I don’t know that vampires won so much as werewolves lost. Or morphed into futures.

Zombies, witches, and even ghosts are still strong contenders.

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AI has slop is a problem, and Shovelware has been a problem for decades, basically as long as videogames have existed.

However, a LOT of these cheap and obscure games on steam have more innocuous explanations, with that explanation often being “the dev doesn’t really care about making money”. Perception, for example, is a student project that was released for free and I wouldn’t pay much for anyways, but it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

Or when I was in a band, one of the other members was a developer by trade who, as a hobby, connects with a couple of his other friends to develop game that he released on steam. I recorded and produced an EP for that band and we released it for free and we certainly spent more money buying drinks at the bars we played than we were ever paid for playing. I think his game was similar: they charged money for it to cover some of their costs, but he certainly never left his day job.

Or Mind Over Magnet, which was the project of the YouTuber GamerMakersToolkit. The whole thing was a multi-year project where the guy made videos covering the game development process and culminated in the release of the game. The actual business model was based on the video content, while the game itself was just a side piece that was probably profitable, but I doubt made enough profit for him to survive on for years.

1. Elon Musk did not found Tesla. It existed before him. Even after he bought the company, a lot of those vehicles were purchased before his politics were widely known.

2. Electric vehicles had tons of government subsidies that Tesla famously leaned on for years. So even if you want to count purchases as votes, a lot of those “votes” were directly from the federal government rather than the people.

3. It’s incredibly hard to get solid data on cyber truck sales, but reports everywhere indicate that it is not doing well. The cybertruck is a highly unique and notable vehicle. For a while I too thought that they were getting more and more popular near me, until one got a unique scratch. I soon realized the truck I saw at the mall was the same one I saw at the grocery store, and also the same one I regularly saw parked near a cafe. The F-150’s, Rams, Tundras, and everything else mostly blends together into a sea of generic traffic, but the cybertruck stands out.

AW2 is going to be a while. Not only because I’m a patientgamer, but because it was published by Epic and I have no interest in setting up an account and dealing with their launcher, plus jumping through all the hoops to be able to play it on my Steam Deck. I’ve already switched a couple of my household’s PCs to Linux, and I’ll probably do the rest eventually. Maybe I’ll pick up the PS5 version some day, but that severely limits the different ways I can play it. I might get FBC Firebreak if it ever goes on sale- I don’t play a whole lot of multiplayer games generally but I’m interested to see if they put any lore in there.

Disco Elysium is great, but at times the “gameplay” so basically just reading a polysci textbook. It’s a very heavy game that deals with a lot of heavy topics. Often I’m tired of processing all of the terrible things happening in the world and look to videogames as an escape, and Disco Elysium is up there as one of the worst games for that lol. Even just seeing the ZA/UM logo starts to get me going from thinking about what happened to the studio and the main creators of the game.

There’s also a lot of friction that just comes from it being a text-heavy game. I had my retina surgically re-attached in one eye a few years ago- it was largely successful compared to going blind in that eye, but that eye is not as good at focusing at screens further away. Action games like Alan Wake and Hellblade are fine on my living room TV, but for Disco Elysium I mostly need to use my Deck or some other screen that can be closer to my face.

Another factor is sobriety. I feel like this doesn’t get talked about in gaming communities a lot- a lot of gamers are children, or adults who are sober for a variety of reasons. I’m adult who does not have any of those reasons, and even a medical marijuana card for my arthritis. I have a full-time job, a house to maintain, and several relationships to maintain. So on the rare occasion that I have an evening to myself to enjoy, I often want to get high (responsibly) and play some videogames. It’s kind of a difficulty customization too: often the difficulty settings in-games are just boring number changes that make enemies bullet sponges. So I’m more entertained by playing on Easy and getting high than playing on Hard sober. Disco Elysium, for as much as it features drug-use in its world and gameplay, is nearly impossible for me to play while high. It’s not a huge deal, but it often means that other games are just more appealing when I’m planning any given evening.

Firewood banks are a fantastic tool for teaching rural people that socialism is actually fucking great.

Assuming that ALL rural people voted a singular way and have singular beliefs is incredibly prejudiced and dangerous. I live in a northeastern US city that has been solidly blue for my entire life, but I still see plenty of houses and cars with Trump merch. Heck, a lot of rural people have been disenfranchised by voter suppression tactics. A lot of these people are illiterate. They’re victims.

