complaining and stop playing them" is laudable common sense. Because people should stop playing them. On the other hand, it would be best to keep in mind that quote that is misattributed to Albert Einstein: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get different results." Telling people to (yes, indeed) boycott games like that is worthless, because people are simply not going to boycott games like that, or at least not enough to matter at all. It never works. It's probably never going to work. That's just all there is to it.

And telling people to stop complaining about this shit is not going to work either, because fuck you, John Papadopoulos of website "Dark Side of Gaming," I'll complain about whatever I want, whenever I want. ¬_¬

For me, the order of annoyance probably goes like this, in ascending order from least to most annoying:

1. People who complain about modern video game industry dumbfuckery, such as me and owsf2000.
2. People who complain about people who complain about modern video game industry dumbfuckery, such as Mr. Papadopoulos here.
3. People who complain about modern video game industry dumbfuckery while still actively giving money to the modern video game industry, such as roughly 99.9% of all people who buy/play video games.

Anyway, I'll just say it again:

C'moooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooon modern video game industry crash.

[1] - Well, in the specific cases of Tekken or Calluhdoody or most of the other games mentioned by name in this article, I didn't care about any of that shit even before they were drowned in a deluge of modern video game industry dumbshit. Well, maybe aside from the earlier Mortal Kombat games, I guess. And The Elder Scrolls, of course, because even though he never mentions that by name, the header image on the article is of that asinine Oblivion Horse Armor bullshit (which, despite my post there, actually wasn't the first video game to ever have paid DLC, since MechAssault predated that by a few years[3]).

[2] - See also: giving campaign contributions to Donald Trump (or the GQP in general).

[3] - Not only that, but that MechAssault game was apparently one of the first known instances of on-disc DLC, too. Shit.

Yet another instance of "Dreamwidth can't handle the full headline because their subject field length restrictions are annoyingly asinine": "Daedalic's bizarre Gollum apology was apparently written by ChatGPT and the studio didn't even get approval on it"

The vast majority of this article is just talking about the failed Gollum game in general, which makes that headline seem kind of like clickbait anyway, since they only talk about the weird ChatGPT-written apology in a couple of small paragraphs in the middle of it, but the article as a whole is pretty interesting and just yet another example of the modern video game industry maybe starting to finally (hopefully) choke on its own shit after all this time. It's also yet another example in a endless stream of examples over the past few decades of a smaller company being bought by a bigger company and then immediately almost entirely dying as a result (though, apparently, Daedalic was kind of shit even before selling out).

Vidya gaem jurnlizm.

(EDIT)

For years now, the best-trafficked pages at game journalism sites haven't been reviews. They've been stories with headlines like "Pokémon Go Type chart, Type effectiveness and weakness explained" and "Mystic Messenger email guide - all correct answers for every guest in Casual, Deep and Another Story".

Yeah, I've mentioned myself how it seems like I've been seeing more and more of those asinine "Here Are The Exact Fourteen Steps Required To Properly Jobble The Jooble In Current Flavor Of The Month Video Game" type articles. It's annoying.

And as much as they continue to drive traffic long after their initial publication, having a robust set of guides in the early days of a launch is hugely beneficial not just in taking advantage of the largest wave of people looking for guides on a game, but in convincing them it would be easier to just go straight to your site in the future instead of trying out the alternatives offered by Google, which seem to be getting noticeably less helpful as the years go by.

The problem here is that search engines, social media, and the advertising industry they rely on have been the black holes of the Internet for decades, exerting an incredible gravitational force on everything around them to the point where many outlets seem to focus more on serving ads than serving readers. The ratio of advertising space to editorial space on gaming sites is the most obvious example of this shift, but that inexorable pull has warped the remaining editorial space as well.

And that, of course, is why they do that shit now, rather than spending time on articles that are actually interesting.

Advertising/marketing, and especially the fact that content creators become beholden to their advertisers/marketers and have to kowtow to their fickle whims, was one of the the worst things to ever happen to the Internet.

And from one of the image captions in that article (for an image showing "influencers" at NASA space camp):

Traditional game journalists lost favor with audiences for obvious conflicts of interests like accepting lavish experiential trips from publishers promoting their games. As a result, audeinces increasingly trust influencers, who are famously incorruptible and would never go along with stunts like being sent to NASA space camp because something something Starfield.

As much disdain as I have for "traditional" video game journalism (which has sucked ass for decades and will continue to suck increasing amounts of ever more encrusted ass for decades more [assuming it doesn't simply cease to exist altogether, which is a very distinct, strong possibility]) these days, I loathe the very concept of "influencers" even more, just on general principle, for a variety of reasons.

(/EDIT)

(EDIT 2) Oh, and of course, a good chunk of the criticisms found in that article could be applied more generally to just "jurnlizm" without the "vidya gaem" modifier on there, too. (/EDIT 2)

It makes sense, I guess, given that the Legend of Zelda games Breath of the Wild and now Tears of the Kingdom are things that exist, but I know that I've seen at least three or four games that look suspiciously similar show up in my Steam discovery queue over the past few months or so, and now there's this thing as mentioned on PC Gamer there. I mean, sure they look interesting, especially given that I haven't actually played either BotW or TotK myself (due to not owning a Switch), but it's still just yet another case of the interminable copycat/bandwagon cycle in action.

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Speaking of PC Gamer (and other similar video game journalism websites), I'm getting kind of tired of this recent trend of not mentioning the game they're talking about by name in the headline of the article about it. In the above case, at the very least, they manage to give the name in the deck/drop head (i.e. that sub-headline under the byline that I had to look up the name[s] for on Google while writing this post), but in some cases it'll be a paragraph or two or three into the article itself before they ever deign to actually give the name of the game they're discussing, which I find to be rather asinine and aggravating. It's just a new breed of clickbait, as far as I'm concerned.