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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • That’s not at all surprising. PvE game design is almost always about making the computer less competent in fun and/or believable ways. If you’ve got a computer that can simulate every item and skill in an enemy team’s arsenal and game out the best combination in milliseconds, the player is going to be dead by Turn 1 or stun-locked and dead by Turn 2.



  • You, like the author, are just falling for console war nonsense

    You are sprinting to the defense of a multi-billion dollar company to call me a console war partisan. That is some American-politics level projection right there. I was a Sega kid. We lost the console war at the turn of the century. Now I go where the games are.

    If the Xbox is a console for people to play games, it’s not the only console on the market, so it needs to compete. If it gains feature parity with its direct competition…except that said competition has a quality stable of exclusive titles, then the console is going to struggle. Like say, moving 20% of the volume that their competitor does. Microsoft’s answer to this seems to be to forego adding the value of console exclusives to their own platform and instead releasing more of their first-party titles on Playstation and PC.

    That’s good for gamers, yes. It also flies in the face of any attempt to develop the Xbox as a platform choice. If I can afford one console per generation, why would I choose the Xbox over a Playstation? If I can afford multiple consoles, what does the Xbox offer that I don’t get already with the Playstation?


  • You’re calling Jason Schrier, a dumb author. He is one of, if not the most respected games journalists in the industry. You might want to take a moment and consider his words.

    For my part, I do well enough that I could easily afford a good PC and 2-3 consoles per generation, and I’ve bought an Xbox and PlayStation since the start of both product lines. My Xbox One S was by far my least utilized console, to the point where I just couldn’t justify buying one in the current generation.

    I just don’t know who the Xbox is even FOR anymore. If they put out a good exclusive, I’ll think about getting it… on PC, but even then, that’s probably money going to Steam or even EGS, because fuck the Windows Store, and most of the time I don’t even bother buying it there because something else on PC or PS5/PS Plus has caught my eye and I don’t feel enough FOMO to go back looking for it.

    I should be one of Xbox’s core customers. But they stopped giving me the time of day when they spent an entire E3 blathering on about being a media console back in 2013. They’ve done precious little to try to win me back in the decade since.


  • As someone who actually played these games on the Genesis and Sega CD, I’m guessing someone said, “We need to compete with the Mortal Kombat movies. Find me another fighting game franchise that’s got the same level of violence. Bonus points if there hasn’t been a new game in 30 years so we won’t piss off as many nerds when we butcher the lore.”

    And it might work. As much as I enjoyed the games back in the day, it really doesn’t take up much space in my brain. I really wouldn’t lose any sleep if it bombed.



  • I wouldn’t downplay the achievements of the Mattachine Society of DC. They engaged with the government over and over in court and challenged the belief that gay men were open to blackmail and therefore unsafe to employ in government. Kameny created the Gay is Good slogan and argued that government workers who were open about their sexuality had no risk of blackmail, and were only at risk of unfair prejudice from the government itself.

    Kameny was far from perfect, but there’s a reason he was standing over Obama’s shoulder when Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed.


  • I just finished reading The Deviant’s War by Eric Cervini and I would highly recommend it for anyone wanting to learn more about the political aspects of the LGBT civil rights movement in the 60s and 70s.

    It focuses on Frank Kameny and the Mattachine Society of Washington DC. Kameny was a government astronomer who was fired and lost his security clearance for being gay. He believed that America needed to see that gay people were proper, respectful Americans who looked and behaved just like everyone else outside of the bedroom. He organized the first pickets and insisted that everyone wore business formal clothes, picketed quietly, with pre-approved signs, and displayed no signs of affection to their partners during the picket if they were present.