And where do you draw the line? This inevitably leads to “purity testing” all of the “blue” folks to figure out just how “blue” they are, and that’s kind of gross.

These people are my neighbors and fellow humans. Give them their fucking firewood, food stamps, libraries, healthcare, and all of the other material support any reasonable government should in 2025.

The real enemies are the wealthy elites. The fossil fuel magnates, the wealthy elites who own the land and control the lumber. They absolutely love that you’re picking on a bunch of uneducated and powerless poor people and drawing attention away from the people with power who made the system this way.

Alcohol is pretty terrible for sleeping.

There may of course be psychological reasons alcohol can help you get to sleep. And for alcoholics I would imagine the withdrawal symptoms may interfere with sleep. We are all balancing the needs of our bodies and minds to cope with this cruel world and I’m not judging, but the science says there are benefits to sleeping without alcohol.

Quit trying to undermine what Bill Clinton did. Just because it was heavily politicized doesn’t mean it wasn’t also an egregious offense.

There’s a reason pretty much every organization in the world has written rules regarding the relationships between its members, especially when there are power imbalances. I can’t think of a bigger possible power imbalance than the US President and an intern.

And it goes the other way too. What if Lewinsky had been an intelligence asset for a foreign nation? Or even if she was just a lobbyist for some special interest group?

The US was lucky that Lewinsky was a victim of sexual harassment and not a fucking spy. She was demonized so heavily in the aftermath she literally moved out of the country.

It’s been a while, but I thought the theory that MaxwellHill was Ghislaine had been debunked, And it turned out the user was some guy in Malaysia who lived near a place known as Maxwell Hill?

It’s entirely possible I’ve fallen for a smokescreen, but also there never seemed to be a whole lot of evidence that account was Ghislaine’s other than the name “Maxwell”, which is pretty common.

Ilhan Omar has lived in America longer than Elon Musk.

We could complain about large groups of South Africans voting for Musk, except no one ever voted for that shithead for anything.

I would not call PE a “bubble”. It’s not something people are just tossing money into because there are nebulous promises and the numbers are going up. PE is involved in EVERYTHING - restaurants, housing, tech, manufacturing, finance, marketing. It’s not an industry, just a way of investing that bypasses pretty much all of the safeguards and regulations societies have put in place for public trading. And I don’t expect it to “pop”. Either it continues, and all of the wealth continues to be concentrated towards the top, or the populace manages to take enough power back to get legislation, regulation, and enforcement to add transparency and rules to private equity.

It’s not an open market when there are only 3 companies that manufacture RAM, and they already have a history of being punished for illegally colluding with each other.

Love to see Giffany represented here

I don’t know if any whole games, but a lot of games have boss battles or segments that are in 2nd person. Where the perspective is from the target, and you can see the character you are controlling through their eyes.

Off the top of my head, this boss fight from Ratchet and Clank 3 comes to mind.

It’s hard to do this for extended periods for a few reasons. Part of why this is reduced to boss fights so that if you have sections with dozens of enemies, whose perspective do you take? What happens when that enemy dies, or if that enemy needs to suck under cover or go down a stairwell or look down at their weapon to reload?

Even for boss fights, it only works if the boss’s behavior is controlled pretty strictly, like in that Ratchet and Clank example.

You could kind of make an argument about sections where you view your character through some sort of diagetic device, like a security camera. Technically you could count Lakitu from several Mario games in that sense.

Talking about this is giving me ideas though, especially for stealth games. Something that lets you see through the enemy’s eyes and make sure that you do NOT appear in their line of site could be really neat. Maybe.

This is a tired old gimmick.

It can work situationally. Different games have different approaches to health and to UI. Mario had different sprites and mechanical implications for health. Spyro the Dragon had Sparks change color, and if you lost Sparks entirely it became a pain to collect things.

But most of the time, often in modern action/horror games, it’s just nonsense. A pretty transparent attempt to make the player “feel” in danger by making the character bloody or putting up an increasingly opaque vignette without actually communicating health well. It makes it all that much more easier to try to give the player the feeling of “surviving that attack on 1HP” without actually having to fudge numbers.

There has been a trend the past several years of thinking UI = bad, and that less UI = more good. I find it incredibly annoying. Just give me the UI. Give me the minimap. These are things that are so useful in real life that humans have been trying to make them for thousands of years. We made smartphones and GPS systems because maps are great. Google and Meta and Apple and tons of other companies have been trying to make AR glasses a thing for years. It honestly breaks my “immersion” to NOT have a minimal in games like Horizon Zero Dawn.

It CAN be interesting to do stuff like this if the game is designed around it, but usually it just feels like the devs are trying to re-invent stuff they don’t need to, or following trends for the sake of being trendy.

Eh I think Fallout 4 is the only one that would really work with.

You could have maybe argued for Oblivion, but I think they made the right call in re-making it. (I know Bethesda calls it a “re-master”, but imo when you start re-doing models, NPC behaviors, and voice lines that crosses the threshold into “re-make”).

I think Fallout 3 would really benefit from the same re-make treatment Oblivion got. Morrowind too.

Starfield is current gen. Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online are kind of different beasts as live-servics games. The older Elder Scrolls games are so outdated and janky that I think they would either have to completely re-imagine them into functionally new games, or just do a quick port (maybe upscale the resolution and add a few QoL improvements to call it a “re-master”) in a cheap sort of “classics collection”.

I haven’t played the pre-Bethesda Fallout games, but they do look re-makeable. They’re also nowhere near as popular as the rest of Bethesda’s games so there may not be enough demand for them.

Of course, if there’s a lot more options for games by other studios and published by Bethesda, but I could spend all day picking through that library and evaluating lol.

Just finished up the Alan Wake 1 DLC, and the American Nightmare spinoff game. I really loved Control and had decided to go back and play the Alan Wake games. The base Alan Wake game had some good ideas, but the controls and balancing were clunky and the combat was tedious. The DLC’s got better, using the dark/light mechanics in much more interesting ways. American Nightmare had controls that felt much better and a neat structure of more open, less linear levels. Still nowhere near as great as Control was imo.

So now I’m playing Disco Elysium. I had tried to start it a few times and bounced off- it’s great, but a TON of heavy text and political theory. I managed to make some headway a couple months ago when I was traveling with my Steam Deck. Figured now is as good for a time as any to try to beat it at least once. It is truly great, and I think needs to be in the conversations for best game of all time. But it also takes a lot of energy and a specific mood to play.

Another game I tried to go back to was Hellblade. I’m, idk, about a third of the way through I guess? First started over a year ago. I love the initial concept of the character’s psychosis manifesting in-game, but it seems like 90% of the gimmick was done in the opening sequence and the game got incredibly repetitive after that. It’s so slow it’s hard to play. My hands hurt after a bit because I find myself pushing on the joysticks harder, pushing on the “jog” button harder, trying to make Senua move. It’s really frustrating to have a puzzle mentally solved but needing to spend 5 minutes moving her slow ass around to execute the solution. It’s a good thing exploration is pretty useless because it also takes forever. The combat is also boring and repetitive: the enemies take way too many hits and there are way too many of them. Even just starting the game, sitting through all the stupid splash screens and the same trigger warning is tedious and dumb. I feel like I’ve put dozens of hours banging my head against this game, but when I look at steam I’ve only put in a little over 5. I think I might retire the game and just watch a lore video of it instead.

The YouTube comments

Oh look: tons of comments explaining how this is a ridiculous product that shouldn’t exist.

And yet it’s going to sell and be profitable.

Re-releasing old games is a great thing. Keep everything available, give consumers options, increase the size of libraries for every platform. Enhanced resolutions and better load times. It’s a free upgrade if you already own the Anniversary edition on Switch.

Rather than asking why they are doing this, I think the real question should be why was this not a launch title months ago?

Acetaminophen/Paracetamol/Tylenol is the 2nd most common cause of liver failure in the US.

If you’re looking for some magical drug that can make you feel better without having some adverse affect, good luck. The second a pharmaceutical company finds one (or one that where the adverse affects are hidden enough hey think they can get away with it) they will corner the market and exploit the hell out of it for as long as their patent lets them.

Pain killing, like pretty much all medicines and drugs, is a trade-off. People should make informed decisions about their use and not just treat them as magical. I still use acetaminophen occasionally, but with caution. Ibuprofen too - it damages the kidneys. When I had surgery a while back the doctor recommended alternating between the two to avoid taking too much of either too quickly.